Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

19 pointszorkian11 comments

A short-term mitigating measure could be to place a comment nearby in the code indicating that the maintainer is aware that the constant is juvenile and somewhat embarrassed by it, but has no choice but to retain it for now because it's needed for interoperability with another system that's hardcoded it. Then at least it'd make it clear to anyone who stumbled across it that the Linux-side maintainers aren't doing it as some kind of in-joke, and do realize it might annoy people.

(What the odds are of anyone actually stumbling across it randomly, I don't know, but it's a cheap band-aid just in case.)

Spelling "boobs" with numbers is a classic joke, acceptable enough that you'll even see it on American broadcast TV in prime time, where they have to cater to the most sensitive viewers. This indicates that anyone complaining about this is probably being ridiculously over sensitive.

What you won't see or hear on American prime time broadcast TV is the word "fuck", so maybe if they are really concerned about offending people, they should take a look at the couple dozen "fuck"s in the Linux source.

And what about the animal lovers that might be offended by the 200 or so "deadbeaf"s in the Linux kernel?

Comparing sexualised language to generally offensive language is a wonderful example of false equivalence. Good work.

"Sexualized"? That is, with the newspeak concept of: "oh, it can hurt the feelings of some sex"?

Well, I fail to see the difference between "generally offensive language", then.

It too can hurt the feelings of a very large part of a population -- the conservative, prudish ones.

Do you imply that something being offensive to (some) women as women, is worse than something being offensive to (some) conservative people as conservative people (which might be even more populous than women in general)?

It seems to me that the PC police just wants to build it's own prudish rules...

Why are we assuming men wrote that particular piece of code? As one of the OPs comments points out, 'men are not the only gender who appreciate breasts.'

I hope you die lonely.

You "hope he dies lonely" because in a comment thread about a joking reference to boobs in hex constants, he wrote that "men are not the only gender who appreciate breasts"?

I hope you understand that your comment shows a disturbed personality and/or horrible person.

Now, it could just be that you didn't have your morning coffee yet.

But in any case, the hate you spread with that comment is far worse than any (probably immature) reference to boobs or dicks or whatever.

Were we not all once suckling at the teet? Big boobs are universal. Furthermore, the joke is so childish and innocent that it's more offensive of you to object to it than it was in the first place. Lighten up.

>Big boobs are universal.

Not only that, but the whole fucking reason of progress, for example, is not to be so fucking sensitive about commonplace things.

WTF, people, have we merely exchanged the prudish, religious police with the politically correct police?

Yes, America was built by puritans and religious nuts sent away from Europe (literally, in the beginning), but can we fucking move along?

The rest of the world could care less about such moral outrage over a hex joke.

George Carlin FTW!

Don't forget Java's CAFEBABE

http://www.artima.com/insidejvm/whyCAFEBABE.html

> Try "big boobs" with a Z.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com