2101
The magic of the Japanese convenience store sandwich
Why is the Japanese Convenience Store Sandwich so iconic? After eating (a lot of) them on my past trips I decided it was time to find out exactly why they are so moreish! There are
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,821 posts.
2102
Web 3.0 – The Great Con
I'll say it - web 3.0 is a meaningless buzzword, and blockchain and cryptocurrency is nothing more than a giant fraud.
2103
2104
How is portable AM radio possible?
If AM radio antennas were as long as a quarter wavelength of the carrier signal, you'd need an antenna as long as a football field.
2105
Being a Solo Software Entrepreneur at 40
A tale of growth, responsibilities, and limits.
2106
Why train when you can optimize?
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…
2107
My Notebook System
This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. (Update: 10 years reached 2022-03-31, 100th notebook 2022-07-28.) After many attempts to write this up, I’m just going to disgorge it all. This article is long and rambling and I make no apology for it. Feel free to skip around to any part…
2108
Money Stuff is Linear-ish
What was once a pre-market morning newsletter became an afternoon newsletter, 12 seconds at a time
2109
2110
Talk like a systems engineer: Yaks all the way down
Professional niches have – time immemorial – built their own special dialects and languages, sometimes using this as an…
2111
Crypto, the Left and Technofeudalism
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
2112
AWS Graviton vs. M1 vs. M1 Pro Node.js Benchmarks
I am lucky in that I have a few side projects which have grown up to become full fledged companies. One of them builds little tools to detect different types of financial crime.
2113
2114
Vets today are like doctors yesterday
And doctors today are miserable
2115
SQLite Doesn't Use Git
Instead, it uses Fossil as a version control system. Some thoughts.
2116
DOS on Dope (2010)
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
2117
Cracking encrypted LastPass vaults
The recent (2022) compromise of Lastpass included email addresses, home addresses, names, and encrypted customer vaults. In this post I will demonstrate how attackers may leverage tools like Hashcat to crack an encrypted vault with a weak password.
2118
2119
Ultrasonic Payments
Experimenting with ultrasonic data transmission in JavaScript as a payment method.
2120
Where in the world are Trader Joe’s warehouses? (2015)
Personal website of Samuel Burer, Tippie Rollins Professor of Business Analytics, University of Iowa.
2121
2122
Stop Writing Dead Programs
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
2123
Microvium Is Small
The Microvium JavaScript engine for microcontrollers takes less than 16 kB of ROM and 64 bytes of RAM per VM while idle, making it possibly the smallest JavaScript engine to date with more language features than engines 4x its size
2124
Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
2125
A 74xx-Defined Radio (2021)
Video Appetizer TLDR I built a shortwave radio receiver from scratch using only cheap and easily available components, i.e. standard transistors, op-amps and 74xx logic chips. No typical radio part…
2126
Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security
When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech's centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.
2127
How to Drop Out (2004)
People who work get bored when they don't work. People who don't work never get bored.
2128
Psychedelics and mental illness
The science of psychedelics is everywhere – but we should treat it with serious scepticism
2129
My next main browser: a review of Orion
Orion is currently my favourite browser, and has replaced Safari entirely on one of my primary Macs. Here's why.
2130
A guide to getting started with embedded systems
In this article, I share a beginner friendly guide to learning the basics of embedded systems and how they work. I talk about micontrollers, electronics, and software. I also share my motivation for working on embedded systems.