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Are there equivalents to alleyways in software? Things that were meant as pragmatic ancillary solutions, but have taken on a life of their own?

For me, vi's ! springs to mind.

Hmm...

"Surprisingly Turing-Complete" https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete

> ‘Computers’, in the sense of being Turing-complete, are extremely common. Almost any system of sufficient complexity—unless carefully engineered otherwise—may be found to ‘accidentally’ support Turing-complete somewhere inside it through ‘weird machines’ which can be rebuilt out of the original system’s parts, even systems which would appear to have not the slightest thing to do with computation.

Javascript was (in)famously hacked together in ten days.
I went wandering the alleyways in my small town in Alberta recently during the summer. And I was pleasantly surprised by how many garages had been turned into makeshift bars and patios. There were myriad garage sales and such but so many people had full on bars for themselves and guests.

It was like discovering a hidden world where the rules that prevent businesses from forming were all tossed out and people could just do as they wanted. In toronto, this style of business led to so many of the street front businesses that are literally impossible to do in any city now.

Came here for a story about my favorite Game Boy launch title.
I kinda wish there was a separate news feed for these long, meandering but often interesting stories (I propose we call it hacker news after dark). over 3k words is kind of a big commitment for the kind of bathroom breaks I am normally reading hacker news on so wish the main feed was kept to sub 2 k word stories/news. The other problem also happens where I sit down to the kind of epic bathroom break where I could enjoy a longer form item like this and then only run into said longer form item after chewing up most of the time on 10-15 shorter articles (on second thought, we could rename the original feed to normal dump and this new feed to epic dump).
My request would be for a button which saves the article to a form which I can read on a kindle or remarkable at a good time, for example on the commute home.
Firefox has something like that called Pocket. I don't know how easy it is to send the articles to an e-reader.
Kobo readers at least have Pocket built-in.
If you use an ios device you can save webpages to Books directly from Safari. This creates a pdf that should be transferable to other e-reader devices.
I just tried it -- I couldn't figure out how to save directly, but I could save the page as a PDF to Files and then from Files share it to Books.

Note: if the page you are saving makes use of deferred loading of images you may need to scroll all the way down before starting this whole process.

Product pitch - an app that appends "now wash your hands" to the end of every article linked from HN. Subscribe by spending a penny whilst you, er, spend a penny.
Right. How are your bathroom breaks going anyway? Plumbing all working well, I hope! Drinking enough water?
Right as chocolate rain most of the time but sometimes it is cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
Out of the box solution: change your diet!
Second that. I found myself thinking, "too many adjectives."
I call it "send to Kindle".
Saigon, Vietnam is a massive massive city with something like 8m+ people living there. When I was living there and couldn't sleep at night, I'd hop on my motorbike and just go explore all the little back streets and alleyways that cut through the whole city.

As a foreigner, it is relatively safe to do this. Most people are just busy living their lives (or sleeping!), but seems super sketchy if you think too deeply about it.

I never really saw anything too crazy (beyond the absolute poverty a lot of people live in), but the occasional illegal cockfight or overhearing screaming and yelling was always entertaining. One time, I had a gang of hookers on bikes chase me around for a bit, but eventually they realized that I wasn't interested in being a customer and left me alone.

I'm sure in a few instances, I could have stopped and had drinks with the more than friendly locals. From what I understand, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to leave until properly lubricated. I never worked up the courage for that one though, mostly because of the language barriers.

Gumball Alley in San Luis Obispo, CA is equal parts magical and disgusting.
Lovely article. I wish the author would have spent more words explaining why he is so against laneway houses, though.
Chicago has great alleyways. On my block, we have a few alleycats that keep it clear of rats. There's a troop of raccoons that come thru every once in a while looking fo food. A scrapper comes around every week or so to haul away big trash items in his truck. And there are a couple regular dumpster divers looking for cans. It's a really interesting ecosystem!