July 2010
7 posts
1 tag
Jailbreaking is legal in the U.S. →
Basically, all those who were saying that you can’t jailbreak a legally owned device can go fuck themselves.
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“An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his...”
– From Christopher Hitchens’s book “God Is Not Great”.
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Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear... →
Street Fighters is not about the reasons why Bear Stearns failed and how did its management came to this mess. Kate Kelly did not write a book for those readers who want cold analysis of the problem. By getting right to the company’s collapse and using her style of slight exaggeration (as one of reviewers on Amazon pointed out, excitement in this book is provided by constant...
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Living With a Computer →
“The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen.”
This article is from July 1982 issue of The Atlantic Magazine.
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God is in Emacs
So I was going to my friend’s place to pick up some stuff and then suddenly I got this urge to do some programming. It was weird and awesome, at the moment I really wanted to write some code, not matter what — just code.
Luckily I live almost next door so I ran back to my apartment and worked for a little bit. Feels good now, although that feeling is still with me.
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In the end, we are our choices. →
I don’t remember opening this page but, anyway, the tab was there and I read the speech, and I must say that it is the most relevant text for me right now. Especially the quote.
June 2010
6 posts
2 tags
“When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
– Old saying
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“Вот, видите, даже у французов крах по-своему прекрасен. То есть казалось, что в...”
– Yaroslav Kotyshov, Lenta.ru
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“We are young,
We are strong,
We’re not looking for where we belong.
...”
– Mika
May 2010
6 posts
1 tag
Lost stashed changes
Just lost my stashed changes. This will be a lesson to make a lot of small commits instead of a single big one.
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“On the wrong day of the wrong week,
I used the wrong method with the wrong...”
– Wrong by Depeche Mode
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The Go Programming Language →
Was in a discussion with Andrew Gerrand and (!!!) Rob Pike about Go earlier today and as a result, I am much more interested in it now.
April 2010
11 posts
2 tags
Everybody's changing the world
It is rather interesting how overused the phrase “changing the world” is in the Valley. Almost every company is changing the world or starting a revolution and yet the world is pretty much the same as five-ten years ago.
From an email to a friend.
“The mankind adopted the decimal system is a physiological accident. Those who...”
– Tobiaz Dantzig in Number, the language of science.
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valerij1970 →
The journal of a homeless guy in London. He has a job, he sends money back to his family. He just does not have a permanent place to live.
He writes in russian.
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High Performance JavaScript →
This is a very nice book with tons of interesting tips and tricks.
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“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it...”
– John Carmack
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JavaScript: сделаем Scheme или что-то похожее →
From now on, everything about that is in russian and about JavaScript will go there. Boom.
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“Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the...”
– Cory Doctorow, Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).
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“We did not want to make a trade-off between security and privacy. It would be no...”
– John Poindexter, in a letter to the director of DARPA, August 12, 2003
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March 2010
10 posts
1 tag
“Hi Anton,
I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo has been...”
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“That’s why I can’t say enough times, whatever love you can get and...”
– Larry David in Whatever Works
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Third-party cookies behavior in different browsers
It seems like browsers have different policies regarding how to block third-party cookies. Firefox and Opera block embedded scripts from both writing and reading those cookies while Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer block only writing. In those browsers, if a cookie was set as a first-party (i.e. user explicitly visited the page that sets this cookie), embedded script still has access to it,...
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“Hi Anton,
I am writing to let you know that one of your photos with a Creative...”
– From the email I got today.
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February 2010
8 posts
1 tag
“I don’t understand blog posts, emails and other messages that begin with an...”
– Seth Godin
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Making Disqus faster
Hello. I am Anton Kovalyov, I work as a software engineer here at Disqus and this blog post is about one project I was working on. It extracts all the static parts out of our embeddable code which makes our widget much faster than it is now. We are still testing this update but you already can try it out. For more details on the project and how to enable it for your website, continue reading.
It...
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Another way to restore built-in method in...
A short follow-up to this post. Apparently, both Chrome and Safari restore built-in method if you try to delete it from the prototype. In other words:
Array.prototype.map = null;
[].map
> null
delete Array.prototype.map
[].map
> function map() { [native code] }
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Media Attachments
About a week ago we pushed my media attachments feature and yesterday we officially announced it. Media Attachments was a feature I wanted to do since my day one at Disqus. I really like when system is smart enough to extract links to images and videos and present them nicely. It is simple, there is no need for additional buttons. If you want to share an image or a video—just put a link inside...
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Wired's Hide and Seek
So I read this article about an attempt of one air force analyst to sell secrets to Iraq and China and there author claims that two puzzles created by Regan (the spy in question) were sent to the National Security Agency, where cryptanalysts spent hundreds of hours without any result. Then, they found some other guy that cracked the first code and apparently it was enciphered with Caesar’s...
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“4.4. Dress Code
Since attendees must wear their name tags, they must also...”
– The Tao of IETF: A Novice’s Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force
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Brewer's CAP Theorem
Brewer’s Theorem is pretty neat. It essentially states that you cannot have a clustered system that supports consistency, availability and partition-tolerance at the same time. So, if you want to build a nice clustered system you have to stop partitions from happening, or accept the fact that from time to time affected services will either be unavailable or inconsistent.
Eric Brewer...
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ACM ICPC 2010 World Finals →
Gold medals go to teams from Shanghai Jiaotong, Moscow State, National Taiwan and Taras Shevchenko Kiev National universities.
January 2010
8 posts
1 tag
“In the 1790s, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, any two people could have a...”
– Whitfield Diffie
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“Buxton, whose warm waters have made thy name famous, perchance I shall visit...”
– Mary, Queen of Scots on her last visit to Buxton
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Quick JavaScript profiling
The text below was posted on my old blog in August, 2008. Since I still use this technique, I think it is worth moving it here.
Sometimes, you need to know how many times a function was executed and how much time did it take. It is not a problem if you have good profiling tools, but sometimes they are not available. A few months ago I was optimizing my code in some very early Fx3 build and the...