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stong1

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Hack the Planet

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Well said. To expand on what you wrote, I like to think of there being three components (axes) to activities: fun, value, and meaning.

Fun is you enjoy doing it. Playing video games and watching TV is fun.

Valuable is it makes money. Importantly, it's what other people are willing to pay you money for, not what you think is important or even good.

Meaningful is it's spiritually enriching. These are things you would regret not doing on your deathbed. Spending time with your family or going to church are common examples of things that are meaningful to people (and potentially fun). This one is defined based on one's internal compass and varies significantly from person to person.

You can come up with activities that are pure fun, value, or meaning. Measuring activities against these three axes has been a valuable mental model for my time management and life design.

There's jobs that are fun and meaningful, but don't pay much. This is like charity work or passion tax industries such as game dev, music, or art.

There's also jobs that are fun and valuable, but are meaningless. Working at a trading firm/hedge fund is a common example (though some people may find that it's all three or only one). Another example is being a successful startup founder working on the wrong problem.

Finally, there are jobs that are valuable and meaningful, but maybe not all that fun. To me, this is what being a startup founder (working on the right problems) or how I imagine a professional athlete is like.

The grand slam would be having all three, but in my experience these are exceptionally rare. If it's fun and meaningful, everyone wants to do it, and supply and demand pushes the value down. Most of these cases are due to unusual personalities that let one find fun or meaning in activities others don't. This ties into the common startup advice of paying attention to "founder-problem fit" and "what are your unfair advantages".

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This is my article. Thank you for your kind words, I'm glad you all enjoyed it! I was very surprised to wake up this morning to see it on HN, haha.

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We work across all major ecosystems and platforms. Our specializations include EVM, Cosmos, Solana, Move (Aptos/Sui), and L1 code as well. We're a full-service provider and can do anything from auditing ZK circuits to web frontends to hardware wallet firmware. Clients include LayerZero, Solana Foundation, Aptos Labs, Sui Foundation, Starkware, Jump.

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Right. The challenge is written incorrectly on purpose, otherwise the code isn't vulnerable. The use of volatile is a bit of a misdirection for the CTF players, since you're right that it's a common misconception that volatile acts like a barrier.

You cannot write a single-writer, single-reader FIFO on modern processors without the use of memory barriers.

I am not sure about this. From my understanding, on x86, given the absence of compiler reordering, processor reordering should not cause a problem for a single-reader-single-writer FIFO. Normally I just use atomics but I think in this specific instance it should still be okay anyways. Obviously it will not work on ARM.

From my testing if you compile the code on x86 with clang or gcc, the resulting binary is not vulnerable.