5071
The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,194 posts.
5072
Photographs of 19th Century Japan
A world of dew
5073
Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work
I've dealt with any number of technically brilliant people who produce outstanding work. The majority of them never bothered to write down their work and communicate it to others - report writing is too boring, uninteresting, and hard. And irrelevant. Or so they thought.
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TSA: Fail
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel. Instead, they have made air travel the ...
5077
Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
I reverse engineered the hardware and firmware of my Egret GT E-Scooter. I describe how I got in, analysed communication between components, and reverse engineered firmware. I speak about writing custom firmware for the display unit.
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Rotoscoped Animation of Filmed Parkour
Hallå! Welcome to my first game devlog. I figured I'd start out talking about graphics, as they are a large source of anxiety for first-time developers. And not without reason! Everyone is a judgy bastard when it comes to how your low-budget game is presented. Oh sure, it's become easier for a solo developer to mask…
5080
Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
What do each of these languages value most?
5081
Parental controls aren't for parents
I found a stranger texting my 12-year-old on a 'kid-safe' Gabb phone. Parental controls are broken.
5082
Early-Retirement Update
I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to create a new entry on a blog that has essentially been dead since 2015. Yet, I have had a persistent feeling that I owe my readers an update.
5083
Many software companies are a joke
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
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ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was …
5085
Building the mouse Logitech won't make
Modifying the MX Ergo trackball mouse to fix its micro-USB charging, loud switches, and bloated software issues.
5086
Companies embracing SMS for account logins should be blamed for SIM-swap attacks
[UPDATE Since this was posted in 2024 : Major US telcos like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have suffered a months-long breach (the ongoing Salt Typhoon attack). These companies, of course, pass along the unencrypted SMSes vital to countless log in flows, account re-activations, and password resets. They are now known to…
5087
O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data
In Which I Try to Maintain Human Supremacy for a Bit Longer
5088
Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view
Apple has announced the new client-side content scanning (based on parameters received from the center) to find child sexual abuse materials to be reported to law enforcers.
5089
Floating Point Visually Explained
While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…
5090
PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
5091
Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
A deep dive into Claude Code for daily users. Covers the .claude directory, CLAUDE.md the way Boris writes it, CLAUDE.local.md, Skills with real examples, custom subagents, plugins, underused commands like /goal and /insights, MCPs, and the workflow patterns the Anthropic team actually uses.
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Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant
To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over several years and nearly seven thousand notes. Every day ideas flit through my head, ideas for essays, for characters, for jokes. Just now I catch a glimpse of […]
5094
Files Are Hard
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
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Basic Music Theory in ~200 Lines of Python
A basic introduction to Western music theory using the Python programming language to derive scales, chords, and modes in every key.
5098
How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
5099
Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)
One year ago, I quit my day job to work on Zig full time . Since then, the project has seen a steady growth in funding. Thanks to the people donating, Zig is on track to become fully sustainable before my savings run out.
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The art of not taking things personally
Why other people’s emotions might not be about you — and your emotions might not be about them