It reminds me of an incident involving an old colleague of mine at some kind of graduate recruitment fair thing. He walked past a stand which was trying to hire engineers which had some code on the wall when the following exchange happened:
Recruiter: Hey there! <indicates the code> Do you know what this is?
Colleague: Err, <looks…thinks for a bit>… It *looks* like some sort of network protocol
Recruiter: <smug> No, it’s *COMPUTER CODE*
I like to pause movies when some code is shown and see what it is. Apparently you can break into pentagon by knowing basic sql and high-level employees have alternate life writing tcp implementations and graphics libraries.
Its crazy to me how little effort publishers put into the basic parts of their job sometimes. Its even funnier that raymond chen of all people is the one calling this out
If you don't want to be called out for putting zero effort into the books that you publish, you probably shouldn't put zero effort into the books you publish!
Also, if you want to keep your job designing the book covers!
Effort-free stock image on the front cover, generic copy-paste description on the back cover. Hard to tell if whoever was responsible for the cover design is worried about his job being replaced with AI, because if he is, he has an odd way of showing it.
On the matter of book back text, The Profit by Kehlog Albran has a rear blurb that likens the style of the author to that of a man with a much larger brain.
Most textbooks sold are bought by students because they were required for a course. Students are not choosing a textbook by cover because they're not choosing a textbook at all. Professors choosing which textbook to assign are doing so based on the content, because that's what they'll be teaching. Professors also get a lot of free sample copies, and are probably choosing between those instead of purchasing their own set of candidates based on the cover.
This sounds reasonable if your use case is squeezing more horsepower out of Node applications and the JavaScript part has already been pushed to its limits.
As someone who's done lots of backend development _in_ node though, I'm not really proficient in C++ enough nor I ever had teams able to maintain such modules.
I'm not criticizing your approach, mind you, it's absolutely understandable, just uncommon for someone to be really proficient at both languages.
Plot twist: the publisher just looked into the future. I’m currently building an EBNF parser for my project, C³ (C cubed), which allows you to define arbitrary grammar at the very beginning of a file to seamlessly mix strings and syntax from Python, JS, or any custom DSL.
While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!
The repo readme doesn't mention anything like that. It looks an ambitious project. I think the AI-style tone in the readme, or things like 'paradigm shift' and that it would be an online service (for a language? huh?) may be contributing to the downvotes you're getting.
There have always been people trying to push low-effort, low-value things as high-value things by copying the superficial aspects of high-value things. People literally do "judge a book by its cover", and can be tricked into buying it even when the contents are worthless.
People in a bookshop don't want to have to read entire chapters of each book they're thinking of buying in order to be sure they're all legitimate books of value. They want the bookseller to have done that for them, and know every book in the shop had at least some effort put into it.
The internet is not a bookshop. An enshittified platform like Amazon is not a bookshop. If a slopmaker can pay a platform to tout absolute slop, you now can't trust the platform. It's all so tiresome.
It's now just easier to perform that dishonesty and waste even more people's time than ever before.
It reminds me of an incident involving an old colleague of mine at some kind of graduate recruitment fair thing. He walked past a stand which was trying to hire engineers which had some code on the wall when the following exchange happened:
I like to pause movies when some code is shown and see what it is. Apparently you can break into pentagon by knowing basic sql and high-level employees have alternate life writing tcp implementations and graphics libraries.
Occasionally there are some real treats in those snippets. I remember being floored when Trinity exploited a real ssh v1 bug in Matrix Reloaded.
The movie "Demon Seed" showed a DECsystem 10 command line. Hahaha.
My memory is probably faulty but didn't she use nmap too?
Yep. (Discussed more than once on HN, which is why I know this link exists:)
https://nmap.org/movies/
I always liked the code Easter egg in Ex Machina. A scene with Caleb has a Python script visible on screen that, when run, prints:
This is Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, quite relevant to the film.Well, at least movies no longer run the ka-chunka-ka-chunka ASR-33 teletype sounds when showing text on a screen.
There’s a Tumblr for that: https://www.tumblr.com/moviecode
Also Eddie Izzard shows how it really looks like: https://youtu.be/TKQzqwn-jIM?si=Ad_ZMhFr4As6H0lr
Do we actually think you couldn't though? Probably unintentionally accurate.
I guess there might be Bobby 'insert into EMPLOYEES...' tables somewhere.
Also hackers in movies never use a mouse!
Alng the same lines: movies and tv shows have taught me that there are no door knobs in the future.
I beg to differ, here's Scotty using one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiDu1BQXY
He's a miraculous worker!
I felt like a movie hacker when doing literal
SELECT * FROM military_bases
On a public dataset :)
I paused the film to catch Lisbeth Salander, brilliant hacker and investigator, doing exactly this kind of complex query.
