Top all-time · #549
Signs of Triviality
Personal blog · netmeister.org/blogsystemssecurity
Signs of Triviality is a personal blog at netmeister.org about systems and security. Since 2012, 107 different Hacker News readers have linked it 160 times, most often “Complexities of e-mail validation logic”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 34 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its write-ups on DNS records, URLs, email validation and inet_aton, and for its list of CS falsehoods.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called a treasure, a wonderful explainer, a fun read, very poignant, a good blog post, a good pairing, funny, and a better starting place.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 34 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Complexities of e-mail validation logic9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2021-04-03
- Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-11-02
- A few ops lessons we all learn the hard way (2020)7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-01-25
- What’s the maximum size of a DNS response?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-07-18
- Use of HTTPS Resource Records5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-11-14
- Browser Startup Comparison4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-02
- TLDs – Putting the '.fun' in the top of the DNS4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-08-13
- Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-10-25
- URLs: It's Complicated4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-06-22
- IPv4 addresses are silly, inet_aton(3) doubly so4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-29
What Hacker News says?
The full list: https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-paramete... I recall (All) DNS Resource Records listed [1], which is another treasure of historical tidbits. [1] https://www.netmeister.org/blog/dns-rrs.html
Comment linking /blog/dns-rrs.html
on “DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland”Submitted Everybody's Lost Their Minds as a story · 373 points
HN discussionWell... There's a more serious first start browser comparison by netmeister.org [0] which shows that 4 downloads are made. I downloaded and extracted the files. They look like helpers or partials for Brave internal extensions. All of them include manifest files with their names: - 1_0_14: "Brave HTTPS Everywhere Updater extension". Contains a 1MB ZIPped database of https domains. - 1_0_21: "Brave NTP sponsored image…
Comment linking /blog/browser-startup.html
on “Brave, the false sensation of privacy”Submitted There is no 'printf' as a story · 325 points
HN discussionWhat's more likely to go down. OpenDNS or YouTube. curl -4si0A "" https://www.youtube.com|sed -n '/ip=/{s/.*ip=//;s/\.*//p;};'|uniq What's more likely to go down. OpenDNS or Cloudflare. This will work with any Cloudflare IP address and it does not even require TLS. printf 'GET /cdn-cgi/trace HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: cloudflare.com |nc -vvn 104.18.25.13 80 |sed -n /ip=/p To get list of Cloudflare IPs curl -4si0A "" https://…
Comment linking /blog/dns-rrs.html
on “DNS Toys (2022)”Submitted Complexities of e-mail validation logic as a story · 287 points
HN discussionYou can also use the macOS Keychain directly from the command line. This isn't the guide I originally used but gives you an idea: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/keychain-passwords.html
Comment linking /blog/keychain-passwords.html
on “How to handle secrets on the command line”Submitted Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so as a story · 228 points
HN discussion> Although there is: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html I think the section named "Pathname" is wrong. It describes the path of an URL as if every server was Apache serving static files with its default configuration. It should describe how the path is converted into a HTTP request. For instance, the article states that "all of these go to the same place : https://example.org https://example.org/ https://exam…
Comment linking /blog/urls.html
on “Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?”Submitted A few ops lessons we all learn the hard way (2020) as a story · 197 points
HN discussionLike, in: example.com/secret-id-48723487345 I hope the last bit is not leaked somehow (?) Btw, we need a "falsehoods programmers believe about URLs" ... Although there is: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html
Comment linking /blog/urls.html
on “Ask HN: How did the internet discover my subdomain?”Submitted URLs: It's Complicated as a story · 165 points
HN discussionIt seems ridiculous to apply form validation to a name, given the complexity of charsets involved. I don't even validate email addresses. I remember [this]( https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html ) wonderful explainer of why your email validation regex is wrong.
Comment linking /blog/email.html
on “Charset="WTF-8"”Submitted If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters as a story · 164 points
HN discussionI checked the original list [1] and it's a fun read; however the following is absolutely true in my experience: > 30. Software with version numbers ending in '.0' are buggy and you should wait until the next release. [1] https://www.netmeister.org/blog/cs-falsehoods.html
Comment linking /blog/cs-falsehoods.html
on “Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe”Submitted Software Engineering Laws Everybody Loves to Ignore as a story · 148 points
HN discussionSee https://www.netmeister.org/blog/sharing-secrets-using-ssh-ke... and https://github.com/jschauma/jass
Comment linking /blog/sharing-secrets-using-ssh-keys.html
on “Git-secret – store private data in a Git repo”Submitted DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI found this quite amusing as it seems as if Google is trying to impersonate Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, whereas 010.010.010.010 is indeed the octal representation of 8.8.8.8. Credit: IPv4 addresses are silly, inet_aton(3) doubly so. https://www.netmeister.org/blog/inet_aton.html
Comment linking /blog/inet_aton.html
on “Google DNS at 010.010.010.010”Submitted Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete as a story · 128 points
HN discussionHere is the list of blogs on my rss feed. I have found most of them from front page on HN. https://stopa.io/feed.rss https://kliu.io/index.xml https://waitbutwhy.com/feed https://rsshub.app/blogs/paulgraham https://danluu.com/atom.xml https://lethain.com/feeds/ https://programmingisterrible.com/rss http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/index.xml http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml https://www.benkuhn.net/index.xml http…
Comment linking /blog/rss.xml
on “Ask HN: Favourite blogs?”Submitted Infosec Core Competencies as a story · 125 points
HN discussion> making this is a valid URL: https://!$%:)(*&^@www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html Uh, no. "%:)" is not <"%" HEXDIG HEXDIG> nor is % allowed outside of that. (Although your browser will likely accept it) > This includes spaces, and the following two URLs lead to the same file located in a directory that's named " ": > https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/ /f > https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/%20/f > Your client…
Comment linking /blog/urls/%20/f
on “URLs: It's Complicated”Submitted (All) DNS Resource Records as a story · 122 points
HN discussionAs a co-founder of a fintech company, I absolutely 100% agree with this. When the company was 1 person, sure, you can revel in how you implemented some cool data structure or algorithm. But once you scale, none of that really matters anymore. Organization is more important to get people to work together, understand each other's code and generally just execute the product.... Also, this recent article from HN is a go…
Comment linking /blog/cs-falsehoods.html
on “Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2013)”Submitted Basic Network Troubleshooting as a story · 118 points
HN discussionYeah, "what if the file system was a database?" was a very common line of thought in the late '80s/early '90s -- see BFS, WinFS/Cairo, Apple's "soups" for the Newton PDA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) ), Palm OS' virtual file system ( https://www.netmeister.org/palm/PalmMisc/PalmMisc.html#1.7 ), et al.
Comment linking /palm/PalmMisc/PalmMisc.html
on “Practical File System Design: The Be File System (1999)”Submitted The Art of Plain Text (2015) as a story · 115 points
HN discussionquite funny reading HN articles sometimes. So... I read https://www.netmeister.org/blog/cs-falsehoods.html which came from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500672 in the top HN articles at the moment Item 27 of that list made me laugh when I read this article :)
Comment linking /blog/cs-falsehoods.html
on “My Favorite Programming Problem to Teach: Digit Length”Submitted What’s the maximum size of a DNS response? as a story · 112 points
HN discussion
