Rich-Harris

Edit — February 2019

This gist had a far larger impact than I imagined it would, and apparently people are still finding it, so a quick update:

• TC39 is currently moving forward with a slightly different version of TLA, referred to as 'variant B', in which a module with TLA doesn't block sibling execution. This vastly reduces the danger of parallelizable work happening in serial and thereby delaying startup, which was the concern that motivated me to write this gist
• In the wild, we're seeing (async main(){...}()) as a substitute for TLA. This completely eliminates the blocking problem (yay!) but it's less powerful, and harder to statically analyse (boo). In other words the lack of TLA is causing real problems
• Therefore, a version of TLA that solves the original issue is a valuable addition to the language, and I'm in full support of the current proposal, which you can read here.

I'll leave the rest of this document unedited, for archaeological

joepie91

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

• A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
• A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
• There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

0xDE57

ABOUT

about:config settings to harden the Firefox browser. Privacy and performance enhancements.
To change these settings type 'about:config' in the url bar. Then search the setting you would like to change and modify the value. Some settings may break certain websites from functioning and rendering normally. Some settings may also make firefox unstable. I am not liable for any damages/loss of data.

Not all these changes are necessary and will be dependent upon your usage and hardware. Do some research on settings if you don't understand what they do. These settings are best combined with your standard privacy extensions (HTTPS Everywhere No longer required: Enable HTTPS-Only Mode, NoScript/Request Policy, uBlock origin, agent spoofing, Privacy Badger etc), and all plugins set to "Ask To Activate".

Integralist

The three design patterns (Adapter, Facade and Bridge) all produce the result of a clean public API. The difference between the patterns are usually due to a subtle context shift (and in some cases, a behavioural requirement).

Adapter

The primary function of an Adapter is to produce a unified interface for a number of underlying and unrelated objects.

You will notice this pattern being utilised in many applications. For example, ActiveRecord (the popular Ruby ORM; object-relational mapping) creates a unified interface as part of its API but the code underneath the interface is able to communicate with many different types of databases. Allowing the consumer of the API to not have to worry about specific database implementation details.

The principle structure of this pattern is: