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fatjonnyon Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?

I've been thoroughly enjoying "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann. It primarily deals with the current state of storing data (databases, etc) starting with storing data on one machine and expanding to distributed architectures...but most importantly it goes over the trade-offs between the various approaches. It is at a high level because of the amount of ground it covers, but it contains a ton of references to dig in deeper if you want to know more about a specific topic.

fatjonnyon New Faster Undersea Pipe for Google Cloud Platform

The High Performance Browser Networking book that was recently featured here has a good section about this.

https://hpbn.co/primer-on-latency-and-bandwidth/#speed-of-li...

fatjonnyon GCHQ – Not So Secure?

Sure, teachers could reset the password. My point is that there is no reason to. It is one extra step for teachers and gets rid of the benefit of having a consistent password for the student.

fatjonnyon GCHQ – Not So Secure?

I think there are some cases when storing passwords in clear text is valid. One example:

A website has educational content. Teachers can sign up students in their classrooms. The teacher's password is stored securely, the student's password is not. The student password is shorter and automatically generated. The goal is to make the password just hard enough to not be guessed by other students, but not so hard that the student can't remember it. It is stored in clear text so that the teacher can look it up for the student, or print out the password to pass out to the student, etc. The student account is only given access to the content. The worst thing that happens if a student's password is guessed is that another student can mess up their progress tracking.

Is there a reason the student passwords should be encrypted in the database?

fatjonnyon Building Atari With CreateJS

It is not IE only. CreateJS works well in the major browsers. The games work in new versions of all browsers. The games are only ad-free in IE and should work well especially in IE 10 as this looks to be partially sponsored by Microsoft.

Some of the links at the end also pertain specifically to IE.

fatjonnyon Blazing fast node.js: performance tips from LinkedIn

"Our initial logging implementation accidentally included a synchronous call to write to disc."

You really want to avoid synchronous calls all of the time in node.js unless you are at a point in the app's life where it makes sense to block if necessary, such as on startup or shutdown.

Since this call was used in logging my guess is that the synchronous write call was called a lot and was easy to spot because of it. There are other places where calls like that would be harder to track down. As with any programming environment it is important to understand how things are working at least one abstraction level below the code you are writing.

fatjonnyon John Carmack is making a virtual reality headset

"It’s worth noting that the prototype Carmack is demoing wasn’t made by him, but by another Texan builder of VR headsets. It’s using the same tech and principles as Carmack’s own version, which was unfortunately unable to make the trip to E3."

It sounds like he is making his own headset as well. The demo was not on his, though.

fatjonnyon My Node.js Linksheet

I would remove the Mastering Node link from the resources. It is pretty far out of date and a lot has changed in the 9 months since it has been updated.

Specifically it does not mention the binaries for installing node, includes old, unusable ways of requiring modules, uses the sys module (which is now util), and probably more things that are wrong to do now in node.

fatjonnyon How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster app

You could write your own way of doing it or use an existing flow control library. There are lots. :)

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules#wiki-async-flow

For a specific example, look at async.parallel: https://github.com/caolan/async

fatjonnyon Show HN: I made a better interface for Google Tasks and I can't go back

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...

It is a part of tasks for iGoogle.

fatjonnyon Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (December 2010 Edition)

Bouncing Pixel - Houston, TX

We are looking for developers (PHP, node.js, Actionscript, CSS, Javascript, or able to learn those), working remotely is not currently a possibility. We have client work as well as our own properties that we are working on. See http://bouncingpixel.com/jobs.php ... we are very small and looking for the right person to fit our company culture. We have a rock wall behind our office that we built for bouldering. Feel free to contact me for any reason.

fatjonnyon What Happens At Y Combinator

I enjoyed reading it. It is nice to read about what the startups in Y Combinator go through.

Minor typos I noticed (since you seem like you want the feedback):

missing 'the': "to get the company into best shape possible"

spelling of predict: "know the investors but can preditct their reaction to each specific startup"

see instead of seem: "no one except the current batch of startups gets to seem them"

fatjonnyon JeffCroft.com: On Flash

My guess is that not very many people are talking about it because with Flash 10.1 Adobe added support for multi-touch. Once Flash becomes available on a lot of devices that support multi-touch, you will probably see developers adding proper support to their games. If a mouse is present, use it. If multi-touch is supported, use it. And so on. Granted, the current support has problems in some browsers and on some operating systems, but that will (most likely) only get better as long as the multi-touch input information is available through the browser.

