Ok, this is just golden.

We were still 1.5 MB over the memory limit!

At this point one of the most experienced programmers in the team, one who had survived many years of development in the "good old days," decided to take matters into his own hands. He called me into his office, and we set out upon what I imagined would be another exhausting session of freeing up memory.

Instead, he brought up a source file and pointed to this line:

static char buffer[1024 * 1024 * 2];

"See this?" he said. And then deleted it with a single keystroke. Done!

He probably saw the horror in my eyes, so he explained to me that he had put aside those two megabytes of memory early in the development cycle. He knew from experience that it was always impossible to cut content down to memory budgets, and that many projects had come close to failing because of it. So now, as a regular practice, he always put aside a nice block of memory to free up when it's really needed.

I don't know how to say this politely but we really need a bunch of Erlang articles on HN right now. _this _is _getting _out _of _hand.

I also noticed that if you rearranged the letters in 'why' you get 'hwy', which, if pronounced a specific way, sounds very similar to the Pacific island of Hawaii, leading me to believe that he made his escape there on the 19th, which you get by fully curving the bottom right part of the 'h' around to make a '9', flipping it over both horizontally and vertically, and placing it to the right of the underscore when propped up to give us the '1'. It was under our noses the entire time.

I think it's exactly the right place to discuss it. This is Hacker News, _why is a great hacker. This is the one place in the web where him disappearing is considered important. Those who prefer to read what Julia heard that Scoble said to Arrington about Twitter have the whole Hyposphere for that.

Oh man, that's funny. So you purge articles about a programming language, about a legendary hacker, and about me off of "hacker news".

Yet, every other day you've got those crap posts from the Mixergy guy, random posts about idiotic sexist dating theories, a billion VC posts, and everything from techcrunch.

Apparently, "normal" at HN means "douche".

Keep on rockin' in the free world brother,

Zed