# ­xkcd thread **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** comic-strips\ **Created:** [May 28, 2020, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574 "2020-05-28T00:57:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 43
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/842 "2021-06-25T20:07:44Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Obviously, it was settled by someone who liked the original Atlantic City, and found it amusing to name the new place after it. And when you only have 39 citizens, it’s not hard to convince enough of them to go along with the joke Maybe, but there could be another way it got its name. For instance, there’s > **[Atlantic, Iowa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic,_Iowa)** > > Atlantic is a city in and the county seat of Cass County, Iowa, United States, located along the East Nishnabotna River. The population was 6,792 in the 2020 census, a decline from the 7,257 population in 2000. > Atlantic was founded in October 1868 by Franklin H. Whitney, B.F. Allen, John P. Cook, and others. While historians cannot agree on how Atlantic got its name, local legend tells that the founding fathers estimated that the town was about halfway between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlanti... > [@](#): > > While historians cannot agree on how Atlantic got its name, local legend tells that the founding fathers estimated that the town was about halfway between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, so it led them to flip a coin and, clearly, Atlantic won. ---
**Author:** ![whitetho](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whitetho/32/1059_2.png) [@whitetho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whitetho)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/843 "2021-06-25T20:16:55Z")
I was a little suprised to see Portland, Maine listed as the obscure one. Here in the east I believe it is as well known as the one in Oregon, as it was the original Portland. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/844 "2021-06-25T23:13:57Z")
[xkcd: 1991 and 2021](https://xkcd.com/2481/) As of this posting, the OneBox thing isn’t working. And I don’t see any Title-Text on the strip. Looks like the xkcd page wasn’t updated correctly. Probably be fixed later. ---
**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/845 "2021-06-25T23:17:08Z")
You pasted it in as the page title with a hyperlink, instead of pasting the URL directly. This is a “helpful” feature of Edge and I believe Chrome. > **[1991 and 2021](https://xkcd.com/2481/)** > > "Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT." But you’re right that the hover text isn’t working (yet). ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/846 "2021-06-25T23:26:11Z")
If you go to > **[1991 and 2021](https://m.xkcd.com/2481/)** > > "Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT." you don’t see the alt-text properly, but you do get what is probably the alt-text See also: [“Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns.” “The WHAT.”](https://m.xkcd.com/2481/) ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2021, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/847 "2021-06-25T23:43:05Z")
> [@TroutMan](#): > > You pasted it in as the page title with a hyperlink, instead of pasting the URL directly. I did the same thing I always do. But I figured out what the problem was: I included a space in front of the url. For some reason I didn’t think to check for that. ---
**Author:** ![Shagunathor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47c2d/32.png) [@Shagunathor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagunathor)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/848 "2021-06-26T00:45:41Z")
While “City” is optimistic, it got the name “Atlantic” from being just on the Atlantic flowing side of the Continental Divide. See [Atlantic City: Boom-bust Survivor | WyoHistory.org](https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/atlantic-city-boom-bust-survivor) ---
**Author:** ![tofor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tofor/32/13727_2.png) [@tofor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tofor)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/849 "2021-06-26T01:04:06Z")
I agree with Randall that “TV Shows where Robots Battle” is the most important. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/850 "2021-06-26T12:48:32Z")
Also on the XKCD site, the comic image is a link, to [www.xkcd.com](http://www.xkcd.com) . Though I’m not sure why that link would be necessary or useful-- Presumably anyone reposting the comic on another site wouldn’t preserve the link. ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/851 "2021-06-26T15:24:25Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Wednesday’s apparently didn’t get posted: I remember seeing a shirt in Vancouver that said something like “The other Vancouver, near the other Portland, in the other Clark County, in the other Washington.” ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/852 "2021-06-26T16:27:27Z")
It looks normal, now. I’m guessing that he was experimenting with a new way to make the mouseover text show up, to be more compatible with mouseless mobile devices, and the experiment wasn’t entirely successful. ---
**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2021, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/853 "2021-06-26T17:34:29Z")
I looked at the page source before it was fixed, and it was just incorrectly coded HTML. The mouseover text was in an **href** tag instead of **title**. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2021, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/854 "2021-06-27T02:43:45Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > Pretty much all US town wikipages have a standard block of text with demographic data from the 2000 Census. Virtually certain to have been generated by a program based on a Census database. I suspect that most, if not all, the pages themselves were generated at the same time by the same program. So if a town, no matter how small, was in that database, it has a Wikipage. Yes, that’s exactly what happened. There is a page (whose name I’ve forgotten) about the early growth of Wikipedia, and there was a very short period of time where the number of articles suddenly skyrocketed, precisely as you describe. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2021, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/855 "2021-06-29T04:44:57Z")
> **[Indoor Socializing](https://xkcd.com/2482/)** > > The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2021, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/856 "2021-06-29T13:03:03Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > Pretty much all US town wikipages have a standard block of text with demographic data from the 2000 Census. Virtually certain to have been generated by a program based on a Census database. I suspect that most, if not all, the pages themselves were generated at the same time by the same program. This is exactly what Derek Ramsey did in October 2002: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2002](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2002) ---
**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2021, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/857 "2021-07-01T03:23:01Z")
> **[Linked List Interview Problem](https://xkcd.com/2483/)** > > I'd traverse it myself, but it's singly linked, so I'm worried that I won't be able to find my way back to 2021. This one is probably baffling to non-programmers, and probably to some newer programmers as well. A linked list is way of storing data in which each entry in the list has a link to the next entry. Modern programming languages generally abstract the implementation so programmers don’t have to deal with traversing linked lists. But it’s still a (somewhat) common interview question to see if the person understands basic programming principles. I guess the joke is that linked lists belong in a museum because they are old and not something people need to worry about these days. A singly linked list means each entry links to the following entry, but there is no link to the previous one. Therefore you can follow it only in one direction. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2021, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/858 "2021-07-01T03:36:31Z")
Fairly baffling to old programmers, too. I’ve spent part of the last few months trying to _delete_ redundant linked-list implementations from our codebase, because for some reason people like to rewrite them all the time. It didn’t occur to me that a programmer at the level of doing a coding interview could possibly think that it’s not worth knowing how they’re implemented. Then again, I expect people to name a handful of sorting algorithms, list the tradeoffs for each one, and be able to implement them. And that’s doubly true for fresh-out-of-college types. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2021, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/859 "2021-07-01T05:15:51Z")
Tangentially related: > **[Tim Berners-Lee’s NFT of world wide web source code sold for $5.4m](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/30/world-wide-web-nft-sold)** > > Crypto asset represents ownership of various digital items from when Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2021, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/860 "2021-07-01T05:48:31Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > It didn’t occur to me that a programmer at the level of doing a coding interview could possibly think that it’s not worth knowing how they’re implemented. > > Then again, I expect people to name a handful of sorting algorithms, list the tradeoffs for each one, and be able to implement them. And that’s doubly true for fresh-out-of-college types. I think it depends what kind of company you’re working for. It sounds like your company has a large body of ancient code to maintain, so you need new employees with that kind of old-fashioned, low-level knowledge. A start-up company, or a company developing new applications from scratch, on the other hand, would be testing knowledge of the latest technologies and high-level languages. That’s not to say that low-level knowledge can’t be useful in some rare situations even today, but for the most part testing a knowledge of linked lists and sorting algorithms is redundant. It would be like expecting an interviewee to know Morse code and semaphore. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2021, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574/861 "2021-07-01T08:43:24Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > It sounds like your company has a large body of ancient code to maintain, so you need new employees with that kind of old-fashioned, low-level knowledge. Yes and no. On one hand, sure, we have a large body of old code to maintain. But it’s in a constant state of modernization, and we generally use a reasonably modern variant and style of C++. So while there are some old crufty corners of the codebase, there are other places that are shiny and new (not that old is necessarily bad–there’s code around that I wrote 20 years ago, and wouldn’t be improved by a rewrite). The bigger problems are performance and environmental limits. Performance means we’re obligated to use C++ or another low-level language. Also, some of the common abstractions (like built-in sort routines) are not good enough. The environment also places limits; our code may have to run in places where it can’t dynamically allocate memory, for instance, or doesn’t support function pointers. And this isn’t running on some crusty old machine, this is the absolute fastest hardware on the market for its application. It’s fast because people know the low level details inside and out and use the most productive tools they can while also maintaining full control over the implementation. Many times, that means implementing a well-known algorithm or data structure in a way that’s optimized for a certain platform. Knowing this stuff at a low level has other benefits. I recently debugged a rare crash that only showed up in the field. Our sole bit of information was a crash dump that gave a call stack and a snapshot of the registers (no memory aside from the few adjacent instructions). The call stack pointed to a qsort routine that I wrote (yay!). But I knew that qsort was rock-solid, so it couldn’t have been me (I hoped). Well, since I knew that routine inside and out, I could recognize how it mapped to the assembly code, and was able to convincingly determine that another thread had written to the array _while_ it was being sorted. Bad juju. I found the culprit thread and fixed the problem. In some other universe, I just used some off-the-shelf sort routine buried in a library. It still crashed, but I had zero means of actually debugging it, not least because I didn’t even know what qsort was. So I spent a few weeks randomly messing with stuff until I thought I fixed it, though since I had no means of verifying it I probably didn’t fix anything. And one in a million end users still get a weird crash once in a while, though it doesn’t surprise them much since all their stuff is just a tiny bit flaky. Anyway, rant over. Low-level code may be a smaller part of the industry but it’s as necessary as ever. It’s not like this stuff was just written 40 years ago and forgotten about. And performance still matters. When people get the idea that performance doesn’t matter, it’s because _someone else_ already wrote the high performance code they’re depending on. Eloi and Morlocks. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574.md?page=42) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-thread/854574.md?page=44)