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dfboydon Formatting as Courtesy to the Reader

The post* READS like a MARVEL COMIC BOOK.

---

* last ish.

The way the article uses RSA is no better than a simple substitution cipher. Both the "l"s in "hello" are enciphered to 2575. It's a newspaper cryptogram.

You're supposed to concatenate all the input numbers, to create a message that has hundreds or thousands of digits; then RSA-encrypt that number.

dfboydon COBOL to Kotlin via Formal Models (IR and Alloy and Golden Master)

Isn't the first code sample pasted in there twice?

dfboydon How the cochlea computes (2024)

tinnitus

dfboydon Every American Is Bilingual

We all only speak two languages: English and bad English

dfboydon Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

The iOS app is long-unmaintained and has bugs. It needs a new maintainer, but they need some kind of Apple developer account to actually get it in the app store.

dfboydon No Hello

I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times.

The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second group never seem to take the hint that the first interruption is an imposition in itself.

dfboydon Ray Tracing in J

"[verbs] get forked and hooked until you go insane trying to track it all"

J comes with a Qt IDE, which has a function "dissect" that displays a graphical parse tree of an expression.

load 'debug/dissect'

dissect '(+/ % #) ? 10 $ 100'

dfboydon Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477 -- HN discussion of "Seeing like a Bank"

dfboydon Employment for computer programmers in the U.S. at lowest level since 1980

This story is entirely based on the idea that "computer programmer" is different from "software developer", which the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers different occupations. It's as though "lawyer" and "attorney" were considered separate professions. If you want to see how moronic this is, look up the definitions and see where the definition says people with these occupations work. Where do software developers work? "In companies that develop software" Where do computer programmers work? "Indoors, in offices."

dfboydon Almost one in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN

https://dfboyd.github.io/hw/index.html

A clickable version of the original heatmap

dfboydon The IPv6 Transition

https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html still as relevant as the day it was written

dfboydon Unveiling the Enigma: Cryptonomicon – A Tale of Codes, War, Innovation (2023)

I think this article was written by AI. It claims Amy was a WWII character, when she was actually a modern one. Also it has the usual preamble paragraphs that read like a sixth-grader's term paper.

dfboydon Shipbreaking

These could be Battlefield 2042 screenshots of the "Discarded" map

dfboydon Don't Just Say "Hello" in Chat

5 points by dfboyd on March 11, 2022 | parent | context | next [–] | on: Don't ask to ask, just ask (2019)

46 points by dfboyd on Jan 23, 2021 | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013) I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com".

dfboydon Don't ask to ask, just ask (2019)

dfboydon Ventilated Prose (2009)

In the early days of word processing (runoff, troff, IBM script etc.) when people used line-oriented editors like ed, it was considered good practice to split each sentence across lines at the boundaries of clauses and phrases, for ease of rearranging them. The effect is similar to what's described in the article.

dfboydon The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality

What really matters is how much carbon you can capture per unit electricity used. Presumably you're going to run the carbon-capture plant on renewable electricity. If it can't capture more carbon per watt-hour than your dirtiest non-renewable power plant, you might as well just use the renewable electricity directly and junk the non-renewable plant.

dfboydon Lisp as an Alternative to Java (2000)

Where did this crazy list come from? Has the guy never looked at an actual telephone?

  The following mapping from letters to digits is given:

  E | J N Q | R W X | D S Y | F T | A M | C I V | B K U | L O P | G H Z
  e | j n q | r w x | d s y | f t | a m | c i v | b k u | l o p | g h z
  0 |   1   |   2   |   3   |  4  |  5  |   6   |   7   |   8  
 |9
  

  We want to use this mapping for encoding telephone numbers by words, so
  that it becomes easier to remember the numbers.

dfboydon This Prime Does Not Exist

What I really like is that a lot of the time it's obvious the number isn't prime, because it's either even, or ends in a 5!

dfboydon I’ve had the same supper for 10 years

Die Ball ist rund. Der Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. So ist alles klar. Alles anderes ist Theorie. -- Sepp Herberger

dfboydon Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

If it had been authorized, presumably they'd have kept my name on it, no?

dfboydon Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com". The linked article at nohello.net is a paraphrase of the nohello.com content; compare the list of salutations (especially "yt?) and the paragraphs at the end mentioning "asynchronous communication". ("yt?" was a favorite of Raymond B---., who was in many ways my mentor at Google and who I'm forever grateful to.)

dfboydon Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)

Is this project's name a pun on "gnusto"? That's the spell in the Infocom game "Enchanter", which copies a spell into your spellbook.

dfboydon New Method of Electrical Production That Does Not Require Fossil Fuels

Perpetual motion machine.

dfboydon Is anybody still using Windows 95?

Just the plain .ms macros. Plus "pic", I like that a lot.

dfboydon Is anybody still using Windows 95?

I use troff (groff) under Linux. The really freaky thing is that you already have groff on your Mac -- it's installed by default.

dfboydon Technology that changed air travel

The post has annoying little errors that make it harder to read. The figure says BA286, and the text says "BA287 means British Airways flight 287". So does that mean you always add 1 to the flight number shown on the screen, to get the actual flight number? "388 equipment type: 389 refers to Airbus A380-800". Again, you add 1 to the number shown on the screen? Why does "389" mean "A380-800" and not "A380-900"? I realize it's possible to figure out that these are just typos and you don't really mean "take the number shown on the screen and add 1 to it to get the actual flight number", but why would you make your readers deal with that kind of confusion?

dfboydon Is AMD Stuck in the Past? PGA vs. LGA

Crappy copy-editing. Sentence 1: "and" should be "on", sentence 3: "air" should be "are", and more like that throughout the article. I think it was voice-to-text and never corrected.

dfboydon Mainframes Are Having a Moment

I think this is just an IBM PR piece. It ticks all the boxes: quotes from IBM customers, quotes from IBM staff, mentions the "Master the Mainframe" contest. You can tell because when it says "mainframe" it doesn't mean "any large computer", it means "Something descended from the IBM 360".