haylem

As we're sharing prank stories...

I think one of my most simple - yet evil - prank was to LD_PRELOAD a modified `malloc()` on a colleague's computer. Except where the common practice was usually to have it blow up the memory or not return enough, I had mine to work mostly correctly: in most cases it would allocate as requested, and in occasional cases it would allocate slightly less than requested, and in rare cases it would blow up the memory.

You could think I shouldn't be proud of that one, considering some classmates probably went crazy wondering why their systems behaved erratically, and that it probably didn't help with some of their assignments. Generally our pranks were rather tame at school, and if I recall I had reserved that particular one to only 2 guys that were extremely d-ckish. Can't even recall their names now.

Other pranks were your usual stuff: switch keyboard mapping to Dvorak, swap LTR to RTL, randomly modified clocktime by a few minutes (also rather mean when you need to handover assignments, I suppose...), bind some keys to the most annoying shortcuts possible, unsecured xdisplay accesses, open cdroom on ssh-accessible machines... Basic stuff.

I also grabbed all the login/passwords for an entire promotion once. To my defence, I didn't exactly use the accounts for anything else but to change the default passwords (so, technically and legally, I did access the accounts, I suppose). I was just making a point to IT that assigning default passwords with guessable sequences (if I recall, major + year of promotion) was a bad idea and that for some students it could take weeks before they'd change it and leave some accounts open for abuse (e.g. for students who dropped, were sick on the first days, or would simply not use the labs that much). They weren't pleased by the surge of people contacting them to ask why their passwords didn't work.

When scientific distributed computing came rather prominent, I also clustered an entire classroom (didn't want to hit the whole school network, only rooms that were underutilized). That got noticed by an admin though, but he didn't know what it was and I just said this was one of my projets for graphics computing (which was indeed a real project for which distributed comp was authorized).

I miss these lab setups.

My reaction to this was "Oh hello Firebug, old friend" :)

It's not firebug, but it was nice that firebug at the time was installable as an extension or a simple bookmarklet, for just about any page, before "Dev Tools" became integral parts of our modern browsers.

EDIT: Firebug's old page is actually still up with a bit of history: https://getfirebug.com/index.html

It's already as far away as I possibly can. I'm afraid you overestimate the size of my housing.

It's a good tip, though. But with mobile phones now, people tend to start printing already on their way to the room and then stare at the printer and wonder if it's OFF, starting up, pending, or if for some reason it decided whatever PDF they were printing was a bit too annoying to print (I do have occasional buffering issues with some of these printers, as I suspect their available memory/disk storage isn't great).

Thank you!

And congratulations on a successful investigation!

Agreed, drawn and quartered for the culprit seems warranted.

Please do get started. This sound like an awesome story! (For HN, that is, maybe not so much for dinner parties).

Just thinking about the thought process you had is entertaining in my end, because my procrastinating self would have delayed the part about going into the ceiling as the last possible resort... So what evidence was strong enough that you figured there must have been something wrong with a particular cable, or all cables, and just a specific section?

I'm honestly a bit confused by the comments.

I've had and installed only 5 home printers over my entire life (excluding professional printers at works)

One was an already refurbished dinosaur from Xerox. 1 was a canon (would have to look for the model). The other 3 are HP LaserJet 100 Color MFP M175nw.

All 5 have lasted over 10 years, the MFPs being the youngest at 12 years. That Xerox one was still going with after 20, it was just slow. And 1 of the HPs may be replaced for that reason, as apparently waiting 20s for a page is now too long for my family members, which I can't fathom for a single page of paper once in a while.

Not a single technical issue with any of these.

Not a huge test sample, but that makes me wonder:

1/ What do you people do with their printers?

During the most active period, I printed about 2000 pages / year, which was already too much, and was mostly because of the kids when they were younger and when someone I knew had to deal with a lot of paperwork with an administration, and maybe one year when finishing my studies where I printed a crap load of reports.

2/ What's the failure rate on these things??

3/ When did we decide that "over a decade" is an achievement to be noteworthy for any piece of equipment worth a decent amount of money?

EDIT: My only gripe was the disappearance of ChromePrint. That bugged me quite a bit. Unrelated to the printers, though. Those MFPs work fine with HP Print, default print drivers, CUPS, etc... on Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS.

If you like that sort of look back at tech history, and at things that came out from the PARC, I highly recommend "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik. It's a very well-written book with a ton of insights about how a lot of the things we took for granted came to be, from our printers and scanners, tablets, programming languages, and more.

If my memory serves right, it details a bunch of things on the development of laser printers, which gave Xerox a huge edge, the creation of the PARC and the giants that joined it, and many of the things they worked on: the Alto, Smalltalk, the Dynabook, and, indeed, the Ethernet.

