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bluesmoon

4,383 karma · joined January 2, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bluesmoon; my proof: https://keybase.io/bluesmoon/sigs/zjNc0lEla9p9TSEm8TeHw-BkA0ot1GazUD9QPGq2qAI ]
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bluesmoon··on We got a $60k tax penalty for a zero-revenue side project
Go with S-corp.
bluesmoon··on Google Safe Browsing incident
Exactly! For a web dev in 2025 to still not know security best practices that have been around for 20+ years is a failure on the part of the dev.
bluesmoon··on Google Safe Browsing incident
Github discovered the same thing a long long time ago which is why you now have the github.io domain.
bluesmoon··on Anscombe's Quartet
I did a talk on Cognitive Biases in performance measurement and included Anscombe's Quartet (among other things) in the section on developer bias: https://speakerdeck.com/bluesmoon/we-love-speed-understandin...
bluesmoon··on Couchers is officially out of Beta
yeah, that's about the time I quit couchsurfing and limited my interactions to community meets. Then it pretty much died out. I couldn't tell if this is the same folks trying to do it right or different folks who believed in the original mission of CouchSurfing.
bluesmoon··on Couchers is officially out of beta
Wait, is this a rebrand of couchsurfing.org?
bluesmoon··on Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal
Thanks for the feedback. It's more correct to say that traffic drops off for 3-4 hours rather than everyone goes offline for 3-4 hours. It's likely to be staggered based on the slope of the curve at that point.
bluesmoon··on Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal
That's a fair criticism. The data suggests that there are different breaks spread out over that 3-4 hour period, not one break of 3-4 hours. I've reworded it accordingly.
bluesmoon··on Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal
Thank you for your personal story about this. It helps to put things in perspective.
bluesmoon··on Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal
I have it on my TODO list to look a little more into that. It caught me by surprise when I pulled up the data for Germany.
bluesmoon··on Take the pedals off the bike
It's like the author has never heard of balance bikes, but they're very common, and have been for over a decade. FWIW, I taught my kid to ride when he was 3 by putting him at the top of a wheelchair ramp and letting him go. Took him 5 seconds, and he was riding around the park by himself by the second attempt. He'd never been on a bike before.
bluesmoon··on Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
Not specifically game related, but adjacent. Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net/) is designed for making music specifically with kids in mind, and they might accidentally learn a whole bunch of programming concepts as a side-effect.
bluesmoon··on Toasts are bad UX
I came here thinking there was a new recommendation for making toast, or at least a recommended type of bread to use, but I found nothing edible.
bluesmoon··on 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development (2011)
Nice. Reminds me of the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia from back in the 90s/early 2000s: http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/index.php
bluesmoon··on 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development (2011)
Julia supports Complex numbers as a built-in type.
bluesmoon··on The weirdest bug I've seen yet
Reminds me of the time back in 2010 when a piece of CSS on the Yahoo Search page would cause a complete desktop crash on Red Hat Linux: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/04/can-website-crash-your-r...

To the author, did you ever consider contacting the Chrome dev team about this? They're pretty responsive to bug reports.

bluesmoon··on Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)
Reminds me of the 500 mile email (2002): https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
bluesmoon··on Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
I can't say that I specifically learnt COBOL for fun because I did it in 1997 or so in India when the entire Indian IT industry was bidding on a host Y2K migration projects. I only graduated college in May 2000, so I never actually used COBOL to solve any Y2K problems, however, I did figure out that you could use a large number of paragraphs in the SCREEN SECTION to build animation frames and use that to build fun animations. It was tedious though, so I wrote a C++ program to generate the SCREENs for the COBOL program.
bluesmoon··on Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom text on the web
Hangul is phonetic, but doesn't have the capability to represent all phonetic sounds of a language. For example, Hindi has 4 distinct letters and consequently sounds for the each of D and T (D: ड ढ द ध, T: ट ठ त थ), which all correspond to the single Hangul letter diot (ㄷ). I have Korean friends who write their names in the Chinese script because they don't have the necessary letters to represent the sounds.
bluesmoon··on Epochalypse
Perl counts from 1900, so the year 2000 was actually stored as 100. You'd get 2 digit years in the 1990s and suddenly 3 digit years after 2000. The solution was to arithmetically add 1900 to the year before rendering. Newer perl functions would handle that internally.
bluesmoon··on Epochalypse
COBOL programs will be fine. They use 4 characters just for the year since it's stored as the decimal characters. I was trained in COBOL in the late 90s to work on Y2K migrations. It's done this way so that COBOL programs stored on punched cards are readable (also why COBOL has its line-length limitations).
bluesmoon··on A self-updating list of the most current useragents
Already happening. Client Hints are the way forward.
bluesmoon··on A self-updating list of the most current useragents
Nope, this is already happened in Chrome. Client Hints are the way forward.
bluesmoon··on Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPI for over a year
In 1999, I was an intern at a company in India. We wanted to put a machine in a datacenter, and the datacenter admin asked us to set the Administrator password to "password". Turns out that all the other companies that put their boxes in that datacenter did the same. Infosys was one of those companies.

I wrote more about it here: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2017/04/a-tale-of-datacenter-sec...

bluesmoon··on User-Agent Reduction
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that "Akamai is whining" about this. It's an informational blog post about what's happening and what's changing.

User Agent strings aren't used for feature detection, they're used for classification. As a developer, when you're trying to fix a bug reported by a customer, it helps to know exactly which browser right down to the patch version that bug shows up in so that you can try and reproduce the bug in the same environment.

bluesmoon··on Please stop disabling zoom
> I don't know whether this is a trend

I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not...

It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.

bluesmoon··on Role of ambient humidity underestimated in research
As Jacques Pepin once said... your recipe is just a guideline because you have to adapt it to the ambient humidity when and where you cook.
bluesmoon··on Imitate, Then Innovate
Back in the 90s the Microsoft version was "Embrace and Extend" which really meant, adopt a standard and then change it so that the original implementation no longer works.
bluesmoon··on Reverse engineering Wordle
Fun times. I remember back in the year 2000, during the dot com craze, there was a company in India that built a clone of "Who wants to be a millionaire". It was in beta and there was no real cash or prize involved.

They had all the answers stored in the source code. I wrote up a quick perl script to play the game and unfortunately left it running overnight, and in the morning there were complaints from other players asking how I'd reached the top rank so quickly.

bluesmoon··on Archaeological dig reignites debate over the Old Testament’s historical accuracy
+1 for using chthonic in a coherent sentence.
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