Top all-time · #770
Jeffrey Friedl
Personal blog · regex.info/blogculturedesign
Jeffrey Friedl's personal blog at regex.info covers culture and design. Since 2009, 84 different Hacker News readers have linked it 92 times, most often “Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jeffrey Friedl's regex.info for the post tracing the 'Now you have two problems' quote, which many threads cite, and for his book Mastering Regular Expressions. Commenters call the book worth reading.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called worth reading and a classic; one commenter finds the book easy to read and full of genuinely good information.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)42 people · 42 mentions · first linked 2009-10-31
- /book.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-05-24
- /blog/2006-09-15/2475 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-12-31
- Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-01-16
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-10-21
- /exif.cgi3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-10-07
- An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-08
- /blog/2006-09-15/2482 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-29
What Hacker News says?
... Then ChatGPT came along and I had 3 problems! https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “FFmpeg by Example”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006) as a story · 159 points
HN discussionThere's quite a nice history to that one: http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 It dates back to August 12, 1997! (Perhaps someone should encourage jwz to have a 20th birthday party for that at DNA?)
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Stack Overflow Outage Postmortem”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006) as a story · 154 points
HN discussionZawinsky's classic quote "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.", was apparently based on military humor where the serviceman thinks to ask an officer... http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on ““Just remove the duck” (2013)”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionThat particular image is a GIF with a reduced palette of 8 bits per pixel, whereas the rest seem to be full-colour PNGs. http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix....
Comment linking /exif.cgi?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fanders.unix.se%2Fimages%2Fdmr_screenshot.gif
on “Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002”Submitted More Details on the Insidious iOS Snap-To-Road “Feature” as a story · 87 points
HN discussionJust so you know, jwz is not the original source of this quote, it's much older: http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “How I fixed a bug in Atom”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote as a story · 75 points
HN discussion> For many products today, it’s very difficult or impossible for most people to verify the product works. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski via Coding Horror [0] To your point, maybe Zawinski's aphorism is broader than regexp. The quote investigation [1] linked from CH is well worth reading. 0. https://blog.codingho…
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags”Submitted Discovering and Cycling Japan’s Biggest Climb as a story · 26 points
HN discussionJust needs a quick regex! (now you have two problems: ) http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Wikileaks publishes 500k new Stratfor emails”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionHe or she is probably referring to Jeffrey Friedl's classic tome: http://regex.info/book.html
Comment linking /book.html
on “Learn RegEx step by step, from zero to advanced”Submitted Vice magazine outs John McAfee's location in Exif data as a story · 9 points
HN discussionBeing a perl/regex person back in the day, I recall having Mastering Regular Expressions as a well thumbed reference book. The author, Jeffrey Friedl ( http://regex.info/blog/jfriedl-links/about ) worked at Yahoo! Finance at the time. It was a most impressive and useful site in its time.
Comment linking /blog/jfriedl-links/about
on “Google throws away 12 years of work by investors (Portfolios in Google Finance)”Submitted An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThank you fellow HyperLooker! For me, PostScript WAS the appeal! For the rest of the civilized world, Arthur van Hoff wrote "PdB", an object oriented PostScript => C compiler. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088193 >Arthur van Hoff wrote PdB, and we used it for to develop HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS nee GoodNeWS). You could actually subclass PostScript classes in C, and vice-verse! https://news.ycombinator.com/i…
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Forth: The programming language that writes itself”Submitted Delta Airlines: Gauging the Quality of Your Customer-Service Representatives as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhat does the famous saying in the first paragraph actually say? The phrase is hyperlinked, and it 404s for me: https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 It's quite odd to see a dead link from a post made literally today.
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Email addresses are not good 'permanent' identifiers for accounts”Submitted Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote (2006) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCollapse that indirect pointer. The source is http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “A regular expression to check for prime numbers (2007)”Submitted An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings as a story · 2 points
HN discussionno need to wait! http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/247
on “Learn regular expressions in about 55 minutes”Submitted Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYeah I didn't mention Friedl because I've dumped on him in the past, and didn't want to belabor it. But Friedl definitely didn't start this. According to him, he was just using what was common vernacular even back then: http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/248 (Note that blog is from 2006, but he's actually quoting himself from ~10 years prior to that in 1997.) But... he is the one who ultimately installed this ambigui…
Comment linking /blog/2006-09-15/248
on “Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count program”Submitted Informal GPS Logger Test: iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYeah, you're right of course. Housing prices would go down towards the cost of production. Those $750k McMansions really only cost $300k to build (making numbers up here). But if new homes drop below the cost of production then we're in trouble. Any economic model that doesn't assume for the cost of production simply isn't realistic. Japan has a particularly weird model that might work: homes drop in price like cars…
Comment linking /blog/2007-03-25/403
on “Why is everyone so busy?”Submitted Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
