Could someone explain this joke to me, a total programming noob?

This is the programming equivalent of a politician embezzling money by writing a law that says "I get ten percent of all the money!" and asking everyone to pass it.

They made a pull request - which basically means a request to change the source code - to insert a huge hacker console into wp.

Thanks. I'm with parent and very curious about what this is about. Does this console give root access to the server via a web interface?

Sort of. It gives access with whatever user the webserver is running under. Might be root, but will usually be a less privileged user eg www-data.

Check out the book "punished by rewards". Also explains why achievements in video games are such a bad idea.

To save me the trouble of reading an entire book just to get the one point I'm interested in, why does the author think that achievements in video games are a bad idea?

Reminds me of 9/11 and no one in government taking any responsibility. Except Richard Clarke.

Yeah you can write a "note". But it sucks, closed to people who don't have FB accounts, and, depending on your settings, possibly closed to people who aren't your friend.

Okay, it was down, but now it's back. I guess nevermind. It's just I never ever see it go down.

Oh crap, was that today?

Just want to point out, that the reason he cites is NOT, at all, the reason why most sci-fi sucks.

The real reason that most sci-fi (and fantasy and romance and most 'genre' novels) suck is that they focus too much on the "stuff", and not on the things which actually matter in narrative fiction writing.

The things that really matter in a story are characters, strong motivations, good dialogue, plot, conflict, etc... techniques of the writing craft. These are what make a book good or not, but they are kind of an afterthought to all the "STUFF" in Sci Fi books.

I love how it's considered this great awesome thing that you "can" spend lots of money on BUTTONS for the damn thing.

Most iPod Touches do not have a microphone =[

I also hope they don't "do a worse" than Yahoo. I'm a big Yahoo fan, actually. Call me crazy. I prefer their email service to gmail - I know that's not allowed, but I do. They have text email links that I can open in new tabs, look it up Google. Also I love Yahoo! Games, especially Chess and Go. Great service. Google, where are your games?

"...that's not allowed..." LOL! Not liking Gmail might soon become a law rather than something that is frowned upon. ;-) I'm not much of a Yahoo fan myself, but Delicious is one awesome service.

PS. Thanks for catching the typo. :) I'm terrible at proofreading.