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People said the same thing about a joke Douglas Adams made in his Hitch Hikers series -- that the (corrupted) Ultimate Question to which the answer was 42 ("wha
by wzdd 4mo ago
People said the same thing about a joke Douglas Adams made in his Hitch Hikers series -- that the (corrupted) Ultimate Question to which the answer was 42 ("what do you get if you multiply six by nine?") was a maths joke because 6x9=42 in base 13. Douglas Adams said this was nonsense.
- Xirdus 4mo agoReminds me of one of my favorite joke programs. #include <stdio.h> #define SIX 1+5 #define NINE 8+1 int main() { printf("%d\n", SIX * NINE); }
- srean 4mo agoDidn't Linus #define THREE as something else in Linux source code. Was that the 2-3-4 tree? Can't seem to find it now.
- Xirdus 4mo agoIt was from some filesystem code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7296497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7296497 unsigned three = 1; unsigned five = 5; unsigned seven = 7; These actually get changed through pointers to consecutive powers of 3, 5 and 7 respectively. `three` is initialized to the 0th power of 3, but because only a single 1 is needed by the algorithm, `five` and `seven` are initialized to the 1st powers instead.
- srean 4mo agoAh right. Thank you so much. At least I wasn't hallucinating.
- BoardsOfCanada 4mo agoAnd by accident, 42 happens to be the first base after her multiplication gives the answer 19 here (when 20 would be expected), although it would produce an answer of "tenteen", not twenty.