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Daycrawler

153 karma · joined October 16, 2017

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Daycrawler··on US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data
Banning things works relatively well for people because they fear having trouble with law and justice. Doesn't work that well for corporations whose law department is just like any other department. In this case you must assume that if it's technically possible then it's done.
Daycrawler··on The Cyber Security Body of Knowledge
In web dev there is the OWASP top 10, which is made of relatively old but still widespread vulnerabilities, right?
Daycrawler··on You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS
My last two laptops were an HP Pavilion and an Acer Swift. Linux Mint installs and works without a problem.
Daycrawler··on You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS
Why is 3:2 better than standard 16:9?
Daycrawler··on On becoming a better developer (2015)
This really isn't understandable without the context of the article this one is a rebuttal of (http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2011/08/09/programming-achievem...), and specifically this "method" that the author of the first article uses the be a good developer:

    1. Identify the experiences that advance a person as a developer.
    2. Select a particular experience to pursue.
    3. Pursue that experience to completion. (Achievement unlocked!)
    4. Reflect on that experience. Really soak it in.
    5. Return to Step 2, this time selecting a new experience.
The rebutal's point is that instead of cycling back to step 2 after step 5, you should continue above and beyond, becoming really expert in the field you decided to pursue.

What the rebutal misses, in my opinion, is that in order to go beyond step 5, you need to have chosen an ambitious subject in a first place. A symptom of wanting to cycle from 5 to 2 is that the experience you chose isn't that significant and you can explore most of it quite rapidly. I see it a lot in the web development world, where after having done one or two CRUD applications devs have seen it all, and start cycling through technologies, frameworks and methodologies to make it more spicy.

One solution to this is to move deeper into the backend of rich and complex software/websites, where solving problems related to distributed systems, algorithmic efficiency and architecture will provide (but also require in a first place) vast knowledge and experience; enough for one career at least. Other fields than webdev also work well for this, including embedded systems, security and digital imaging.

Daycrawler··on The Programming Talent Myth (2015)
/r/iamverysmart
Daycrawler··on Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)
2.2 billion is a bullshit number, plain and simple.
Daycrawler··on Elon Musk Deletes Own, SpaceX and Tesla Facebook Pages After #deletefacebook
Uh... I'm pretty sure SpaceX and Tesla marketing teams are kinda sad right now.
Daycrawler··on YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users with Ads So They Pay for Music
Is a business model built on people's ignorance of ad-blockers really reliable?
Daycrawler··on Some software cannot be used at Google
What do you mean fill out a form? There is a clause in the work contract?
Daycrawler··on Wikimedia director on commercial use of Wikipedia
The fundamental problem is trusting pieces of information people read on non-authoritative sources like random social network posts being liked or twitted. People are granting such trust, which is bad but not so much. More dangerously, however, we have authoritative sources such as reputed news venues granting more and more trust, or at least, giving credit, to such garbage sources.

I don't know if the government should get involved, but if it is to, then it should only be a educative and preventive job, to warn people that:

* Other than reputed news sources using their Twitter account to spread information, it is to be assumed than information from social networks is garbage

* When a reputed news source is referencing information from Twitter or other social networks, they're doing a bad job

Daycrawler··on Slack's bait and switch
Making your UI so that it doesn't break is the very definition of supporting it.
Daycrawler··on The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects
You're talking about implementation complexity. The only argument you can throw at the user is feature complexity. Handling spaces in filename isn't a complex feature at all, and users don't care that the simplistic implementation you're using makes it a problem.
Daycrawler··on Ad network uses advanced malware technique to conceal CPU-draining mining ads
"Conceal" is quite an ambitious term for something that literally makes noise out of your computer fan. `top` to check that Firefox is guilty and `about:performance` to close the guilty tab. There are so many shitty JS single-page sites out there that abuse clients' resources I don't even care whether it's crypto mining or just incompetence.
Daycrawler··on Why Searching Through 500M Pwned Passwords Is So Quick
Doesn't know about Cloudflare but as a Microsoft Regional Director he's certainly pro Azure.
Daycrawler··on Nobody's just reading your code
I just write that the library's function at hand is unreliable and can't be used this way.
Daycrawler··on AMP for email is a terrible idea
I don't quite buy into the public utility thing. Any Google product has competitors. The reason people use Google products is because Google advertises its new products on its products people already use massively. I don't think people actually see it as a public utility and are unaware of the competition. When you're in use-case A and suddenly you have a link from the same service to subscribe to use-case B, there's some effort required if you want to study the alternatives, and people prefer the easy way. Google crawls its way from one oligopoly to another this way.
Daycrawler··on The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy
The first part of the article where the author explains how time-consuming it is to study algorithms can really be applied to any field of study. The fact that the author spends much time learning algorithm doesn't mean that he's "dumb" as he humbly presents himself, it just means that he's just getting started. It's like trying to pick up guitar and when you realize that it really is hard and takes time you decide after one month that you're not a talented guitar player.

