The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

$("#frist").fadeIn(1000, function(){ console.log("stillfunny"); });

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Frist. And yes, I am at work staring at my own WTF code written many months ago. In the two countries I call home, we've given up Labour day. Nice to see the USA still being socialist.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Bah. Missed.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Most countries (who am I kidding, all countries apart from the US) celebrate the working man on May Day, also known as International Workers Day, which commemorates the killing of unarmed working week length protesters in Chicago by police.

Ironically, the country where this happened no longer commemorates this, since International Workers Day is a bit too commie.

PS, shouldn't celebrate too much having today off if you're American. You annually get 10 days public holiday, compared to our 8, but we have a minimum of 5.6 weeks of annual leave - and that is a bare legal minimum, most people get more, this year I have 7 weeks :)

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

I want to see it! Any URL available?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

I can't find the original website, but if you search for a snippet of this mess you get to the stackoverflow below, which has some suitable comments :)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18551719/js-will-not-loop-stops-after-first-loop

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Yes, I'm the one that said "Looks like something for thedailywtf.com", but didn't think that it would actually be posted to the front page.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

This is the first Labor Day in 3 years that I actually get paid for not working!

Contracting isn't always what it's cracked up to be. I know, I know, I'm doing it wrong.

Heh, for you all complaining that the US has too few vacation time, there are about 34% of us who've been on a very long vacation. (Labor force participation rate is below 66% since 2008.)

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

the way:
This is the first Labor Day in 3 years that I actually get paid for not working!
Contracting isn't always what it's cracked up to be. I know, I know, I'm doing it wrong.

Heh, for you all complaining that the US has too few vacation time, there are about 34% of us who've been on a very long vacation. (Labor force participation rate is below 66% since 2008.)

If you had more paid holiday each, there would be more work available to share around.

From my experience of working in the US is that you're not in general any more productive than your average European, despite your attendance at the workplace for an extra 3 to 5 weeks a year - there's considerably more slack time in a US office than in a UK one, so those extra weeks at work don't actually gain anybody anything.

But the real WTF as I understand it is that the concept of sharing is viewed as akin to communism in the US. You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage. What price ideology ...

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

story:
...day off in honor of the working man.

I thought Labor Day was a day off in honor of the pregnant women...

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Actually, the May Day holiday celebrated in most of Europe predates International Workers' Day and is a spring festival.

For example in the UK it is both a traditional national holiday, and the customary day of protest for the Anarchist and Anticapitalist movements (not to be confused with one another). Yet despite there being a Labour Party as one of the two most important political forces, there isn't an official workers' solidarity day.

This is holiday, then is holiday, this... is wrong tool.

Strolskon · 2013-09-02 Reply Admin

QJo:
You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage. What price ideology ...

But the US has a minimum wage?

Germany, on the other hand does not. And if you became unemployed, you need to pay a 350€ penality every month to social insurance (well they call it fixed health care insurance rate for freelancers, but the name does not change anything, since you need to pay it even if you have no income from freelancing).

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

So did the person (I'm so PC!) who were writing this finish it after the SO question or did someone fabricate a submission based on the SO question?

Oh and it's ironic that your labour day is today while ours are 1st of May to commemorate a US incident. I would love to move ours to September. We're swimming in days of in May and get squat from June to December :(

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

*days off

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Strolskon:
QJo:
You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage. What price ideology ...

But the US has a minimum wage?

Germany, on the other hand does not. And if you became unemployed, you need to pay a 350€ penality every month to social insurance (well they call it fixed health care insurance rate for freelancers, but the name does not change anything, since you need to pay it even if you have no income from freelancing).

The high-profile case of Walmart comes to mind, which (unless we outside the US are all being deliberately misled) is actively campaigning against there being a minimum wage, i.e. fighting against getting one introduced.