It's also pretty funny to read how some administrative red-tape was sometimes being circumvented.

And also a bit sad to read how things went a bit south.

OP here. I just realized that it may seem like I'm trying to drive traffic to the post on StackExchange. I was more trying to get some discussion going here as well and see what people might think, as I suspect many people have an opinion on that around HN. I didn't want to duplicate the question, though, and wanted a single point of reference.

But obviously I'm looking forward to comments and thoughts from people who may not be able or wouldn't want to answer on SE.

Sorry if that intent wasn't clear.

Well, in the case of Bitcoin, the value didn't come from nothing. The mining analogy itself was part of the concept.

There's definitely a wastefulness aspect that may have been underestimated, though...

Let's hope so... er... wait... Except there are way too many systems that store plain text passwords.

My memories are that Google Video worked fine without additional plugins, but I primarily used it to consume Google content (primarily their tech talks), documentaries, etc... YouTube really was all about short home-made videos.

The UX on Youtube was generally better.

One thing I did like in Google Video though, was that it allowed to download copies of the videos easily to save local copies. That appealed to the data-hoarder in me, I suppose.

As former resident of several European countries, I find your statement, while not entirely incorrect, a bit too "blanketing".

All this may be quite dependent on where you live (the mention of the "church tax" makes me suppose Germany, as they have a Kirchensteuer, but I'm sure other countries must have a similar tax). In any case, there are European countries without church tax, beyond normal taxes that could be used for preservation of historical sites, religious or otherwise (which I agree may be somewhat biased in what religious sites can pretend to be considered historical).

Similarly, many countries do not have "religion" classes in "publicly funded schools", especially in countries that are (supposedly or admittedly) laic. That being said, there's also often a bias there as a lot of holidays are tied to religion and Christianity in particular, and it'd be quite common to explain in class the origin and nature of these holidays. I'd hardly think it counts as "religion" class, though, but that'd depend on what the teachers do.

That grandfather and two of his brothers left [...] with no plan [...]. They were helped by strangers and survived. Their mother however, along with two other siblings, had a plan. They had a deal with a smuggler [...] and all 3 of them died in deportation. Lesson: each person who has information on you represents an additional chance for it to be leaked.

This puzzles me... The paragraph clearly states that the grandfather had contacts with strangers (and we can then assume there was some exchange of information of some kind), and the ending was positive, whereas another exchange with a single point of contact had a negative outcome. But goes on to present as a lesson that the chance of a negative outcome increases with the number of contacts.

I see the point the author is trying to make, but I think this part fails to prove it satisfyingly. It either doesn't prove anything, or it's missing key information (shared information with the strangers and the smugglers) to support the point. To me, it proves that luck (and maybe the grand-father's ability to be a good judge of character in picking which strangers to rely on) were more likely deciding factors.

(Or that having no plan helps. But that's for a different perspective.)

Hmm, so... You've rediscovered the roots of the wikiwikiweb (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb) ?

Nice. Wish more of the web was still like this, really...

Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years, because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud.

The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.

Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.

Between GitHub being acquired by Microsoft, and Atlassian ignoring most of its top-voted issues for BitBucket Cloud and having significant differences between its Cloud and Server versions, it looks like a great week for GitLab.

As a strong supporter of BitBucket for years, this makes me sad. As a very happy GitLab users over the past few years, this makes me fairly happy, though, to balance things out (and hosting FOSS on an open source platform makes more sense to me anyways).

See also: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-github-microsoft-gitlab/g...

Yes, but:

- we're not talking about space probes, - this is just one dev who thought "I want to write an email client" and make a tech choice based on his/her own proficiency with that stack and his/her project constraints (time, cost, quality, scope).

It seems unfair to rant so much about it. If it's feature full and good and perf becomes an issue, consider it an MVP and a stack change is doable. If the thing blows, trash the MVP.

Personally I'm far more worried about the first noted limitation about email forwarding with attachments not being available. I'd have wanted that before most of the showcased features, none of which I find particularly interesting. But I applaud the effort and the Polish, and the approach to build the tool that you want/need when. You can't find one.

(Second worry would be: if it's not open source, please make so.)

Teaching, academic research and OSS.

True, I haven't seen another product "match" Facebook.

But I also don't see much need for it (entirely), or at the very least for most of its features.

The Facebook of ~2007 was about as good as it ever needed to be (minus the pokes). It served its purpose well. It could have used some of the UI polish it got afterwards, but no new feature addition has made any significant change to end users in my view, apart from pushing them towards more extreme sharing.