Some more information on multi-touch support: http://theflashblog.com/?p=1678

fatjonnyon Bill Gates pledges $10bn for a 'decade of vaccine'

The problem I am referring to in my post is the overall population problem of the world. There are a finite number of resources to sustain the population on this planet and we currently have a very high population growth rate in the world. At some point, the resources we have won't be enough. That is the overall problem.

I am fully aware that if someone close to me was sick that I would do what I could to help them. It doesn't change the problem. I was replying to a question about unintended consequences. One of the potentially unintentional consequences of this is that it might make a lot more people suffer in the future overall.

It is a tough problem.

fatjonnyon Bill Gates pledges $10bn for a 'decade of vaccine'

I recently started thinking about this after reading Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons essay from 1968 about the "population problem". After reading the essay I started on his 1993 book Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. I just passed the halfway mark in it, but I highly recommend it if you like his essay and the way he presents ideas. The book really does a good job of covering the evolution of the ideas of population control from Malthus onwards.

The essay Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor from 1974 is probably the essay available online that is more applicable to the current discussion.

I do not yet have a well-formed opinion on this one way or the other, I simply find Garrett Hardin's arguments to be thought-provoking. Saving millions of lives will mean that those millions of lives need to be sustained in some way. The resources to do this have to come from somewhere. By saving those millions of lives is that going to lower the quality of life of millions of others? It is a tough problem with, as Hardin mentions, "no technical solution".

Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor essay: http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_lifeboat_et...

Tragedy of the Commons essay: http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_...

fatjonnyon Microsoft, Google Take Maps in New Direction

It is possible to read it for free through a google search of the title, or other methods.

Some other methods: http://www.labnol.org/internet/read-wall-street-journal-arti...

fatjonnyon Animated Engines

The SVG animation looks much nicer. It works well in Chrome 3.0.193.0 in Windows XP.

fatjonnyon Automatic Update Hell Must End

Things might be slowly getting better for Windows. Omaha http://code.google.com/p/omaha/ was released under an open source license recently. It will be interesting to see if other projects adopt it, or if it remains being used by Google products only. Ars Technica had a good summary about the current state of Omaha. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/google-opens...

fatjonnyon The Quiet Coup: IMF advice on the US economy

I enjoyed the article. I also enjoyed looking through their blog (which is mentioned at the bottom of the article pages). It seems like a good place to get an easy to understand analysis of the banking crisis news.

http://baselinescenario.com/

fatjonnyon First Privately Developed Liquid Fuel Rocket to Launch Today

That link (the comment this was referring to is now deleted) is to the second launch of the Falcon 1 which made it further than the launch today, which was the third launch. Today's launch only made it roughly 140 seconds (no stage separation) before the "anomaly".

Actually the anomaly was right at stage separation apparently. Video and comment by Elon Musk: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1299

fatjonnyon The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

I can try. I'll send you an email.

fatjonnyon Ask HN: Flex/Flash, Authenticating your .swf + decompiling

Isn't that where the password comes into play? Basically you authenticate once by passing the password and the client generated public key to the server. The server checks the password and then if it matches it sends all future communication to the client encrypted with their public key. It can generate a new "public" (in quotes because it will only be shared with the client) key specifically for that client and send it encrypted to the client using the public key passed along with the password. All communication from client to server will be decrypted with the private key that matches the public key given to the authenticated client, and all communication from server to client will be decrypted with the private key that matches the public key the client gave to the server with the password. This is probably more like TLS or SSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security) than I suppose. Which makes me think you could just use an SSL connection since it is supported (http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/...).

Or am I really missing something and should just stop commenting? :)

fatjonnyon Ask HN: Flex/Flash, Authenticating your .swf + decompiling

If you can trust the client by having them enter in a password, can't you then set up a system that uses the same idea as public-key cryptography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography)? Once the user has logged in and authenticated with their password they generate their public and private keys and send the server the public key while keeping the private key local. This method would be processor intensive, but good security usually isn't cheap. Or maybe my understanding of how public-key cryptography works isn't accurate and someone can explain why it wouldn't work?

fatjonnyon The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0

I work with ActionScript 3.0 on a daily basis. This article does a good job of summarizing some of the things that are wrong with the language and that I have run into. The advice on how to try and fix what is wrong was useful. Flash is the most widely adopted (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...) way of presenting complex interactivity in a browser. For those trying to reach the widest audience possible for casual games it is the best choice. With the release of the flex compiler it is possible to create Flash content without having to buy the Flash IDE and FlashDevelop (http://www.flashdevelop.org/) provides a good alternative IDE.