What is the current situation there?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

The high-profile case of Walmart comes to mind, which (unless we outside the US are all being deliberately misled) is actively campaigning *against* there being a minimum wage, i.e. fighting against getting one introduced.
What is the current situation there?

Individual states sometimes have a higher rate, but the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, or about half what it was (in real terms) in the 1960's. There is a movement to increase it to $15/hour (I suspect that's more of an opening bid than a real goal), and Walmart is strenuously opposing any increase.

Interestingly, they claim that only 1% of their employees are paid at minimum wage, which would mean that increasing minimum wage would cost them almost nothing, while increasing costs for their competitors and putting more money in the pockets of low-income families, which make up Walmart's customer base. They should be leading the charge unless they're, you know, lying.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

function triggerAnimation(){ $("#logoareacontainer").delay(12000).fadeOut(2000, function() { $("#title-1").fadeIn(0).delay(0, function() { alert("Help, I'm trapped in a callback factory"); }) }) }

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

At leats the code is indented.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

wintermute:
The high-profile case of Walmart comes to mind, which (unless we outside the US are all being deliberately misled) is actively campaigning *against* there being a minimum wage, i.e. fighting against getting one introduced.
What is the current situation there?

Individual states sometimes have a higher rate, but the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, or about half what it was (in real terms) in the 1960's. There is a movement to increase it to $15/hour (I suspect that's more of an opening bid than a real goal), and Walmart is strenuously opposing any increase.

Interestingly, they claim that only 1% of their employees are paid at minimum wage, which would mean that increasing minimum wage would cost them almost nothing, while increasing costs for their competitors and putting more money in the pockets of low-income families, which make up Walmart's customer base. They should be leading the charge unless they're, you know, lying.

Or unless they're, you know, paying a large fraction of their workforce above minimum wage and significantly less than 15$ an hour.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Is the WTF that you guys don't like CPS, or that JavaScript doesn't have CPS syntax? CPS is not a WTF.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that the end braces aren't combined on to a single line. That's what I always do when I manually convert my code to continuation-passing style.

pjt33 · 2013-09-02 Reply Admin

wintermute:
Individual states sometimes have a higher rate, but the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, or about half what it was (in real terms) in the 1960's. There is a movement to increase it to $15/hour

Now that makes a lot more sense than the trade unionist Colbert interviewed who seemed to be saying that fast food workers should be paid twice the minimum wage because the minimum wage wasn't enough to live. I couldn't understand why she wasn't campaigning to increase the minimum wage in that case. (She did seem a bit loopy: she also wanted working in McDonald's to be a "middle-class" job, which seems ludicrous given the amount of training required).

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

TRWTF is not using AJAX to pull the animation timings from the server.

daveime · 2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Alexandros:
TRWTF is not using AJAX to pull the animation timings from the server.

Using a custom written XML de-serializer.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Captain Oblivious:
wintermute:
The high-profile case of Walmart comes to mind, which (unless we outside the US are all being deliberately misled) is actively campaigning *against* there being a minimum wage, i.e. fighting against getting one introduced.
What is the current situation there?

Individual states sometimes have a higher rate, but the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, or about half what it was (in real terms) in the 1960's. There is a movement to increase it to $15/hour (I suspect that's more of an opening bid than a real goal), and Walmart is strenuously opposing any increase.

Interestingly, they claim that only 1% of their employees are paid at minimum wage, which would mean that increasing minimum wage would cost them almost nothing, while increasing costs for their competitors and putting more money in the pockets of low-income families, which make up Walmart's customer base. They should be leading the charge unless they're, you know, lying.

Or unless they're, you know, paying a large fraction of their workforce above minimum wage and significantly less than 15$ an hour.

% Wage Job 1 $7.25 Fools 98 $7.26 Normal workers 1 $100+ Managers etc.

Amirite?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Herr Otto Flick:
Most countries (who am I kidding, all countries apart from the US) celebrate the working man on May Day, also known as International Workers Day

You've never worked in Australia or New Zealand have you?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

wintermute:
The high-profile case of Walmart comes to mind,...