It's a super cool app, and a super cool platform, with unfortunately little actual value to its end users (except if you consider advertisers and users of the tech platform the end users, not the actual Facebook users).

Not that I think it's all Facebook's fault: you build something for a certain purpose, and it naturally evolves, and you adapt to what people want, or what you think they want based on some metrics or "need" for growth. And then you get... this.

I'm in Chrome65. I didn't say anything about using Safari.

In any case, even w/o the lag, the page is still way too slow to load and quite heavy. Not really the best approach for conversion.

Dang. I have an MBP with an i7 and 16GB of RAM, and a landing page lags?! Hells no.

Also, I think it ate 1% of my battery in the blink of an eye. No thanks.

Update: 8MB for a landing page. Wait, waaattt?

I'll give you the first animation is somewhat cool, but a lot of visitors will definitely be turned off by the slow and sluggish experience, and I don't think it's the impression I want from a company (apparently) banking on Virtual Reality. I like my reality fairly instantaneous, thank you, so the goal would be to have my VR to behave in kind.

Solomon being French - and considering the title - my brain automatically played tricks on me and as I read his post's title I pictured him saying "Au Revoir" in its most famous form in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obJfkU9xB4 . :D

(It's the official good bye of former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing as he left office, and it's been used over and over again as a comic element.)

My hat tip to shykes. We studied in the same engineering school and he was part of the teaching assistants' panel doing the interviews for the new batch of candidates I was in. When I met him that day, he was in charge of testing my conversational English level and this interview (amongst others) convinced me to go for this school. He was also one of my tutors/teachers in the first few months, and I eventually became part of the same teaching team. Great guy all around, talented technician and a great educator.

I think he entirely deserves the praise for creating dotCloud and Docker, no matter what people may say about the underlying technology and the lackluster Docker activity lately.

He's turned it into a great product and company, with impacts and snow-ball effects all over the IT landscape.

True, but I was also hinting at the fact that the other reported article does not really provide much in terms of reporting.

Also, this is HN: pedantry is built-in. Not saying it's a feature, but I guess it was a manufacturing defect I've gotten accustomed to. I don't mind. To each to have their own filter :)

You're right, and my grammar was indeed incorrect: I did not mean to say that it measure the impacts but instead that it measures the amplitude of the quake, and also describes the impacts (which may or may not originally be true, but is how I've always seen it taught in classrooms, at least where I'm from). I guess I did remember it being closer to the model of the Beaufort scale for wind strength (which is more about the description than an actual measure of speed, originally).

And of course it does not give a precise description of the actual impacts for a given event, but I don't think it's generally far off the bat. But I'm no seismologist.

I disagree. The OP pointed to the perfect source for his title, showing the origin of the data.

The Richter scale measures and describes impacts, so you already know the impact from the 6.4 rating itself.

For 6.0 to 6.9:

Damage to a moderate number of well-built structures in populated areas. Earthquake-resistant structures survive with slight to moderate damage. Poorly designed structures receive moderate to severe damage. Felt in wider areas; up to hundreds of miles/kilometers from the epicenter. Strong to violent shaking in epicentral area.

Also, your link added very little info, and the only mention of the building toppling (the infamous impacts) are in the title, with no reports, photos, or witness accounts (as of yet).

I like that the OP didn't fall into voyeurism, that the title was enough to inform me that a strong earthquake happened in Taiwan, and that the source was enough to confirm it.

For the rest, I'll have the evening news, or BBC articles, but I don't think I need them here on HN or that they were needed for this particular piece of information, at this point in time.

I sometimes do, though not specifically with git. Can be emacs, can be ls, can be anything where I interrupt my thought process.

So... I really fail to see why this article is of any relevance at all, really. Or at least a more global solution would have been better, but I think it's not really an annoyance. For me, it's the same as wanting to fix a UI so that I wouldn't re-double-click a software that I've already started (well, some prevent it, and generally when they do, it means there are sessions, and it annoys me).

I know all that, but if reposts or not reading articles was deserving of censorship, there'd be quite a lot of [flagged] placeholders around here.

Funny that the parent was flagged, even though the link is valid, and the parent's author is not at fault.

Oh! The beauty of censorship by the masses.

Now I can see why jwz would choose to take a stab at HN. He may be right, and even too kind.

That flag is just sad...

That'd be a good example of a similar community I guess, ~but my other requirement was focus on research papers, not discussions.~

Worth digging into though, thanks.

Update: Actually is apparently focused on papers. Thanks!

I want something more like "most popular papers across any field" ("science", while broad, seems already somewhat focused).

It's just always fun to discover stuff that may be unrelated to what you do or know.

Very nice clone.