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The Whispering Earring
Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is ba...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 322 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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How to design a proper USB-C™ power sink (hint, not the way Raspberry Pi 4 did it)
This issue came up recently for a high profile new gadget that has made the transition from Micro-USB to USB-C in its latest version, the…
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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1
A new series that reviews 21 different microcontrollers — all less than $1 — to help familiarize you with all the major ecosystems out there.
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The impossible dream of USB-C
I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.
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CAN Injection: Keyless car theft
This is a detective story about how a car was stolen - and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.
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The microhydro plant
setting up a microhydro installation
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RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
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Thinkpad X62
Back in January, I used an old Thinkpad while my 12” Macbook was being repaired. I found myself really enjoying some aspects of it. This nudged me down a path that ended with me modding a frankenpad…
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Clip control on the Apple GPU
After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games. There’s more to do, but Neverball is already playable (and a lot of fun!).
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Explaining 4K 60Hz Video Through USB-C Hub
USB-C offers exciting new capabilities, including external monitors connected through the USB port. USB-C converters to DisplayPort or HDMI are common and inexpensive. USB-C hubs with external monitor support are also common, but understanding their capabilities and limitations can be extremely confusing. Some are…
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Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
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Ice Lake AVX-512 Downclocking
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
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My Business Card Runs Linux
I’m an embedded systems engineer. I spend a lot of my free time looking for things I could use in future designs, or things that tickle one of my fancies.
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USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
A short story of me trying out different USB-C hubs, taking them apart, and slowly descending into madness.
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Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?
How Chinas strategic focus on 3D printing and patent incentives since 2020 created a "minefield".
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
A 2016 technical analysis of the 16GB RAM limit in Intel MacBook Pro models, including Phil Schiller’s direct response and two corrections.
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Open Hardware on Its Own Doesn’t Solve the Trust Problem
A few years ago, Sean ‘xobs’ Cross and I built an open-source laptop, Novena, from the circuit boards up, and shared our designs with the world. I’m a strong proponent of open hardware, because sharing knowledge is sharing power. One thing we didn’t anticipate was how much the press wanted to frame our open hardware…
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
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The $12 Gongkai Phone
Recently, I paid $ 12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.
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The KindleBerry Pi
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
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The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
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