⏰ Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 AM Cron Jobs (2013)
A sharp reminder for DevOps teams—time zone quirks still break automation. Running jobs in UTC or adopting smarter schedulers can save hours of debugging chaos.
The post cautions system administrators against scheduling cron jobs at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., particularly on Sundays, due to complications from daylight saving time changes. Such shifts can cause jobs to run multiple times or be skipped entirely. The author recounts an event where a job executed around 60 times in one minute because of DST adjustments.
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🧠 Why Busy Beaver Hunters Fear the Antihydra
An insightful look at the edge of theoretical computer science—this article shows how even simple machines can expose the boundaries of what’s provable and computable.
Ben Brubaker investigates the enigmatic Turing machine called Antihydra, central to efforts in computing the sixth busy beaver number, BB(6). Its unpredictable behavior parallels the unsolved Collatz conjecture, making it nearly impossible to decide if it halts. The piece connects this puzzle to the wider landscape of computational limits and mathematical undecidability.
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🖨️ Printing at FedEx
A funny yet painful reflection on UX design—how layers of ‘security’ and poor interface choices can make even basic tasks feel impossible.
In a witty retelling, the author describes a disastrous trip to print a zine at a FedEx kiosk. From unreadable USB drives and endless CAPTCHAs to login failures and arbitrary file limits, the experience devolves into total frustration.
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