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This is how a quiet family lunch in a small Australian town sent shockwaves around the world after a sinister murder plot came to light.

Police have launched a probe into the sudden death of a girl - in her late teens - at the Emerge dance music festival.

The former Manchester United defender, 46, and his reality TV star wife, 34, have packed up their life in Bromley southeast London in exchange for a £6.5million bolthole in Dubai.

Today's awfulness comes from Tim H, and while it's technically more than one line, it's so representative of the code, and so short that I'm going to call this a representative line. Before we get to the code, we need to talk a little history.

Tim's project is roughly three decades old. It's a C++ tool used for a variety of research projects, and this means that 90% of the people who have worked on it are PhD candidates in computer science programs. We all know the rule of CompSci PhDs and programming: they're terrible at it. It's like the old joke about the farmer who, when unable to find an engineer to build him a cow conveyer, asked a physicist. After months of work, the physicist introduced the result: "First, we assume a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum…"

Now, this particularly function has been anonymized, but it's easy to understand what the intent was:

bool isFooOrBar() { return isFoo() && isBar(); }

The obvious problem here is the mismatch between the function name and the actual function behavior- it promises an or operation, but does an and, which the astute reader may note are different things.

I think this offers another problem, though. Even if the function name were correct, given the brevity of the body, I'd argue that it actually makes the code less clear. Maybe it's just me, but isFoo() && isBar() is more clear in its intent than isFooAndBar(). There's a cognitive overhead to adding more symbols that would make me reluctant to add such a function.

There may be an argument about code-reuse, but it's worth noting- this function is only ever called in one place.

This particular function is not itself, all that new. Tim writes:

This was committed as new code in 2010 (i.e., not a refactor). I'm not sure if the author changed their mind in the middle of writing the function or just forgot which buttons on the keyboard to press.

More likely, Tim, is that they initially wrote it as an "or" operation and then discovered that they were wrong and it needed to be an "and". Despite the fact that the function was only called in one place, they opted to change the body without changing the name, because they didn't want to "track down all the places it's used". Besides, isn't the point of a function to encapsulate the behavior?

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Lauren Parker, who lives in London , recently shared her story on TikTok , where she has 122,000 followers, warning fellow parents of the careless mistake that left her 'screaming'.

What the Dickens is going on in Germany?

Opinion  Let’s talk law and let’s talk donkey. Or. in the British vernacular, ass. In particular, let’s go back to Charles Dickens, a pungent critic of the law, who had one of his characters in Oliver Twist say of a legal assumption that “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass - a idiot.”…

Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu is accused of trying to kiss a teenager, as well as putting his hand on her thigh

Brianna Sky Morton, originally from the States, regularly shares TikTok videos about the quirks of living in Britain.

Oracle-backed FOSS hypervisor a worthy rival to Hyper-V and VMware

hands on  VirtualBox 7.2 is here, bringing improved Arm-on-Arm virtualization features and better 3D acceleration support.…

BBC Gardeners' World presenter and horticultural expert Adam Frost has revealed there's only one issue that he and his wife Sulina often disagree on

Two of Japan's largest media groups are suing AI search engine Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement, joining a growing list of news publishers taking legal action against AI companies using their content. FT: Japanese media group Nikkei, which owns the Financial Times, and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said in statements on Tuesday that they had jointly filed a lawsuit in Tokyo. The groups join a number of Western media companies taking legal action against Perplexity, which provides answers to questions with sources and citations, using large language models (LLMs) from platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Japanese news providers claim Perplexity has, without permission, "copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi" and ignored a "technical measure" designed to prevent this from happening. They claim that Perplexity's answers have given incorrect information attributed to the newspapers' articles, which "severely damages the credibility of newspaper companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angela Mortimer Barrett, the 1961 Wimbledon ladies' singles champion and one of Britain's most successful postwar players, has died at the age of 93.

His impressive resume includes a starring role in John Landis' 1981 comedy horror film An American Werewolf in London. He joined forces with the Queen of Pop in the 1987 comedy Who's That Girl.

Patterson, 50, was found guilty of poisoning three of her in-laws - and attempting to kill another - with a lunch laced with death cap mushrooms in July 2023.

Everyone knows miniature horses are cute and cuddly - but few realise just how powerful they can be.

Dr Ozlem Galip (pictured) is accused of taking money from small businesses to get them Home Office licences to hire migrant labour despite not being registered with any official regulator.

Rare aircraft filled the skies above Stow Maries for the Great War Aerodrome’s annual air show.

A CLINIC in Braintree has become the only clinic in the area to hold a prestigious accreditation.

John Price, a retired farmer from Steeple Bumpstead, is crowned clay pigeon shooting World champion

She helped steer the school through a period of uncertainty due to crumbling RAAC concrete