Hacker News: stearns

New comment by stearns in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

stearns — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:06:45 +0000

Ugh. Lousy Smarch weather!

New comment by stearns in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

stearns — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:42:58 +0000

> I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one

Oh, but it's so much more beautiful than that! You're really underselling it! It's not "the reason stated by the customer support", it's:

The reason snarkily paraphrased by a Mastodon post Which quotes a Twitter post Which quotes a Bluesky post Which tells a story about a conversation with an Adobe customer service rep.

Surely that tongue-in-cheek Mastodon post increases the information that we have about this incident by exactly Zero.

New comment by stearns in "Perlsecret – Perl secret operators and constants"

stearns — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:51:20 +0000

Right, that's the point of TFA. It doesn't list "special" operators, it lists "secret" operators -- that is, operators combined from existing sigils that do clever things.

The "Venus" operator is a good example: it's the '+' addition operator! You just add zero to a value that's coercible into a number.

The Eskimo operators are also interesting: similar to a SQL injection attack, you use a close brace and an open brace to stop and start a new code block from within a string that's sent to the interpreter. Perl didn't invent open and close braces: hence the verb "discover" rather than "implement".

The whole page is a bit of a lark, and a good example of why some of us don't enjoy Perl!

New comment by stearns in "We Found Insurance Fraud in Our Crash Data"

stearns — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:30:32 +0000

>Which I found very much not plausible.

Yeah. I'm not a fraud expert, but "impaired judgement" is a common effect of alcohol, and "desperation" is a common effect of drug addiction, so it seems weird to assume that people using drugs are committing fraud at a lower rate than the overall population rate.

As a side note, I grew up in Norwich so it's funny to see it mentioned in that report as "remote" because there isn't really anything remote in Norwich. Wilderness Rd, despite its name, does a ring around Mohegan Park, which is an urban-ish park with some trees and a rose garden. You can walk to the rose garden from the high school, which I sometimes did. Anyway.

New comment by stearns in "A shirt whose price increases by 1 euro with every purchase"

stearns — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:01:11 +0000

I think you're right. A price of 183 means that the seller is offering it to potential buyers at 183, not that it has sold at 183. So your calculation is correct.

New comment by stearns in "Vanguard's average fee is now 0.07% after biggest-ever cut"

stearns — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 22:17:00 +0000

Right, you are hinting at the angle that other commenters have pointed at, which is that Vanguard runs a fund management business (which is what the article is about) but also runs a brokerage, does 401k/403b/529 administration, has an advisory business, etc. The total employee count refers to employees working across all those business units, and that includes a lot of customer service, regulatory, back office, etc.

New comment by stearns in "How saffron became an American cash crop"

stearns — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 15:05:00 +0000

The term "cash crop" refers to a crop that is grown for sale rather than use. So NYT is using it correctly, but I agree they could have chosen a better term for the headline, since "cash crop" doesn't really help to explain the article.

Also, to be pedantic, 3.5kg was from one American farm, not "from American farms".