1441
Tales from Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are fun, at least if you're making money.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,497 posts.
1442
Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator
Note: this post uses a $\LaTeX$ plugin to render math symbols. It may require a desktop browser for the full experience…
1443
Stock Market Returns Are Anything but Average
A reader asks: Ben, I believe you have written at least once about how surprisingly few times the stock market has grown near its long-term average in a given year. In other words, its typical annual returns are well above its long-term ~10% average, or well below. I’m searching for it on your blog site...
1444
Why did bar ends go away from mountain bikes?
For a little over a decade, they enjoyed strong popularity among mountain bikers, but then the feelings got cold.
1445
Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces
A few months ago I experimented with DigitalOcean spaces as my backup solutionthat could replace Dropboxeventually.
1446
Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface
One of the most popular arguments against Emacs is that it is “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”. The promotion of the idea of “Living in Emacs” by some of the hardcore Emacs users only make this argument more compelling. At the first glance, using a single program for “everything” does seem to…
1447
The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past
The success of an open source browser game called Friday Night Funkin tells us where "instant games" might go. Hint: we've been here before.
1448
Behaviours to avoid in a software architecture role
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work in architecture roles alongside experienced software/technical/solution architects. Through observing others and my own trial and error,...
1449
Hacking a $200 Under Desk Exercise Bike
Due to COVID, I haven’t been getting my usual amount of exercise this year. To help with that, I decided to take a chance and order an under-desk exercise bike to get some extra cardio. The bike I bought is decent: it has good tension, stays in place, operates quietly, and offers Bluetooth connectivity for tracking…
1450
Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
Scaling the WhatsApp online-status hack from a single contact to 5000 random phone numbers — what the data says about phone usage habits.
1451
I paid for Spotify playlist placements so you don’t have to
As part of my ongoing mission to throw money into thin air I decided to promote some of Corserine’s songs on Spotify. Objectives: increase monthly streams on my Spotify artist page so I can g…
1452
Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering
Once upon a time we were creatures in the wilderness and we evolved the ability to hear sounds. Now here's an interesting thing, if you hear a sound of frequency f and others of frequency 2f, 3f, etc then there's a good chance these sounds come from the same object, due to the physical principle of resonance . And so…
1453
macOS Zero-Day Used Against Hong-Kong Activists
Google researchers discovered a MacOS zero-day exploit being used against Hong Kong activists. It was a “watering hole” attack, which means the malware was hidden in a legitimate website. Users visiting that website would get infected. From an article: Google’s researchers were able to trigger the exploits and study…
1454
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and this post (EvE) as a crash course on how BGP works).
1455
The Bay Area has become a large declining tech company
The large declining tech company. We’ve all read articles in the tech press and blogs analyzing how once hot companies lost their way. Most ...
1456
How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
1457
Can We Stop Pretending SMS Is Secure Now?
SMS text messages were already the weakest link securing just about anything online, mainly because there are tens of thousands of employees at mobile stores who can be tricked or bribed into swapping control over a mobile phone number to someone else. Now we’re learning about an entire ecosystem of companies that…
1458
Kinda a Big Announcement
The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha…
1459
Microsoft Silently Dropping Emails – a Sad but True Story (2020)
From time to time Microsoft decides to block or even silently drop emails that are sent by my selfhosted email server. It’s always a pain and takes a lot of effort to deal with it. This time I decided to…Read more ›
1460
PDP-11 Booting
Instructions for booting a PDP-11/34 with RT-11 from a RK05
1461
How to learn compilers: LLVM Edition
A collection of resources to start learning compilers (with a focus on LLVM)
1462
1463
SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
SVG, short for <em>“scalable vector graphics”</em> is a format for, well, scalable vector graphics. In this article I summarize my opinion of the format, what its problems are and suggest what could be done to improve things.
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1465
How Tail Call Optimization Works
Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…
1466
The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to…
1467
The Linux Distributions of 1992
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
1468
My thoughts about the Principal role
Am I a manager? No. In some cases, people may report to me from an organisational point of view but my way to manage is "don't manage at all" and let the team self organize with my help. I tend to focus more on the team and processes and less on people. I'm not a manager, I try to be a technical leader. Organizations…
1469
The only skin care that works? science video response (2020)
Recently ASAP Science released a video called "The ONLY face cream that works! – according to science". A lot of people asked me to do a response, so here it is on YouTube (keep scrolling for the text…
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