Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there's a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it's very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn't put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

</old man rant>

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f--king idiot who can barely do what they're supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f--king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f--king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f--king idiot you're trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards ~~f--king idiots~~ people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

This is Hell propaganda. There's no way you'd get a comfy bed.

And before you say that bed might not be comfortable, he's maintaining a smile while laying on it, so it's still too comfortable even if it isn't comfortable per se.

There's a condition called progeria that is pretty much the real version of this.

Unfortunately - however you might take that - it usually takes a decade or two and is pleasant for no-one.

Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy let alone their kid.

But if you're looking for a more entertaining take, try this shocking 2002 XBox TV ad that was quickly banned in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjeYb7_kPqo

Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.

As a fan of log-scale axes, Randall really ought to at least suspect that the vertical axis is also logarithmic. If so, the average 800m sphere is very much not tasty.

Those guinea pigs are enormous.

Either that or it's a tiny trap and it was meant for a guinea-pig-sized bear such as, if true, the one in this comic.

8388409 = 2^23 - 199

I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I'm still none the wiser as to why.

199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you're going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?

Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?

WHY DO I CARE

No more than identical twins are the same person.

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

Caution: Finding something that one hates more than one's self does not take away the initial self loathing. Attempting to mollify or subdue the lesser by observation or interaction with the latter may result in something greater than the sum of its parts and oh boy, Jeffery Christmas, now we're in for a bad time.

U nd to rembr tht mny snr devs grw up prgrmng on old hrdwr tht ddn't hv mch mmry & oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms anywy. Also thy wr th gen of txtspk fr smlr rsns.

Yngr snr devs pckd up bd hbts frm tht gen.

And here's a sentence that's not squashed to cleanse your palettes / give a sigh of relief because I figure if I need a break from typing like that, you need a break from reading it.

Nmng thngs s hrd.