News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dfboyd

Re:Formatting as Courtesy to the Reader on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @06:58AM (#49520282)
The post* READS like a MARVEL COMIC BOOK.

---

* last ish.

Re:RSA and Python on Saturday March 28, 2026 @02:26PM (#47557098)
The way the article uses RSA is no better than a simple substitution cipher. Both the "l"s in "hello" are enciphered to 2575. It's a newspaper cryptogram.

You're supposed to concatenate all the input numbers, to create a message that has hundreds or thousands of digits; then RSA-encrypt that number.

Isn't the first code sample pasted in there twice?
Re:The ear does not do a Fourier transform on Thursday October 30, 2025 @07:05PM (#45766452)
tinnitus
Re:Every American Is Bilingual on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @12:05AM (#44718932)
We all only speak two languages: English and bad English
Re:Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection on Saturday July 26, 2025 @06:39PM (#44697469)
The iOS app is long-unmaintained and has bugs. It needs a new maintainer, but they need some kind of Apple developer account to actually get it in the app store.
Re:No Hello on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @08:25AM (#44298285)
I'm the original author of this content. I wrote it on the internal wiki at Google in 2007. Someone copied it and posted it at nohello.(something) after I left Google. It's made the front page of HN multiple times.

The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second group never seem to take the hint that the first interruption is an imposition in itself.

Re:Ray Tracing in J on Friday May 30, 2025 @09:20PM (#44141203)
"[verbs] get forked and hooked until you go insane trying to track it all"

J comes with a Qt IDE, which has a function "dissect" that displays a graphical parse tree of an expression.

load 'debug/dissect'

dissect '(+/ % #) ? 10 $ 100'

Re:Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong? on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @03:28PM (#43976673)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477 -- HN discussion of "Seeing like a Bank"
This story is entirely based on the idea that "computer programmer" is different from "software developer", which the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers different occupations. It's as though "lawyer" and "attorney" were considered separate professions. If you want to see how moronic this is, look up the definitions and see where the definition says people with these occupations work. Where do software developers work? "In companies that develop software" Where do computer programmers work? "Indoors, in offices."
Re:Almost one in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @03:49PM (#42870969)
https://dfboyd.github.io/hw/index.html

A clickable version of the original heatmap

Re:The IPv6 Transition on Sunday October 20, 2024 @02:48AM (#41893436)
https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html still as relevant as the day it was written
I think this article was written by AI. It claims Amy was a WWII character, when she was actually a modern one. Also it has the usual preamble paragraphs that read like a sixth-grader's term paper.
Re:Shipbreaking on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @02:55AM (#40425001)
These could be Battlefield 2042 screenshots of the "Discarded" map
Re:Don't Just Say "Hello" in Chat on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @06:28AM (#40209338)
5 points by dfboyd on March 11, 2022 | parent | context | next [–] | on: Don't ask to ask, just ask (2019)

46 points by dfboyd on Jan 23, 2021 | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013) I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com".

Re:Don't ask to ask, just ask (2019) on Friday March 11, 2022 @11:56AM (#30642412)
46 points by dfboyd on Jan 23, 2021 | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com".

Re:Ventilated Prose (2009) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @04:52AM (#28499568)
In the early days of word processing (runoff, troff, IBM script etc.) when people used line-oriented editors like ed, it was considered good practice to split each sentence across lines at the boundaries of clauses and phrases, for ease of rearranging them. The effect is similar to what's described in the article.
Re:The dream of carbon air capture edges toward reality on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @11:40PM (#28310378)
What really matters is how much carbon you can capture per unit electricity used. Presumably you're going to run the carbon-capture plant on renewable electricity. If it can't capture more carbon per watt-hour than your dirtiest non-renewable power plant, you might as well just use the renewable electricity directly and junk the non-renewable plant.
Re:Lisp as an Alternative to Java (2000) on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @08:44AM (#28048487)
Where did this crazy list come from? Has the guy never looked at an actual telephone?

  The following mapping from letters to digits is given:

  E | J N Q | R W X | D S Y | F T | A M | C I V | B K U | L O P | G H Z
  e | j n q | r w x | d s y | f t | a m | c i v | b k u | l o p | g h z
  0 |   1   |   2   |   3   |  4  |  5  |   6   |   7   |   8  
 |9
  

  We want to use this mapping for encoding telephone numbers by words, so
  that it becomes easier to remember the numbers.
Re:This Prime Does Not Exist on Thursday July 15, 2021 @10:23PM (#27852448)
What I really like is that a lot of the time it's obvious the number isn't prime, because it's either even, or ends in a 5!
Re:I’ve had the same supper for 10 years on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:28AM (#27084797)
Die Ball ist rund. Der Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. So ist alles klar. Alles anderes ist Theorie. -- Sepp Herberger
Re:Please don't say just hello in chat (2013) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @11:29AM (#25883493)
If it had been authorized, presumably they'd have kept my name on it, no?
Re:Please don't say just hello in chat (2013) on Saturday January 23, 2021 @10:57AM (#25883135)
I am the original author of the document this document was based on. It was an internal Wiki page at Google written when I was an SRE. After I wrote the original page, someone put up an internal shortlink at "go/nohello". After I left Google, someone took the Wiki page content and [illegally, since it was Google confidential, simply from being on the internal Wiki], and put it up on the net at "nohello.com". The linked article at nohello.net is a paraphrase of the nohello.com content; compare the list of salutations (especially "yt?) and the paragraphs at the end mentioning "asynchronous communication". ("yt?" was a favorite of Raymond B---., who was in many ways my mentor at Google and who I'm forever grateful to.)
Re:Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012) on Monday December 28, 2020 @07:32PM (#25565127)
Is this project's name a pun on "gnusto"? That's the spell in the Infocom game "Enchanter", which copies a spell into your spellbook.
Perpetual motion machine.
Re:Is anybody still using Windows 95? on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @12:03AM (#24416989)
Just the plain .ms macros. Plus "pic", I like that a lot.
Re:Is anybody still using Windows 95? on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @09:39PM (#24415806)
I use troff (groff) under Linux. The really freaky thing is that you already have groff on your Mac -- it's installed by default.
Re:Technology that changed air travel on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @04:07AM (#23232474)
The post has annoying little errors that make it harder to read. The figure says BA286, and the text says "BA287 means British Airways flight 287". So does that mean you always add 1 to the flight number shown on the screen, to get the actual flight number? "388 equipment type: 389 refers to Airbus A380-800". Again, you add 1 to the number shown on the screen? Why does "389" mean "A380-800" and not "A380-900"? I realize it's possible to figure out that these are just typos and you don't really mean "take the number shown on the screen and add 1 to it to get the actual flight number", but why would you make your readers deal with that kind of confusion?
Re:Is AMD Stuck in the Past? PGA vs. LGA on Friday May 01, 2020 @04:46PM (#23046294)
Crappy copy-editing. Sentence 1: "and" should be "on", sentence 3: "air" should be "are", and more like that throughout the article. I think it was voice-to-text and never corrected.
Re:Mainframes Are Having a Moment on Saturday April 18, 2020 @11:25AM (#22908368)
I think this is just an IBM PR piece. It ticks all the boxes: quotes from IBM customers, quotes from IBM staff, mentions the "Master the Mainframe" contest. You can tell because when it says "mainframe" it doesn't mean "any large computer", it means "Something descended from the IBM 360".

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