What alternatives to Auth0 are worth looking into? Between this P0 (with no ability to check the status or file a ticket) and the Okta acquisition, I hesitate to continue using Auth0 as the default when spinning up new web apps.
What's the point of such services? Every web framework worth its salt supports all common authentication schemes and offers an easy interface to write your own.
Keycloak is pretty battle-tested and rock solid although it is a bit of a behemoth operationally.
Outside of that they Ory ecosystem is really nice. We user Hydra, which is not a drop-in Oauth2 server but requires you to write several of the components yourself.
"Keycloak is pretty battle-tested and rock solid although it is a bit of a behemoth operationally."
Just looked. Java, Wildfly, Infinispan, Hibernate + A DB, network multicast if you want a cluster, your own separate load balancer, etc. So, a fairly large time investment if you aren't familiar with all of that.
Yeah, it's not the easiest thing in the world to get up and running but not quite as hard as it might seem at first look. If you are already using k8s then you can use https://github.com/codecentric/helm-charts/tree/master/chart... to deploy Keycloak fairly easily. If you're not using k8s then it is probably more of an undertaking.
Every year or so I check back in to see if Cognito has gotten any better. I hasn't. I'd love to use it, but some very basic things are just not done correctly. Yan Cui has a nice writeup on Cognito [0] that touches on some of its shortcomings.
My blood pressure is still coming back down from AWS having an all-day outage during a holiday week last year, because Kinesis had an issue and it turns out their entire infrastructure depends on that.
Yep, I practiced it for a year over 25 years ago and I can do it all the time. I am usually lucid multiple times a nice. Would not want to miss it for the world.
I kept a journal and practiced for a while, and eventually could lucid dream somewhat consistently with a few simple techniques plus melatonin.
Here is my question: do you find that you're actually rested when you lucid dream? I always found myself exhausted, so I stopped trying, and in my case the skill has atrophied. But I'm not sure if that was only due to my technique and if it would have improved in time.
Can you control whether you are lucid or not? I would be annoyed at the prospect of being "locked in" to having lucid dreams every night instead of the typical unconsciousness
My initial guess is that it focuses on human depravity, an accessible topic compared to the more explicit theological claims in the latter parts. That is based on my very loose knowledge of the material, though.
The self-righteous urge probably contributes: assurance that "I wouldn't possibly qualify as anywhere near this bad."
They talk a little in the article about how the Inferno was more based in earthly things than the the later two books, and that makes it easier to approach.
I think the reason why the Inferno is solely taught is becaue it's just so long a text, and the characters Dante interacts with in his descent are more familiar to an early student of the classics than the later volumes.
I would absolutely recommend reading Purgatorio and Paradiso if you have a chance. Though it's long, it's quick reading, and sublime is an understatement.
The 9 circles of hell are a popular literary reference through the ages. Knowing inferno helps you understand future works that you’ll encounter in western literature.
The other two not as much afaik.
For what it’s worth, in my neck of the woods we always learned that The Divine Comedy is a trilogy and dove into Inferno.
Yes, although all three books are beautifully written, it is in the Inferno where he shines.
This is because is the most dramatic in terms of passion and where it's more controversial.
In the Inferno he exercises a call for sympathy for putting certain characters there (is god fair for condemning them? Remember the beautiful case of Ulysses or lovers) but also criticism by putting others in that place, even some not yet dead at the time.
:)
Unrelated to the algorithm, I’ve found that doing things “by hand” is a surprisingly good way to develop intuition for otherwise opaque concepts. I wonder if it’s a function of doing work more slowly or paying closer attention. Examples include writing code written by others and working through math on paper.
I think it's because the human mind tends to jump over things which don't seem important, as a performance optimization. But its idea of what's not important is not well-tuned to many contexts. I think a lot of "secret tricks" are just ways of trying to bypass that heuristic and force yourself to do all the steps. E.g. rubber-duck debugging: putting the situation into words means putting it into concrete terms, which catches the parts that your brain let sit unexamined.
