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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
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The quest for a simple smartwatch
My trusty old smartwatch recently stopped working. It was a Garmin Vivomove HR, a minimal hybrid watch with regular watch hands and a tiny hidden screen that showed notifications and messages. It served me well for quite some time but unfortunately the hidden screen has stopped working and it would cost me as much to…
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Cheap FPGA Development Boards: What to look for
I bought Avnet's $49 Spartan 3A development board but it was discontinued not long afterward - right about the time when I decided I needed a few dozen more. I've since done some extensive research (thanks, Google!) to find a comparable thrifty thrill.
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Where's my petabyte disk drive?
Fourteen years ago I noted that disk drives were growing so fast I couldn’t fill them up. Between 1997 and 2002, storage capacity doubled every year, allowing me to replace a 3 gigabyte drive with a new 120 gigabyte model. I wrote:
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We are starting to operate our CNC machines remotely
Explores how a CNC micro-factory adapted to remote operation using cameras, dashboards, and VPNs to overcome challenges like travel restrictions, improving…
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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.
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ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus
tl;dr: The ODROID-C2 is a very solid competitor to the Raspberry Pi model 3 B, and is anywhere from 2-10x faster than the Pi 3, depending on the operation. The software and community support is nowhere near what you get with the Raspberry Pi, but it's the best I've seen of all the Raspberry Pi clones I've tried. The…
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Discovery could extend battery life by replacing tape that causes self‑discharge
Thanks to a discovery in a Dal lab, manufacturers of laptops and other tech devices now have an explanation for why the batteries that power their gadgets tend to lose some of their charge over time and a path forward to fixing the problem..
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Why SSD Drives Destroy Court Evidence, and What Can Be Done About It (2012)
Why SSD Drives Destroy Court Evidence, and What Can Be Done About It: Explore the challenges posed by SSD drives in preserving court evidence and discover strategies to mitigate data loss risks.
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Tried Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – still no external GPU on a Pi
Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…
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A technical history of Acorn Computers
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
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Samsung demonstrates 3D stacked FETs with triple nanosheet channels at 42nm
Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor Research Center presented the paper “First Demonstration of 3D Stacked FETs at Gate Pitch of 42 nm Featuring Triple Stacked Nanosheet Channels for Advanced Logic Applications” at the 2026 VLSI Symposium, held from June 14–18.
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Reverse Engineering the Comtech AHA363 PCIe Gzip Accelerator Board
All this work was done in November last year. I haven’t worked on it since, but others have shown interest in picking this up, so it’s about time this gets thrown out in the open.
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Inside the 8086 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
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Implant.ARM.iLOBleed.a
HP servers provide a management module called iLO (a.k.a. Integrated Lights-Out), which turns on as soon as the power cable is connected, loading a full-blown proprietary operating system. This module has full access to all the firmware, hardware, software, and operating system installed on the server. In addition to…
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3D printing with cellulose
Researchers at MIT have invented a 3-D printing process for cellulose, the world’s most abundant polymer.
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Japanese Handsaws: The Maebiki Ooga
A famous blockprint by Hokusai titled “Mount Fuji Seen from the Mountains of Totomi,” showing a crew of sawyers rip-sawing a timber into boards using maebiki ooga saws, one man on top a…
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6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
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Chromecast: Exploiting the Newest Device By Google
On Wednesday, July 24th Google launched the Chromecast. As soon as the source code hit we began our audit. Within a short period of time we had multiple items to look at for when our devices arrived. Then we received our Chromecasts the following day and were able to confirm that one of the bugs existed in the build…
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Reconfigured Tesla coil aligns, electrifies materials from a distance
Rice University researchers use a modified Tesla coil to assemble nanoparticles into a wire from a distance. Their process, “Teslaphoresis,” may be used for the self-assembly of nano- and macro-scale materials.
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Reverse-engineering the division microcode in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
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A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
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Hacking eInk Price Tags (2021)
Dmitry.GR: Wireless picture frames that run for years on batteries
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Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.