joepie91

No, your cryptocurrency cannot work

Whenever the topic of Bitcoin's energy usage comes up, there's always a flood of hastily-constructed comments by people claiming that their favourite cryptocurrency isn't like Bitcoin, that their favourite cryptocurrency is energy-efficient and scalable and whatnot.

They're wrong, and are quite possibly trying to scam you. Let's look at why.

What is a cryptocurrency anyway?

There are plenty of intricate and complex articles trying to convince you that cryptocurrencies are the future. They usually heavily use jargon and vague terms, make vague promises, and generally give you a sense that there must be something there, but you always come away from them more confused than you were before.

joepie91

While a lot of Node.js guides recommend using JWT as an alternative to session cookies (sometimes even mistakenly calling it "more secure than cookies"), this is a terrible idea. JWTs are absolutely not a secure way to deal with user authentication/sessions, and this article goes into more detail about that.

Secure user authentication requires the use of session cookies.

Cookies are small key/value pairs that are usually sent by a server, and stored on the client (often a browser). The client then sends this key/value pair back with every request, in a HTTP header. This way, unique clients can be identified between requests, and client-side settings can be stored and used by the server.

Session cookies are cookies containing a unique session ID that is generated by the server. This session ID is used by the server to identify the client whenever it makes a request, and to associate session data with that request.

*S

joepie91

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

• A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
• A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
• There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

staltz

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

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This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

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benstr

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