Then there the second part where the author considers algorithmic knowledge as useless (or not so much useless at best) because the tools available to a programmer already implement any relevant algorithm.

There's some ironic parallel between this way of thinking and algorithmic proficiency, actually. Many algorithms work by leveraging data structures whose understanding of internal working isn't needed. For example, one way to efficiently merge N sorted list into one big sorted list is to use a priority queue. Do you need to know how a priority queue is implemented to find this solution? Not at all. You just need to know the interface it offers, and the complexity of each method. Finding the k-th smallest element in a list can be done using a heap. Do you need to know how a heap is implemented to find this solution? Not at all. You just need to know what a heap does.

Really, studying algorithms is like studying the C++ standard library, except that instead of knowing about classes and methods as your toolbox, you know data structures (and common patterns) as your toolbox. Of course any curious mind will then go deeper and actually read about how those things are implemented, building an even better understanding of the foundations, and solving even deeper problems with it.

While being an interesting parallel, this doesn't really answers the author's questioning about: what's the point? Which brings us to what the author forgot to address in his article: white board test. The title of article sets the scene with someone wanting to find a job in one of those big tech company hiring people who can pass the whiteboard tests, but then who somehow... forget about it and decides to abandon this endeavor? Well, fair enough, but to be perfectly honest, while Google & Cie engineers certainly aren't spinning up algorithms on a daily basis like mad computer scientists, the engineering level there is still quite high. So there's definitely some basis in wanting to pass the whiteboard interview, mostly working with intelligent people.

Daycrawler··on AMP for email is a terrible idea
Gaining customers doesn't mean monetizing, and it's particularly relevant to point out that a channel is under monetized specifically when this channel has a lot of users.
Daycrawler··on Google and Facebook are watching our every move online
Why stopping going to the sites? The point of blockers is specifically to make them harmless.
Daycrawler··on George Soros: Facebook and Google are a menace to society
I agree with all except that it needs to be regulated. Nor Google nor Facebook (nor any social media) are pushed down our throats, and it is the choice of the people to use it. I don't understand how consumers can build judgement and learn to be responsible for themselves if we always shelter them from poor consumption choices through regulation laws. Furthermore if they're unaware enough to need regulation laws, it means they're unaware enough to be abused by regulation laws, so it's definitely not an actual solution.
Daycrawler··on The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
Call me back for the Death of Cargo Cult Programming altogether.
Daycrawler··on Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
That's correct.
Daycrawler··on SPAs are harder and always will be (2013)
The answers to the first difficulty are called "Universal Rendering" and "Isomorphic Rendering". Universal Rendering will render the page at any URL server-side, then the client will render other pages from there. Isomorphic Rendering is a special case of Universal Rendering in Node.js apps where the same JavaScript code is used to render pages in the client and the server.

Anyway, the article is right. Of course presenting users the current state of things in real time and allowing them to mutate this state in real time will always be harder than issuing requests to query the current state and requests to mutate the current state. It'll always be harder because it's way more complex and powerful from a user perspective.

Daycrawler··on Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentication to a REST API?
It depends on the use-case.

* Public data API (no notion of user account, e.g. weathers API, newspapers API, GitHub public events, Reddit /r/popular, etc): use an API key. The developers must create an account on your website to create their API key; each API call is accompanied by the API key in the query string (?key=...)

* Self-used API for AJAX (notion of user account, e.g. all the AJAX calls behind the scenes when you use Gmail): use the same user cookie as for the rest of the website. The API is like any other resource on the website except it returns JSON/XML/whatever instead of HTML.

* Internal API for micro-services: API key shared by both ends of the service. There can be a notion of user accounts, but it's a business notion and the user is an argument like any other. If possible, your micro-services shouldn't actually be accessible on the public Internet.

* API with the notion of user accounts intended for third-parties (e.g. Reddit mobile app where the users can authorize the app to use their Reddit account on their behalf): OAuth2

Daycrawler··on The screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday
Also jet pilots have years of training whereas users are presented to "intuitive" interfaces where they have no reason not to push every button just to test them out.
Daycrawler··on Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
Stallman of course.

> I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Daycrawler··on Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS
> So what, the site could route you through a server side proxy anyways

There's little interest in proxying through a token system (this would require a DB read at each click, and a DB write at each page generation), which means the actual link is available client-side and the whole thing can be bypassed.

Daycrawler··on Google Memory Loss
The worse is when it gives you results containing synonyms of your query words (and even highlights them in the little description under the link). Like, dude, I used this word for a reason
Daycrawler··on Show HN: PAST, a secure alternative to JWT
This doesn't solve the criticism against JWT being used for sessions, which is one of the main point against JWT expressed in the very site linked at the top of the README.
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