1321
It's the memory latency, stupid
When your database CPU is at 100%, what is it actually doing? Memory stalls, CPU caches, and how radix partitioning makes GROUP BY faster.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,805 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
1322
Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
1323
Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration
Why the integration has been removed from Home Assistant in 2023.10.2.
1324
An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Plane radar is a neat little project that pulls nearby ADS-B traffic, plots each aircraft by distance and bearing, and shows the details directly on a cute little screen.
1325
DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter
I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.
1326
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL
London's Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page s...
1327
I turned the Lego Game Boy into a working Game Boy
Sharing my thoughts and current projects.
1328
New iPad mini
Apple unveils the all-new iPad mini, featuring an OLED display in a thinner design, a leap in performance with A20 Pro, and water and dust resistance.
1329
M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
1330
Building a Lightroom PC
Why I switched to Windows 10 from macOS and built a water-cooled and overclocked 5.2GHz 6-core PC for photo editing with Adobe Lightroom Classic CC.
1331
Meta’s Reality Labs prototype hardware
Both Butterscotch Varifocal and Flamera are very much in the research stage, and the technologies they’re investigating may never make their way into a consumer-facing product. And, as we hope you’ll come to see, that’s very much the point.
1332
1333
The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
1334
1335
Make your electronics tamper-evident
If the police ever have physical access to an electronic device like a laptop, even for five minutes , they can install hardware keyloggers, create images of the storage media, or otherwise trivially compromise it at the hardware, firmware, or software level. One way to minimize this risk is to make devices…
1336
Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4
Read up about how you can cool off your Raspberry Pi 4 and drop a few degrees. I compare several cooling solutions including firmware updates.
1337
Bare-metal Rust in Android
Posted by Andrew Walbran, Android Rust Team Last year we wrote about how moving native code in Android from C++ to Rust has resulted in ...
1338
1339
New Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor
lego AND mindstorms, lego AND robot, lego AND product, lego AND launch, lego AND 2020, lego AND code, lego AND coding, lego AND inventor, lego AND stem, lego AND steam, lego AND app, lego 2020
1340
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
1341
Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
1342
1343
Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
1344
1345
A home made PCB stepper motor
The first idea is interesting because it means cheap, precision-manufactured PCBs can be easily transformed into cheap, precise tiny motors.
1346
The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
1347
HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
1348
Lisp Badge LE
This is a self-contained low-power computer with its own display and keyboard that you can program in uLisp, a version of the high-level language Lisp for microcontrollers:
1349
CPU Backdoors
It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…
1350
It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…