Top all-time · #1102
Charles Miller
Personal blog · fishbowl.pastiche.orgprogrammingculturecareer
Charles Miller's personal blog at fishbowl.pastiche.org covers programming, culture and career. Since 2007, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 78 times, most often “Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Charles Miller's weblog, covering software development, online culture, and whatever assorted nerdery happens to cross my path.
Most-linked posts?
- Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-03-11
- Understanding Engineers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-06-01
- I don't care. It's not my problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-04
- Understanding Engineers: Feasibility2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-07-22
- The Hibernate Origin Story (Outsider Edition)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-23
- /2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_greatest_luxury/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-29
- “AI Skills” are worthless in 20262 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-26
- Simplicity isn't simple2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-04
- Charles' Rules of Argument2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-10
- Charles' Rules of Argument (2004)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-16
What Hacker News says?
I'd be interested in hearing how other people on HN implement persistent logins. I'm currently working on it, following "Charles Miller's Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice"[1], but hearing some other opinions/techniques would be great. [1] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/01/19/persistent_login_coo...
Comment linking /2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practice/
on “The Definitive Guide To Website Authentication”Submitted The Two Things about Computer Programming as a story · 138 points
HN discussionNeal Stephenson, "Diamond Age" "You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?" ... "Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are natur…
Comment linking /2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_greatest_luxury/
on “Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife”Submitted The Java Deserialization Bug as a story · 80 points
HN discussionCharles Miller today commented on this: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2010/02/12/two_steps_forward_tw... And mentioned his own anecdote: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/10/09/the_internet_and_und... Choice quote: URLs. Bookmarks. Changing your homepage. All of these things were voodoo. As he points out, claims that people are more "savvy" today than they were then probably don't hold up; if anything, users back the…
Comment linking /2003/10/09/the_internet_and_understanding_users/
on “Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"”Submitted What web developers thought of in the noughties as being MVC doesn't scale as a story · 80 points
HN discussionThe sibling comment alludes to parsing calendar events (possibly .ical files). In general you need it for any kind of (de)serialization -- and as the recent java deserialization bug[1] (along with similar bugs in python, ruby) illustrates -- even in a mature language, "common practice" might not be "best practice" (everyone should've known that the various uses of blind deserialization was a bad idea -- but that doe…
Comment linking /2015/11/09/java_serialization_bug/
on “LL and LR in Context: Why Parsing Tools Are Hard (2013)”Submitted Understanding Engineers as a story · 62 points
HN discussionFinding the same thing with node.js, I got started OK with passport thanks to the examples for passport-local: https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-local/tree/master/ex... , especially express3-mongoose-multiple-files. Beyond that though, I've had to hack a fair bit to get "remember me" working (following the practices suggested http://stackoverflow.com/questions/549/the-definitive-guide-... and http://fishbowl.p…
Comment linking /2004/01/19/persistent_login_cookie_best_practice/
on “Everything you need to understand to start with AngularJS”Submitted “AI Skills” are worthless in 2026 as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThe opposing viewpoint: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2002/02/12/xslt_is_the_spawn_of...
Comment linking /2002/02/12/xslt_is_the_spawn_of_satan/
on “Why I like XSLT”Submitted The String Memory Gotcha (2005) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI prefer fishbowl's law Every regexp that you apply to a particular block of text reduces the applicability of regular expressions by an order of magnitude. - http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/08/18/beware_regular_expre... The minimum any programmer needs to know about regexps is when they are applicable, and more importantly, when they are not.
Comment linking /2003/08/18/beware_regular_expressions/
on “The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions”Submitted Hi, I'm a Mac… Beep, beep as a story · 45 points
HN discussionRelevant: https://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/08/12/the_head_first_girl... I've noticed this stock photo on various flyers over the years too
Comment linking /2005/08/12/the_head_first_girls_double_life
on “A short history of the O’Reilly animals (2013)”Submitted Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice as a story · 24 points
HN discussionFor those who have never seen one, here is a picture http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/pictures/three-apple-m...
Comment linking /archives/pictures/three-apple-mice.jpg
on “Apple Designer Jonathan Ive Talks About Steve Jobs and New Products”Submitted The Death of Blogging as a story · 13 points
HN discussionJavaScript is a beautiful language with much more to it than just the DOM API. You seem to suggest that this is JavaScript's only strength. In fact it could be argued that the DOM API is the single greatest problem with JavaScript in the browser[1]. It's true that different languages have different problem domains for which they are well suited. I would say that projects such as Node.js[2] prove that JavaScript has…
Comment linking /2009/02/20/the_dom_stigma/
on “CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination”Submitted The Only Flowchart You'll Ever Need as a story · 10 points
HN discussion"... when your alarm goes off the next day, just get out of bed ... Just get the hell out of bed ... It's just self discipline." http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/10/07/just_is_a_fourletter... http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JustIsaDangerousWord http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/08/cant_you_just_... Or, for a more specific counterpoint, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3828794
Comment linking /2003/10/07/just_is_a_fourletter_word/
on “Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me”Submitted Twitter is a crowded bar as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI think it grew out of very much the same idealism that still drives Ted Nelson to this date. I guess to unify all of human knowledge to reach a higher form of understanding just isn't on most people's mind. Not even those whose day job it is to do just that, as is my experience from dabbling in academic publishing. This reminds me of an old blog post, Charles’ Rules of Argument [1]: “5. DO NOT argue with Lisp progr…
Comment linking /2004/03/21/charles_rules_of_argument/
on “Ask HN: Idea Sunday”Submitted IT Security in a Nutshell as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIndustry software "engineers" trained up in trade schools or worse, without any awareness that they are reimplementing solutions (poorly) to problems that were solved decades ago...and we get...horrible industrial monstrosities like Java Since Guy Steele coauthored both the Lambda Papers (late 1970's) and the first three editions of the Java specification, I don't think that you can successfully argue that awareness…
Comment linking /2004/03/17/halfway_between_the_gutter_and_the_stars/
on “The Rise and Fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab.”Submitted "AI Skills" are worthless in 2026 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDepends on what you call 'quite easy'. In the terminology of http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/07/17/understanding_engine... , it's still a 'hard' problem. There are tens of thousands if not an order of magnitude more objects and reflections of that size in the ocean. It certainly is not a 'computer vision 101' project. 'Computer vision 101' is 'do edge detection using opencv', not 'build a complete system that inte…
Comment linking /2007/07/17/understanding_engineers_feasibility/
on “Satellite photos of possible crash site of MH370”Submitted Simplicity isn't simple as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNeal Stephenson has a great quote on this (from the Diamond Age): "You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices. It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? "Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people a…
Comment linking /2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_greatest_luxury/
on “Reddit Readies For ‘Inter-website War,’ Major Subreddits Ban Links to Gawker”Submitted Dear Twitter as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