Interestingly, they claim that only 1% of their employees are paid at minimum wage...

Creating lying. Walmart employees are typically paid a few cents above minimum wage.

The relevant question is, what fraction of their employees are currently paid below the proposed new minimum wage?

-Harrow.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

QJo:
If you had more paid holiday each, there would be more work available to share around.

Of course, big labor has tried tactic all over the world, and after about 80 years of it, they're almost completely defunct. It doesn't work in individual companies, they go bankrupt. And it doesn't work within nations, the taxpayers eventually get tired of subsidizing the union leeches.

The reason is that the opposite is true: By adding value, labor generates more economic activity, which in turn generates more jobs. If everyone performs less labor, there is less economic growth, and thus some combination of fewer jobs or worse paying jobs.

From my experience of working in the US is that you're not in general any more productive than your average European, despite your attendance at the workplace for an extra 3 to 5 weeks a year - there's considerably more slack time in a US office than in a UK one, so those extra weeks at work don't actually gain anybody anything.

Except actual measurements of productivity per capita show the opposite: American workers are among the most productive in the world, European workers among the least.

But the real WTF as I understand it is that the concept of sharing is viewed as akin to communism in the US.

Not at all, "sharing" is something you teach children so that they can get along with each other, and "communism" was a brutal ideology that slaughtered hundreds of millions and whose crimes were ignored by the left. No one here thinks the two are remotely related.

You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage. What price ideology ...

How is it humanistic to put people in prison because they wanted to work for less than some arbitrary "minimum wage"?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Actually there is support in C++ STL for building logical structures that look pretty much like this. Or Tour de France coding.

captcha: conventio - absolutely.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

As far as Wikipedia tells me, European countries and US lead the productivity per capita pack: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_hour_worked

What stats were you looking at?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

The reall wtf is creating a "fluent interface" hype and then criticize people how got used to read and write code using it.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

If you had more paid holiday each, there would be more work available to share around.

Of course, big labor has tried tactic all over the world, and after about 80 years of it, they're almost completely defunct. It doesn't work in individual companies, they go bankrupt. And it doesn't work within nations, the taxpayers eventually get tired of subsidizing the union leeches.

The reason is that the opposite is true: By adding value, labor generates more economic activity, which in turn generates more jobs. If everyone performs less labor, there is less economic growth, and thus some combination of fewer jobs or worse paying jobs.

So why is it that the US has higher unemployment and lower wages than Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and various other countries where the taxpayers are subsidising leeches?

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Without kowledge you're just another guy with an opinion!

Matt Westwood · 2013-09-02 Reply Admin

pjt33:
wintermute:
Individual states sometimes have a higher rate, but the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, or about half what it was (in real terms) in the 1960's. There is a movement to increase it to $15/hour
Now that makes a lot more sense than the trade unionist Colbert interviewed who seemed to be saying that fast food workers should be paid twice the minimum wage because the minimum wage wasn't enough to live. I couldn't understand why she wasn't campaigning to increase the minimum wage in that case. (She did seem a bit loopy: she also wanted working in McDonald's to be a "middle-class" job, which seems ludicrous given the amount of training required).

Well I know I'd be useless at it. I can never tell which way up the burger is supposed to go. Both sides look the same to me.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

wintermute:
If you had more paid holiday each, there would be more work available to share around.

Of course, big labor has tried tactic all over the world, and after about 80 years of it, they're almost completely defunct. It doesn't work in individual companies, they go bankrupt. And it doesn't work within nations, the taxpayers eventually get tired of subsidizing the union leeches.

The reason is that the opposite is true: By adding value, labor generates more economic activity, which in turn generates more jobs. If everyone performs less labor, there is less economic growth, and thus some combination of fewer jobs or worse paying jobs.

