Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 391 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
61

Second IC

In 2018 I made the first lithographically fabricated integrated circuits in my garage fab. I was a senior in high school when I made the Z1 amplifier, and now I’m a senior in college so there are some long overdue improvements to the amateur silicon process. The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great test chip to…

62

Setting up Starlink

In March, I got an email from SpaceX saying Starlink was available at my address, and I could pre-order. I paid $500 for the equipment, plus $25 for a Volcano Roof Mount, and $99 for the first month of service, and a few weeks later, I got the kit you see in the image above. I was a little too excited about getting…

74

Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags

Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…

89

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

14 November 2022: This blog has been updated to remove the link to the preview form. Last year at AWS re:Invent, Jeff Barr wrote about the exciting availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances. Today, we’re announcing the preview of a new EC2 M1 Mac instance. The introduction of EC2 Mac…