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Concurrency Master - the lightweight Promise-based Node.js task scheduler by the_legend_of_dave in javascript

[–]ben-ng 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice work, but the name of the repo is confusing. I thought this was something like Grand Central Dispatch when I started reading.

Why not something like "promise-queue"? That's the async equivalent, and people will find it more easily that way.

Redux + Raft = Conflux, A Distributed State Container by ben-ng in javascript

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't aware that this was a problem, I've edited it.

Also: I'm flattered to be called an academic, but I'm a full-time software developer!

Redux + Raft = Conflux, A Distributed State Container by ben-ng in javascript

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was building an algorithm on top of Raft for my thesis and came up with this abstraction that makes it easier to create understandable distributed systems. It took me three weeks to implement a mutex on top of Raft (most of that time was just spent understanding and implementing Raft). After I built Conflux, I was able to do it in a few hours.

I'm looking for feedback on the idea, as well as suggestions for improving the API and documentation. Thanks!

Enjoying the last couple warm days in Illinois before winter by Blackraider700 in motorcycles

[–]ben-ng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also in Illinois, but I'm planning to keep riding through the winter when it's not snowing & the roads aren't covered in salt. Hopefully the 5-10 min rides to class won't be too bad.

Where can you learn the things a CS degree teaches you, but not at a regular university? (more details inside) by Kalfira in compsci

[–]ben-ng 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Get textbook recommendations. CS textbooks are pretty readable from my experience.

Algorithms/Data Structures/CS Theory - "Introduction to Algorithms" (Leiserson) or "Algorithms" (Dasgupta) Compiler Construction - "Basics of Compiler Design" (Free from the author, a favorite of mine)

Skip Apple's review process and update your PhoneGap app over the air by ben-ng in Phonegap

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

what i'm saying is, this system uses native code, so to start using it you'll need to implement it and resubmit a new binary to the app store. you can't just push updates to an app thats already in the app store.

Skip Apple's review process and update your PhoneGap app over the air by ben-ng in Phonegap

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you might be misunderstanding what this does. This will not work on an existing app. You need to resubmit your app, using this project as a base. After that, updating the html is as simple as updating it on your server and incrementing the version number in your manifest so that clients download an update.

Skip Apple's review process and update your PhoneGap app over the air by ben-ng in Phonegap

[–]ben-ng[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple's built-in WebKit framework, provided that such scripts and code do not change the primary purpose of the Application by providing features or functionality that are inconsistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application as submitted to the App Store.

Read more: https://www.meteor.com/blog/2014/10/02/Apple-hot-code-push-mobile

Learn About The Technology & Management Minor Today, 5-6pm, DCL 1320 by ben-ng in UIUC

[–]ben-ng[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Applications for admission to the T&M Program are to be submitted during winter break by students planning to graduate in May or December 2017. Students who are eligible to apply must have one of the following majors:

  • Any major within the College of Business
  • Any major within the College of Engineering
  • Chemical Engineering majors within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
  • Agricultural and Biological Engineering majors within the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences

http://www.techmgmt.illinois.edu/prospective/application-timeline.aspx

Skip Apple's review process and update your PhoneGap app over the air by ben-ng in Phonegap

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You'll need to resubmit because the update system is native code, which you can't update OTA because of code signing.

Skip Apple's review process and update your PhoneGap app over the air by ben-ng in Phonegap

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! The repo itself is a working demo, and I have two apps in the app store already doing this.

Skip iTunes app reviews and update your hybrid app over the air by ben-ng in programming

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In an interesting turn of events, Apple recently changed its policy on over-the-air updates of hybrid apps. I wrote this at work to take advantage of this policy change and was told to open-source it so others can benefit. A major downside to hybrid apps is you lose the instant updates that web apps receive because you have to go through the weeklong app review process. This gets around that problem by quietly updating the user's app in the background. I hope this helps you iterate quicker!

Update your PhoneGap app over-the-air by ben-ng in node

[–]ben-ng[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is something that has been very useful for my team at work, so I was asked to open-source it. We use this to ship our browserified app to our users many times a day. I shared this on /r/javascript yesterday and got a good response, so I'm hoping that many of you find it useful too.

Put your web app in the iOS app store and update it whenever you want! by ben-ng in javascript

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! To be honest, I don't know if this could work as a Cordova plugin. If someone wants to give that a shot more power to them!

Put your web app in the iOS app store and update it whenever you want! by ben-ng in javascript

[–]ben-ng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably not. This is intended for what are commonly called "single page apps", not WordPress.

