2611
Signing data structures the wrong way
Domain separation bugs have bitten Bitcoin, Ethereum, TLS, and AWS. Snowpack solves this by embedding random domain separators directly in the IDL.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,710 posts.
2612
The AI Marketing BS Index
You may already be aware of John Baez’s “Crackpot Index” , which provides a simple tongue-in-cheek scoring system for assessing whether a research contribution to physics is likely “revolutionary.” The list contain such gems as “40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is…
2613
The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
The internet made coordination cheap and gave us the Bazaar. Coding agents make code cheap and are giving us sprawling, idiosyncratic software.
2614
I quit. The clankers won
The one where I pack up my bags.
2615
The most-disliked people in the publishing industry
One way of studying literature is through direct experience.
2616
Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
Thoughts on an experiment that I've been running for about a month.
2617
A dot a day keeps the clutter away
The simplest organization system I've tried is a sheet of colored dot stickers. It's also the best.
2618
I traced my traffic through a home Tailscale exit node
A practical deep dive into Tailscale exit nodes: route changes, traceroute evidence, DERP fallback, trust boundaries, and why this model can be free.
2619
What changes when you turn a Linux box into a router
I think it is incredibly cool that we can change a Linux system into a networking device. But have you ever wondered:
2620
Nobody is coming to save your career
I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.
2621
The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
Anthropic accidentally shipped a source map in their npm package, exposing the full Claude Code source. Here's what I found inside.
2622
Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter
This blog post and the companion video both explain an erosion technique I’ve worked on over the past eight months. The video has lots of e...
2623
Gone (Almost) Phishin'
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes. One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac …
2624
Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
2625
I'm betting on ATProto
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who…
2626
Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision.
2627
Vulnerability research is cooked
Vulnerability discovery has always been gated by elite attention. Elite attention is now abundant. What happens next?
2628
2629
“CEO said a thing” journalism
"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
2630
Recover Apple Keychain
Yes, I do—and probably more than I should admit. But a few things led to this situation. For one, I’d gotten too used to relying on Touch ID. As a result, if my muscle memory failed me, I was stuck. On top of that, I kept entering my office Active Directory (AD) password instead of my Mac password—again, muscle memory…
2631
You are falling behind because you haven't fed the insincerity machine
I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect…
2632
Take better notes, by hand
Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back…
2633
An NSFW filter for Marginalia search
… optional, that is. I’ve been working on an NSFW filter for Marginalia Search, as that is something some people have asked for, primarily API consumers. The search engine has had some domain based filtering for a while, based on the UT1 lists, but that isn’t a very comprehensive approach. We’ll land on a single…
2634
72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes
The US dollar lost 96.9% of its value since 1914. Four inflationary episodes spanning 29% of the time caused 72% of the destruction. Monthly dataset, 1,357 obs.
2635
How to turn anything into a router
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router…
2636
Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
2637
Do your own writing
When you write a document or essay, you are posing a question and then answering it. For example, a PRD answers the question, “What should we build?” A technical spec answers, “How should we build it?” Sometimes the question is more difficult to answer—“What are we even trying to accomplish?” And with every attempt at…
2638
Intuiting Pratt Parsing
You already know that a + b * c + d is calculated as a + (b * c) + d. But how do you encode that knowledge precisely enough for a machine to act on it?
2639
How the AI Bubble Bursts
The catalysts for a crash are already laid out, and it can happen sooner than most expect. AI is here to stay. If used right, chances are it will make us all more productive. That, on the other hand, does not mean it will be a good investment. Big tech doesn’t need to win, just outspend Magnificent 7 companies are…
2640
Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models
Why the HJB is Bellman's equation in continuous time, why continuous time matters, and how to solve the resulting control problem with neural policy iteration.