Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 258 posts.
It’s been over a year since I created the first version of my Ambilight clone , but I finally found the time to return to it and add some new features. I was originally planning on adding colour correction (to correct for the purple wall behind my TV) and output delay (to get perfect synchronisation with the TV), but…
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider with a unique focus on technology and collaborative problem solving.
In-memory workloads continue to be the backbone of innovative data management use cases, but as demand increases, so does the need for even larger memory capacity. In July, we announced a partnership with Intel and SAP to offer GCP virtual machines supporting Intel® Optane DC™ persistent memory for SAP workloads. This…
East-German spy radio set Type 2, used during the Cold War by agents working for East-Germany (DDR).
I have been studying the Magic Leap One (ML1) for a few weeks, taking over 1,000 photos and making many measurements. I’m bursting with things I want to talk about, so I am planning to releas…
Tokyo, Japan—Sony Corporation today announced the upcoming release of the IMX586 stacked CMOS image sensor for smartphone cameras. The new sensor features 48 effective megapixels, the industry's highest pixel count.
I recently learned that in the mid 90s in Japan, the Super Nintendo had a peripheral called a Satellaview, which was a satellite modem that would receive data broadcasts from Nintendo.
Update 2021-11-12: System76 is now using the LVFS to distribute firmware. We're working together to put much more firmware on the LVFS in the future. System76 is a hardware vendor that builds laptops with the Pop_OS! Linux distribution pre-loaded. System76 machines do get firmware updates, but do not use the fwupd and…
Microsoft IntelliMouse. Originally launched in 1996, it became instantly famous with gamers and highly regarded as a great gaming mouse. The IntelliMouse 3.0 had exceptional ergonomics due to its the asymmetric from, and sculpted buttons and finger rests, making it fit perfectly into your hand. It also used long life…
Processor problems have been in the news lately, due to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But generally, engineers writing software assume that computer hardware operates in a reliable, well-understood fashion, and that any problems lie on the software side of the software-hardware divide.
MINERVA-II1: Successful image capture, landing on Ryugu and hop!
Hardware Bugs can be frustrating, as they are likely the last place you would expect a bug. Unfortunately, they can and do happen. Most likely every CPU has a list of erratas. This post outlines th…
Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18 With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to m…
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro, perished November 8 due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California. He was 79.
How to combine Minecraft and the Wolfram Language, both standard on Raspberry Pi, to make interesting structures, add character capabilities or render your own output in 3D. Clear instructions on installation, using the MinecraftLink library, building, reacting to events.
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
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.
The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, the optic...
A blog post on reverse engineering and customizing the firmware of a cheap fitness tracker bracelet.
The last primary keyboard I’ll use in my life might be the IBM Model M. It’ll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete. - Kheng Meng, 2018 I just had to start my blog post with that self quote ^^^ but I’m pretty confident it’ll hold true for me. I have owned several keyboards so…
In recent years, compute-intensive artificial intelligence tasks have prompted creation of a wide variety of custom hardware to run these powerful new systems efficiently. Deep learning models, suc…
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other expo…
