Those look like pretty normal numbers in my experience. Certainly nothing to worry about. But, the effectiveness of your marketing isn’t necessarily a good measure of your idea and product. Different targeting can change those numbers drastically.
Also, how good web or search ads are really depends on the economics of your product. If your customers will be paying $60 per year then paying 5$ to acquire them is pretty damn good.
For the moment though, I would focus on getting into real conversations(phone or video) with your customers to understand what they want, how much they’d pay, etc. With so much competition for attention, the days of validating with a landing page may be over.
Knowing powers of two in your head (as I guess many of us do) can helps with root estimates and this algorithm.
Take an example sqrt(5819):
That's between two powers of two 2^12 = 4096 and 2^13 = 8192.
The square roots of those numbers are easy, since you just half the exponent
sqrt(4096) = 2^6 = 64
That gives us our initial estimate g for the algorithm from the article.
Now we do:
b = n / g = 5819 / 64
To do this division in our head we remember that we already know 4096 is 64 x 64. So we just need the remainder (5819 - 4096) / 64 ~= 1700 / 64. Now that's low enough that I can approximate it in my head 64 * 30 is too high by about 3 * 64 so the answer should be around 27 (actual answer 26.5). So b = 64 + 27 = 91
So now we finish the algorithm, sqrt(5819) ~= g + b / 2 = (64 + 91 / 2) = 77.5.
Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it. And the author has now removed it.
I find it hard to relate with people who not only would be annoyed by something like this, but are annoyed about it enough to push their view on the internet to the point that the author feels the need to remove it.
In my view, the best response to those people? Update it to a more recent, or perhaps a more recognisable reference. Perhaps "Rocket Man".
The person asking the Q wasn't annoyed by it as far as I can tell (just understandably confused).
And the author's initial response was to leave the easter egg in, but to just fix the bug in it, since this behaviour was never intended (the intent was to trigger the easter egg on error condition, the bug was that it also triggered on manpath lookups).
Later in the thread the author mentions they eventually removed it completely after "some reflection", but they don't really expand on their reasons.
Were people annoyed? Was the author pressured? Was that the reason?
I'm the author. Wow, this is suggesting a lot more drama than actually happened. I just decided that the joke (which after all was not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy) had had its day. I'm sure I could have dug my heels in and made a big thing of it, maybe freewheeling open source developer versus humourless corporate internet, and I imagine I'd have had people lining up as defenders and detractors and whatever, but the thing is ... if I'd done that, it wouldn't have been funny any more anyway, so why bother?
For me, the point of an Easter egg in software is to make people who discover it smile without getting in their way: make a few people's days a little brighter. The nature of this one was that it wasn't all that likely that people would notice it - you had to run man without non-option arguments at the right time and you also had to know enough about ABBA for the output to remind you of the lyrics. For six years I heard barely a peep about it, and I'd pretty much forgotten about it myself, then suddenly it turns up on Stack Exchange and is all over the internet. Somebody on HN suggested that maybe this was the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm. The Register later had a comment thread on it full of ABBA puns. I'd only ruin it if I decided to be an arse about it; for a formerly-obscure silly bit of code, it isn't going to get any better than this anyway.
Four years later, it still occasionally crops up and I get an ABBA earworm for the next day. I'm not sad about that!
I can think of a reason why I would take it out: it’s an easter egg – i.e. unnecessary – that has already caused a problem once in a way that was not foreseen.
Of course there may be some that have been using the existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.
> Of course there may be some that have been using the existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.
I'm half curious and half afraid of this being an actual thing. Do I try it or not? I feel like doing this on a remote VM spun up just to do it would be wasted with no speakers. Do I spin up a VM on my local machine? Or screw it, where's the fun in no risk?
> Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it. And the author has now removed it.
One could also do like the nano developers did and add a straight forward configure flag to disable Easter eggs, which some distros then dutifully set for their nano packages.
Humour, fun and games, and easter eggs are fine as long as they don't interfere with the actual functionality of an app or don't break other apps and workflows.
It isn't an Easter Egg, it is a defect with intent. Using a program at 0:30 isn't an unusual precondition and as seen here it will break stuff. Nondeterministic behaviour in a relatively common use case is bad. As seen here, predictably, it is breaking someone's test pipeline.
