Have I tattooed a syntax error on my arm?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21186724/have-i-tattooed-a-syntax-error-on-my-arm?newsletter=1&nlcode=4592%7Cdedb

by yaph • 13 years ago

70 77 13 years ago

For once Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't apply because the answer is -- yes! At least it shouldn't be that difficult to laser off if he wants to redo it!

VLM3• 13 years ago

Excellent, the source code equivalent of

http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/

which implies that about 99% of westerners walking around with Kanji tattoos either have gibberish font (hilarious, read up about it) or think they have some girls name but its actually "weeds / brush (vegetation) / wild grassland"

The concept that you'll look better with a foreign language phrase as part of your skin is weird / mildly amusing all by itself, but the really funny part is the execution is so often an epic fail. So you've got an illiterate foreign language on your skin, not just a foreign language.

Given the apparently extreme popularity of the above genre, ridiculous source code should fit right in.

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

I've heard of some tattoo artists that grab a copy of the barcode for Tampax or Corn Flakes when they're asked to do a barcode tattoo.

jordan0day3• 13 years ago

I have a theory that foreign language tattoos (or code tattoos, for that matter) arise mainly from a desire to have something (seemingly) unique tattooed. That, and some signalling implying some hidden skill/knowledge that the tattooed person must have.

The uniqueness bit is somewhat ironic, considering it's the thing that a large part of your peer group is rushing to do, as well.

VLM3• 13 years ago

"considering it's the thing that a large part of your peer group is rushing to do, as well"

I'm just barely young enough that I'm considered somewhat rebellious for not having tattoos or piercings. From what I've seen of the general public, the peer pressure on younger people must be immense to get tattoos / pierced.

DennisP• 13 years ago

Could be worse. I know someone who picked a tattoo out of the artist's book because it looked cool, and later discovered it was the logo of a Mexican prison gang.

user243• 13 years ago

I remember when my brother proudly showed me his Chinese tattoo. He said "guess what it says". I looked at it for about 15 seconds and said "Tiger?" and he was like "how'd you know that?!".

It said "tig" in a sort of Chinesey looking font.

micampe• 13 years ago

You’ll see just as much english gibberish on chinese teens t-shirts. I haven’t seen any on tattoos, but they also seem to be significantly less common than in the US.

JimmaDaRustla2• 13 years ago

Syntax error or not, tattoo still seemingly dumb.

I figured it was going to be a forever loop or something...

pavel_lishin4• 13 years ago

Why is a non-terminating loop better than a fork bomb?

tinco• 13 years ago

A fork bomb will quickly take up your systems resources and invariably will force you to turn off your computer.

A non-terminating loop will simply drag on forever, stealing cycles whenever it gets the chance.

pavel_lishin4• 13 years ago

Replying to self rather than everyone; I meant as a tattoo choice, not as an actual problem to have on your computer.

ambiate2• 13 years ago

I suppose this is an excellent example of testing prior to moving to production. I have 'ex nihilo ad absurdum' tattooed on my right forearm. It was more a reminder of the dark depression that spawns from philosophy and to distance myself from the subject. I would undo that decision if I had the choice.

pavel_lishin4• 13 years ago

What does 'ex nihilo ad absurdum' mean? I only know what little goofy Latin I've picked up online, and my guess is "absurdity out of nothing".

ambiate2• 13 years ago

Out of nothing to the absurd. (Take that with a grain of salt, we're on the same level.)

mikestew• 13 years ago

I'm afraid that's the conclusion I've come to with every idea for a tattoo I've had over the last 20 or so years. I can't come up with anything with which I care to be stuck for the rest of my life. "Yeah, that's not going to seem so clever in ten years, is it?" So my skin remains untouched by the inky goodness of my local tattoo artist.

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

Go for Henna tattoos ... They are temporary .. like a few days/weeks. :)

javert• 13 years ago

Philosophy is just what we call the most fundamental systems of ideas that govern everything else. Naturally, it is the source for the gravest possible darkness. But it is also the source of the greatest possible light.

scarecrowbob• 13 years ago

Not unrelated, but I have "Cheese is good" tattooed across my lower back... it's pretty ambiguous in meaning, but has served me well throughout my life... I only note this because of most of the things that I did as an undergraduate philosophy student, it's about the only thing I still find charming. You can't really test against an uncertain future.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

This made me laugh, as my 3 year old daughter heard someone say Jesus, and assumed they said cheeses. She still think people are discussing cheeses every so often. Christmas was a very confusing time, as other food groups don't get birthdays.