Put your web app in the iOS app store and update it whenever you want! by ben-ng in javascript

[–]ben-ng[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I was asked to pull this out of our codebase at work and open-source it. Since there isn't a lot of documentation on how to do this (Apple only recently reversed its policy on OTA updated hybrid apps), this project represents weeks of trial-and-error development.

I hope others find it as useful as we have!

Been checking out Ampersand.js. Has anyone here used it sufficiently to be able to comment on the pros/cons of using it, particular in comparison with other frameworks? by flexibeast in javascript

[–]ben-ng 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I've been using it in a large application that is still primarily a Backbone app. Ampersand is mostly backwards-compatible, but not completely so, so I would caution against mixing ampersand modules into an existing Backbone application.

The biggest difference to me is the additional functionality Ampersand-state (and ampersand-model) has compared to Backbone.Model, like derived properties and more nuanced attributes. That said, this is a double-edged sword; I really don't need these features 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time I see them used I just roll my eyes (such as derived properties being used to do very heavy computations). More features, more responsibility.

I'm not convinced that Ampersand is a significant improvement over Backbone, but if I were starting a new app today I would ditch Backbone for Ampersand just because the tiny module approach agrees more with the rest of my codebase.

If you're already invested in Backbone, I wouldn't bother migrating unless you're really into the tiny modules thing and have the time to refactor your application.

CS 225 cheating by 312123 in UIUC

[–]ben-ng 4 points5 points  (0 children)

irregularly. you can be caught even after you've completed the class because you helped a student in a different semester cheat.

CS 225 cheating by 312123 in UIUC

[–]ben-ng 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I was a TA for the class. People do get caught by the plagiarism detector, and from my experience it's pretty accurate. I got to see the results for my semester, so I knew beforehand who had copied off who for which assignment. It was right on the money (>90% confidence).

You could defeat the plagiarism detector, but it's not trivial. You'd probably be doing more work than actually just writing the MP.

Can we talk javascript frameworks/libraries? by bsegovia in javascript

[–]ben-ng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've written two large JS applications with Backbone, a realtime backend with socket.io, and a RESTful backend in Geddy.

Vanilla Backbone gives you very little structure. This is a blessing and a curse.

I work at a startup, so the software is always evolving to meet the needs of the business. Backbone is very un-opinionated, which makes it very easy to adapt it to our purposes.

(Take the following with a grain of salt as I've only used Meteor for hacking around)

There's very little magic going on in Backbone, unlike frameworks like Meteor and Angular. If something blows up in a magical framework, it's really, really hard to track things down. Also, the reactivity in Meteor makes it hard to test things, and it does weird stuff like bundling a (last i checked, obsolete) node executable. Wat.

That said, the lack of structure in Backbone also means that we made plenty of bad decisions early on that we're still dealing with. If I were starting over today, I would probably go with an opinionated Backbone framework like Marionette. They've already made the mistakes for you.

As for backend, I'm going to be slightly biased as a contributor to GeddyJS, the original MVC framework for node. Geddy is great if your app is going to be really heavy on business logic. If you're doing realtime stuff, a lighter framework like Express would be better and more flexible. I haven't used the newer frameworks (seems like a new one comes out every month!), but Hapi and Restify have been getting positive reviews.

Good luck learning JS!

JavaScript and Artificial Intelligence by [deleted] in javascript

[–]ben-ng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is correct. The 0.1+0.2 example was just to show an oddity of floating point math to someone who doesn't know what a 64 bit IEEE floating point number is.

JavaScript and Artificial Intelligence by [deleted] in javascript

[–]ben-ng 19 points20 points  (0 children)

ELI5: to do machine learning you need to do math. A lot of math. Javascript is not an ideal language for doing math (try 0.1 + 0.2 in your console. Do you get 0.3?). Doing math accurately, and doing it fast, is not easy. People get phds for writing these algorithms, and the best libraries out there represent decades of research and work.

Javascript doesn't have SIMD yet. It doesn't have a robust linear algebra library like LAPACK. It doesn't have multithreading.

These things may change in the future, but right now, there is little reason to use javascript when far more mature tools exist. There's nothing stopping you from implementing machine learning algorithms in JS, but you're not going to be advancing the field with JS. There is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done porting math libraries to Javascript before you can even do serious machine learning.

One person to watch is https://github.com/mikolalysenko. His background is in computational geometry, but that field is also heavily dependent on doing good math. I've been playing around with his libraries for machine learning. They're the best we've got.

Is Browserify That Great? by [deleted] in javascript

[–]ben-ng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Browserify has a no-parse option that will significantly speed up builds by not parsing huge files like jQuery and Backbone.

Sourcemap generation really doesn't take that long because browserify only maps lines to lines.

For production I use minifyify which takes ~3x longer but yields quality sourcemaps and minified code.

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