Hacker News: makr17

New comment by makr17 in "Ear Training Practice"

makr17 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:45:22 +0000

I remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.

New comment by makr17 in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

makr17 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:56:46 +0000

In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."

My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.

New comment by makr17 in "The difficulty of making sure your website is broken"

makr17 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:51:10 +0000

Coming up on 20 years ago I was building a system that was going to be deployed at various locations throughout a very large country. All locations had internet access; but the throughput, latency, and quality (e.g. packet drops) were all over the map.

For testing we ended up building a small linux box to proxy for the test environment in the office. We could throttle the throughput to any arbitrary level, introduce latency, and introduce packet drops. It's amazing how poorly a frontend will work when you throttle the network to 128kbps, and introduce a small percentage of dropped packets. But once you get the system to work (for some definition of "work") under those conditions you feel pretty good about deploying it.

New comment by makr17 in "12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)"

makr17 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:26:12 +0000

California has a low-double-digit percentage of the US population, and mandates organic waste separation/collection.

https://calrecycle.ca.gov/Organics/SLCP/collection/

New comment by makr17 in "I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer"

makr17 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:35:49 +0000

Years ago I worked for a company that bought another company. Our QA folks were asked to give their site a once-over. What they found is still the butt of jokes in my circle of friends/former coworkers.

* account ids are numeric, and incrementing

* included in the URL after login, e.g. ?account=123456

* no authentication on requests after login

So anybody moderately curious can just increment to account_id=123457 to access another account. And then try 123458. And then enumerate the space to see if there is anything interesting... :face-palm: :cold-sweat:

New comment by makr17 in "The Perils of ISBN"

makr17 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:05:21 +0000

My favorite example of this sort of thing has been In My Tribe by 10000 Maniacs. The UPC/Catalog Number remained the same between the 1987 release and the removal of Peace Train (track 7) in 1989. I have this memory of sifting through the stock at a large used CD store in the mid-90s hoping to find the pre-removal version.

New comment by makr17 in "What Killed Perl?"

makr17 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:33:05 +0000

> it was a good decade before they even admitted Perl 6 might take longer than expected

I was there at OSCon when Larry announced Perl6, and that it would be "out by Christmas". And I was there the next year, when he was asked about that, and cheekily replied "well, we never specified _which_ Christmas."

New comment by makr17 in "Washington Post editorials omit a key disclosure: Bezos' financial ties"

makr17 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:19:54 +0000

I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?

New comment by makr17 in "Video game union workers rally against $55B private acquisition of EA"

makr17 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:06:54 +0000

A former manager once told me

> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.

New comment by makr17 in "New lab-grown human embryo model produces blood cells"

makr17 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:58:52 +0000

We have the Enhanced Games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games), so we already have an alternative Olympics that definitely includes medical companies.

New comment by makr17 in "California passes law to reduce volume of commercials on streaming services"

makr17 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:52:58 +0000

All of them? It's gotten so bad that I remapped the Netflix button on the Shield remote to mute the receiver. The remote has volume up/down buttons, but no mute, and ads are _so_ loud now.

New comment by makr17 in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

makr17 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 16:53:28 +0000

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

--James D. Nicoll

New comment by makr17 in "A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams"

makr17 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:57:15 +0000

This. "Scam resistance", in my mind, maps to critical thinking and a bit of pattern matching. Could definitely be taught, but critical thinking seems to be out of favor in (American) education at the moment (and has been for a while, honestly).

New comment by makr17 in "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

makr17 — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:42:59 +0000

As with most things, it depends. If you truly do understand something, then you can derive a required result from first principles. _Given sufficient time_. Often in an exam situation you are time-constrained, and having memorized a shortcut cut be beneficial. Not to mention retaining is much easier when you understand the topic, so memorization becomes easier.

New comment by makr17 in "Atlassian terminates 150 staff"

makr17 — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:12:47 +0000

Better than one company I was at. Wednesday-evening meeting to announce that there will be layoffs. "If you are affected you will receive an email by 7am EST tomorrow." Which I summarized in slack as

"Sleep well Wesley, I'll likely kill you in the morning."

Nobody is getting good sleep that night, at least until the doom hour has passed without an email.

New comment by makr17 in "Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood"

makr17 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:28:11 +0000

At the start of Covid lockdown my group at work started having a daily "drinking alone together" afternoon Google Meet.

When that job ended, our household started drinking on our front porch in the afternoons. Soon a few neighbors started doing the same, and we got close enough (15-20 feet) to trade cell numbers. After that we would text back and forth to communicate during "distanced happy hour".

The friendships we made drinking _not_ together have lasted, and we still count those neighbors as friends...

New comment by makr17 in "1/0 = 0 (2018)"

makr17 — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 22:50:58 +0000

I remember my junior high maths well enough, allowing division by zero is an essential step in proving that 1 == 2, which we _definitely_ don't want.

New comment by makr17 in "What I wish someone told me about Postgres"

makr17 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:38:58 +0000

Interesting, I would have said Boyce-Codd unless you have a good reason to vary in either direction.

New comment by makr17 in "Things you didn't know about GNU readline (2019)"

makr17 — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 18:35:44 +0000

I haven't worked with sqlplus in forever, and I'm much happier for it. But back in the day we would wrap sqlplus with socat to add readline behaviors.

New comment by makr17 in "Disappointment"

makr17 — Thu, 23 May 2024 18:24:48 +0000

Reminds me of one of my Maths professors in college, Ben Freedman. He was a writer and an engineer until his son Michael started asking math questions that dad couldn't answer. So he went back for his PhD in his 40s. Michael ultimately won a Fields Medal.