So why is it that the US has higher unemployment and lower wages than Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and various other countries where the taxpayers are subsidising leeches?

For a variety of reasons, including changing market conditions. Post WW2 America and Britain embarked on a de facto policy of mass production of poor quality goods. This is the origin of the phrase "planned obsolescence". The point was to keep people working (a good thing), at the cost of constantly replacing things that "should" have kept working (a bad thing). Instead of creating things with intrinsic value that lasted, they created things with intrinsic value that did not, and piles of money backed by now worthless trash. In short, they diverted resources that could have created wealth into creating waste, on a massive scale.

Productivity is good, but it is only good insofar as it raises people's quality of life. Making products that don't last is mere toil. Maximizing quality of life requires maximizing it intertemporally, as modern utilitarian ("capitalist") economics prescribes.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

QJo:
You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage.

Wanna be humanistic? Next time you buy something from eBay pay the poor guy double price. Heck, do it every time.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

The real impact of raising the minimum wage isn't the relatively few minimum wage workers who will see their income go up, but rather the millions of union workers who are already paid well but who have their wages tied to the minimum wage by a formula in their contracts. Meaning if the minimum went from $7.25 to $8.25, an auto worker or teamster who already makes $20 might see a raise to, say, $23 or even $25.

Even if there isn't an immediate raise in the contracts, the next time negotiations occur they'll argue that since prices have necessarily risen (due to low wage workers being paid more) they need larger increases than they would otherwise receive.

A final thought: if a McDonalds has to pay a low-skilled worker $15 (or whatever) when does he simply buy a robot to flip burgers, who has no minimum wage, no health care insurance, no time off for family emergencies, no potty or smoking breaks, no petty arguments with coworkers, etc? When does he get iPads for the front counter so customers can enter in their own orders, instead of paying someone to work the cash register? A crew of 10 could easily become a crew of 3 or 4 in most fast food establishments.

Just sayin,

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Herr Otto Flick:
Most countries (who am I kidding, all countries apart from the US) celebrate the working man on May Day, also known as International Workers Day, which commemorates the killing of unarmed working week length protesters in Chicago by police.
Ironically, the country where this happened no longer commemorates this, since International Workers Day is a bit too commie.

PS, shouldn't celebrate too much having today off if you're American. You annually get 10 days public holiday, compared to our 8, but we have a minimum of 5.6 weeks of annual leave - and that is a bare legal minimum, most people get more, this year I have 7 weeks :)

don't think we do. don't think we have any holidays in May...(I am not a yank)

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Memorial Day is last Monday of May. Celebrates those who have died in military service.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

A final thought: if a McDonalds has to pay a low-skilled worker $15 (or whatever) when does he simply buy a robot to flip burgers, who has no minimum wage, no health care insurance, no time off for family emergencies, no potty or smoking breaks, no petty arguments with coworkers, etc? When does he get iPads for the front counter so customers can enter in their own orders, instead of paying someone to work the cash register? A crew of 10 could easily become a crew of 3 or 4 in most fast food establishments.

The problem is that someone earning $7.25/hour is probably also claiming some form of government benefit in order to be able to afford to live; that is, the government is subsidising corporations' wage bills.

Every time any country has abolished slavery or increased the minimum wage, people have insisted that corporations will make huge numbers of people unemployed, in order to prevent their profit margins from shrinking slightly. And yet, somehow, every time there's an increase in the minimum wage, the rate of unemployment manages not to go down. True, maybe next time will be the exception, but it seems like an odd way to bet.

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

TheIrritainer:
$("#frist").fadeIn(1000, function(){ console.log("stillfunny"); });

Real WTF is using console.log without testing for it's existence.

captcha: gravis - Buy gravis footwear and bags online!

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

The notion that there is only so much work to go around has never been true.

And the notion that an entry-level job, that can be done by trained monkeys, should pay enough to support a family is pure emotionalism masquerading as an idea.

