[HN Gopher] The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
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The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
Author : harporoeder
Score : 308 points
Date : 2022-08-26 21:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (suricrasia.online)
(TXT) w3m dump (suricrasia.online)
| xg15 wrote:
| In some meta way, I like
| 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a
| because it's like a prototypical example of a clickbait article.
|
| It strings you along for 20 paragraphs and 3 sections, constantly
| repeating itself and never quite telling what the deal is with
| that hash, before ending with "so actually this is just a weird
| coincidence and a complete non-story"...
| noduerme wrote:
| I clicked that one too, and I'm pretty glad it never loaded for
| me.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| This is brilliant and a welcome repost.
|
| As a developer with superannuated eyes and a penchant for side-
| by-side diffs, I am disappointed to see that the supplemental
| deep abyss contains "80 columns". Damn kids with their memes and
| 5pt fonts _shakes fist_!
| danielheath wrote:
| Linking 80 columns to the size of foolscap paper several
| centuries ago is pretty arcane whether you like narrow lines or
| not.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| My bad -- I assumed the "80 columns" was listed in the guise
| of a complaint about narrow wrapping in the age of 40"
| widescreen displays.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Here's a similar one for the C preprocessor:
| https://jadlevesque.github.io/PPMP-Iceberg/ (previously discussed
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094693).
|
| Pretty cursed stuff down there.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26766722 - April 2021 (60
| comments)
| _osorin_ wrote:
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
|
| My wife has complained that open office will never print on
| Tuesdays!?!
|
| Made my day.
| bombcar wrote:
| I love bug descriptions that leave you saying "whaaaa"
|
| Pasting an image from the clipboard on Firefox while the
| browser language is set to German causes the filename not to
| get a timestamp
|
| https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-79517
| noduerme wrote:
| Maintaining code written as far back as 2006, especially in
| PHP, I went from a phase where I thought users who complained
| about things like this had to be batshit crazy/stupid to where
| I started putting the really ludicrous user issues like this
| one at the top of my list. Users suck at giving repeatable
| steps to reproduce bugs. To my shame it probably took me about
| 10 years before I was able to detect the subtle differences
| between their universally illiterate emails that would indicate
| whether they'd actually tested something or not; they aren't
| great at explaining how or when they tested it if they even
| did. But I've learned the hard way that when they reference
| something as specific as "Tuesday", it's probably an actual
| error.
| wyager wrote:
| This website is incredibly good. Reminds me of qntm.
| https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...
| skunkworker wrote:
| The fictional article
| https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/ is one the best
| written computer science/cryptography SCP like articles I've ever
| read.
|
| What I loved is that:
|
| $ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItM
| ZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary |
| openssl dgst -sha256 (stdin)=
| 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17
|
| actually works, but is a little sneaky. See
| https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-tr...
|
| Edit2: https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter How the
| examples were generated.
| moffkalast wrote:
| What is interesting is what the top comment in the previous
| thread points out, both the collection and the iceberg are part
| of the same domain. The text for it is the only one that's
| italic and stands out a bit but not too much. It's like the
| whole thing is made just to sell that one.
|
| And I gotta say congrats to them, I completely fell for it.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| There are other italicized entries. For example, OpenOffice
| does not print on Tuesdays and Falsehoods programmers believe
| about time.
|
| It may still be a clever ad, but doesn't seem necessarily
| related to their font choices.
| fossuser wrote:
| Lots of great stuff - not sure if it's on there, but I like
| the story about a user complaining they couldn't send an
| email farther than 150 miles.
|
| Turned out to be related to some sort of timeout (and 150
| miles being around the time it would take for the timeout
| to fail).
|
| I liked it because the user reporting it was debugging in
| an interesting way a non-technical person might, but it
| initially weirded out the technical person when they first
| tested it and saw the 150mi thing appeared to be true
| (before deducing why).
|
| The story of Mel is also on there and a great (true one).
| Speed up loops was another fun DailyWTF one and I also
| liked the one about the cool cam (that saved some flight
| video game that was way behind schedule).
|
| The old programmer lore stories are great.
| opan wrote:
| It's in there, the 500 mile email.
| fossuser wrote:
| Ah 500mi - I misremembered, thanks
| woojoo666 wrote:
| There was another story on the same site [1] that involves
| thermodynamics and signal processing. I don't think I've seen
| such technical sci-fi before. Anybody else have more examples
| to share?
|
| [1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-
| Precogna...
