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Bug #915: Please help
Updated: this was solved on Hacker News. Details in Bug #915: solved!
Ned Batchelder
Ned Batchelder's personal web site, blog, writings, software, math, parenting, autism
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Visit nedbatchelder.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2009 – Sep 2025
Software Engineering 10Life, Learning & Writing 3Web & Frontend 2Math & Algorithms 2Tools & Productivity 1Society, Policy & Culture 1
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Print this file, your printer will jam (2008)
Another story from printer-land of 20 years ago: this time about a seemingly impossible bug.
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Bug #915: Solved
Yesterday I pleaded, Bug #915: please help! It got posted to Hacker News, where Robert Xiao (nneonneo) did some impressive debugging and found the answer.
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Goodbye Freenode
For the last month or so, the IRC world has been embroiled in drama over the new ownership of Freenode. For me, it culminated yesterday when I was banned from Freenode.
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What’s in Which Python
A concise summary of Python’s versions, and what’s in each.
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Testing is better than data structures and algorithms
People should spend less time learning DSA, more time learning testing.
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Why a mock doesn’t work
Mocking is a powerful technique for isolating tests. But yours isn’t working. Why!?
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On Python security amidst recent Rails/YAML vulnerabilities
The Rails community has had a few high-profile security issues this week. They are well-summarized, with an alarming list of what follow-ons to expect, by Patrick McKenzie: What the Rails Security Issue Means for Your Startup.
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GitHub monoculture
I continue to notice an unsettling trend: the rise of the GitHub monoculture. More and more, people seem to believe that GitHub is the center of the programming universe.
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How to Be Helpful Online
Helping people online is difficult. We expect technical questions and discussions, but everyone involved are just people, so it doesn’t always go smoothly.
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The myth of the myth of learning styles
“Four different learning styles” has been debunked, but learners still have to learn how they learn, and choose the paths and materials that are right for them.
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I fixed a bug in Python
About a month ago, I found a bad-behavior bug in the tokenize standard library module, and with help from Aron Griffis, submitted a patch to fix it. Yesterday was a Python bug day, and Ezio Melotti merged my change, so I have officially contributed to CPython!
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Python iteration
This is a presentation I gave at PyCon 2013. You can read the slides and text on this page, or open the actual presentation in your browser (use right and left arrows to advance the slides), or watch the video:
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Computing primes with CSS
I’ve been working on a redesign of this site, so doing more CSS, finally internalizing Sass, etc. During my reading, the nth-child pseudo-class caught my eye.
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Two-part Rubik's algorithms
When Rubik’s Cube first appeared decades ago, I jumped on it. I bought one, and spent an entire summer fiddling with it. Over that summer, I developed a solving technique that has stuck with me. My technique is not the fastest; that was never the goal. My algorithms make sense to me because they are constructed, and…
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Http-https transitions and relative URLs
When building a web site with HTTPS pages, one of the annoying tasks is to ensure that those pages make no references to HTTP resources. If they do, then Internet Explorer will pop up alarming messages about mixing secure and insecure content, and do you want to display the insecure content.
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Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.