And when I started at Wal-Mart in March of 2008 my hourly pay was $9.90 US per hour. It was 11.50 when I quit to take my current job (my first software gig).

2013-09-02 Reply Admin

Kiwi:
Herr Otto Flick:
Most countries (who am I kidding, all countries apart from the US) celebrate the working man on May Day, also known as International Workers Day
You've never worked in Australia or New Zealand have you?

Or Japan or Canada.

To make up for that, if Herr Otto Flick visits Hiroshima, he can hear Japanese people blame him for the A-bomb. (Yes some people understand that Germany was Japan's ally in the war, but most don't; they just see a skin colour slightly lighter than the ... no wait, slightly darker I think ... well something.)

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

Pumkinpatch:
Real WTF is using console.log without testing for it's existence.

TRWTF is browsers where you have to.

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

stfu:
QJo:
You even seem, in general, averse to such a humanistic concept as a minimum wage.

Wanna be humanistic? Next time you buy something from eBay pay the poor guy double price. Heck, do it every time.

I very rarely buy anything on ebay. I have sold lots of stuff there, though.

But I'm curious: why is it (as I have inferred from our comment by the law of contraposition) inhumanistic to pay on ebay the agreed price?

Does the same apply to all auctions? Oh look, I've won a auction for an original Picasso. Oh, you poor guy who had to sell it. Tell you what, rather than the 30 million we agreed on, I'll be humanistic and pay you 60 million instead. There. there. Now dry your eyes and go and buy yourself another yacht to cheer yourself up.

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

Oslo:
Pumkinpatch:
Real WTF is using console.log without testing for it's existence.

TRWTF is browsers where you have to.

spot on. And i hate alerts =)

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

Al H.:
The real impact of raising the minimum wage isn't the relatively few minimum wage workers who will see their income go up, but rather the millions of union workers who are already paid well but who have their wages tied to the minimum wage by a formula in their contracts. Meaning if the minimum went from $7.25 to $8.25, an auto worker or teamster who already makes $20 might see a raise to, say, $23 or even $25.
Even if there isn't an immediate raise in the contracts, the next time negotiations occur they'll argue that since prices have necessarily risen (due to low wage workers being paid more) they need larger increases than they would otherwise receive.

A final thought: if a McDonalds has to pay a low-skilled worker $15 (or whatever) when does he simply buy a robot to flip burgers, who has no minimum wage, no health care insurance, no time off for family emergencies, no potty or smoking breaks, no petty arguments with coworkers, etc? When does he get iPads for the front counter so customers can enter in their own orders, instead of paying someone to work the cash register? A crew of 10 could easily become a crew of 3 or 4 in most fast food establishments.

Just sayin,

Sounds like a good idea to me. It would certainly increase the efficiency of such places.

I don't know what it's like in the US (haven't been there for a few years now) but there's a tendency in the UK to install automatic checkouts in supermarkets, thereby reducing the number of people needed to crew the checkouts.

But this opens another political argument, on one side of which is the belief that employing people on whatever terms is good, just get them off welfare; and on the other rides the argument that just "being busy" should not be the be-all and end-all of existence, and to have 40+ hours of your week siphoned off doing something unutterably tedious and soul-destroying is detrimental to a person's spiritual development, when in fact (with a modest governmental stipend, perhaps) they might have the opportunity to extend their self-worth by learning a useful skill, e.g. an art or craft, or even how to program a computer.

Steve The Cynic · 2013-09-03 Reply Admin

QJo:
I don't know what it's like in the US (haven't been there for a few years now) but there's a tendency in the UK to install automatic checkouts in supermarkets, thereby reducing the number of people needed to crew the checkouts.

Yeah, they do that in France as well. These tills (sorry, dude, but in the UK they are tills. "checkout" is an Americanism) are often *slower* than staffed tills, because the operators (customers) manage to collectively achieve an epic level of that most omnipresent commodity, stupidity.

