#235 – October 29, 2017
No, I have no side code projects to show you
I know the exact moment in the interview I lost the job for a boutique app firm in downtown Austin. They wanted to see some of my code, and, of course, they understood I couldn't show them anything from my current or past companies. But that shouldn't be an issue, certainly I can demonstrate any one of my numerous side projects that I no-doubt have in progress.
What did Alan Kay mean by, "Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed"?
First, let me clear up a few misconceptions from the previous answers. One of them said “Try writing an operating system with Lisp”, as though this would be somehow harder.
How we found @rogerkver’s $1,000 wallet obfuscated private key
We could have simply named this post “How great QR code are and how we recovered one from almost nothing.” But it’s much more interesting when the QR code is the key to a $1000 Bitcoin Cash wallet.
Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets
TL;DR: performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result. We set a budget in time of <= 5 seconds first-load Time-to-Interactive and <= 2s for subsequent loads. We constrain ourselves to a real-world baseline device + network configuration to measure progress. The default global baseline is a ~$200 Android device on a 400Kbps link with a 400ms round-trip-time (“RTT”). This translates into a budget of ~130-170KB of critical-path resources, depending on composition — the more JS you include, the smaller the bundle must be.
Defeating Google's audio reCaptcha system with 85% accuracy
Across the Internet, hundreds of thousands of sites rely on Google's reCaptcha system for defense against bots (in fact, Devpost uses reCaptcha when creating a new account). After a Google research team demonstrated a near complete defeat of the text reCaptcha in 2012, the reCaptcha system evolved to rely on audio and image challenges, historically more difficult challenges for automated systems to solve