Reading up on hardware

The author successfully printed a 500‑micrometer‑tall Benchy using the RepRapMicron PIKA V0.02 printer and eSun Standard Resin in under three hours.

The post shows how J‑Link and Zephyr let you pick access ports to debug the Cortex‑M33 and RISC‑V cores on the nRF54LM20, with AP IDR examples.

Atomic Machines uses AI to design and fabricate microrobots by training models on material properties and design patterns to accelerate development.

Tony Fadell says the first AI gadgets flopped because they addressed no genuine need and couldn't earn user trust, and that trustworthy AI assistants must run‑on device to protect privacy.

The author describes building a decentralized, fire‑proof backup system using M‑Disc Blu‑rays sealed in rugged cases and given to trusted friends for long‑term data preservation.

Meta introduced its Muse Home Link smart‑home device and encourages users to design and build their own Muse‑compatible gadgets today.

The Hacker News post titled 'World Labs is Joining AMD' asserts that the company World Labs has entered into a relationship with semiconductor manufacturer AMD.

Micron’s CEO predicts memory supply will be significantly tighter in 2027 and 2028 compared to 2026 levels, citing rising AI-driven demand and constrained fab capacity.

Apple has released detailed dimensional drawings of its products for developers and designers.

The Ask HN post inquires which businesses still rely on legacy DOS systems and keep them operational for critical operations.

Phyllotaxis is an audio-reactive LED display project that uses programmable LEDs and a microcontroller to translate sound frequencies into dynamic light patterns.

a16z’s State of Markets II shows tech drove ~76% of S&P 500 earnings growth in 1H’26, hardware and AI infrastructure are rising, and software faces a ‘prove‑it’ phase.

The author built an audio-reactive LED sculpture based on phyllotaxis patterns, detailing the math, 3D‑printed Voronoi cells, PCB assembly, and Rust‑based firmware.

Starship reached orbit for the first time on its 14th test flight, a crucial milestone toward SpaceX's moon and Mars ambitions.

S3's architecture is built for disk-era limits, but with cheap SSDs and fast networks, a new SSD-based disaggregated storage service could replace it — cloud providers lack incentive.

Students turned a pharmacy cross into a programmable display using a custom C++ library, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and Pillow to show images and video.

Inferact's TPU‑v7 megakernel for Kimi K3 achieves over 700 tokens per second with speculative decoding, nearly double the GB200 baseline at batch size 1.

China's CXMT says its fifth‑generation DRAM, with 11.95 nm half‑pitch and four‑exposure patterning, matches Samsung and Micron’s leading nodes and delivers at least 50% more dies per wafer.

The article presents an assembly language snippet and asks readers to identify its function and the computer architecture it belongs to.

Googlebooks launch October 4 with five OLED Android laptops from $899 to $1,299, featuring premium hardware, deep phone integration, and on‑device AI tools.

Reddit users share their curated lists of five favorite games for each retro system to load onto a Nova handheld, debating selections and omissions.

Jason Hoffman recounts his failed attempts to buy half a million dollars of Sun servers, contrasting Sun's unresponsive sales with Dell's efficient direct sales process.

Guitarists should purchase effects hardware for its physical qualities and run any firmware they choose, since cheap modern chips and open-source amp models make proprietary firmware unnecessary.

For local LLMs, memory bandwidth and size determine token speed and model capacity; Strix Halo offers more memory per dollar, while Apple Macs with higher bandwidth generate tokens faster.

Valve's new Steam Frame gaming monitor launches with a starting price of $1,059, featuring a 27‑inch 4K 144Hz HDR display aimed at enthusiast PC gamers.

SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine by eliminating external sensors, igniters, bolted flanges, and internalizing piping via 3D printing, raising thrust about 35% while reducing mass.

Tiny e-ink readers are designed to replace phone glances in brief moments, not to substitute full-sized Kindles for extended reading.

The piece argues that Apple’s September event marked the start of the John Ternus era, positioning the iPhone as the AI-era intelligent personal hub while unveiling new hardware.

SpaceX plans to launch Starship Flight 14 on September 22, aiming to reach orbit for the first time while carrying 26 V3 Starlink satellites.

Jim Nielsen prints and tapes a social‑media post about preserving a big box of cables to his own cable storage as a personal reminder of its usefulness and joy.

The article argues that rapid advances in hardware, AI models, and agent harnesses are converging to create distributed superintelligence that could reshape the world before humans can react.

Speculative decoding in vLLM enables vLLM to verify multiple draft tokens per target-model pass, boosting throughput on AMD GPUs depending on drafting method and acceptance rate.

The project showcases an open-source bike computer that uses an e‑ink display to provide low‑power, sunlight‑readable cycling metrics and navigation.

Copperhead is a new open‑source editor that brings Cursor‑style AI assistance to PCB design, letting designers generate and edit schematics with natural language prompts.

Apple is expected to release the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max featuring a titanium frame, periscope zoom camera, and improved A19 Bionic chip.

The Hacker News post highlights rumors and user reactions surrounding the anticipated release of Apple's AirPods 5, covering expected features and community speculation.

The article discusses rumors and speculation about a potential dual-screen iPhone, dubbed the iPhone Duo, and its implications for Apple's product lineup.

Apple introduced its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, at $1,999, alongside AI features and other devices at its September event.