SiVal• 13 years ago

A tattoo is an oxymoron: a permanent fashion item.

My kids can't believe what we used to wear when I was their age. (It makes me laugh, too.) I look around at every garage sale and see $5 items that used to be considered quite elegant. I think of the hairstyles, room styles, humor styles, political causes, hobbies, relationships, and so much more that have flowed past like a river and disappeared around the bend.

Thank goodness, I'm not stuck today having to continue making any fashion statements I might have chosen years ago.

I tell my kids that I don't care if they get tattoos as long as they are the temporary kind. Maybe adults should switch to temporary tattoos, too. Treat them like any other form of fashion statement: make the statement you want when and where you want, then change when you want something else (and later you probably will want something else.)

GuiA• 13 years ago

I've noticed that quite a few American hackers have tattoos - at least way more than the hackers from where I come from (France).

Is there any cultural significance to it? Does anyone have any good hacker tattoo stories?

iwasphone• 13 years ago

There's no cultural significance, it's just (hetero) male bonding.

mhurron• 13 years ago

Tattoos have simply become more acceptable in some circles where they previously were not.

jordan0day3• 13 years ago

I think it probably has more to do with just how prevalent tattoos seem to have become in America in general.

ctide• 13 years ago

I have my username tattooed in binary on my arm:

http://imageshar.es/52deec31f629007c14000e24

PhearTheCeal• 13 years ago

That's actually a pretty aesthetic pattern of 1's.

famousactress• 13 years ago

But is it unicode!?

daeken• 13 years ago

I'm an American hacker with a tattoo. For me, I wanted something that symbolized my life up until that point (and since, but I don't like to make assumptions about what I'll be doing in the future). So, I ended up with a very simple lambda on my left shoulder -- it was the best symbol to summarize what my life had been up until that point. Very few others ever see it, so it's really just for me; a nice reminder of my commitment to hackerdom.

yread• 13 years ago

How is this question not blocked yet?

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

Because there's a definitive answer and it's reasonably free from opinion.

Jun8• 13 years ago

I thought this guy went too far, but no, it seems there are a lot of examples of code tattoos:http://readwrite.com/2012/01/03/32_more_of_the_best_and_wors...

Which begs the questions: which snippet is important/timeless enough to use and, of course, which language. As the OP found out the hard way one should use a Lang where whitespace doesn't matter.

Ideas?

callesgg2• 13 years ago

i liked the cat /dev/random | sort Boringly it does not work as /dev/random never closes

Here is my own one:

grep life /dev/urandom | strings

The search for life continues.

glhaynes• 13 years ago

i liked the cat /dev/random | sort Boringly it does not work as /dev/random never closes

It's also a "useless use of cat"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat

user243• 13 years ago

I wanted to get <?=phpinfo();?> on my arm once. The thought of what it would output if run on a human still amuses me and if I had got it done, I don't think I'd be sick of it now, even though I've not coded in PHP for 2 or 3 years.

jdiez17• 13 years ago

Please don't get PHP tattooed on your arm.

drcube3• 13 years ago

I just have my son's name in binary ascii spiraled around my upper arm. It's nothing but ones and zeroes but it gets a lot of compliments.

deadfall• 13 years ago

The Augmented Reality tattoo is pretty cool and functional. I could see that catching on. I can imagine a screen floating with text massages instead of a animated character.

staunch• 13 years ago

You broke the #1 rule of tattoos: only get one in a language you're proficient in :-)

callesgg2• 13 years ago

ha Great story. It bugs the crap out of me is when bash stuff wont work in more "modern" shells.

kibibu2• 13 years ago

This is the opposite, it works in zsh but not bash.

Crito• 13 years ago

I wonder if a skilled plastic surgeon could re-arrange his skin to add space between those characters and remove it on either side of the tattoo.

ansible• 13 years ago

You could go the skin graft route, but that would be annoying.

IANAD, but if you tried to (gently) stretch the skin where you need the space (like with some tape and sticks) then over a period of months you'd grow some new skin in between. You don't want to stretch the skin too much too quickly, or you'll get stretch marks (like some pregnant mothers do).

lucb1e4• 13 years ago

I think some bleach would work miracles for adding white space.

