New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 80,798 posts.

Any topic
Any year
2376

Aluminum foil (2021)

It’s typically 10 μm thick and 400 mm wide, giving it an aspect ratio of 40000 in that dimension, and rolls are commonly some ten meters in length, for an aspect ratio of 1 000 000; heavy-duty versions can reach 30 μm or more. Despite their thinness, foils of 25 μm or more are impermeable to oxygen, water, and light…

2395

Scheme Is a Hoot

Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…

2397

Web-based cryptography is always snake oil

Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…