Hacker News: alexjm

New comment by alexjm in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

alexjm — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:05:24 +0000

Are you thinking of "The Codeless Code" poem about this?

https://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/234

New comment by alexjm in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

alexjm — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:09:02 +0000

I read it as a to-do or calendar event: at such-and-such time, we will put the icing on some cookies.

New comment by alexjm in "Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?"

alexjm — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:15:02 +0000

I have a kitchen slide rule that I use to scale recipes and do simple conversions. I used it last week when inflating a ball that had a target diameter in centimeters, but measuring the circumference was much easier and my measuring tape was in inches.

New comment by alexjm in "221 Cannon is Not For Sale"

alexjm — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:37:27 +0000

We don't even need the term "identity theft". We already have a perfectly good word for than: "fraud".

New comment by alexjm in "Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better"

alexjm — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 18:56:01 +0000

From the article... Passkeys:

- are generated securely and so can’t be guessed - can’t be phished - are unique for each website you use, so if one website is compromised it doesn’t put your other logins at risk

New comment by alexjm in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

alexjm — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:38:08 +0000

Watch out for Occam's Hacksaw: Any complex problem can be made to look simple by hacking away enough parts of it as "not essential", saying you'll handle them in version two.

New comment by alexjm in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

alexjm — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 21:41:17 +0000

Many filing cabinets in the US are also sized so you can put letter sized folders in one way, or rotate the folders 90 degrees and legal sized folders will fit correctly.

New comment by alexjm in "Hacker News Hug of Deaf"

alexjm — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 21:28:41 +0000

You might want to add the --http0.9 flag to curl, to tell it that getting a response of just "ok" (HTTP 0.9 style, body only without headers) isn't an error.

New comment by alexjm in "Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)"

alexjm — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:32:11 +0000

Grep is from an ed editor command: global (g) to apply a command to all lines that match a regular expression, a regex surrounded by slashes (/), and print (p) to display those lines. Or g/re/p for short. This proved a useful enough operation that they made it a separate command in the early days of Unix.

New comment by alexjm in "Beej's Guide to Git"

alexjm — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:41:28 +0000

The minor difference is that :q! quits without saving but returns zero as the exit code, but :cq quits with a nonzero exit code. Git interprets the nonzero exit code as "editing failed", following the Unix convention that zero means success. If you didn't save the commit message while working on it, :q! will send the empty template back to Git, which Git is smart enough to not commit. But if you accidentally save your work partway through, :q! will still commit the message you wanted to abandon.

New comment by alexjm in "Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard"

alexjm — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 19:53:59 +0000

That was how I learned to tense my ear muscles -- because I could see they made my glasses shift on my face.

New comment by alexjm in "UI is hell: four-function calculators"

alexjm — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 18:44:20 +0000

I have a kitchen slide that I use for ratios in recipes. It's an old plastic one from Think Geek.

For example, I usually put 15 grams of coffee with 8 oz of water (please excuse the mixed units). To make a different amount, I align the 1.5 on the top rule with the 8 on the bottom rule to set the ratio. Then each number on the top rule (coffee in grams) matches the scaled value on the bottom rule (water in oz). The 6 on the bottom rule aligns with ~1.1 on the top, meaning I should brew my little six-ounce cup with 11g of coffee. In practice, I do this a lot with bread, but the "baker's percent" convention for writing bread recipes makes it a more complicated example.

Another way to use a kitchen slide rule is when scaling a recipe. Say I want to make 2/3 of a batch of cookies. I line up the 3 on top with the 2 on the bottom. Then for each ingredient, I find the recipe's quantity on top, and read off the scaled quantity on the bottom. This works better with recipes that use weights, to avoid awkward fractions or converting between units so you can subdivide.

New comment by alexjm in "US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods"

alexjm — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:32:03 +0000

Shellac isn't made of bugs - it's made by bugs. Specifically, it's the resin secreted by a female lac beetle onto the branch of the trees that they live and feed on.

New comment by alexjm in "Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps"

alexjm — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 17:25:51 +0000

Some of the letter shapes look like Latin/Roman cursive, but even then I'm not sure I recognize any words either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

New comment by alexjm in "Thomas E. Kurtz has died"

alexjm — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:08:25 +0000

It's most likely legacy from pre-computer unit record equipment. These machines could only handle numbers and printed zeros without a slash because there was nothing to confuse them with. When letters were later added, it was the new character that got the slash.

Additional citation hunting from 2020 when the BASIC manual was shared & discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462835

New comment by alexjm in "Buy payphones and retire"

alexjm — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 02:04:07 +0000

I saw one city park where they took this one step farther. They had a small wooden structure (I think the cover to a water valve, from years ago when they used to set up an ice skating rink). The open it so rarely they don't even padlock it - they just bend open an S shaped link of chain, put that where the lock would go, and bend it shut. When someone needs to access it, they cut the one link of chain with a pair of bolt cutters, and then put on a new one.

New comment by alexjm in "Covid-19 Intranasal Vaccine"

alexjm — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:45:02 +0000

To your original question, yes. The phrase "formerly known as" comes before the old name.

New comment by alexjm in "Facebook Is Being Overrun with Stolen, AI-Gen Images That People Think Are Real"

alexjm — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:10:54 +0000

BBS, Gopher, Usenet, and friends are all still there - no need to invent a new protocol.

New comment by alexjm in "Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications"

alexjm — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 18:00:43 +0000

A push notification is generally what creates the "you have a new message on " red bubble.

New comment by alexjm in "The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City"

alexjm — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 22:36:47 +0000

It's not real - but imagine if it were!