Likewise. Once in a while I force myself to do backprop by hand to make sure I still understand all the concepts and can walk myself through the calculus.
I just learned backprop for the first time a week ago and doing exactly what you described, working it out by hand, was absolutely invaluable. There's something about being able to visualize what my code is doing on a sheet of paper that just helped everything click.
I've been doing this while optimizing leetcode problems recently. I just force myself to step through the same logic that the computer is doing to solve the problem. Not the code, but the same logical manipulations to calculate the answer the same way the code is.
Very often I'll find myself thinking "This is a waste of time, I could easily shortcut this by... X" and when I find the shortcuts that make the "by hand" process more manageable, I can apply that same logic to the code and make it faster as well.
Both. And another aspect you missed: Doing things by hand stimulates regions of the brain which are directly tied to regions of creativity and to improve the ability to relate a new concept to existing concepts.
If I’m unfamiliar with a project I force slow work by first looking for existing process improvements, like organized GitHub milestones and well-described and meta’d issues.
I’ll commonly explore new tech by generating my own summarized documentation and through light tooling of initial configuration.
I am in the midst of this now where an existing operational “algorithm” needs better software support.
A lot of the discovery for that is starting with very general issues describing “problem” areas and then drilling them down to specific issues that might require action.
It can be tedious to go this “slow,” but it’s how I get to fast.
I agree. For some reason, I didn't get the lambda calculus when I first encountered it but it became entirely obvious after doing just a couple of exercises by hand.
I love whiteboards, they are much better than paper: more space, nice colors, easy to see, very easy to collaborate on, simple redos. That's actually the biggest thing I miss from going into the office: nice huge whiteboards that cover the whole wall, not the little dinky ones that office depot sells for exorbitant prices.
I found a solution though: Lowe's sells a 4'x8' sheet of whiteboard for fifteen bucks, now I have my whiteboard covered wall in my home office so I'm happy again.
One more to add for consideration: electrostatic sheets. You can get a whole roll of them for just a few bucks and turn your entire office into a whiteboard. No hanging, no mess. Surprisingly effective as a low-cost whiteboard-like solution.
And if you're sharing that whiteboard (in any form) with remote colleagues, try sharetheboard.com. Our team put it together precisely because we didn't want to say goodbye to the ol' board.
I like pencil and paper. Colored pencils are plentiful, and paper is easier to image and share than a whiteboard. You can write smaller on paper and don't get gorrila arms.
Hey, you can have preferences, even if they are wrong. ;)
Colored pencils are usually very difficult to erase. I've found whiteboards are great for sharing. Get a set of small tip dry erase pens, much better than the standard ones, and helps both writing small and gorilla arm (though I've never really had issues with the latter).
It's called "Smooth White Wall Panel", but honestly just go with a truck and ask an employee, apparently they're popular. The guy I asked said they even use them in the employee areas in the back. https://www.lowes.com/pd/47-75-in-x-7-98-ft-Smooth-White-Wal...
I think this is due to some kind of muscle memory.
You only start hearing certain patterns in complex music, e.g. Mahler symphonies, if you listen often enough to it.
At some point you recognize stuff unconsciously.
I've noticed something similar in dance and language. I think it has something to do with mirror neurons feeding back into meaning making.
When you hear a word in a language you know, mirror neurons probably fire the patterns that would be required to make those sounds yourself. If you don't have experience making a sound, you're less likely to be able to detect subtle nuance in it, and those patterns tie into your memory of the times you have used that word.
The same with dance. While taking dance classes, I found that watching very good dancers gave a visceral thrill that wasn't there before... Like I could FEEL what they were doing.
You go to where your customers are. If you’re building for yourself, find people like you. If you’re building for someone else, reach out to them cold, then ask them to refer you to people like them. If you’re building something they want, they will refer their friends.
The best book on the subject is the “Startup Owner’s Manual.” If you’re starting a B2B company, try “Lean B2B.”
