Hacker Noon

Node.js (or more accurately, the entire Javascript ecosystem) changes, but the tropes don't. https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016… (beware the green background, I recommend reader mode.)

This calls for a "me too" moment where everyone shares their Google is terrible and I'll never use them again. Here are a couple of my favorites from our company: https://medium.com/hackernoon/why-and-how-we-left-app-engine-after-it-… https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience-mp3 There's this story from a couple of days ago which is shocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805 Google is a terrible, dystopian company.

>- are instantly usable just by following a link Depends on the size of the web app and by data bandwith >- people can share with others, without needing to install anything, by just sending a link true, as long as the web page still exists. >- work equally well on all major mobile, desktop and tablet platforms I wish, most of the time web apps are either optimized for mobile phone, tablet or desktop not all three of them. >- don't require any sort of app store or gatekeeper to distribute or use The app can therefore change without your knowledge and execute malicious code the next time it is called. https://medium.com/hackernoon/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-pa… Not to mention that the web app is gone when the site no longer exists.

Love it. Write ideas to forget 'em. Reminded me of a blog I wrote a few years ago: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-life-cycle-of-a-to-do-list-83b2a23e2…

Nothing. These are also very, very dangerous and expose your site to supply-chain attacks. The article linked to here [0] which is a must-read for everyone who feels that adding a dependency is safe. [0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-pa…

You'll get many different responses to this question depending on who you ask. If you want to read into further i recommend you read the great scaling debate[1]. Its pretty long but does a fantastic job of summarizing the history. In short the most popular reason for not having a block size increase (to allow many low fee transactions) was that it would increase the cost of running a full node, in turn centralising the network. More transactions would mean nodes would need a bigger hard drive and a better cpu to process the transactions. The small block camp wanted people to be able to run nodes on a raspberry pi. This theory is misguided in my opinion though, they chose to sacrifice cheap transactions to keep node running costs cheap. [1]https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timel…

This is great! I remember working with my son when he was transitioning from Scratch to "code" about 4 years ago -- I wrote about my experience teaching him Javascript and the different analogies I used to explain functions, closures, arrays, etc. (https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-my-10-year-old-learned-javascript-d8… Replit wasn't around back then, but he now uses it frequently with his school coding club. Great job!! If you need any help, feel free to reach out.

I think Django has by far the best story here, so much built in or activated with simple plugins. It took us an hour to add 2FA. On the other hand, looking at node.js it's really a dumpster fire[1]. Even when using passport, you are still back to writing the code to compare passwords at which point so much can go wrong. So there's a lot of scope for hosted services. This of course compounds the problem because those service providers are GREAT at SEO and content marketing, so now a lot of Google hits on nodejs auth end up recommending Auth0 &friends. [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tutorial-is-…

Perhaps, if it wasn't a fork of Bitcoin. If was originally called Cash Coin and rebranded to Bitcoin Cash, then it would seem likely that group is trying to capitalize on the name. That's not the case here. This name came naturally, just like similar names occur in other forked software.[0] Bitcoin Cash came from a minority group (big blocks) in the Bitcoin community.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timel…

If you don't use OTP, I definitely recommend turning it off as it contains your YubiKey serial number and can be used to identify you. https://medium.com/hackernoon/avoid-leaking-your-identity-with-yubikey…

Heat pumps are really amazing and can be used both for cooling and heating with the same hardware. If it wasn't for natural gas they would make sense for many American homes https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-magic-of-heat-pumps-fd2721a00586

This is similar to what we're doing! Hasura + AutoCRUD framework + Metabase is a great stack for putting together a solid business application in no time. Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps similar to Forest) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours. This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql Here's a reference application I put together: https://github.com/cpursley/react-admin-low-code And we're taking a step further and using Elixir to listen to Postgres table changes for an "Event" style architecture: https://medium.com/hackernoon/get-notified-of-user-signups-and-plan-ch…

It means different business strategy. Tech companies can have massive revenues without having many employees. They write software, this is the initial big fixed cost, then making a copy of the software or servicing another customer in a SaaS is extremely cheap. This has not started with software - a factory has the same characteristics in comparison with manufacture: https://medium.com/hackernoon/aggregators-bffd36063a72 - but with sofware it goes on another level. The Stratchery article is great in analysing all the angles of this.

