Hacker News Reader

ashwinraghavon Giant body of water found in space, black hole claims it was just hydrating

Its 12 billion light years away. Just keep in mind that this is what it looked like 12 billion years ago => it takes the light 12 billion years to reach the Earth. So the image as seen is really that old!

ashwinraghavon How Hackers Stole 200,000 Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL

Firstly this kind of vulnerability requires no white-boarding. It is fair to assume that a dev with a reasonable understanding of how the web protocols work will not need a white board to figure this out. So firstly the argument of catching this on a WB is a little juvenile.

Associating TDD to being haphazard is pretty random. Being hap hazard and TDDing are really in 2 different math spaces. Care not to mix em?

ashwinraghavon Building Jabber Chat Bots in place of redundant web applications

Ah well, I guess there is nothing wrong in getting back to an 'old' yet 'proven' solution.

ashwinraghavon Building Jabber Chat Bots in place of redundant web applications

Here is the ruby library that I used https://github.com/ashwinraghav/marvin. It can help you write a pure ruby application that you can later convert to an event-driven app(If you wish)

ashwinraghavon Building Jabber Chat Bots in place of redundant web applications

Thanks for bringing up the web-app vs chat bot straight away. I did get some questions on these lines during the conference itself. 1) I do not agree that maintaining bots and web apps are the same effort-wise. An IRC can very easily be served of a framework that is event driven in nature -- on the lines of a node.js or eventmachine with barely any additional effort. On the other hand, doing this for a web application would require extensive effort for writing your code the right way and bringing in the right tools like a templating engine. You will build your own framework almost.

2) Since the application is process heavy and take over 45 seconds to serve a request, this would involve extensive tweaking of your forward proxy which in the case of most data centres and clouds will simply respond with a "Service Unavailable" after 30 seconds. Off course you can defer this to a background job and provide the results elsewhere on your application. But like I said, you would be doing things that the user actually does not need.

3) How would you scale up such an operation heavy application if it were a web app. Have 1000 background jobs running for a 1000 users? An event driven approach will pay off for sure. And 1) illustrates why its easier to do this with a bot.

The real disadvantage I came across was to be able to get it to work with a load balancer. I can write about this if there is more interest.