/Entertaining

My Blog is Hilariously Overengineered To The Point People Think It's A Static Site

tl;dr: "I'm going to share the gory details on how my blog works, and why people often mistake it for a static website. Buckle up and kick back, we're going to learn about the internet today."

featured in #352

Janet Jackson Had The Power To Crash Laptop Computers

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: "A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops."

featured in #344

A Story About `Magic'

- Erik Brunvand tl;dr: "You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words 'magic' and 'more magic'. The switch was in the 'more magic' position."

featured in #342

Sending Spammers to Password Purgatory with Microsoft Power Automate and Cloudflare Workers KV

- Troy Hunt tl;dr: "Earlier this year I created Password Purgatory with the singular goal of putting spammers through the hellscape that is attempting to satisfy really nasty password complexity criteria."

featured in #341

Working In The Software Industry, Circa 1989

- Jim Grey tl;dr: "Lots of things we all take for granted didn’t exist. The internet existed but not the Web. Software was delivered to customers on tapes or floppy disks. The CD burner was still a few years in the future. Java didn’t exist, JavaScript didn’t exist, .NET didn’t exist. Languages commonly in use then were C/C++, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, Perl, Tcl, and Lisp."

featured in #333

Markov Chat Bot Disaster Story

- Anders Conbere tl;dr: "Between 2012 and 2014 I worked at Etsy on and experimental remote team "Seller Economics". Etsy was at the time famous for two things: Chat Ops and Hack Weeks. This is a story about how those two cultural touchstones collided to create a near disaster."

featured in #333

The Overengineered Solution To My Pigeon Problem

- Max Nagy tl;dr: "The brains of the operation is a python script using openCV. It compares the current image to the normal background. If the average amount of change of all pixels is above some threshold, we fire the gun."

featured in #328

Code Review: How To Make Enemies

- Iain Cambridge tl;dr: Iain provides ways of getting revenge on co-workers via code reviews: (1) Ask for changes that make no difference. (2) Take your time when responding. (3) Demand they add bugs. (4) Make code style changes in code review requests. (5) Create mega-sized pull requests. And more. 

featured in #325

My Favorite NPM Commit

- Isaac Schlueter tl;dr: "Since setting file timestamps to an arbitrary date in the past is, in a way, a form of time travel, we did this instead..."

featured in #324

The /bin/true Command And Copyright

- John Chambers tl;dr: "One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It's the /bin/true program. This is a "dummy" program whose function is to make it easy to write infinite loops in shells scripts. The program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status... But AT&T's lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection."

featured in #319