Rivian plans to launch its Level‑2+ Autonomy+ system by late 2026, using custom silicon chips to eventually deliver Level 4 self‑driving for consumer cars and robotaxis.

The Guardian tested 16 backpacks and recommends the Columbia Titanium Triple Canyon 24l as best overall, plus picks for budget, investment, durability, adventure, and high-capacity use.

The article argues that APIs should fail explicitly instead of silently falling back, illustrating how vk‑bootstrap’s hidden format swap caused cross‑platform rendering bugs.

The author describes using a Dell XPS 14 with Intel Ultra X7 Panther Lake running NixOS in 2026, highlighting driver challenges, AI assistance, battery limits, and collaboration tool issues.

The author recounts their step‑by‑step journey of disassembling a MacBook, detailing the tools used, pitfalls encountered, and insights gained about repairability.

The author describes building a MacPhone handheld by attaching an iPhone to a Mac mini with a keyboard and battery, claiming it outperforms existing Apple devices as a portable computer.

The Cogito keyboard, designed by Watt IV using hand measurements and first‑principles ergonomics, replaces the QWERTY layout with a split, columnar‑staggered, thumb‑arc design for natural hand fit.

The creator demonstrates how to build an open‑source, adjustable LED task lamp using readily available parts and a step‑by‑step video guide.

Heart Aerospace’s ES-30, the world’s largest electric aircraft, completed its maiden flight at a test facility in Sweden, marking a milestone for sustainable aviation.

The Commodore 64 home computer was released by Commodore International on September 1, 1982, becoming one of the best-selling single computer models in history.

Nori Robotics, a YC S26 startup, unveils a low-cost humanoid robot aimed at developers for experimentation, prototyping, and research.

At DEF CON 34, Cybertiger, Colonel Panic, and The Wrew demonstrated how ESP32 microcontrollers can be repurposed as a counter‑surveillance platform.

Ulrich Drepper’s LWN series introduces programmers to modern memory hardware, explaining DRAM, caches, NUMA, and how hardware limits affect software performance.

Tim Cook's 15-year Apple CEO tenure is reviewed with his ten biggest wins and misses, from Apple Silicon and services growth to Vision Pro failure and Siri struggles.

Apple announced a new Mac mini model that includes both the M6 and M5 Pro chips, according to the Hacker News post.

Apple announced the release of its next-generation M6 chip and the M5 Ultra variant, expanding its Apple silicon lineup for Macs.

Ben Holmen designed and built Halfmoon Chimes, an interactive MIDI‑driven aluminum‑pipe instrument that records and replays festival attendees’ performances as unique paper receipts.

Amdahl's law shows that overall speedup is limited by the unchanged fraction of workload, with maximum speedup S_max = 1/(1−f) as component speedup → ∞.

The article explains how vinyl records encode sound as groove modulations, detailing stereo encoding, RIAA equalization, and playback mechanics from stylus to speaker.

Solid-state transformers, spurred by AI data center demand, offer mass-manufacturable, efficient power conversion that could also benefit EV charging and household grids.

On a Terasic DE0-Nano-SOC, two Cortex-A9 cores cannot see each other's memory writes despite enabled MMU, caches, and SCU, revealing a cache coherence failure.

The article argues that the Raspberry Pi's stripped-down design gives it unique advantages for hobbyists, educators, and low‑cost prototyping in various projects.

The author repurposed an old smartphone into a lightweight home server running Linux services such as SSH, web, and file sharing.

The article describes how a standard pen plotter can be repurposed to produce simple holographic patterns by precisely controlling dot density and movement.

It explains how a hobbyist built a genuine Telnet‑accessible bulletin‑board system that runs on a Casio calculator, showing the calculator can act as a network server.

Tesla told JPMorgan that FSD v15 is a major step-change, HW4 can handle unsupervised driving, and Optimus Gen 3 robots could be sold externally starting H2 2027.

Waymo unveiled a custom 5nm ML ASIC delivering over 1,000 TOPS for ultra‑low latency autonomous driving, built on TSMC’s process and backed by 200 million miles of driving data.

The author boosted Deepseek V4 Flash inference from ~10 to ~20 tokens/sec on four e-waste AMD V620 GPUs by using layer parallelism and a speculative draft model.

The post provides an extensively commented linker script for the SAMD21G18A, explaining each directive and its purpose for embedded firmware.

The piece outlines a six‑stage AI infrastructure journey, maps three predictable cost/latency crises, and demonstrates how ACE Gateway’s control‑plane features cut spend and prevent hardware failures at each stage.

Desktop five-axis CNC machines now cost under $10K, but simultaneous multi-axis CAM still runs 20‑40% of the machine price yearly, creating a costly bottleneck.

Agentic coding tools now make non-software tasks like PCB design feasible via software, creating strong incentive to reframe projects as code-based workflows.

The author spent two years designing and building a custom mechanical keyboard inspired by Apple's Magic Keyboard, sharing detailed design choices and construction process.

AI-driven demand for memory in data centers has caused RAM prices to double or more, challenging the expectation that tech continually gets cheaper.

Christopher Mitchell details his July 2026 progress on a UK Class 800-inspired train simulator, covering headlight PCB work, metal panel fabrication, and AWS sunflower testing.

The author details replacing the Kobo Libra H2O battery with an inexpensive Ali Express unit, outlining the soldering process and confirming successful operation.