301
My phone replaced a brass plug
Porting a 2012 OpenCV paper to YOLOv8 and CoreML on iOS to score rifle shooting targets from a photo - replacing the brass-plug scoring gauge with on-device computer vision.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,805 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
302
MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be
iPads should be radically touch only, and MacBooks should be keyboard-first
303
Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era
An overview of Google’s eighth generation TPUs, built for the agentic era.
304
How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
305
The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
306
Ternary Bonsai: Top Intelligence at 1.58 Bits
Today, we’re announcing Ternary Bonsai, a new family of 1.58-bit language models designed to balance strict memory constraints with high accuracy requirements.
307
Codex Hacked a Samsung TV
We gave Codex a foothold. It popped a root shell.
308
CPUs Aren't Dead. Gemma2B Out Scored GPT-3.5 Turbo on Test That Made It Famous
Gemma 2B scored ~8.0 on MT-Bench. GPT-3.5 Turbo scored 7.94. An 87-times-smaller model on a laptop CPU, no GPU anywhere in the stack. We published the full tape — every question, every turn, every score — so anyone can verify it. We found seven failure classes. Not hallucinations. Specific patterns: arithmetic where…
309
Mechanical Keyboard Sounds – A listening Museum
36 mechanical keyboards. Click. Type. Listen. From IBM Model M (1985) to modern thocky customs.
310
Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6
Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 upgrades spatial reasoning and multi-view understanding, unlocking new capabilities like instrument reading for autonomous robots.
311
80386 Memory Pipeline
The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom. On DE10-Nano it currently runs at 75 MHz. With the core now far enough along to run real software, this seems like a good point to step back and look at one of the 80386's performance-critical…
312
The dangers of California's legislation to censor 3D printing
California’s bill, AB 2047, will not only mandate censorware on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of DRM won’t make anyone safer, but it will hurt innovation in the state and risks a slew of new consumer harms ranging from surveillance to platform…
313
The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
314
Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)
If you often get static electricity shocks when touching your laptop or your office chair, or your monitor goes black when you stand up, this may interest you.
315
The Orange Pi 6 Plus
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
316
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
317
Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase
Researchers at ETH Zurich have realised particularly stable quantum logical operations with qubits made of neutral atoms. Since these operations, called quantum gates, are based on geometric phases they are extremely robust against experimental noise and can be used in quantum computers in the future.
318
How Passive Radar Works
Passive radar is radar that doesn't need a transmitter; it uses existing broadcasts of opportunity.
319
What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
In this blog I will look at some of the drivers for the growth of RISC-V, its value proposition and explain why supporting RISC-V is important to Canonical. […]
320
Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones
Pedestrians wearing headphones are exposed to an increased risk of accidents. In an effort to reduce collisions with cyclists, Škoda Auto, in collaboration with scientists, introduces an innovative bicycle bell whose sound can penetrate even active noise cancellation systems. In doing so, it helps prevent injuries to…
321
Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
How to move fast when building for the physical world
322
Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
I spent years building one of the most popular LED strip visualizers on GitHub. It's the kind of project that's easy to get started but diabolically hard to master.
323
Tofolli gates are all you need
Any Boolean function can be computed with Tofolli gates, and Tofolli gates are reversible, and so any Boolean function can be computed reversibly.
324
Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
325
Will I ever own a zettaflop?
As the eleventh hour dawns all the pieces start to fall into place. I lived my life knowing this would happen, yet when it is I may be just as unprepared as anyone else. As any self driving car maker knows, predicting doesn’t mean you can act.
326
Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…
327
IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
Collaboration aims to advance new technologies that expand infrastructure choice while preserving mission-critical environments ARMONK, N.Y., April 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today...
328
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Today Raspberry Pi announced more price increases for all Pis with LPDDR4 RAM, alongside a 'right-sized' 3GB RAM Pi 4 for $83.75. The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Despite today's date, this is not a joke. I published a video going over the state of the hobbyist 'high end SBC' market (4/8/16 GB…
329
CERN levels up with new superconducting karts
The race is on to test new vehicles in the underground Large Hadron Collider tunnel, ahead of major works starting this summer
330
Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
We turned a MacBook into a touchscreen using only $1 of hardware and a little bit of computer vision.