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A guy on another team who is regarded by non-programmers as a genius wrote a python script that goes out to thousands of our appliances, collects information, compiles it, and presents it in a kinda sorta readable, but completely non-transferable format. It takes about 25 minutes to run, and he runs it himself every morning. He comes in early to run it before his team's standup.
I wanted to use that data for apps I wrote, but his impossible format made that impractical, so I took apart his code, rewrote it in perl, replaced all the outrageous hard-coded root passwords with public keys, and added concurrency features. My script dumps the data into a memory-resident backend, and my filterable, sortable, taggable web "frontend"(very generous nomenclature) presents the data in html, csv, and json. Compared to the genius's 25 minute script that he runs himself in the morning, mine runs in about 45 seconds, and runs automatically in cron every two hours.
Optimized!22 -
That feeling: When you see a piece of code and you're like "I can do that in half the number of lines..."
And so you spend the next 45 minutes redoing something that was working perfectly.
Except now it's a convoluted and unreadable demon child that appears to writhe on the screen before your very eyes and cause madness and hatred in all who view it. But.. it works in 3 lines now instead of 7... and you don't need 4 of those local variables that you did before... and even though it's completely impractical because no sane mortal (including yourself - barely) can actually read it, it's still yours and you're proud of it.7 -
That's it. I am going to learn HTML. Like really, really learn it.
And after that, I am going to learn CSS. Like fully, totally learn it.
Nah .. I am fine.8 -
---WiFi Vision: X-Ray Vision using ambient WiFi signals now possible---
“X-Ray Vision” using WiFi signals isn’t new, though previous methods required knowledge of specific WiFi transmitter placements and connection to the network in question. These limitations made WiFi vision an unlikely security breach, until now.
Cybersecurity researchers at the University of California and University of Chicago have succeeded in detecting the presence and movement of human targets using only ambient WiFi signals and a smartphone.
The researchers designed and implemented a 2-step attack: the 1st step uses statistical data mining from standard off-the-shelf smartphone WiFi detection to “sniff” out WiFi transmitter placements. The 2nd step involves placement of a WiFi sniffer to continuously monitor WiFi transmissions.
Three proposed defenses to the WiFi vision attack are Geofencing, WiFi rate limiting, and signal obfuscation.
Geofencing, or reducing the spatial range of WiFi devices, is a great defense against the attack. For its advantages, however, geofencing is impractical and unlikely to be adopted by most, as the simplest geofencing tactic would also heavily degrade WiFi connectivity.
WiFi rate limiting is effective against the 2nd step attack, but not against the 1st step attack. This is a simple defense to implement, but because of the ubiquity of IoT devices, it is unlikely to be widely adopted as it would reduce the usability of such devices.
Signal obfuscation adds noise to WiFi signals, effectively neutralizing the attack. This is the most user-friendly of all proposed defenses, with minimal impact to user WiFi devices. The biggest drawback to this tactic is the increased bandwidth of WiFi consumption, though compared to the downsides of the other mentioned defenses, signal obfuscation remains the most likely to be widely adopted and optimized for this kind of attack.
For more info, please see journal article linked below.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/...9 -
Fuck regex and everyone who has ever endorsed the use of and/or is affiliated with regex.
It's unreadable, impractical, overly complex and complicated and it adds unnecessary clutter to your code, and your thought process.
It's 00:50 am and I just spent 3 hours debugging a regex only to realise forgot a single "?" in a 75+ character long string and I want to go to bed.13 -
The 5 stages of project management:
1 - the Mission:
Receive a project
2 - the Vision:
Over confidence and optimistic time estimation. Tell people how quick you can finish it.
3 - the Climax:
Adding unnecessary features. Try to be innovative. Think different. Feeling like a Rockstar.
4 - the Bargain:
Does not aware deadline is not far away. Reverse all unnecessary or impractical moomshot features. A bit stressed
5 - the Embarrassment:
Unpredicted obstacles or incidents. Late delivery or fail. Feel like a loser.1 -
College rant:
I have finals next week. I am sitting here learning about things which have no benefit to my career. My college requires me to take Calculus based physics 2, which makes no sense to me at all! I do appreciate physics however I would much rather be coding. In my CS courses you learn theory which is fine, however very impractical. I last October I realized how much more you need to do and a degree just won't cut it. I spend about 50 hours a week learning TDD, git, hashes all this stuff that is not taught in school. Then on top of this I'm learning pointless crap that if I ever needed in a real world situation I would go to Kahn Academy or simply Google it. I'm upset because I have to stop coding for the week to study information I will forget 2 weeks from now, and most likely never use again. I have a job someone offered me which will be extremely beneficial to my career however I have to wait a week to even look at it. I'm just bitter.23 -
I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.
It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"
I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".
- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.
And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.
About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.15 -
Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.
Developers: Sure.
After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.
Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.
Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.
Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?
Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.
Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.
Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.
Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.4 -
Small feature request, but I think it would be cool if you guys could add some devducks with colored capes as well as keep the classic yellow duck as an option inside Desk Items (L).
I know its impractical to add text for obvious readability issues, but I think the base color of the actual capes would be cool, you know to match your current devduck irl :) Maybe keep the classic duck at +100 and have a higher ++ for the devducks with capes? Anyways, I'll just leave this here...
@dfox @trogus
DevDuck Cape Colors:
#222242 // Purple
#b22028 // Red
#f4f6f9 // White
#f4753e // Orange
#171615 // Black
#3a6894 // Blue
3 -
Conversation that probably went down when they designed the pc case I use:
Person A: You know what we should do, we should design quick-release clip things so that you don't have to use tools in order to install or remove a hard drive.
