Byron Gibson byrongibson

The Problem

Standard practices say no non-root process gets to talk to the Internet on a port less than 1024. How, then, could I get Node talking on port 80 on EC2? (I wanted it to go as fast as possible and use the smallest possible share of my teeny tiny little micro-instance's resources, so proxying through nginx or Apache seemed suboptimal.)

The temptingly easy but ultimately wrong solution:

Alter the port the script talks to from 8000 to 80:

}).listen(80);

This is obsolete, since Bitcoin Core has moved to a more modern build system.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

	user www www;
	worker_processes 5;
	error_log logs/error.log;
	pid logs/nginx.pid;
	worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;

	events {
	worker_connections 4096;
	}

	;;;; Translation of Peter Norvig's sudoku solver to idiomatic Clojure
	;;;; See http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
	;;;;
	;;;; Throughout this program we have:
	;;;; r is a row, e.g. :a
	;;;; c is a column, e.g. 3
	;;;; s is a square, e.g. [:a 3]
	;;;; d is a digit, e.g. 9
	;;;; u is a unit, e.g. [[:a 1] [:b 1] [:c 1] ... [:i 1]]
	;;;; grid is a grid, e.g. 81 non-blank chars, e.g. starting with ".18...7..."

	## Solve Every Sudoku Puzzle

	## See http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

	## Throughout this program we have:
	## r is a row, e.g. 'A'
	## c is a column, e.g. '3'
	## s is a square, e.g. 'A3'
	## d is a digit, e.g. '9'
	## u is a unit, e.g. ['A1','B1','C1','D1','E1','F1','G1','H1','I1']

	// How to upgrade your users passwords in the DB without their intervention
	//
	// SHA-1 isn't strong enough to hash passwords with, but lots of people have a
	// whole bunch of SHA-1'd passwords because they thought it was. You could use
	// bcrypt or scrypt, but maybe in two years' time someone will tell you that's
	// also not strong enough, and you'll want to upgrade.
	//
	// This sample demonstrates how you can remove weak password hashes from your
	// user database, without needing the user to enter their password.
	//

	# in /usr/share/xsessions
	[Desktop Entry]
	Name=Xmonad GNOME
	Comment=Tiling window manager
	TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-session
	Exec=gnome-session --session=xmonad
	Type=XSession

	#!/bin/bash

	# downloads all chapters of “handbook of applied cryptography”
	# (<http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/>) and combines them into one pdf file.
	# The resulting file can not be distributed and is only for personal use, as
	# per the copyright notice at
	# <http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/about/copyright-notice.html>.
	# Requires ghostscript.

	TEMPDIR="/tmp"

	#!/usr/bin/env python
	"""
	Example usage:
	$ f=`cat test.json`; echo -e "$f"; python validate_json.py "$f"
	{
	"foo": true,
	"bar": false,
	baz: -23
	}
	Invalid JSON