Ken Kovar kkovar

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Short version: I strongly do not recommend using any of these providers. You are, of course, free to use whatever you like. My TL;DR advice: Roll your own and use Algo or Streisand. For messaging & voice, use Signal. For increased anonymity, use Tor for desktop (though recognize that doing so may actually put you at greater risk), and Onion Browser for mobile.

This mini-rant came on the heels of an interesting twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/591074055018582016

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

ANNOUNCEMENT

I have moved this over to the Tech Interview Cheat Sheet Repo and has been expanded and even has code challenges you can run and practice against!

\

Most developers would agree that, all other things being equal, a synchronous program is easier to work with than an asynchronous one. The logic for this is pretty clear: one flow of execution is easier for the human mind to simulate than n concurrent flows.

After doing two small projects in node.js (one of which is here -- ready for the blinding flurry of criticism), there's one question that I can't shake: if asynchronicity is an optimization (that is, a complexity introduced for the sake of performance), why would people, a priori, turn to a framework that imposes it for everything? If asynchronous code is harder to reason about, why would we elect to live in a world where it is the default?

It could be argued pretty well that the browser is a domain that inherently lends itself to an async model, but I'd be very curious to hear a defense of "async-first" thinking for problems that are typically solved on the server-side. When working with node, I've noticed

	// Comcast Cable Communications, LLC Proprietary. Copyright 2014.
	// Intended use is to display browser notifications for critical and time sensitive events.
	var _ComcastAlert = (function(){
	return {
	SYS_URL: '/e8f6b078-0f35-11de-85c5-efc5ef23aa1f/aupm/notify.do'
	, dragObj: {zIndex: 999999}
	, browser: null
	, comcastCheck: 1
	, comcastTimer: null
	, xmlhttp: null

	/* bling.js */
	window.$ = document.querySelector.bind(document);
	window.$$ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);
	Node.prototype.on = window.on = function(name, fn) { this.addEventListener(name, fn); };
	NodeList.prototype.__proto__ = Array.prototype;
	NodeList.prototype.on = function(name, fn) { this.forEach((elem) => elem.on(name, fn)); };

	<html>
	<head>
	<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/underscore.js/1.4.2/underscore-min.js"></script>
	<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
	<script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/modernizr/2.6.2/modernizr.min.js"></script>
	<script src="//ajax.cdnjs.com/ajax/libs/json2/20110223/json2.js"></script>

	<!--
	TODO:

	# The blog post that started it all: https://neocities.org/blog/the-fcc-is-now-rate-limited
	#
	# Current known FCC address ranges:
	# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716915
	#
	# Confirm/locate FCC IP ranges with this: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-165-135-0-0-1/pft
	#
	# In your nginx.conf:

	location / {

	var _log = console.log;

	window.console.log = function(log){
	_log.call(console, log.reverse ? log.reverse() : typeof log === 'string' ? log.split('').reverse().join('') : typeof log === 'number' ? log.toString().split('').reverse().join('') : typeof log === 'boolean' ? !log : log);
	};