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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,981 posts.

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2014
1743

Let’s Make a Bubble Map

My previous Let’s Make a Map tutorial describes how to make a basic map with D3 and TopoJSON ; now it’s time to cover thematic mapping in the form of a proportional symbol map. The simplest symbol is a circle, or bubble , whose area is proportional to the associated data. In this tutorial, we’ll make a bubble map of…

1746

1971 Social Engineering Attack

From Betty Medsger’s book on the 1971 FBI burglary (page 22): As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft…

1761

An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator

A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…

1764

The Colors of Chemistry

This notebook documents my exploration of color theory and its applications to photochemistry. It also shows off the functionality of several Julia packages: Color.jl for color theory and colorimetry, SIUnits.jl for unitful computations, and Gadfly.jl for graph plotting.