Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 242 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
110

Pinephone first steps

After anki trashed my history, uploaded the trashed history to the sync server, and then repeatedly re-synced the trashed history every time I tried to restore from backup, I wrote my own spaced repetition app. It reads input from a markdown file, asks questions in the terminal and stores state in a json file. I wrote…

112

AWS Graviton2

In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type ( AWS Designed Processor: Graviton ). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation…

119

ThinkPad 560E

I’ve been idly looking for one of the mid-90s ThinkPads known to have perfect OpenStep/Rhapsody support for years as a fun collector piece, but been unwilling to pay eBay prices. The other week I scored a pristine IBM ThinkPad 560E for $20 in a Shopgoodwill auction, below is notes on getting it up and running, plus…