Insightful Redditor comment about #JavaScript micro-libraries vs frameworks

Here’s a choice quote that I think gets to the heart of the matter. Click through for more context.

The big lie of micro libraries is that they snap together like Lego blocks, making them easy to swap out later.
The truth is that, because they were not designed to work together, microlibraries require lots of glue code to make them talk to one another correctly. That glue code becomes app code, it’s usually written hastily under a tight deadline, and is rarely documented.
Rather than being like Legos you snap together, it’s more like you’ve built a house out of plastic bricks that you’ve cemented together

Source: tomdale comments on “I’m a web developer who uses jQuery to write a large scale application – How can I convince my bosses that a JS framework is the way to go?”

<input> I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

If you have web developer friends, show them this article and watch as their face starts to twitch. TL;DR: good piece about browser inconsistencies around HTML forms (of which there are many)

1995 was a good year. Friends, ER, Xena were all on TV. TLC had dominated the charts with “Waterfalls”. Browsers were ok, because HTML was pretty ok. We had Mosaic, Netscape and IE1, and the HTML2 spec was finally getting around to standardizing forms. 1995 was the year when <input> was born, and now that it’s about old enough to drink, we need to have a talk.

Oh man, just found this other awesome quote:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, JavaScript

You see, I can justify CSS quirks. I worked on Chrome for 2 years, I work next to the Blink team now, I understand we’re all writing different renderers and they all have their own CSS bugs. However, the <input> API isn’t quirky — it’s literally just a jar of spiders, and the moment you open the jar, it’s too late. You’re covered in spiders. Even your cat is a spider now. Better find some fire.

Source: I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

Page Weight Matters – Chris Zacharias

TL;DR: “Many of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets.”

I was just about to give up on the project, with my world view completely shattered, when my colleague discovered the answer: geography.
When we plotted the data geographically and compared it to our total numbers broken out by region, there was a disproportionate increase in traffic from places like Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and even remote regions of Siberia. Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load!

Source: Page Weight Matters

Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks | Lars Eidnes’ blog

TL;DR: the author set up neural networks to auto-generate clickbait headlines. View the output at http://clickotron.com/ or click through to read about the system.

In total, this gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.

Source: Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks | Lars Eidnes’ blog

TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do

There are a lot of funnily-named startups here… Having a comedic actor guess what they are = lulz. Here’s my favorite:

WhalePath
T.J.’s guess: “That’s a site that tells you the general migration patterns of whales. And it’s not a very funny site. It’s incredibly informative. It’s for the maritime man in all of us.”
Actually: A crowdsourced business growth site

Source: TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do

Brute Force Amplification Attacks Against WordPress XMLRPC – Sucuri Blog

TL;DR: If you or someone you know uses a self-hosted WordPress site, consider disabling XMLRPC to mitigate this attack.

We’ve actually been tracking this for a few weeks (first attack spotted on 2015/Sep/10), and it keeps getting more traction and becoming more popular. Instead of going against wp-login.php (which can be easily blocked or protected via .htaccess) or doing a single attempt against xmlrpc, attackers are leveraging the system.multicall method to attempt to guess hundreds of passwords within just one HTTP request.


Source: Brute Force Amplification Attacks Against WordPress XMLRPC – Sucuri Blog

Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

TL;DR: apparently altruistic hackers made a botnet that removes other malware from easily-compromised routers.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a computer virus has removed others from the system!

They also placed their malware (or goodware depending on which way you look at it) under the General Public License, the widely-used free software license written by Stallman.There’s still a concern that despite the hackers’ promises, they could still use Wifatch for evil – something The White Team even warned about. When asked if they could be trusted, the hackers wrote: “Of course not, you should secure your device.”

Source: Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

Another awesomely audacious aspiration aims to truly decentralize the web once and for all: IPFS

Remaking The Internet With IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.

Source: Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover | Stanford News Release

TL;DR: mealworms’ microbiome can digest plastic!

The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.


Source: Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover | Stanford News Release

East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases in one fell swoop | Ars Technica

Good news from an unlikely source!

The judge also invited the defendants to submit a joint brief as to why they should get attorneys’ fees. Just the invite is a sign of changing times: in his four years on the bench, Gilstrap has never granted attorneys’ fees to a defendant in a patent case, according to Texas Lawyer.

Source: East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases in one fell swoop | Ars Technica