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The other side of the moon
Personal blog · tech.bluesmoon.infowebprogramming
The other side of the moon is a personal blog at tech.bluesmoon.info about web and programming. Since 2010, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “Scaling MySQL to 700 million inserts per day”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on UI design, such as reducing checkboxes in product forms and putting missing-children notices on a 404 page. The comments only link to these posts and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Scaling MySQL to 700 million inserts per day2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-21
What Hacker News says?
As an answer to your first question: Between 2000-2003, I worked on components of the cross protocol IM backend used by many of the multi-protocol messengers back in the early to mid 2000s (eg: Adium, Trillian, Fire, Ayttm, and more). Each of the frontends had different ways to integrate. Trillian used 2 processes with TCP communication between them to get around the GPL licensed backend), Fire, Adium, Ayttm release…
Comment linking /2010/11/stream-of-collaboration-and-unified.html
on “Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App”Submitted The story of George — ayttm's most prolific non-developing contributor as a story · 212 points
HN discussion> I don't know whether this is a trend I posted this 11 years ago: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2011/01/device-width-and-how-not... It's not a trend, it's been around as long as it's been possible. Site owners dislike letting their users have control.
Comment linking /2011/01/device-width-and-how-not-to-hate-your.html
on “Please stop disabling zoom”Submitted Fixing XSS on a bank website - A customer's saga as a story · 85 points
HN discussionIn 1999, I was an intern at a company in India. We wanted to put a machine in a datacenter, and the datacenter admin asked us to set the Administrator password to "password". Turns out that all the other companies that put their boxes in that datacenter did the same. Infosys was one of those companies. I wrote more about it here: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2017/04/a-tale-of-datacenter-sec...
Comment linking /2017/04/a-tale-of-datacenter-security.html
on “Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPI for over a year”Submitted Help find missing kids by putting them on your 404 page as a story · 81 points
HN discussioneven sed is turing complete. I once did a talk about this at Opensource Bridge: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2008/09/programming-patterns-in-s...
Comment linking /2008/09/programming-patterns-in-sed.html
on “The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]”Submitted Scaling MySQL to 700 million inserts per day as a story · 39 points
HN discussionnice comment from a lead developer of ayttm (im client) on this post here... http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2013/03/reducing-checkboxes.html ~B
Comment linking /2013/03/reducing-checkboxes.html
on “Checkboxes that kill your product”Submitted Programming patterns in sed as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSome recent results are at https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2020/11/understanding-emotion-fo...
Comment linking /2020/11/understanding-emotion-for-happy-users.html
on “We rendered a million web pages to find out what makes the web slow”Submitted Undelete in FreeBSD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe last 4 digits are known, and the first 6 digits are based on the type of card (VISA/MC/AMEX + Bank/Issuer), so are guessable. Apply the Luhn algorithm to these, and you're left with only 10-100K possibilities for the remaining middle digits. If you're only required to specify the last 2, you can narrow it down significantly by only looking at valid combinations of those last 2, which is far smaller than 100. I'v…
Comment linking /2011/01/how-guessable-is-your-credit-card.html
on “PayPal Denies Providing Payment Information to Twitter Username Hacker”Submitted Avoid running END blocks in perl as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMany years ago I ran into a similar problem. A technician came in to the office to replace my hard disk with a larger one, and instead of copying my old data to the new one, he started copying the new disk to the old one, resulting in /home now being partially NTFS and partially ext2. ie, it was unreadable in linux and Windows. I documented the recovery process here: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2004/11/home-is-ntfs.h…
Comment linking /2004/08/undelete-in-freebsd.html
on “Unix Recovery Legend (1986)”Submitted Scaling writes in MySQL (2009) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI started to write a response, but it grew too long, so I wrote this blog post instead: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2013/08/dont-guess-at-timezones-i... tl;dr: the timezone you use depends not just on the user and their environment, but also the event and its duration.
Comment linking /2013/08/dont-guess-at-timezones-in-javascript.html
on “Stop asking users for their timezone – use per-device settings and JavaScript”Submitted Limits of Network Load Testing -- Ephemeral Ports as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've posted a solution to counting coins here: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/11/counterfeit-coins-solutio... Let me know if you think it's right or wrong.
Comment linking /2010/11/counterfeit-coins-solution.html
on “Some fun mathematical puzzles”Submitted Device-width and how not to hate your users as a story · 2 points
HN discussionProgramming patterns in sed: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2008/09/programming-patterns-in-s...
Comment linking /2008/09/programming-patterns-in-sed.html
on “Sedtris: Tetris in sed”Submitted Bad use of HTML5 form validation is worse than not using it at all as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlas, their 404 page is just Blogger's: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/02/missing-kids-on-your-none...
Comment linking /2010/02/missing-kids-on-your-nonexistant-404-page.html
on “Help find missing kids by putting them on your 404 page”Submitted Ask HN (to critique my idea): Stream of Collaboration and the Unified InBox as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReminds me of work I did at Yahoo a long time ago that eventually resulted in publishing basic programming patterns in sed: http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2008/09/programming-patterns-in-s...
Comment linking /2008/09/programming-patterns-in-sed.html
on “Design patterns in Tcl”Submitted The Elements of Style as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReminds me of the time back in 2010 when a piece of CSS on the Yahoo Search page would cause a complete desktop crash on Red Hat Linux: https://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/04/can-website-crash-your-r... To the author, did you ever consider contacting the Chrome dev team about this? They're pretty responsive to bug reports.
Comment linking /2010/04/can-website-crash-your-rhel5-desktop.html
on “The Weirdest Bug I've Seen Yet”Submitted Handling Date/Times and timezones as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Random sampling for measuring performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What's your site's users' bandwidth? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion