Carlos Bueno

I considered it in terms of teaching computer science, especially given (http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/09/ipsum.html) and (http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/07/corrupting-the-youth.html). In that frame of mind, chapter 0 exert seemed like it mentioned computer science concepts, but they weren't really explored as such. I interpreted your goal as edutainment, a noble goal, but one that fails so often it triggers a certain amount of skepticism.

Being entertaining is a tough challenge as it is. Trying to be entertaining _and_ informative, and you're unlikely to accomplish both. That was my biggest challenge as an EFL teacher - I spent most of my time planning activities trying to be engaging and informative. Even then, I'd say only ~30% of the time did I really get the balance right in my lessons and that's in an active media where I can react to the class.

If its just meant to be a bit of fun with a topic then its a different thing. Perhaps its better described as a pop sci book for children. Like how Brief History of Time didn't go into detailed maths, but gave the reader a working mental model of complex phenomena in an interesting way. Perhaps Lorem Ipsum aims to give children that mental model of computation, without any expectation that they could reasonably apply it. Is that the sort of thing you're aiming at?

Edit:
I just read through (http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/01/tortoise.html) extract you mentioned, and am a lot happier with it. You do have a really good way of…

In general, if you are depending on a secret cryptographic algorithm, then you are doing something wrong. Cryptographic algorithms are horribly complicated, with many attack vectors you need to know, and prevent. Chances are, someone writing their own code isn't going to make a secure system. By using a known, secure system, it doesn't actually matter if people know what it is. A known system has been tested, and deemed to be 'secure'. If knowing the name did mean they could exploit it, then it probably isn't a good system to be using in the first place.

As an example, here is an attack you may not have considered. If you wanted to make an authentication system, you would want to compare a password with a stored password (or hash). Most people would do a byte by byte comparison of the passwords (or hashes). The problem is, a byte by byte comparison takes longer for a correct password (even if you use hashes), as the incorrect answer exits on the first compare failure. This is called a timing attack, and is an example of a side channel. Most people wouldn't even know that such an attack existed. This is why you want to use a known algorithm, because the people who wrote them know these kinds of attacks. So if people know your secure algorithm, they shouldn't be able to exploit that knowledge.

Here are two links posted here recently, which show these concepts very well. The third is an hour talk about cryptography in general, and I highly recommend…

This reminds me of a post by an author who had his own book's prize on Amazon decreased in a bidding war between bots [1]. It's a different matter but the post begins with this:

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
A story about computer science
and other improbable things.

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

[1] http://carlos.bueno.org/2012/02/bots-seized-control.html

The article could be appropriately titled to reflect this wisdom: solve every problem in whichever language is your strong suit. It's not always Java, and arguing that Java is the one-size-fits-all would earn you few friends. For web services the importance of the language is diminishing with solutions such as cache, messaging queue, etc. I'd go on a limb to say getting your cache right is the most important web service optimization.

All statements of the form "it's relatively faster to write programs in language Y than language Z" are incorrect because it disregards important parameters such as programmer experience with languages Y and Z, and whether or not it's a comparison between 2 different programmers.

Also there are some performance gains that only pay off at Twitter or Facebook scale [1]. Sometimes shaving milliseconds costs time but rakes in little to no benefits.

[1]: http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/

See also: the Solitaire cipher[0] (requires a deck of cards) Geomantic charts[1], which are... kinda binary encoding and shuffling?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_%28cipher%29

[1]https://digitalambler.com/2020/05/08/how-to-construct-the-shield-chart-of-geomancy/

Related : how to debias a biased coin[2] (aka. a Von Neumann extractor).

It is not exactly the same (randomness extractor vs. PRNG), but there are similarities[3].

[2]https://carlos.bueno.org/2011/10/fair-coin.html

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_extractor

I want to take this opportunity to recommend Hillel's writing and depth of analysis (on top of the quirkiness of doing it in a weird lang). Compared to the equivalent answers on stackoverflow[4], there is just no comparison.

[4]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3919597/is-there-a-pseudo-random-number-generator-simple-enough-to-do-in-your-head

"So they now have a plugin-repository and allow you to directly reference those scripts from your pages. That's great and all, except I don't want to embed external code that may change silently (or not so silently..) at any time."

YUI 3 gallery modules are hosted on Yahoo!'s CDN, and are versioned. Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version.

"YUI feels more like someone took the "Java" in Javascript way too seriously."

This is a common criticism of YUI 2, but have you tried YUI 3? Carlos Bueno's jQuery - YUI 3 Rosetta Stone is an excellent source for comparing common jQuery syntax and idioms with YUI 3. If you haven't looked at YUI 3 before, you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html