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Web hacking

Web Scale Software Challenges for Lay Folk

An Example

This post grew out of a chat with Jae Sinnett, a great jazz drummer, composer, band leader, and music educator here in Tidewater Virginia. Jae likes to write essays about jazz music and the joys and trials of being a working jazz musician. He publishes these on Facebook and he writes well and at length. But Jae’s essays often come out as a single block of text with the paragraph breaks missing.

Thinking Jae had not discovered the secret sauce for getting Facebook to create a paragraph break, I commented on a recent essay to describe the shift-return technique. It turned out that Jae knew this technique but that it worked or failed at random. What could be going on?