Here are the clickable links: - app download: https://listle.app.link/m2DbuzvEDZ - examples of authors already using our player: https://medium.com/hackernoon/wtf-is-the-blockchain-1da89ba19348, https://medium.com/the-mission/your-college-degree-is-worthless-504d6f… https://medium.com/skilluped/the-3-most-important-skills-to-learn-now-…

And it spawned ExtJS. Which could have been React, but they messed up. Literally they built a faster Facebook app 'Fastbook' in 2012. Short history lesson: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-rise-and-fall-of-ext-js-c9d727131991 In August 2006, a guy by the name of Jack Slocum (now CEO of Alta5) began to blog of his experiments with YUI. Over time, these experiments became more complex and Jack would start to bundle them into what would later be named YUI-ext (Yahoo UI extensions) — the precursor to Ext JS (Extensible JavaScript). Jack Slocum’s blog was used to communicate his vision for YUI-ext and garnered community support from around the world. The release of the Grid component for YUI-ext would forever change the trajectory of the library and the community as the GridPanel would become the core UI component for many applications to come. Throughout its early life, Jack continued to build upon YUI-ext by adding features to the framework, such as animations, Modals, Tab Panel, Resizable elements and a layout manager that greatly expanded upon the YUI framework. These components would seldom extend the YUI library and had their own rendering functions. YUI-ext created a foundation for web programmers unlike anything the world had seen before and many developers flocked to the framework and invested in the newly formed community. The net result was the explosive expansion of YUI-ext. From YUI-ext to Ext JS In January 2007 we found Jack extremely busy to push out…

Closure compiler was actually one of the biggest influences on the design of TypeScript, and even the early motivation for the approach that TypeScript took. From https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-first-typescript-demo-905ea095a70f: > There were many options already available, but none seemed to be resonating well with a broad enough section of the market. Internally at Microsoft, Script# was being used by some large teams. It let them use C# directly instead of JavaScript, but as a result, suffered from the kind of impedance mismatch you get when trying to stand at arms length from the runtime model you are really programming against. And there was Google’s Closure Compiler, which offered a rich type system embedded in comments inside JavaScript code to guide some advanced minification processes (and along the way, caught and reported type-related errors). And finally, this was the timeframe of a rapid ascendancy of CoffeeScript within the JavaScript ecosystem — becoming the first heavily used transpiled-to-JavaScript language and paving the way for transpilers in the JavaScript development workflow. (Aside — I often explained TypeScript in the early days using an analogy “CoffeeScript : TypeScript :: Ruby : C#/Java/C++”, often adding — “and there are 50x more C#/Java/C++ developers than Ruby developers :-)”) > What we quickly discovered we wanted to offer was a “best of all worlds” at the intersection of these three — a language as close as possible to JavaScript…

Not sure if you do it for privacy, ethical or practical reasons, but here's my journey: I removed my life from Big Tech (FB, TW, Gmail, YT, G Drive, MS, and other anti-user/spyware/malware companies). It was surprisingly easy to do and refreshing spiritually. First, philosophy: this article resonated so much with me that I made the brave step of deleting my big tech accounts and switching to Linux: https://medium.com/hackernoon/leaving-apple-and-google-my-eelo-odyssey… Then, execution. This site will help you to find user-friendly alternatives to your spyware apps/OSs/services: https://www.privacytools.io/ I am now with a setup that maximizes privacy and giving money to ethical companies: Phone OS: LineageOS and /e/ Desktop/Laptop: Debian and Linux Mint Browser Mobile: Bromite Browser Desktop: LibreWolf (firefox fork oriented to privacy) Maps and GPS mobile: OsmAnd Mobile app store: F-Droid, Aurora Store Search Engine: DuckduckGo, SearX Email: Posteo (1€/month) VPN: Mullvad (5€/month) Online drive: NextCloud-based service ie /e/ foundation Once I researched the above and checked the companies/projects are trustworthy, I started using them with surprisingly low bumps in the road. For mobile OS I went radical and didn't even install microG (a package to enable G services so some apps work well). I still can use my favorite apps, including banking (although if you root your phone you might have issues)

I don't believe Forward Email runs a blog, but this article[0] has a fairly good summary of how forwarding works and why one might want to set that up. The short version, in the context of this thread, is that it allows you to accept email on your own domain without running your own email servers. And if you ever want to change email providers in the future (or start running your own servers) you just need to edit some settings either in your DNS records or your Forward Email account; the email address everyone uses to contact you remains the same. Whereas if everyone knows you as [email protected] then you need to somehow get word out to your entire contact list—potentially without access to your old email account!—to let them know your new address. Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress. [0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best-email-for…

"Property is a burden, we want the experience. The capitalocommunism way of life is coming, a new political system will be needed. The one-party regime will rule: The Machine. Digitalization is to put information about us and the world into computers. The more information we have (IoT, GPS, Cookies…), the more means to share it we have (smartphone, 5G, high-speed Internet) and the more capability of computing we have (Algorithm, IA); the more we can combine them to create new services and to outperform the old ways. Every bite of our lives tend to be digitalized and businesses build “as a service” whenever it’s possible. It costs less: better allocation of resources. That’s all. No more property, only the experience. No need to possess anything, your revenue or a basic income will grant you access to the life you need and you want based on what has been digitalized. The algorithm will know better than you do. You feel that you are losing your freedom? If the algorithm and the digital world can manipulate and serve you for your best interest (or for the best interest of somebody else or something else), maybe it’s because you were never free. We were never free. Only, this time it’s the machine we have built that controls the causes of our actions and thoughts, and less and less an unknown environment. But we don’t control the machines, we merely is the cause of their existence. We haven’t (nobody has) create them, companies have. And the aim of all companies is to…

In 1000 years we will have ascended :) but if not, I hope to be chilling on Risa somewhere! In all seriousness, in the future I suspect we will use a combination of these types of capabilities but they will all be linked together in a way that prevents totalitarian control of speach. I think some of the best technologies today are keybase.io matrix.org briarproject.org and community.mattermost.com My view is that the next emerging social network will be based on a secure and self hostable compute fabric that leverages zero trust compute and secure compute, data sharing, etc. I think Urbit had the right direction but went crazy and lost the plot. I'm working on this problem personally and I hope to be in alpha / beta testing for certain aspects of the platform by end of year :) Feel free to reach out if you want some additional details. I think it pays a lot of dividends to understand some of the history of the past so that we can learn from them as we look to build something better for the future, so I’ve decided to publish some of my thoughts on this topic and also share some of my findings with the community so that nobody has to go down this massive rabbit hole again in the near term. History of Social…

During the interview for my current job (Machine Learning & Deep Learning Scientist), I didn't get any theoretical questions on machine learning, but only questions on my projects. I didn't study machine learning per say, I followed dozens of online courses but no diploma in this exact field, and my last job was in traditional software engineering. Despite this, I managed to do two small projects (one of music genre recognition [1] on my own iTunes library, and one of eye motion recognition [2]). For both I had published the code on my GitHub, and written a small Medium article to expose the problem I was trying to solve, the data available, the issues I faced and how I overcame them. I personally believe that this is all the recruiter wanted to know, and why I encourage interns and candidates to work on their side projects. References of the projects: [1] https://github.com/despoisj/DeepAudioClassification [1] https://medium.com/@juliendespois/finding-the-genre-of-a-song-with-dee… [2] https://github.com/despoisj/DeepEyeControl [2] https://medium.com/hackernoon/talk-to-you-computer-with-you-eyes-and-d…

This describes what I am currently missing the most in the node ecosystem. Deno is a good approach but it will take some time to see how adoption goes. I would prefer some fine grained capability-based solution. Approaches similar to this have often been articulated [1]. Many of my concerns are best described here [2]. There even was an article from someone who would have been able to overtake many high profile npm accounts with very little effort some time ago (cannot find it anymore). With tighter snyk integration into npm and the acquisition of npm through ms one could argue that security bar may have risen/will rise but I (speaking as a js/ts dev) am still sceptical. I haven't really looked to deep into stuff like selinux/apparmor/firejail [3] maybe someone can give an opinion on this. I'd wish for something that would be codeified on package level to make review easier and give me some peace of mind. For now my plan is to dockerize most of my projects and it's dependencies. It should give a little more protection against malicious postinstall scripts. Unfortunately, I depend more and more on npm modules outside of projects (coc-vim comes to mind/for others it may be vscode etc.). [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/npm-package-permissions-an-idea-441a0290… (2018) [2] https://medium.com/hackernoon/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-pa… (2018) [3] https://github.com/netblue30/firejail/blob/master/README.md

The 7 transaction per second limit of BTC is completely artificial. It stems in the max size of blocks being capped to 1 MB. This was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto way back in 2010 as an easy way to keep spam from flooding the blockchain. Keep in mind that back then Bitcoin was basically worthless, so one could spam the network with millions of transactions at very low costs, rendering it unusable to everybody. Satoshi introduced the 1 MB block size limit as a temporary measure meant to be easily lifted as transaction volume and Bitcoin price increased in the future [1]. However this didn't happen, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared shortly after and his appointed successor, Gavin Andresen, was ousted from the project and his commit rights revoked in 2016. A lot of people tried to raise the blocksize, and all of them failed because the developers who took over Bitcoin Core have always refused. Given that consensus failed to raised the block size the Bitcoin ABC implementation split from BTC to create Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on August 1st, 2017. Bitcoin Cash initially supported blocks of up to 8 MB, which was later raised to 32 MB. Mainnet stress tests have proven that the network works fine with blocks of up to 20 MB, making clear that the 1 MB limit of BTC is as artificial as it sounds like. Because of the higher block size accommodating to more transactions the fees in BCH are consistently under 1 cent ($0.01), and the roadmap [2] includes features to keep fees low even as BCH…

One very important aspect of authentication is session management. Doing this wrong (or naively), can have catastrophic effects for your app!! Let me provide an example: It's common knowledge that JWTs are very common. A lot of people who use JWTs, implement them as access tokens for their APIs. JWTs also require a shared secret key - what if this is stolen? Then an attacker can use that to hijack any user's account very trivially, and you may not even realise that it's happened! This is far worse than anyone getting hold of hashed passwords from your database. That being said, I use the following flow for session management: - User logs in, the backend issues a short-lived (~1 hour) JWT and a long-lived refresh token and sends them to the frontend. - The frontend sends the JWT for each API call while it's still valid - In the event that the JWT has expired, the frontend should then use the refresh token to get a new JWT AND a new refresh token (rotating refresh token - see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-10.4) - If the refresh token expires, then the user has to login again. While this sounds quite straightforward, the key here is to use rotating refresh tokens - that's what actually makes it fare more secure than just using simple refresh tokens (i'd argue that it's almost the same level of security as just using a long lived access token) Some of the benefits of this approach: - You can detect token theft! If an attacker gets hold of the refresh / access…

Probably not that related, but the article reminded me of a shadow casting implementation on the PICO-8: https://medium.com/hackernoon/lighting-by-hand-4-into-the-shadows-a92b…

I wrote about analytic easing functions a number of years ago and show how to precisely design a spring function: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-spring-factory-4c3d988e7129 And a bounce function: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-bounce-factory-3498de1e5262

AKA how the Nintendo Switch prevents firmware downgrades - https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-the-nintendo-switch-prevents-downgra…

I've used Keynote to add some basic 'special effects' to videos. It's not super fancy, but you can do quite with just iMovie + Keynote! [1] 1: https://medium.com/hackernoon/adding-visual-effects-to-your-kickstarte…

While you can't buy discipline you can buy accountability, which is very powerful for affecting change. Given your budget you can hire a trainer for every session. A good trainer won't just tell you what to do but will also help track that you're doing it. It's only a partial solution, but it's a start. I'd also suggest tracking more bio metrics so you get a sense of progress before you see it in the mirror, which can take a while. Some related reading from a few years ago -- A millionaire seeing how far they can get by throwing money at the problem: https://medium.com/hackernoon/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-becam…