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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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64 GB Surface Pro will only have 23 GB free
A company spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the 64GB edition of Surface Pro will have 23GB of free storage out of the box. The 128GB model will have 83GB of free storage. It appears that the Windows 8 install, built-in apps, and a recovery partition will make up the 41GB total on the base Surface Pro model.
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Inside the ALU of the 8085 microprocessor
The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works i...
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We don't know why lithium batteries work
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
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Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen
Meet a Shenzhen Maker: Mr. Chen | Automate ALL the things!
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Ludde's FPGA NES
I was a bit bored during Christmas, so I decided to construct a whole Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in an FPGA . An FPGA is a progra...
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The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level
In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathema...
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The Factory Floor, Part 1 of 4: The Quotation (or, How to Make a BOM)
This month, I will be teaching a few MIT Media Lab graduate students and doing a bit of a “geek tour” of Shenzhen – we will visit several factories and live among the electronic markets to facilitate new directions and expand horizons in the students’ hardware-oriented research projects.
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MicroSD card FAQ
A while back I wrote an analysis of fake microSD cards. As a result of the post, I’ve received this question regularly via email:
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Ideas for Raspberry Pi Projects
 Ideas for your Raspberry Pi!The chances are you have a Raspberry Pi or there's one on the way to you, n
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Building my Own Laptop
We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.
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Smuggling USB Sticks
"This Is Not A Film" by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest in his country for alleged “propaganda against the regime,” will be screened under the Free Jafar Panahi Program of the 13th Cinemanila. The film was smuggled from Iran in a Flash-Drive hidden inside a cake to Cannes for screening a few…
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The Core Memory Module from my dad’s homebuilt PDP-11/05
This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle is where the cores are actually stored. Each bit is a little ring with 3 wires running through the middle. By running current…
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A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is very good, but not quite the best
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
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Why I'm returning my Microsoft Surface RT
Do not buy a Microsoft Surface RT yet. I’m typing this with gritted teeth. My 24 hours with the half-baked Surface have been a frustrating challenge, a mix of love and hate. I want want want this…
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An Alternate Universe (Microsoft Surface)
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
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The Hardware Renaissance
October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that…
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Introducing the USB Stick of Death
Several months back we have been playing with different file systems on various system platforms, examining the security posture and robustness of numerous device drivers’ implementations. One of the configurations we spent some time on was the commonly used NTFS on Microsoft Windows – as the file system is rather…
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This Is Why They Call It a Weakly-Ordered CPU
On this blog, I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these …
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A Modern Space Cadet
I spend a lot of my time (easily over 8 hours a day) at a keyboard. As you might have guessed from my previous entries about Vim and Mutt I'm not averse to spending a few hours to improve an environment I'm going to be spending tens of thousands of hours in over the next few years, so it shouldn't be a shock that my…
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How to build a windmill
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they…
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3D printer community revolting against Makerbot's new closed-source printer
When I woke up, my RSS reader showed some "occupy thingiverse" things posted on Thingiverse. I'm still trying to figure out all that happen...