djulius
The white/yellow page service (3611) was free for the first three minutes and was widely used. My parents never had the (huge) yearly book version at home.
As mentioned in other comments it was also widely used to consult Baccalauréat (national exam like SAT) results.
The Wikipedia page on Holocaust victims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims) has a list of the different groups targeted by the nazis. In addition to what other commenters have written there was also: freemasons, spanish republicans from the 36 revolution, soviet prisoner of wars, slovene and romani.
Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews.
You and Your Research (1988)
Didn't go further to investigate but this puts a serious doubt on the representativity of the data.
2nd-largest meteorite in world, weighing nearly 68K pounds, found in Argentina
"Semantic Web" did much better by having plenty of millions euros projects funded in FP6/7 and H2020 with absolutely no outcome.
Incompetence as a Signalling Device (2009)
I think there are more interesting open source projects that should hit the HN frontpage. So let's start with this one, that computes Wikipedia Pagerank on a single node in less than 30 minutes : https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias-internal-pag...
Computing Wikipedia’s internal PageRanks
The Warp 10 Platform – Geo and sensor data
The first option that came was to reduce sleep to gain free time, definitely not a good idea on the long run.
Kilim: Very fast actors for Java (2012) [pdf]
Google lost a top employee to a startup that's like Fight Club for programmers
Underground Railroad
The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
Fictitious entry
Great Engineers and Crap CVs
More precisely, I don't know if the hierarchy is finite or not, or if there is a termination problem in the process. Sometimes penny checking finishes, sometimes not.
A practical introduction to JMH, optimizing Selector.wakeup()
Branchless Conditionals (2011)
The thing is that the french system lacks a proper CS education. "Grandes Ecoles" has the best student but offers pretty limited courses in CS (except maybe TPT, not that sure) and not that much coding experience. Universities are the only offering deep theory education and sometimes good coding experience but their degree are not well recognized so they don't attract good students. As a consequence private schools try to fill the gap by offering a great education in programming, however lacking the CS foundation.
Because of the shortage of coders, big french consulting companies (Atos, Cap Gemini, ...) hire since decades graduates from every domain more or less related to science/technology and give them a six months training (in the best case) before sending them to the clients.
So I'm not that surprised that such a school will be successful as long there is a coder shortage. When the next bubble blows, these graduates will probably be the first to be layed off.
I don't know why, but I suspect people looking for karma, but I would like to be proven the contrary.