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ssl-3yesterday at 12:04 AM0 repliesview on HN

You haven't really gone 'round the block in the world of quasi-modern Linux until you're Googling for answers and guidance to what seems like some obscure issue, wherein: The noise is intense and replete with bad answers, unanswered questions, lack of report (positive? negative? how 'bout "none"?), and dumb SEO spam.

Time passes (how much time? are the birds singing yet?) as you keep slogging through that endless sea of muck.

Finally, you run across an old post on some forum where the person not only wrote about the problem, but also the cause of the problem -- and the answer.

So you're reading along, working to once again evaluate whether your problem matches their problem. And the more you read, the more familiar it all seems... like you've been there before.

"It can't be," you say to yourself.

But you scroll back up to the top of the comment and look at the author's name anyway.

And yep, sure as anything: It was you. Six years ago, you wrote about that exact problem yourself and posted a perfectly-cromulent solution to it.

So you fix it (again), note that the birds are in fact singing, and to try to sleep for a bit while pondering your life's choices: You could have found a hobby in origami or perhaps woodworking. Maybe worked as a Mennonite tradesman producing leather goods, or as a carpenter (even an Amish one if any of that seemed too high-tech).

But you didn't. You chose this path instead. It could have all been so simple, but it isn't.