Geek humor
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Took me a while to get this one.
Hm, I'm tempted to follow up on this with a re-interpretation of this joke in terms of linear logic where "!" is spelled "of course" and means that I have an unlimited supply of the thing I'm "!"-ing. For instance, in linear logic, it would follow that I have $120 given that I have $5!, i.e. an unlimited amount of $5 notes.
I'm too lame to turn this into an actual joke, but I'm sick of the (white?) privilege the factorial function has. All the jokes are about factorial and fibonacci functions only. Nobody makes jokes about minority topics such as linear logic.
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Loving this thread; giving me insights into geek humor.
So far, my favorite is Klaus' first all-time favorite. If I'm understanding it, I'm picturing a roomful of geeks splitting their sides laughing while the teller drones on and on, and the non-geeks looking on cluelessly and scratching their heads.
If that's not the point of the joke, then I'm even non-geekier than I thought.
The words in that joke all come from the mathematical domain called "category theory", and Haskell programmers are infamous for phrasing every programming problem in terms of category theory in such a way that no "mere mortal" understands a single word of it.
There's an even geekier variant of this joke. It too me 15 years of my life to even understand the first half of it. If I understood it completely by the time I retire, I am ready to kick the bucket.
The other one,
is about an infamous backdoor to get around the restrictions that turn program code into mathematics. It's considered highly immoral to ever use it.Oh, and the first two ones from Jon and me are about network protocols. UDP make no guarantees that the receiver actually receives a package. TCP has something called "Timeout-based retransmission", which means that it will send a packet again and again until it gets a confirmation that it arrived
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An Indian chief had three wives, all of which gave birth. The first had a boy and the chief built her a teepee of deer hide. The second also had a boy and the chief built her a teepee of antelope hide. When the third gave birth, the chief built her a two story teepee, made out of a hippopotamus hide. The chief then challenged the tribe to guess what had occurred.
Many tried, unsuccessfully. Finally, one young brave declared that the third wife had given birth to twin boys. 'Correct,' said the chief. 'How did you figure it out?'
The warrior answered, 'It's elementary. The value of the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.'