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Not quite to the same level of technical complexity, but this
| short story about the horrors of mind upload is formatted
| like a future-Wikipedia article [0]. qntm, its author, is a
| great source of... outsider art science fiction? His written
| work feels similar to the movie Primer, which was created by
| engineers without much formal training in filmmaking; namely,
| it's impressive and imaginative and well-polished, but
| obviously without the mien and certain stylistic elements of
| those who learned the "rules" of the medium by rote rather
| than derivation and imitation.
|
| [0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
| jonathanyc wrote:
| Greg Egan is an extreme example of math in hard sci-fi.
| https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html
|
| 72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-
| developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard
| sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of
| his stories became the movie Arrival.
|
| Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The
| slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation
| he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find
| it though.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| For the uninformed, what's sneaky about it?
| woojoo666 wrote:
| From the comments in the linked thread:
|
| > They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's
| example strings do match the hashes given in the story in
| their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the
| last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to
| check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not
| checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the
| real hashes have extra characters in between those start and
| end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with
| many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story
| hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with
| fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22
| zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce
| start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real
| hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An
| achievable-in-reality difficulty level
| 6177c40f wrote:
| Thanks for linking this, I love this kind of "computer science
| fiction" stuff
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's the stuff the _Laundry_ series by Charles Stross used to
| be, but then it really focused on the espionage and then just
| general paranormal parody riffing.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I love the breadth that Reflections on Trusting Trust, Therac-25,
| and The Bitter Lesson are! But there's a lot of "X is Turing
| complete" and "Y is a fork/zip/parsing infinite expansion bomb"
| though.
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| It took me until the bottom of the iceberg to realize that each
| is a link you can click.
| aymar_99 wrote:
| It took me reading this comment to realize.thanks
| ceedan wrote:
| Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation needs to be on there... and maybe
| even just "thumb drive in the parking lot"
| noduerme wrote:
| >> font hinting is Turing complete
|
| TIL. But, from the Wikipedia article:
|
| _> > Although incapable of receiving input and producing output
| as normally understood in programming_
|
| Great. So this is why this hasn't been the subject of 0-day hacks
| since like 1988.
|
| Also, about that Orson Wells thing (from the linked paper):
|
| _> >In 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air
| performed an infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds [12]. The
| broadcast begins with a brief theatri- cal introduction, followed
| by simulated news broadcasts describing an alien invasion of New
| Jersey that run for thirty-eight minutes before the first and
| only intermis- sion, after which the story shifts to the past
| tense and a fictional tone. Prior to the intermission, there is
| not one commercial, not one word out of character, and not one
| scene in the past tense to clue the listener in on the fictional
| nature of the broadcast. While Welles surely was not concerned
| with attacking digital radios in 1938, his broadcast does follow
| the gen- eral pattern of the attacks in this paper. His PIP in
| this case is the thirty-eight minute panicked broadcast, while
| the introduction could be considered an outer header. Listeners
| who miss the introduction might believe the first act to be
| factual, just as a digital radio which misses a preamble might
| interpret the PIP to be a legitimate and full packet._
|
| So basically, because every packet protocol has headers and
| headers can be spoofed, and War of the Worlds was essentially a
| header spoof, let's call this the Orson Wells attack?
|
| Maybe instead of the Big Scary Iceberg website, we can call it
| the Leonardo DiCaprio list of bad shit that could happen to you a
| boat?
| kortex wrote:
| Is this phenomenon related to why websockets use masking? I
| believe it's something to do with shitty proxies being
| vulnerable to being cache-poisoned when an attacker sends data
| down the websocket (packet in packet) which looks like HTTP
| traffic.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I would expect to see https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ there.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Another nice entry would be the fact that cosmic rays can flip
| hardware bits with sometimes drastic consequences.
| Unfortunately I don't have a good source link, but veritasium
| has a video on YouTube about it.
| H8crilA wrote:
| I had a major WTF moment when I read about the basilisk
| collection, only to find out that the file doesn't actually exist
| and the article is a fiction story, SCP like. Lol. Now I kind of
| wish it did exist.
| [deleted]
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Great little compilation of computer lore. Sort of like a Jargon
| file for the meme generations.
| xorcist wrote:
| The page is great, even disregarding the fictional stuff.
|
| I would have expected to find Cicada 3301 in there. That one
| still bugs one.
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(page generated 2022-08-27 23:02 UTC)