Top all-time · #20347
Bill P. Godfrey
Personal blog · billpg.com · on HN as billpgprogrammingsystems
Bill P. Godfrey writes billpg industries™, a personal blog at billpg.com about programming and systems. Since 2019, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Bill P. Godfrey's posts on data mining Wikipedia and on Wikidata. One commenter calls a post a great example of the curse of knowledge and of enthusiasts' blind spots.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The engineering blog of Bill P. Godfrey.
Most-linked posts?
- Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-19
What Hacker News says?
Thank you. (I wrote this three years ago.) https://billpg.com/dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/ Short version: With MySQL, I can't simply backup or deploy a copy of WP by zipping up a folder full of files. The database has to be backed-up and deployed separately but in sync with the folder of files too. Moving to an architecture where the database are files inside that folder would simplify all of this.
Comment linking /dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/
on “Wp-SQLite: WordPress running on an SQLite database”Submitted Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit as a story · 207 points
HN discussionThis is a great post, which also happens to serve as a good illustration of the "curse of knowledge" and the typical blind-spots of enthusiasts. Consider the timeline of events: • The blog post on scraping Wikipedia ( https://billpg.com/data-mining-wikipedia/ , HN discussion 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28234122 which mentions Wikidata as an alternative etc. • The author of this post, a Wikidata…
Comment linking /data-mining-wikipedia/
on “Wikidata or Scraping Wikipedia”Submitted What's a kWh? (And other money-saving tips) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe UIDL command is specified as an optional command, but it's really required. https://billpg.com/pop3-uidl/ The workload required to poll is heavy. You need to reconnect TCP, TLS and login. Once you find you have no messages, you have start over to check again. https://billpg.com/pop3-commit-refresh/ Clients and servers need to keep a short-term "message id" to long-term "unique-id" map. https://billpg.com/pop3-me…
Comment linking /pop3-deli/
on “When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?””Submitted What’s a kWh? (And other money-saving tips) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionShameless plug: NEVER Sanitize Your Inputs (by me, 2013) https://billpg.com/never-sanitize-your-inputs/
Comment linking /never-sanitize-your-inputs/
on “Don’t try to sanitize input, escape output (2020)”Submitted A Primer on Distributed Computing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionShameless plug: https://billpg.com/sixgate/ (Short version: IPv6-only networks can provide a gateway for IPv4-only clients and advertise it via reverse DNS.) SixGate has an interesting contrast with this RFC. RFC8950 removes IPv4 from the network core while preserving IPv4 reachability, whereas SixGate removes IPv4 from the service side while preserving reachability for IPv4-only clients. In both cases, IPv4 survive…
Comment linking /sixgate/
on “RFC8950: Announce IPv4 with an IPv6 next-hop”Submitted Farewell, Hackensplat Industries as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSince everyone else is posting their wish-list, here's mine. Use a database like SQLite so I can back-up a website into a ZIP without being concerned about keeping a separate MySQL database backup in sync. (I wrote about this three years ago: https://billpg.com/dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/ ) Include TOTP one-time-password login in the core. (I hate having to deal with plug-ins.) Full backup in the core. W…
Comment linking /dear-wordpress-please-stop-using-mysql/
on “Things I’d want to see improved in WordPress core”https://billpg.com/qr.html (A little too long for twitter. Also, I could find a font that displayed these characters correctly.)
Comment linking /qr.html
on “A QR code built from Emoji”Dancing icons. It seemed like a good idea at the time. http://billpg.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Show Us Your Personal Website/Blog?”I'm writing a POP3 service ( http://billpg.com/POP3/ ) and I stumbled upon this as a bit of a forehead-slapping moment. Once I read about it, I tried attacking my own server by sending in "STLS\r\nCAPA\r\n" in a single TCP package and it responded to CAPA after the encrypted channel had been established because those bytes were still in the buffer. One hasty bugfix to clear the buffers after establishing TLS later a…
Comment linking /POP3/
on “Why TLS is better without STARTTLS (2021)”