Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 258 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
6

Dumber phone

Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…

8

Mmm, Pi-hole

I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their

17

Why does a spray bottle work?

Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…

19

Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…

25

Introducing Project Mu

The Microsoft Devices Team is excited to announce Project Mu, the open-source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core leveraged by Microsoft products including both Surface and the latest releases of Hyper-V. UEFI is system software that initializes hardware during the boot process and…

28

2018 Mac Mini Review

I hardly ever think about my Mac Mini, but it serves a vital role for my family as our home-theater mixer , Plex server, ScanSnap server, Apple Photos backup, and Backblaze host for our NAS . 1 Almost every port on the back is in use, and it runs 24/7, reliably, in total silence.