frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Landscapes may soon be 'devoid of wild animals': nature photographer

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/18/worlds-landscapes-may-soon-be-devoid-of-wild-...
1•marshfram•45s ago•0 comments

Example skills that demonstrate what's possible with Claude's skills system

https://github.com/anthropics/skills
2•jinqueeny•7m ago•0 comments

When it comes to MCPs, everything we know about API design is wrong

https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/19/mcps-are-not-like-other-apis/
2•todsacerdoti•11m ago•0 comments

Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)

https://zenodo.org/records/14179366
2•hhutw•14m ago•0 comments

What Debts Make Decay?

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-debts-make-decay
1•paulpauper•16m ago•0 comments

American Diary

https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/american-diary
1•paulpauper•17m ago•0 comments

Louvre closes after thieves steal 'priceless' jewels in daytime heist

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/10/19/louvre-closed-for-the-day-after-a-robbery-acc...
1•divbzero•17m ago•1 comments

You Are Not Your Values

https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/you-are-not-your-values
1•paulpauper•17m ago•0 comments

Research results are cultural artifacts, not public goods

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/10/17/research-results-are-cultural-artifacts-not-public-goods/
1•ibobev•18m ago•0 comments

Gymnasium: An API standard for reinforcement learning

https://gymnasium.farama.org/index.html
1•pykello•18m ago•0 comments

Ode to Fisher's Transform

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/10/18/fishers-transform/
1•ibobev•18m ago•0 comments

Revealing the mechanisms of non-thermal plasma-enabled iron oxide reduction

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-62639-4
1•akshatjiwan•21m ago•0 comments

The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) Technical Design Report

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05260
1•P_qRs•22m ago•0 comments

The Fall of the Crypto-Oligarchs

https://unherd.com/2025/10/the-fall-of-the-crypto-oligarchs/
1•binning•27m ago•0 comments

Meltdown Version Pi

https://github.com/Merkoba/Meltdown/tags
1•Toby1VC•28m ago•1 comments

Stapler knows when you need it

https://hcii.cmu.edu/news/stapler-knows-when-you-need-it
2•rammy1234•31m ago•0 comments

Understanding Relationships

https://www.jerry.wtf/posts/understanding-relationships/
1•personjerry•32m ago•0 comments

Torsion Field (Pseudoscience)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_field_(pseudoscience)
1•peter_d_sherman•32m ago•1 comments

The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-19-privacy-theater-pii-phone-numbers/
2•jeromechoo•40m ago•0 comments

China Can't Win

https://www.campbellramble.ai/p/china-cant-win
10•imastrategist•45m ago•7 comments

Functional freedom and Penrose's critiques of string theory

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21515
1•ibobev•47m ago•0 comments

Introduction to reverse-engineering vintage synth firmware

https://ajxs.me/blog/Introduction_to_Reverse-Engineering_Vintage_Synth_Firmware.html
8•jmillikin•51m ago•0 comments

Prester John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John
1•nice_byte•54m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Font Generator with Real-Time Font Comparison

https://fontgenerator.cc/compare-fonts
2•coolwebtoolsguy•54m ago•0 comments

Building a TMS 9900 Homebrew

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/building-a-tms-9900-homebrew/2425
1•SoftTalker•56m ago•0 comments

Making Time Safer in Go

https://www.matthewhalpern.com/posts/golang-type-safe-timezones/
2•whockey•58m ago•0 comments

Introduction to OCaml Extension Points

https://citizen428.net/blog/introduction-ocaml-extension-points/
2•gsky•59m ago•0 comments

Building Systems with a Stroke of a Pen

https://alyx.substack.com/p/building-systems-with-a-stroke-of
2•larakerns•1h ago•0 comments

Some sales teams are killing their company

1•Lopsii•1h ago•0 comments

Federal agency overseeing US nuclear stockpile will furlough most of workforce

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/19/politics/national-nuclear-security-administration-furloughs-shutdown
3•rawgabbit•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Look at how unhinged GPU box art was in the 2000s

https://www.xda-developers.com/absolutely-unhinged-gpu-box-art-from-the-early-2000s/
68•m-hodges•2h ago

Comments

jakebasile•2h ago
I miss when gaming in general was less mainstream and more weird like this. Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes.

I bought a small press book with a collection of this art and it was a fun little trip down memory lane, as I’ve owned some of the hardware (boxes) depicted in it.

