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Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
A gauntlet thrown
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,807 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
3272
Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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Next-generation solar cells pass strict international tests
Light-weight, cheap and ultra-thin, perovskite solar cells have promised to shake-up renewable energy for some time. Research by Professor Anita Ho-Baillie from the University of Sydney means they are ready to take the next steps towards commercialisation.
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Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller
IBM used some unusual techniques in its integrated circuits, and one of the most visible is packaging them in square metal cans. I've been...
3277
Intel Gaudi2 chips outperform Nvidia H100 on diffusion transformers
Our commitment to developing cutting-edge open models in multiple modalities necessitates a compute solution capable of handling diverse tasks with efficiency. To this end, we conducted a performance analysis, training two of our models, including the highly anticipated Stable Diffusion 3.
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Some alloys don't change size when heated – recent work on why
Researchers in the lab of Brent Fultz have discovered why so-called Invar alloys keep a steady size and shape over a broad range of temperatures—unlike most materials.
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Researchers discover new third class of magnetism
A new class of magnetism called altermagnetism has been imaged for the first time in a new study. The findings could lead to the development of new magnetic memory devices with the potential to increase operation speeds of up to a thousand times.
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MNT Pocket Reform first impressions and hardware
Initial experiences with the MNT Pocket Reform, primarily the hardware (and tinkering!)
3281
The Lapdock Kit
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx
「99歳にもなったら入れる施設なんてあるのだろうか…」こんな悩みを抱えてはいませんか？現代社会は「少子高齢化社会」と呼ばれ、人口に占める高齢者の数が増えてきています。また、医療の発達により寿命はどんどん長くなっており、介護に関する悩みを抱える人も多いのではないでしょうか。
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Rapid Prototyping with a $100 Inkjet Printer
Why just print forms and airline tickets from an inkjet printer when you can print electronics! All you need to do is to replace the…
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How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
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Computer-generated dream world: Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
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Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
Rune Skovbo Johansen has a really sweet Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique, where the dither dots “stick” to 3D surfaces, yet the dot density adapts to the view distance and zoom level.
3290
Breaking Samsung Firmware, or Turning Your S8/S9/S10 into a DIY “Proxmark”
This post is a companion to the DEF CON 28 video available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLe-xW-Ws4c Breaking the Firmware of Samsung’s NFC Chips Recently I have been looking into how to push the capabilities of my old smartphones beyond what you could traditionally do just by rooting it. Smartphones contain…
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QEMU 4.0 adds micro:bit emulation support
micro:bit emulation support is available from QEMU 4.0 onwards and can be used for low-level software testing and development. Unlike existing micro:bit simulators, QEMU performs full-system emulation and actually runs the same ARM code as the real hardware. This blog post explains what full-system emulation means and…
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Designing and building an FPGA sprite-based graphics accelerator (2014)
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…
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I don’t need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining …
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The 13-Inch MacBook Air
It’s taken decades of iterative refinement to get to this point — a nearly perfect laptop for nearly everyone.
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Exciting Days for ARM Processors
Introduction ARM CPUs have long dominated the mobile world, nearly all Apple and Android phones and tablets utilize some model of ARM processor. However Intel and AMD still dominate the laptop, des…
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The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party
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Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better
Oculus Go, like all products, is the result of a series of compromises around cost, schedule, quality, and competence. It is clearly the best standalone VR platform on the market, but anyone …
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Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
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Restoring a 37 Year-Old IBM F Mechanical Keyboard
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...