If they want a cute reference every invocation, fine. If they want a cute reference in a bizarre edge case, well maybe. Still poor taste. I don't like to think what it will take, but sooner or later the people demanding that programs do what they are documented to do are going win the battle. They have technical correctness on their side.
If we are going for technical correctness... Anything being broken by this is relying on the output of man with no arguments which is not documented as far as I can see, other than that it should have exit code 0.
Where is the boundary between responsible and harmless fun?
Perhaps I should be careful not to edit this comment in case someone's test pipeline curls it and checks the content.
To be clear, he original stack exchange post was calling “man -w” which does have defined behavior. The maintainer of man fixed it at that point to only happen with the bare “man”.
Presumably because the programmer likes that element of western culture. Are programmers supposed to conduct a poll among global stakeholders before they implement an easter egg?
This reminds me some review or article i read many years ago about OS/2 2.0 (the one before Warp) that wrote something along the lines of IBM tried to use a color palette that would be appropriate for all cultures around the world and ended up making a user interface with colors that looked very bland for everyone :-P
Oh come on, ABBA was probably the most global phenomenon ever coming out of Europe. Everybody is an ABBA fan, even if they haven't discovered it yet ;)
I’m in my late 30s and have never understood the Abba obsession. I’ve heard some of their music and it doesn’t really do it for me. And the weird way everyone acts about Abba, like you see in this thread, just reinforces that for me.
It's probably at least partly a 'you had to be there' situation to remember how popular, globally, that band was back in the 70's. The fact that they weren't from the US or UK made them stand out even more.
I like seeing reflections of creators’ personalities in code. It’s a little reminder to not take myself so seriously, to remember that these artificial systems called computers were totally created by humans and finally, that creativity in code is one of the human essences imbued in these systems.
I wonder if AI’s will create Easter eggs in their creations? Would they see them as a form of play, or only as a form of waste? What would that say about the eventual differences between a human and an artificial mind?
The post even mentions a Big Sur / Monterey visual refresh currently in development. As "maintenance mode" projects go, this looks like the best of the best.
Smart C++ Engineer | CloudNC | London, UK | Full-time | ONSITE
CNC milling machines are at the heart of manufacturing with more than $300B of components produced by them each year. Despite this, their software is in the dark ages. Industrial CNC machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80iIhfjTm5I
We’re researching and applying breakthrough methods to control these machines automatically and more optimally than ever before. We’re looking for experts in C++, 3D graphics and GPGPU acceleration who want to help revolutionise how the things around us are made. From MacBook cases, to jet engine turbines.
Your role will consist of developing novel algorithms to solve real world problems in machining and working with a team to engineer our core product.
Currently, Make Things Now: Blocks requires Chrome, Firefox or Safari on a non-touch device. We're working on support for both IE and touch devices and we will be releasing this soon!
Until then, if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch!
---- I'm on a windows 7 machine running Chrome.
Once I manually disabled your blocking divs, and enabled the content div, I got the UI to display, and I think I understand what your app does...
It's a minecraft style voxel modeller with STL export capabilities, geared toward 3d printing! Cool stuff! You gotta disable all that target platform checking crap and just let it run on anything, and then see what doesn't work.
That said, it was throwing exceptions internally, so I never actually got to drop a voxel... I stopped short of trying to debug your emscripten stuff..
Edit: In your STL export, are you only exporting externally visible faces? Also, does your 3d printing integration allow printing on the fly? Curious how you are tackling that... Ive been kinda thinking about an app like this to make 3d printing more interactive.. it would be really neat to be able to draw and print stuff one layer at a time interactively! like... doing pixel art one layer at a time, and having it print each layer as you move to the next... Cool stuff! Let me know if you're looking for someone to collaborate with!
Yup SketchUp is pretty good, but it's really not ideal for 3D printable objects. And it's still not easy enough to help enable the widespread adoptions of 3D printing.
Also, how good web or search ads are really depends on the economics of your product. If your customers will be paying $60 per year then paying 5$ to acquire them is pretty damn good.
For the moment though, I would focus on getting into real conversations(phone or video) with your customers to understand what they want, how much they’d pay, etc. With so much competition for attention, the days of validating with a landing page may be over.