I guess the brilliant hacking was the bit you don’t see getting access to the super secure database in the first place?
Render your local file tree, win a free pentagon entry
I wish <smug></smug> was a real HTML tag
It's a semantic div tag, and it's spelled "<actually>".
This is tongue in cheek, but those who can't do, teach, and those who can teach, recruit.
Its crazy to me how little effort publishers put into the basic parts of their job sometimes. Its even funnier that raymond chen of all people is the one calling this out
Also is this an official Microsoft dev blog?
Probably not a good look back at publishing hq
If you don't want to be called out for putting zero effort into the books that you publish, you probably shouldn't put zero effort into the books you publish!
Also, if you want to keep your job designing the book covers!
Effort-free stock image on the front cover, generic copy-paste description on the back cover. Hard to tell if whoever was responsible for the cover design is worried about his job being replaced with AI, because if he is, he has an odd way of showing it.
It is, and it's a famous and popular blog too. Lots of older submissions have been highly upvoted here.
On the matter of book back text, The Profit by Kehlog Albran has a rear blurb that likens the style of the author to that of a man with a much larger brain.
I wonder if the book itself is actually any good.
My understanding is that authors often have little or not control over the covers chosen by their publishers.
It's at least possible that the book itself is excellent, but I'm not going to spend $90+ on a hardcover copy to find out.
The cover does not matter for a textbook.
Most textbooks sold are bought by students because they were required for a course. Students are not choosing a textbook by cover because they're not choosing a textbook at all. Professors choosing which textbook to assign are doing so based on the content, because that's what they'll be teaching. Professors also get a lot of free sample copies, and are probably choosing between those instead of purchasing their own set of candidates based on the cover.
At least the JavaScript image is excusable since most implementations are made in C++.
And some of us expect that candidates have at least read the C++ addons documentation chapter.
Which kind of candidates, for which kind of position?
I have not seen much, if any, JavaScript developers touching C++ modules much beyond library authors needing bindings for SQLite, etc.
Backend development with node.
Knowing how to write native modules is one blog post less on "We rewrote X in Y" on HN frontage.
You might argue why not using something else in first place, well in consulting quite often we have tl adapt to the customer IT stack.
Concrete example deploying into Vercel Functions, and there is a small performance boost required.
Nowadays I would rather push for Go or Rust runtime, but until this year they weren't officially supported, as they were community runtime builds.
In any case, I expect someone doing backend development to actually understand performance, and how to improve it.
This sounds reasonable if your use case is squeezing more horsepower out of Node applications and the JavaScript part has already been pushed to its limits.
As someone who's done lots of backend development _in_ node though, I'm not really proficient in C++ enough nor I ever had teams able to maintain such modules.
I'm not criticizing your approach, mind you, it's absolutely understandable, just uncommon for someone to be really proficient at both languages.
Plot twist: the publisher just looked into the future. I’m currently building an EBNF parser for my project, C³ (C cubed), which allows you to define arbitrary grammar at the very beginning of a file to seamlessly mix strings and syntax from Python, JS, or any custom DSL.
While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!
https://gitlab.com/9o1d/C3v3
The repo readme doesn't mention anything like that. It looks an ambitious project. I think the AI-style tone in the readme, or things like 'paradigm shift' and that it would be an online service (for a language? huh?) may be contributing to the downvotes you're getting.
This post discusses the topic and makes several key observations.
We have always had slop.
There have always been people trying to push low-effort, low-value things as high-value things by copying the superficial aspects of high-value things. People literally do "judge a book by its cover", and can be tricked into buying it even when the contents are worthless.
People in a bookshop don't want to have to read entire chapters of each book they're thinking of buying in order to be sure they're all legitimate books of value. They want the bookseller to have done that for them, and know every book in the shop had at least some effort put into it.
The internet is not a bookshop. An enshittified platform like Amazon is not a bookshop. If a slopmaker can pay a platform to tout absolute slop, you now can't trust the platform. It's all so tiresome.
It's now just easier to perform that dishonesty and waste even more people's time than ever before.
A clear case of human slop.
This 9 year old publisher still slops the old-fashioned way
i so wanted it to be the cover of stroustrup book :P
fwiw, i stopped keepin up with c++ in 2003. saved my sanity!
Stroustrup's book is named "The C++ Programming Language" in imitation of the (much superior) "The C Programming Language" aka K&R.
This book's title is a little different.
auto get_xyz_position() -> std::unordered_map<std::string, double *> { ... }
You'll need to elaborate
It's probably the C++ version of the tired EnterpriseBuilderPatternWhateverFactory jokes about java verbosity.