/Entertaining

The /bin/true Command And Copyright

- John Chambers tl;dr: "One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It's the /bin/true program. This is a "dummy" program whose function is to make it easy to write infinite loops in shells scripts. The program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status... But AT&T's lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection."

featured in #319

4 Integers Are Enough To Write A Snake Game

- Andrei Ciobanu tl;dr: "Note that the code should be taken as a twisted joke, or as an exercise in minimalism, or as both, probably a joke. Because of the aforementioned limitations, we are going to write some nasty macros to perform bitwise operations, use global variables, reuse the same counter, etc. This is not a good example of readable or elegant code."

featured in #318

The Project With A Single 11,000-line Code File

- Austin Henley tl;dr: "Something I found hilarious is that a variable might be used on lines 200-210 and then again on line 8544. No where else."

featured in #305

Advent of Code 2021

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: "an advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

featured in #273

What Will Programming Look Like In 2020?

tl;dr: Written in 2012: "What will programming look like in 2020? Keep in mind that programming in 2012 mostly resembles programming in 2004, so could we even expect any significant changes 8 years from now in the programmer experience?"

featured in #255

-2000 Lines Of Code (1982)

- Andy Hertzfeld tl;dr: Bill Atkinson, author of Quickdraw, thought that lines of code was a "silly measure of software productivity." His goal was to write small and fast programs. After completing a project where he re-wrote an algorithm more succinctly, he was asked to complete a business form asking him how many lines of code he had written. His answer was -2000.

featured in #232

Doom Captcha

- Miquel Camps Orteza tl;dr: Miguel created a captcha where you have to kill 4 enemies to pass. "Don't take this too seriously, this is a little project for fun, if do you know how to code it's pretty easy to break the security of this."

featured in #231

The Beauty Of Programming (2001)

- Linus Torvalds tl;dr: "It’s still hard to explain what can be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it’s the greatest feeling in the world."

featured in #228

Reverse Engineering The Source Code Of The BioNTech / Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

- Bert Hubert tl;dr: "DNA is a digital code. Unlike computers, which use 0 and 1, life uses A, C, G and U/T (the ‘nucleotides’, ‘nucleosides’ or ‘bases’)." Bert discusses how the vaccine works using computational parallels.

featured in #219

Advent Of Code

- Eric Wastl tl;dr: "An advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

featured in #217