QJo:
But this opens another political argument, on one side of which is the belief that employing people on whatever terms is good, just get them off welfare; and on the other rides the argument that just "being busy" should not be the be-all and end-all of existence, and to have 40+ hours of your week siphoned off doing something unutterably tedious and soul-destroying is detrimental to a person's spiritual development, when in fact (with a modest governmental stipend, perhaps) they might have the opportunity to extend their self-worth by learning a useful skill, e.g. an art or craft, or even how to program a computer.

The main issue with this line of so-called reasoning is that this allegedly modest stipend has to come from somewhere. Most countries in the West are being slowly (or not so slowly) strangled by the cost of the "stipend" paid to the non-working underclass, and if you encourage the further reduction of the workforce in favour of non-employment, this will only get worse.

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
QJo:
I don't know what it's like in the US (haven't been there for a few years now) but there's a tendency in the UK to install automatic checkouts in supermarkets, thereby reducing the number of people needed to crew the checkouts.
Yeah, they do that in France as well. These tills (sorry, dude, but in the UK they are tills. "checkout" is an Americanism) are often *slower* than staffed tills, because the operators (customers) manage to collectively achieve an epic level of that most omnipresent commodity, stupidity.
QJo:
But this opens another political argument, on one side of which is the belief that employing people on whatever terms is good, just get them off welfare; and on the other rides the argument that just "being busy" should not be the be-all and end-all of existence, and to have 40+ hours of your week siphoned off doing something unutterably tedious and soul-destroying is detrimental to a person's spiritual development, when in fact (with a modest governmental stipend, perhaps) they might have the opportunity to extend their self-worth by learning a useful skill, e.g. an art or craft, or even how to program a computer.
The main issue with this line of so-called reasoning is that this allegedly modest stipend has to come from somewhere. Most countries in the West are being slowly (or not so slowly) strangled by the cost of the "stipend" paid to the non-working underclass, and if you encourage the further reduction of the workforce in favour of non-employment, this will only get worse.

It's called the welfare state, and in places like e.g. scandinavia it functions well. The places (at least in Europe) where it does not work so well is where successive governments have bribed the populace by promises of lower taxes to such a ridiculous extreme that there is no longer enough money to keep the infrastructure of that welfare state going.

As a result, the rich (who can be argued to have a moral / ethical duty to contribute more towards the nation which has afforded them the luxury of having become wealthy) are getting richer (they have been encouraged not to care for the welfare state, you see, and "don't see why" they should contribute towards something they don't use) while the poor (through lack of an adequate infrastructure to ensure their welfare) are getting poorer.

Not all the rich feel like this, of course. A high-profile exception is of course J.K. Rowling, whose considerable wealth was the direct result of having been provided with exactly those facilities provided above in order that she be able to use her state-financed leisure time to write a novel. Consequently she appreciates the benefits of living in a nation where such a "safety-net" exists, and is delighted to be able to contribute towards it by sharing a fair proportion of her bounty with the country which supported her when she needed that support most.

2013-09-03 Reply Admin

Without disagreeing with your stated point... as someone who put in too many hours in an upscale UK pub as bartender - the UK high-end work ethic with its 3-hour "liquid lunches" is not the perfect counterpoint to workplace efficiency. You know what I'm saying. yeah? I count the UK long lunches as "slack time".

I'm a "work smarter, not harder" fan, and have also worked in shockingly worse environments (Greece in its sleep-through-the-morning-afternoon-evening days) so - there are few perfect work cultures. I've worked at the other end of the scale too in Japan, where busy-work was the only work.

BUT - no. Average UK workers are nothing special. Would not employ again for work ethic.

Disclaimer, I'm an IT Kiwi, and I am lucky enough to be able to put aside x% in my own time, and not be a 8am-7pm wage slave. And I make my own holiday time. I did not get here by gouging employers for holiday leave however.

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