Mmm! I love raisins made with SELECT * FROM [Equipment Table]! (pic) | Hacker News Reader

Mmm! I love raisins made with SELECT * FROM [Equipment Table]! (pic)

worsethanfailure.com

17 pointsmattjaynes10 comments

I guess PG didn't entrust his admin duties to anyone while he's on vacation. I expected this to be killed a while ago.

I think he kills stuff that's wildly off-topic. This is still about making webapps, which is a stone's throw from making a business (well, maybe only if you've got a good arm). I'd say this is about as on-topic as, say, much of the Lisp-related stuff that is posted here. And my 2 cents is that this shouldn't be killed.

.. and it's very funny to boot

Trying... to... resist.. arguing pointless stuff...

It's hopeless: First, you're clearly not alone in thinking it should not be killed. This is social site and you could make a good argument that that is plenty of reason to leave it up. Regardless...

I've had show dead on since I signed up and have sorta noted what gets killed. Humorous images most always get killed. Especially if they start to climb up the homepage.

Now for the superfluous nitpicking that I encourage everyone to ignore:

Image of bag of chocolates w/ sql on it both about making webapps and as pertinent as prose about programming languages? I'm lost on the webapps part and I don't buy the Lisp part. I'm not saying it does not have it's place. It's funny and funny's good; you could even argue it's an interesting commentary on technical industry at large if you chose to. But any lessons you might glean from that image are limited to something like don't blow it so hard that you look like one of the most incompetent people on the planet. I think we're all way past that. At least I could theoretically use Lisp knowledge in my startup if I wanted too. Further learning about Lisp is not going to hurt my programming ability, which as a hacker is pretty central to any startup I'm involved in.

I think we're actually pretty much in agreement, just with a slightly different conclusion. If a lot of these "funny image" posts started cropping up, that would not be good (and maybe that's reason enough to nix this puppy?), but I'd never seen anything like this bag of chocolates, and it got a chuckle out of me, so I gave it the upvote. Programming languages prose... definitely more pertinent.

You're right, the picture might not have to do webapps. I think I was imagining those square brackets were the result of some ASP gone astray, but I don't actually know what ASP looks like, so why would I assume that?

Now I'm going to downvote myself and go to bed.

The square brackets are SQL syntax; they let you reference column names containing 'funny' characters, in this case whitespace.

It's definitely not ASP. BTW, ASP doesn't really 'look' like anything, since it's just an environment for the actual languages (vbScript, ECMAScript, C#, whathaveyou) that drive the server side.

I wish I didn't know that.

Fair enough. It's as much about relevancy as it is about the level of discourse around here. And, whatever the value of the post, it's led to to thoughtful and even handed discussion so I'm hard pressed to complain about the latter.

Brett: I agree completely.

I visit this site for certain type of information/inspiration.

The last thing I want to see (especially at no. 1) is another dumbass screwup story, however funny it might be.

There are already plenty of sites for that kind of stuff (WTF, digg, boing boing, etc.).

The Reddit comment thread ( http://reddit.com/info/1p9da/comments ) actually has some useful information in it.

much better than those "vote up if #{condition}" submissions.

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