Person B: That's a great idea! Should we also have the opening for the drives to slide in to on the side so the user has easy access to the drives. Or at least make the front panel completely removable for this purpose.
A: No, let's have him remove the fucking gpu in order to install a new drive.
B: That sounds impractical!
A: Fuck it, you know what, lets design it so bad that even that won't be enough. Let them take out the fucking whole motherboard, so basically let them disassemble the whole working pc in order to add a single drive! That will be hilarious! -
Great, just in the week when I’m on holiday, they decided to do a coffee mug contest on devRant, so I wasn’t able to show mine. Well, I think this one deserves it’s place amongst the other beauties. It’s completely impractical to drink from, but it can count as a statement ;)
1 -
Windows XP was just right. A perfect balance of performance and functionality.
Everything less complex feels too impractical, everything more complex feels too uncontrollable.
When using XP, I was confident I could get the job done, yet I knew what every process in the task manager did. It’s not the case with 7, let alone 10/11. I don’t know what happens under the hood there at all. Maybe custom Linux distros qualify too, but they’re unapproachable by laypeople. You have to be a geek to use them effectively.
Windows XP struck just the right balance between functionality, simplicity and compatibility. Too bad the era is gone in favor of opaque surveillance.8 -
What are the chances of landing any kind of job in the software field without my CS bachelor's degree completed?
Cuz I'm so tired of the impractical bullshit I've had to do in class for the last 2 or 3 years. I just don't get why the University does not prepare people to work in dev teams yet it seems to be a prerequisite for any consideration to be hired in the field.
Edit: I'm quite familiar with programming and learn quickly. But is that not sufficient?6 -
To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.
Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.
Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.
As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.6 -
Don’t you sometimes feel revolutionary and want to use some technology that is completely impractical for the project?
I’m using grpc on my angular app... -
Client push back: when the client wants an impractical feature to be implemented and you tell them HELL NO, with a little sugar coating of course
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The eggs have to make a symmetrical pattern in the box otherwise something doesn't feel right.
They used to do boxes of 15, which worked perfectly. Now it's either 6 or 12, both of which potentially require you to adjust the number of eggs you eat to get a symmetrical pattern.
It is both necessary and sufficient that the number of holes in the egg box should be an odd number.
Nine and fifteen work really well. All the other odd numbers are either too big, or negative, or prime, which would be impractical.8 -
So you guys know how universities can sometimes have TERRIBLE old software that hasn't been updated for years, and sometimes you want to do a specific process over and over again so you end up automating it, now, we've built a tool that automates downloading projects from the University Moodle website, and we would like to publish it for other students to use.
Problem.
The University is using SSO.
And so far we've made the application to work by observing the network connections over the Android app version in order to extract the cookie session, now imagine that we publish this little tool, and tell people to do those exact steps, of course it's impractical and misses the whole point of the tool itself for being easy to use.
So, where can I read more about SSO, how can I figure out what the University uses? And if I had to reverse engineer this, where should I start? (It goes over 4 pages and I'm not able to capture those requests to even figure out what's going on)
In short is there a guide where you take a university SSO service and build on top of it? I couldn't find anything that is helpful. -
The thing i worked for last 3 weeks has been scrapped.
Knew it was coming.
I'm glad the real boss is not unrealistic and impractical like my boss. -
Back in 2004-2005 when I was 2-3 years old, (I guess that, from this statement, the fact that I'm 15 rn can be inferred), I would sit on my dad's dinosaur computer. I don't remember brands and stuff, just Windows XP, Dial-up internet and the heap of CD-ROMs I had my parents buy me. They had all kinds of games, software, etc. It was a time when sharing that kind of stuff over the internet was, to say the least, impractical. It kind of makes me feel older than I am, looking at the cases full of those CDs, remnants of a past era. But what I consider my first actual exposure was in 2007, when I got my first laptop (netbook) and started diving in, exploring. It was the computer through which I learnt programming (My first lang was cpp), and the one that got me interested to dive deeper into the matter.
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CircleCI takes the cake for the most annoying of constant development advertisement campaigns on YouTube, change my mind.
I mean, the product is nice and everything, but what the hell? Why should *I* make sense of your changelog - just go and show what it does in practice! Ugh, why I must teach you marketing, CircleCI, smh...1 -
I gotta write a quick mailing solution for an email discussion list, given a budget, so i'm like, ok, cool, let me check out sendgrid api, etc, whatever, right?
Wrong! 10000 members, with an email volume of about 100 messages per member, per day, meaning you're sending at least 100*1000 msgs/day ... or 3 million messages a month!
With most services you're looking at like $2,000 right there. My budget was $100.
So.... wtf. How would you use an api to host a discussion list... seems impractical?
I see no discussion about it, no service addresses it, nothing.
Email discussion list. Can someone point me in the right direction?5 -
Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.
I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.
It would not receive non manual software updates
It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.
Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol
Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.
The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.
Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol1 -
Really wish the likes of JetBrains would hurry up and offer an LSP server for every language. I'm categorically not interested in using PHPstorm because my RSI makes it impractical but I'd be happy to shell out for an LSP I can use with Neovim9
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My team is currently using a confluent cloud kafka architecture via protobuf and wordpress as website.
We realized this is quite impractical when you want login functionality and such and would like to make a page from scratch now.
problem is we are all java backend developers with minor php knowledge, and php doesnt work well with protobuf or kafka.
how would you get such a website started. what language and frameworks are easy to get going?
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