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kshay

138 karma · joined August 5, 2013

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kshay··on How SSH port became 22 (2017)
I like how he didn’t explicitly request 22. It was more like “anything 1-255 would be great... oh, by the way, I happen to be using 22...”
kshay··on History of Alice and Bob (2017)
I always assumed the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” had something to do with the use of these names...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064100

kshay··on Smart Programmers Write STUPID Code (2022)
It seems like the U should be “Unambiguous” rather than “Ubiquitous”?
kshay··on Great Pyramid of Cholula
Huh, never realized you could target individual elements of an SVG with CSS :hover rules!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Comparis...

kshay··on DotDict: A simple Python library to make chained attributes possible
So basically Perl autovivification for Python?
kshay··on Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple
Glider was the Flappy Bird of its day!
kshay··on BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product
I’ve been using it for most of those years, and still use it every day. We recently had to wrangle a bunch of 400Mb+ XML files, and everyone else’s editor struggled even to open them, while I happily regexed my way around extracting various data.

However, I reluctantly have to say that when working with TypeScript codebases specifically, I do feel the lack of IDE features for recognizing imports and cross-referencing symbols across files. Any other BBEdit diehards in this position? What have you ended up doing?

kshay··on I found the best anagram in English (2017)
I’m going to hear the Paul Simon lyric as “Don’t I know you from the megachiropteran’s party?” from now on
kshay··on The inventor of the troll doll only made a sliver of the proceeds
It seems you can buy reproductions of these now (of course). https://boingboing.net/2018/11/21/monster-shirts-based-on-an...
kshay··on The inventor of the troll doll only made a sliver of the proceeds
Hmm, pretty sure the Beav was long gone from the airwaves by 1969…
kshay··on Testing Without Mocks
Yes, exactly. “Bake your mocks into your third-party library implementations” is an interesting idea and might be a useful thing to do, but it’s certainly not “testing without mocks.”
kshay··on Testing Without Mocks
> The factory should create a “Nulled” instance that disables all external communication, but behaves normally in every other respect....

>...For example, calling LoginClient.createNull().getUserInfo(...) should return a default response without actually talking to the third-party login service.

So... a mock.

kshay··on How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick
Yeah, I guess maybe this is what a 300 Multiple Choices[1] response was intended for but that seems to be underspecified and I’ve never seen it used.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7231#section-6.4.1

kshay··on How does it know I want CSV? – An HTTP trick
> There's nothing in the underlying HTTP response from https://csvbase.com/meripaterson/stock-exchanges that tells me I can get an HTML or CSV version. Is there a JSON version available? What other variants exist? How do I know that this URL will deliver different responses?

Well, you can send a HEAD request with a given accept: header to find out what you’ll get without actually fetching the data. But it’s true that it would be nice to have the full set of possible responses advertised somehow.

kshay··on For your next side project, make a browser extension
Right, for the average user the barrier to entry for userscripts is significantly higher than for extensions. I recently released one (a small enhancement to the Netflix UI) in both forms for this reason: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/446689-netflix-recommendat..., https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/netflix-recommenda...
kshay··on How I ruined my SEO
Honestly, the thing about other sites using your GA tag seems like the biggest red flag/potential for some Google algorithm to have actively started penalizing you. The timing doesn’t quite track, but maybe some interaction between that and the spam update?
kshay··on How I ruined my SEO
> It's not one thing that cause the drop but a combination of things

Let me propose a bold generalization based on observations of sites of all sizes wrestling with Google over the last 20 years, and to which there are certainly exceptions (this case may be one):

It’s always one thing.

Of course, there are always a multitude of improvements that can be made to nibble around the edges and get incremental improvements in various metrics. And a gradual change in traffic may have several simultaneous sources.

But when the effect is an identifiable precipitous drop in search traffic, almost all the time, it turns out there was a single reason, whether a change Google made or a change the site made.

This may be a totally unhelpful observation, and feel free to ignore it. But in these situations I’ve come to find it’s more fruitful to look for A Cause than to approach it as “a little here, a little there.”

kshay··on Show HN: Piano Chord Player
Neat! One idea might be to switch it to one octave at smaller (mobile) viewport widths... the keys get a little small :)
kshay··on In honor of Weizenbaum's Centenary, I asked ChatGPT to program ELIZA
Does it please you to believe I am of a certain age) or( if I am not...) I've almost certainly experienced a knock-off of your's?
kshay··on Stone tablet shows Babylonians able to approximate √2 with 99.9999% accuracy
I’ll blot out the sun! http://stewartgreenhill.com/articles/eclipse-saves-the-day/i...
kshay··on Show HN: Pressn't – a site where you can only have a single post
One nitpick about the responsive design—between width 1535 and about 1920, the Comments box appears in the left rail but it’s partly obscured. Seems like you should either adjust the media query to keep it at the bottom until there’s room to show it, or make the box itself a variable width.
kshay··on “Angry” Immune Cells in Brain and Spinal Fluid Identified as Alzheimer Culprit
The study itself: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01463-5
kshay··on All About USB-C: Illegal Adapters
There are dozens of tools marketed specifically for this (search “phone port cleaner” on Amazon) but I’ve had the best luck with a pushpin.
kshay··on Show HN: Dog API
402 Treats Required
kshay··on Safari's date-picker is the cause of 1/3 of our customer support issues
One interesting alternative (that I can’t remember actually encountering, but just occurred to me when reading this) would be to have an Age numeric field before the calendar, entry in which would jump the calendar to the corresponding birth year.
kshay··on The Overlords Finally Showed Up
Reminds me of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-it-woul...
kshay··on What ChatGPT can't do
Also a Phys. Ed. question…

Hopefully the many “AI-powered” fitness apps out there would not give this advice.

kshay··on This is the year of the RSS reader?
Agreed—I love RSS, but don’t really see “organizing newsletters” as its killer app, or experience “newsletters come via email” as a pain point. Filters seem to serve basically the same purpose.
kshay··on Against All Applications
> very fun jobs like musician and professional athlete pay subsistence wages

Modulo a very small subset of top-tier performers, I think we’re already there!

kshay··on Medium bans user for Chrome extension that opened articles in incognito mode
When submitting an extension to the Chrome Web Store you’re asked for a written justification for why it needs to run against the sites/URLs specified in the manifest. I’m curious how closely anyone at Google examines these; if this is such a clear ToS violation then maybe it shouldn’t have been approved?

(Edit: I’m not asserting that it is in fact a violation, but that its having been approved suggests it didn’t seem like one to the Web Store folks, at least, and maybe Medium should have addressed this by trying to get it removed rather than banning the user.)

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