Theodores• 13 years ago

Or he could squeeze in a square of white ink.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

put on hold as off-topic by FreshPrinceOfSO, Christian Payne, billinkc, ajma, Maxime Rouiller 23 mins ago

This is why StackExchange sites will die.

Or perhaps they're just being subtle:

"This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or a simple typographical error...."

jonahx2• 13 years ago

Well, at least it's not a total loss, since the SO mods take great joy in killing joy.

One wonders how they deal with the situation of their own joyfulness, because it too should obviously be killed, but in order to do that they'd have to unhold joyful and interesting questions, creating joy which itself necessitates killing, and so on. Fork bomb.

kibibu2• 13 years ago

Not only that, there are many great and informative questions/answers that are gone.

One of my favourites was "Most astonishing violation of the principle of least astonishment", and the answers were a catalogue of how-not-to-build-software. Examples of good behaviour are nice, but counter-examples are often just as informative. Alas, it was "not a good fit for a QA"

jonahx2• 13 years ago

Could someone break down how that fork bomb works? In particular, why is the pipe and the background on one of the function calls needed to make it work?

m_myers2• 13 years ago

It recursively calls both itself and another copy of itself. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/991142/how-does-this-bash...

tikhonj2• 13 years ago

For some reason, people really like complaining about questions like this being closed.

I think this misses the mark for two reasons. One is simply that these sort of questions aren't really the point of SO, but I guess people disagree.

A bigger one is that closing is no big deal. People can still read the question and vote on answers! The only thing you can't do is add new answers. And given that there's already a perfectly good answer along with a bunch of other posts, more answers would just be adding to the noise.

Seems like a win-win to me, but others somehow construe this as the downfall of StackOverflow.

drcube3• 13 years ago

Leaving it open is no big deal either. Or would that be the downfall of SO?

castis• 13 years ago

There are valid reasons that the question was closed. Those reasons are known and expected to be enforced.

tikhonj2• 13 years ago

With no or lax moderation, there's always the danger of becoming Reddit.

People come to StackOverflow because it has a good signal-to-noise ratio. Maintaining this ratio, and the reputation of the site as a resource rather than a discussion board is important.

I personally jump to StackOverflow results on Google pages because they almost always solve my problem exactly. If the results start being polluted by a bunch of less relevant discussions--which, being popular, are likely to rank well--I would probably stop using SO results as much.

On top of this, just leaving a question like this open hurts the question itself as well. There is no reason to want 100 different answers all pointing out the missing space in different words! That way lies madness and Quora--where many answers to popular "survey" questions only get read because of the follow feature and a Facebook-esque machine-learning-based feed.

DanBC2• 13 years ago

The question doesn't appear to be closed, just protected.

Why is a Question asking about syntax of whitespace in bash not suitable for stack overflow?

There's a worse problem on English stack exchange where people will say that your question has been answered even though none of the words you used are in any of their suggestions. This not only hurts searchability of questions and answers, but fails to recognise that many people using the site have English as a second language.

a3n• 13 years ago

How come he didn't tattoo the failing unit test first?

ozh• 13 years ago

At least the tattoo inker should have run some CLI tests first... duh. Can't trust those people.

lucb1e4• 13 years ago

Welcome, Redditors! We're looking for answers that provide serious, practical solutions to the problem stated. If you'd prefer to post a joke or launch a tangential discussion, please do so on the corresponding Reddit thread.

Wrong, StackOverflow. I'm logged in with a years-old and couple thousand rep account so I kind of know the rules, and no HN is not Reddit thank you very much.

m_myers2• 13 years ago

The notice is playing the odds; it doesn't track referrers, and right now most of the traffic is actually coming from Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1vs4uu/have... to be precise). You might be surprised how many people with several thousand rep points forget the rules when they've been on Reddit recently.

Pitarou• 13 years ago

At least none of the letters were upside down. You should see some the absolute travesties of Chinese character tattoos.

adamconroy• 13 years ago

It pays to check these things before making a big commitment. Reminds me of a girl I know who decided to change her first name by deed pole. She changed her name to Pheonix rather than Phoenix.

Have I tattooed a syntax error on my arm?

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