Interesting Things #13 — Honeypot

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This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields.

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#tech

The FBI’s honeypot Pixel 4a gets detailed in new report — FBI honeypot phones are now public and showing up on the secondary market. (hn)

Lessons of a startup engineer — I’d like to document all the lessons I’ve experienced and been reminded of. (hn)

Hello, Video Codec! — Let’s demystify video codecs by writing one from scratch in about a hundred lines of Rust. (hn)

Software Development Is Misunderstood — Quality is the fastest way to get code into production.

Keyboard Pants — A split keyboard attached to the pants. Really. (hn)

Ribbon filter: Practically smaller than Bloom and Xor — A new data structure that is more space-efficient than the popular Bloom filters used for optimizing data retrieval. (hn)

How SHA-256 Works Step-By-Step — We’ll break down each step of the algorithm and work through a real-life example by hand.

Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications — Millions of production workloads, and trillions of requests per month. (hn)

Cyborg Control — An Internet-remote-controllable toy cyborg with a little doll head. (hn)

The strange, sketchy emails a browser extension developer receives — Where does extension malware come from? It might originate from emails like these.

There Are Many Ways To Safely Count — A compilation of ways on how to implement a goroutine-safe counter. (hn)

Write good examples by starting with real code — The basic idea here is to start with real code that you wrote and then remove irrelevant details. (hn)

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding New Developers: Industry Best Practices and How to Plan the First 90 Days — Wondering how to best get your new developer assimilated and contributing as quickly as possible? (hn)

How to Install Windows 3.1 on an iPad — Thanks to a MS-DOS emulator called iDOS 2 on the App Store. (hn)

Endless Loops: Detecting and Animating Periodic Patterns in Still Images — A new automated method for creating surreal and structured cinemagraphs. (hn)

Navigating the 8 fallacies of distributed computing (Jun 2021) — How to avoid falling into their trap when engineering distributed systems. (hn)

Using WebAssembly threads from C, C++ and Rust — How to bring multithreaded applications written in other languages to WebAssembly. (hn)

Deno is Webby — This response to nodejs has a very web-like philosophy. (hn)

The Internet of Things is a Complete Mess (and how to Fix it) — I want to demonstrate why based on some recent experiences. (hn)

The Human Side of Elixir — A look at the Elixir programming language from the engineer/business perspective. (hn)

One Database Transaction Too Many — I learn a valuable lesson about nested transactions and Django signals.

Writing a Bash Builtin in C to Parse INI Configs — If you have a task poorly suited to Bash, consider writing a custom builtin to extend Bash for the task. (hn)

Apple Security Bounty: A personal experience — Why I believe it’s a lie after reporting an issue, testing fixes and being left in the dark after 14 months. (hn)

Using Client-Side Map Data to Improve Real-Time Positioning — How Lyft improves on device location tracking with map data. (hn)

#indie biz

Decentralized Finance: What It Is, Why It Matters — DeFi’s two foundational qualities, permissionless-ness and transparency, translate to multiple, powerful use cases. (hn)

The rule of three in persuasion — Less than three, you miss out on being more persuasive. More than three, people become skeptical. (hn)

Your competitors don’t matter — Your real competition isn’t your competitors, it’s the status quo. (hn)

#science

Cauliflower and Chaos, Fractals in Every Floret — Scientists take a crack at recreating the hypnotic fractal spirals of the Romanesco cauliflower. (hn)

This researcher has cracked the bioelectric code of the body and learned to reprogram it — It turns out that all cells in the body communicate with each other using electrical signals.

Beetle that can walk upside down under water surface filmed in Australia in world first — Tiny insect walks on the underside of the water surface as if it were a pane of glass. (hn)

Neurons Unexpectedly Encode Information in the Timing of Their Firing — A temporal pattern of activity observed in human brains may explain how we can learn so quickly.

Scientists Have Created a New Bendy And Flexible Form of Ice —Scientists have just grown microfibers of water ice that can bend in a loop. (hn)

Scientists produce continuous sheets of sustainable mushroom leather — An alternative leather made from fungi.

Self-Medicating Chimps, Pugilistic Shrimp, and Other Remarkable Animals: An Illustrated Guide — A short catalog of wondrous beings. (hn)

#life

Inside the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation — Russia and Ukraine promised to cooperate and help catch the world’s most successful hackers.

Your Life is Driven by Network Effects — Revealing the Unseen Forces That Guide Your Life. (hn)

Can you hear the Hum? The mystery noise that says a lot about modern life — The insistent low-frequency sound has been attributed to everything from horny fish to 5G, but the enigma itself is telling.

The Inner Ring of The Internet — In any group, there is an ever-shifting circle of insiders. (hn)

The strategy you need to manage that micromanager — How to push back respectfully. The key point is, you need to push back. (hn)

A Founder’s Guide to Over-Communication — What it means and how to approach it in a remote environment. (hn))

You Really Need to Quit Twitter — I have succumbed to this common, embarrassing habit that just about everyone on Earth knows is a scourge.

Can People Still Play the Same Games as They Get Older? — While some aspects of cognition degrade with age, there’s a type that stays flat or even improves. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng