........

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Look what I found!
Even my L3 cache is bigger than this!

“Those were the days😂”

Happened with anyone?

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

Code never lies
Comments sometimes do

Nah!
Code lies too, especially when you train a neural network 😂😂

Le college freshman nibbas: Don't know C, Java, C++, python or any other programming language but want to do AI and machine learning!

💀🤷

Switching to macOS was an entry to paradise.

I go to Windows only to play Call of Duty. It’s crap and always will be.

P.S no comments on Linux.

My rant is that I low key hate devRant.

I'm 23, I'm an average software engineer, with some expertise in machine learning and with a decent job.
But seeing all your cool stories, skills and rants makes me feel like I don't know shit and everyone else is just more driven, skillful and passionate, taking care of a 1000 pet projects at a time and dominating their work routine.

Oh impostor syndrome, how I've missed you!

P.S.: I still love your rants, keep them coming.

Hello all,

Did a MASSIVE spam down vote action..

If you've watched the algo-list you kinda had an idea how much spam there was. In exception of rants, it also down vote the spam comments posted under regular rants. Also made a progress with historic rants.

I think I leave it at this for now, gonna do some machine learning for spam and will apply that as filter in the future.

Site is now clean enough now to not encounter spam just browsing the site.

Our new frenemy Buffon gave as tip the no index tag what is a great idea for users not having reputation < 5 or so. Will contact dfox if he's willing to do this small change.

Which books are best for machine learning?

Data scientist life begins when for him:
Forest becomes Random Forest and Tree becomes a Decision tree.

Rant:
My jupyter notebook has outgrown itself on some real world trading data analysis and its becoming a pain to add to (further) and share.
Need to find better alternatives, web apps where are you?

But i know nothing about it. Learning curve ahead!

Requirements:
I've 7 interactive dashboard plots (from some data) in jupyter-notebook.
- It'd be nicer to have a web app to use them without running notebook from a different location.
- Or running notebooks remotely (running as daemons on host machine).
Any suggestions for a starter ?
rant before requirements, coz rants lead to better requirements.

if rant++:
make_requirements(what_something)
do_work(that_something)

Does devRant use machine learning to select the rants to display on the feed?

What is the best searching algorithm for big data technologies like Machine learning and Neural networks?

ANY GUESS!!!
Comment it.