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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
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The Death of the Von Neumann Architecture
Lots of exciting new things were announced at the latest Apple WWDC this week, but hidden amongst the big announcements was an extension of something that's been bothering me for a while.
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A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…
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Inside Look at Valve's New Lighthouse Tracking System
While walking around the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, I stumbled across an amazing piece of technology: Valve's "Lighthouse" tracking system. Valve's demos were (supposedly) a major contributor to Oculus' fundraising efforts and ultimate sale to Facebook, and this device may have been a key piece of those demos…
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Inside a $34 smartphone
This Huami H3 smartphone cost me $34US (210RMB) in January. It's sold with a 5 inch screen, Bluetooth, WiFi, 4G cell connectivity, Android 4.4 and an 8 core processor.
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Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10
Read it on alexvking.com
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The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
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Coding for SSDs
Translations: This article was translated to Simplified Chinese by Xiong Duo and to Korean by Matt Lee (이 성욱). Introduction I want to make solid-state drives (SSDs) the optimal storage solution for my key-value store project. For that reason, I had to make sure I fully understood how SSDs work, so that I can optimize
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DIY FPGA-based HDMI ambient lighting
Ambient lighting is a technique that creates light effects around the television that correspond to the video content. It has been pioneered...
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NHL goal celebration hack: real-time machine learning and hue light show
This post does a deep dive on the **epic goal celebration hack**. In a single sentence, I trained a machine learning model to detect in real-time that a goal was just scored by the Habs based on the live audio feed of a game and to trigger a light show using Philips hues in my living room.
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8088 PC Speaker MOD player: How it’s done
The last 100 seconds of 8088 MPH sound very different to the rest of the demo. The end tune is actually a 4-channel Amiga MOD file (which you can download here ) composed by coda . Playing back a MOD through PC speaker on such a slow machine has never been done before. Here is how we did it.
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Atreus – kit to build your own mechanical keyboard
My last post documented my initial exposure to the wild world of custom keyboards and the numerous ways it's possible to improve on the conventional design. As I dug deeper into the topic, I was struck with the simplicity of the underlying concepts. While the Ergodox is a notable and admirable achievement of…
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Is the Mill CPU real? (2014)
I’ve seen the Mill CPU come up a number of times — maybe because I subscribed to their updates and so I get emails about their talks. They’re getting a bunch of buzz, but every t…
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Motion sensing using the doppler effect
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic ! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!
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USB-C and Modular Smartphones Are the End-Game for Convergence
Two new technologies – the modular smartphone and USB 3.1 – are set to radically accelerate the convergence of everything to a single, in-pocket device. In fact, they are so revolutionary that they will change the entire way we think about mobile computing as the iPhone did earlier this millennium.
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A database of SMS cards: The technology inside IBM's 1960s mainframes
IBM's mainframes of the 1960s are based on an interesting technology - Standard Modular System cards or SMS cards. These cards, created in ...