2401
My experience releasing failed SaaS products
Build it and they will come! In the 1989 classic: Field of Dreams an Iowa farmer has a vision to bulldoze a portion of his corn crop in…
2402
2403
The first commercial astronaut mission to orbit Earth aboard Dragon
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.
2404
Tales from Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are fun, at least if you're making money.
2405
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…
2406
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...
2407
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.
2408
Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces
A few months ago I experimented with DigitalOcean spaces as my backup solutionthat could replace Dropboxeventually.
2409
Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
Which countries and rivers emit the most plastic to the ocean? What does this mean for solutions to tackle plastic pollution?
2410
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…
2411
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.
2412
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,...
2413
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…
2414
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.
2415
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…
2416
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…
2417
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…
2418
Nintendo DS-TV-Out Restoration Project
How Instagram helps gamers build authority, attract sponsors, and grow a loyal community beyond the game.
2419
(Very) Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Learn cryptography in Go by building ciphers, hashes, password security, and encryption tools. Understand security beneath the library call.
2420
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).
2421
Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
Alan Kay — “father of personal computers" — is best known for his work on personal computing and for leading the team that developed Smalltalk.
2422
PostgreSQL EXPLAIN Output Explained
UPDATED July 2023: How to use EXPLAIN ANALYZE in PostgreSQL, learn tools to visualize the output. See query execution time and row count.
2423
What’s up with these new not-open source licenses?
Understanding the movement of ‘single source’ companies from ‘open source’ to ‘source available’ licenses.
2424
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 ...
2425
We still believe in private offices (2015)
There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument , the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us.
2426
Atlas robot does parkour
By training Atlas to maneuver its way through complex parkour courses, our engineers push the humanoid robot to its limits.
2427
How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
April Fool's may be over, but once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Here’s what we found.
2428
Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)
Why does it take so long to build software? We hear variations of this question frequently: Why is building software so expensive? Why is my team delivering software so slowly? Why am I perpetually behind schedule with my software? There is a good reason we hear these questions over and over. Businesses need more and…
2429
My app failed: lessons learned
Making Software, the hardest way to make an easy living. TL:DR – check out Rithm: Habit tracking machine v2 in apple app store today Hey Kyle here, maker of Rithm. So early 2020, I launched Rithm, an app that helps...
2430
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…