from Hacker News

Essays from the funniest man in Microsoft Research

by tujv on 12/24/13, 9:48 PM with 58 comments

• by chetanahuja on 12/25/13, 8:01 AM

  My personal favorite passage (no comment on HN's favorite obsessions at all)

  "GUIs are useful. Spell-checkers are useful. I’m glad that people are working on new kinds of bouncing icons because they believe that humanity has solved cancer and homelessness and now lives in a consequence-free world of immersive sprites. That’s exciting, and I wish that I could join those people in the 27th century."

• by ColinCochrane on 12/25/13, 3:00 AM

  From The Night Watch:

  Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love.

• by seiji on 12/24/13, 11:07 PM

  You must read his The Slow Winter: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi... — It deserves to be made into a movie.

• by tomlu on 12/25/13, 12:58 AM

  On C++ syntax errors:

      Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from
      std::nonstd::__map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars> const
      basic_string< epic_mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>,
       __default_alloc_<casual_Fridays = maybe>>

• by elteto on 12/25/13, 8:37 AM

  Absolutely hilarious! From The Slow Winter:

  John began to attend The Church of the Impending Power Catastrophe. He sat in the pew and he heard the cautionary tales, and he was afraid. John learned about the new hyperthreaded processor from AMD that ran so hot that it burned a hole to the center of the earth, yelled “I’ve come to rejoin my people!”, discovered that magma people are extremely bigoted against processor people, and then created the Processor Liberation Front to wage a decades-long, hilariously futile War to Burn the intrinsically OK-With-Being-Burnt Magma People.

• by AndrewBissell on 12/25/13, 2:21 AM

  A few weeks back I was inspired by "The Night Watch" to write a short systems programming take on Col. Jessup's famous monologue: http://abissell.com/2013/11/22/a-few-good-systems-programmer...

• by matthewmacleod on 12/25/13, 12:57 AM

  All of his articles are absolutely worth a read. Rarely read anything about computer history that's quite as compelling as The Slow Winter...

• by bronson on 12/25/13, 12:15 AM

  If you finish these and want more, it's worth skimming back through time on http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/

  Bemused frustration is such an entertaining writing style. Alas, my attempts tend to end up as incoherent raging. Maybe switching to bourbon would help.

• by rbanffy on 12/26/13, 1:08 AM

  Is it my predisposition against all things Microsoft or there is someone else who doesn't find him that hilarious?

  Mind you, the title only states he's the funniest man in Microsoft Research, not that he would be considered funny in the general population, and, therefore, a lot is left open to interpretation.,

• by tujv on 12/25/13, 1:58 AM

  There is also this interview from the National Science Foundation: http://www.livescience.com/40023-james-mickens-microsoft-s-l...

  Incidentally, I look forward to the day when Lebron James is called the James Mickens of Basketball.

• by moocowduckquack on 12/24/13, 11:12 PM

  Mickens is awesome, they should make him their new CEO.

• by ianet-goog on 12/25/13, 1:07 AM

  Also recommended, "The Old New Thing" blog itself.

• by mnemonicsloth on 12/25/13, 12:51 AM

  > You can't just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

  1. Loudly declare that theory is useless.

  2. Ignore any tool that is not "serious" -- i.e. so larded with other people's complexity that all theory is useless.

  3. Justify (2) by claiming that "ordinary" programmers are too stupid: only the brilliant can understand a tool so simple that theory is not useless.

  4. Pension!

• by superuser2 on 12/26/13, 1:13 AM

  "In some way that I don’t yet understand, I’m glad that theorists are investigating the equivalence between five-dimensional Turing machines and Edward Scissorhands"

• by codfrantic on 12/30/13, 2:25 PM

  From 'theSaddestMoment'

  "As it turns out, Ted the Poorly Paid Datacenter Operator will not send 15 cryptographically signed messages before he accidentally spills coffee on the air conditioning unit and then overwrites your tape backups with bootleg recordings of Nickelback. Ted will just do these things and then go home, because that’s what Ted does. His extensive home collection of “Thundercats” cartoons will not watch itself. Ted is needed, and Ted will heed the call of duty."

• by andybak on 12/24/13, 11:16 PM

  I went to some of the essays linked but the only way I'm going to be able to read that is to increase the line spacing about 150% and put in about 3x as many paragraph breaks.

• by kelvin0 on 12/25/13, 2:48 PM

  Best.Comedy.Evar.

  My cynical self was caught off guard and laughed to tears on at least 4 occasions reading these essays. Priceless.

  Last time I laughed so hard was while watching a Dave Chapelle Show...

• by alfiejohn_ on 12/25/13, 9:28 AM

  I've read a few and they have been really good reads. If there were more swear words, I would have said that Zed Shaw was his ghost writer.

• by jacinda on 12/25/13, 6:15 PM

  This is like xkcd in essay form. Thanks for posting!

• by shalmanese on 12/25/13, 1:44 AM

  His facebook page is also a hidden treasure trove of hilarious writing!

• by pgbovine on 12/25/13, 2:37 AM

  these essays are amazing ... also great for learning about CS systems in general. if you can get all the jokes, then you're well on your way to an applied CS degree!

• by almosnow on 12/25/13, 1:52 AM

  "this solution will definitely work in practice"