most software is large, slow, complicated and bug-ridden.
this makes small, fast, clean software written by competent programmers "beautiful".
taste varies. what is too terse and "obfuscated" to some is pleasingly succinct and manageable to others.
right now there's another post about yann lecun on the front page. he once wrote a lisp-like interpreter that compiles to C called "lush". of all the lisps i have tried i think it's one of the more "beautiful" ones in it's design.
The fastest DNS lookups are ones that do not need to traverse the network.
A zone file of public DNS information can be served by a daemon bound to the loopback on the user's device, obviating the need for many (but not all) lookups sent over the network.
These local lookups are also more private than ones sent out over the private LAN or public internet.
Same goes for any type of data. It's not limited to DNS information.
If a user downloads publicly available data dumps from Wikipedia, and then serves them from a local database and httpd, the response time will be faster and the requested URL's more private than accessing the same content over the public internet. Not to mention the small benefits of reliability and reduced dependence on the network.
I know a user who does this and has automated the process of setting it up.
To use the examples in the article, the idea is that a user can periodically download bulk data, e.g., information on medical conditions, in an open format, load it into her database of choice and query to her heart's content, without any ISP or website knowing what she has queried.
Same with daily newpaper content, and even a catalog of toys.
"Browsing" through the data remains private.
The alternative is to have this data served from third party computers and have the user send each and every request for each small item of information over an untrustworthy, public network (the Internet).
Despite ample, inexpensive local storage space for users to store data of any kind themselves, let us break up the data into little bits and make users request each and every bit individually. (Not only that, let's make them register for the the ability to make numerous queries.) Then we can record all user requests for every item of data.
1. a. whitney 2. ioccc.org winners (djb, etc.)
what makes [some] software beautiful?
the ugliness of other software.
most software is large, slow, complicated and bug-ridden.
this makes small, fast, clean software written by competent programmers "beautiful".
taste varies. what is too terse and "obfuscated" to some is pleasingly succinct and manageable to others.
right now there's another post about yann lecun on the front page. he once wrote a lisp-like interpreter that compiles to C called "lush". of all the lisps i have tried i think it's one of the more "beautiful" ones in it's design.