Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes, he was insane.

More like a pedantic jerk.

It's good to know about the existence of quines. But people are (presumably) paying good money for (and more important: investing their perfectly valuable time in) their education, and there's only so much time in a systems programming class, and so much more fundamental stuff to cover (or cover more robustly).

The people who really need to figure out how to write quines will no doubt find time to do so, in the dead of night, no matter what you may try to do to stop them. (And try to make them 3 bytes shorter than the shortest known version in that particular language). The rest -- they just need to know that they're out there.



Chill out, Franz. It was like a one day lab assignment and to be fair, I had no idea what quines were so I did learn something interesting and it led to an incredible discussion about Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: