WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

owlish's comments

owlish | 9 years ago | on: Vim Anti-Patterns

I've found it helpful to use relative numbering in normal mode and switch to absolute numbering in insert mode:

  set relativenumber nonumber
  autocmd InsertEnter * :set norelativenumber number
  autocmd InsertLeave * :set relativenumber  nonumber
IIRC this tip was from the Practical Vim book

owlish | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you handle DDoS attacks?

If you're getting more traffic than 1 request/s, it's less work to generate a static cached version on the cadence of ~1 second than to dynamically generate the content for each request.

owlish | 10 years ago | on: Why your favorite apps are designed to addict you

As developers, many of us work everyday on increasing page hits, creating more engaging user experiences. What are the ethical implications of this? At what point do we become responsible for users' addictive behavior?

owlish | 10 years ago | on: Better Java – Resources for Writing Modern Java

This is contrary to the OP's example, where he passes data and num to the constructor, which is how I've seen it used frequently. The Builder pattern is often recommended to "make code easier to read" and wouldn't be useful if many/most of those parameters were required.

owlish | 10 years ago | on: Better Java – Resources for Writing Modern Java

I used to be a fan of the Builder pattern (or Fluent Interface), but the ease of use for developers comes at the cost of no compile-time checking. Before, you just had to look up the constructor to see which parameters go where, with the benefit of type-checking. Now, you have to look up the Builder's methods to make sure you've filled in all required fields. The only case where I can actually advocate using Builders is when you have a mess of telescoping constructors.

owlish | 10 years ago | on: Efficient Tabular Storage

How do databases like MySQL store data efficiently for querying? It seems like something like protobuf would do well here, though you'd need to generate code for each dataset.

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Crunchbang is not dead

Posting this from #! right now.

> Philip has mentioned that, since CrunchBang has been his project from the beginning, he would like to see the name separated from any derivative that succeeds it.

Not sure if the people responsible for this fork are aware

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you analyze logs?

As others have said, the classics awk, grep, cut, sort, uniq, and scripting languages (perl/ruby for on the fly one-liners) are great for log analysis. One additional tool I've found particularly useful (three actually) is zgrep/zcat/zless. You'll often be searching through archived gzipped logs, so it's nice being able to work with the files without needing to pipe everything through tar.

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Retiring Python as a Teaching Language

A lot of the discussion in here revolves around "not being able to get an interactive GUI up and running quickly". If this is indeed the main problem with teaching programming with Python, there are many ways of tackling this problem without resorting to teaching Javascript. Don't get me wrong, Javascript is an interesting language, but it has many oddities that could throw off a newcomer.

Sites like OpenProcessing[1] and ideone[2] already allow users to compile and share code in the browser. Why not create a Python GUI "toolkit" that interacts with the browser and can be accessed from an interpreter implemented in Javascript? Granted, this isn't the "vanilla" Python experience, but if you're just ramping up, having shiny bells and whistles to show off to friends is definitely a plus.

[1]: http://www.openprocessing.org/

[2]: https://ideone.com/

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Intro to Distributed Hash Tables

What is the accepted identifier for nodes? I did a rough implementation of Chord once using IP address as the identifier and ran into the issue where the node would see itself at a different IP than others. The obvious solution is just "don't use it through NAT" I'm guessing.

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Emoji One

I think you're looking for something more like :|

owlish | 11 years ago | on: Achieving Anonymity Online Remains Difficult Despite Evolving Privacy Tools

The issue is more significant than just changing a simple browser user-agent string. To completely prevent fingerprinting, you must also eliminate all browser differences (e.g. vender prefixes). Additionally, remember that the lack of information can also be information.

Also keep in mind that it's quite difficult to prevent leaking of other information. An example: OS type can be determined from lower-level protocol information like TTL and window size.

page 1
more