9721
Economic Termites: Monopolies not noticeable enough for most of us
Why is this economy so difficult to manage? The macro statistics are hiding the experience of being cheated.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,207 posts.
9722
So you want to build a browser engine
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
9723
How many High Streets are there in London?
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9724
Dmv.org
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to address the inconsistent…
9725
Fixing a knockoff Altera USB Blaster that never worked
What follows is the story of how I fixed not one, but two, different flawed Altera USB Blaster clone devices that never worked correctly after I bought them.
9726
Finding out where syscalls are called from: Stack traces with strace
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
9727
Anti-patterns in event-driven architecture
Event-driven architecture is great, but it can cause a lot of headaches if it is used for the wrong purpose.
9728
My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
9729
Detecting a PS2 Emulator: When 1*X does not equal X
Using an odd floating point error to detect emulators
9730
Compilers are too smart
Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…
9731
South Pole Water Infrastructure
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
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Yes, you can play Duck Hunt without a television (but I can't)
Duck Hunt is considered a classic of the Nintendo Entertainment System. But surprisingly, the concept of hunting ducks did not originate in 1984– people have...
9734
Feynman’s Razor
If an expert can't understand your explanation, you've dumbed it down too much!
9735
Alarms in medical equipment
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
9736
How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?
Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…
9737
The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
9738
Inline Assembly Dangers
Resolving PS2SDK Soft Reset Issues
9739
Let rand = main as usize (2022)
The other day I posted something silly, and learned some interesting things about raw pointers in Rust.
9740
I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it
The personal website of Elias Daler about programming, technology and videogames
9741
9742
TPM GPIO fail: How bad OEM firmware ruins Intel TPM security
In this article I demonstrate a software only attack that allows an operating system to set the PCRs of a discrete TPM device to arbitrary values and unseal any secret that uses a PCR based sealing policy (such as disk encryption keys used by unattended unlock TPM FDE schemes).
9743
PSA: If you're a fan of ATmega, try AVR Dx
A little-known offshoot of the ATmega series of 8-bit microcontrollers is better, faster, and cheaper than its progenitor.
9744
Managing my motivation as a solo dev
One of the biggest sticking points of being a solo dev is maintaining motivation. I’ve been keeping a journal entry about how to hack my motivation, what works and what doesn’t. Here are the things that have worked. Convert external sources to motivation I’ve always known that I’m more extrinsically than intrinsically…
9745
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9747
You'll regret using natural keys
Beating another dead horse.
9748
Implementing the Goodfellow GANs paper
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), discovered by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, were an early method in the area of generative AI. I will focus on image generation as set out in the paper Generative Adversarial Nets 1 . This paper is the focal point of the post, I will guide you through the implementation of the paper…
9749
An animated introduction to Fourier series
This article will be part of an extensive series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphics), and hope that it will be helpful to anyone looking for a clear, visual introduction to these concepts. The article…
9750
Some notes on influenceering
The ups and downs of publishing non-commercial content on the internet.