For anyone else interested: https://lockbooks.net/pages/overclocked-launch

m-hodges•2h ago
Woah, that book is cool; and so much more from this publisher!
soupfordummies•16m ago
You ain't kidding! What a treasure trove of a publisher. Never heard of them before, great rec
Gigachad•8m ago
On the plus side, PC gaming hardware seems to last ages now. I built my gaming desktop in 2020, I had a look lately at what a reasonable modern mid tier setup is and they are still recommending a lot of the parts I have. So I'll probably keep using it all for another 5 years then.
nice_byte•1h ago
look at the evolution of the DirectX branding through the years as well. OGs remember the logo themed after the radioactive hazard symbol.
ComputerGuru•1h ago
dxdiag.exe
cruffle_duffle•47m ago
Link because I had to look it up to remember: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/DirectX
Mountain_Skies•1h ago
Those box designers appear to have moved on to the performance whey protein and workout supplement industry.
booleandilemma•1h ago
As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun. Not to mention all the pretending money-seekers who can't code their way out of a paper bag.
BeetleB•47m ago
> As usual, when money is to be found the soulless bean counting serious mba types come along and kill all the fun.

A reminder: Even years after inventing CUDA, Nvidia, the top GPU manufacturer, was fighting for survival. I'm not sure what saved them - perhaps crypto.

If you ignore the money, they appeared quite strong. But they struggled financially. Intel famously considered buying them around 2010 because they knew they could buy them cheap - Nvidia might not survive and weren't in a position to negotiate). Thankfully, the Intel CEO killed the idea because he knew Jensen wouldn't work well with Intel.

Nvidia may not have been saved by "bean counters", but they do have a place in the world.

lethologica•1h ago
This is a blast from the past! I remember being really young and buying a GPU based solely on what art was on the box (and yes, it was a scantily clad woman) and getting really, really luckily that it actually worked with my components but it was my intro to upgrading PCs!
kristianp•1h ago
The Voodoo range had some cool boxes: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/yp5qzo/3dfx_v...
Mawr•1h ago
Please stop reminding me of how soulless and watered down everything has become :(

Games are no different, in Morrowind gods ripped each other's penises off and used them as spears; in Skyrim you fight dragons.

bee_rider•42m ago
For sure, games have gotten bland and lame. But in an era of quirky games Morrowind was still extra quirky.
zdw•1h ago
Unusual designs are still a thing in some markets (mainly china) - for example, a cat themed cooler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGGKaX1D9Zo and various anime themed backplates on cards are available from Yeston: https://yestonstore.com/collections/graphics-card
dlivingston•35m ago
That's fantastic. I recently bought a Lofree mechanical keyboard (they're a Chinese brand) and they definitely have the most unusual hardware designs I've ever seen.

Here's one of their mice: https://www.lofree.co/products/lofree-petal-mouse

Larrikin•6m ago
It's nice to see, but the design feels like it's meant to go into a clear case so that it can be streamed for the world to see.
neko_ranger•1h ago
soul
abtinf•1h ago
I would guess part of the reason for this was box art used to matter because most of these cards were sold through dedicated electronics retailers like Fry's Electronics, Microcenter, and CompUSA. There was basically no such thing as online ordering for this sort of thing. People were physically browsing goods on shelves.
MoOmer•54m ago
Just chiming in here, but at least two of the generations of cards there are from ~2005-2008 and we old farts definitely bought (or convinced our parents to buy) things from Newegg at the time!
ulfw•1h ago
When people still bought Graphics Processing Units for processing graphics and not crypto mining or AI inferencing
tcherasaro•54m ago
I remember some of those.
dkh•48m ago
oh god some of these just brought back memories long repressed
bee_rider•35m ago
I think what happened is, at the time those were literally more or less examples of the best scenes the cards could render. Nowadays, putting together an example of the best scene the card could render requires a whole art department and a couple months of design. Nobody’s going to spend months on box art, so we get bland rectangles or whatever.
dlcarrier•27m ago
It's nothing that complicated. Nvidia started micromanaging their distributors, and removed all the fun, and AMD just copies what they do.
gdulli•19m ago
Or it was just a fad when the scene was novel and it ran its course as fads and design elements do. This explanation doesn't require there to be an enemy to demonize but sometimes there just isn't, as much as we might want there to be.
Gigachad•5m ago
What the best scene you could render is a bit fuzzy. In blender you could render anything at all. But in a game, at what resolution, and what framerate, are the shadows dynamic or baked in?
Lammy•29m ago
> you could say they were unhinged

> GPU makers have all abandoned this practice, which is a shame as it provided something different through box art alone. Now, we're drowning in bland boxes and similar-looking graphics cards

I feel like there could be a more positive adjective than “unhinged” if you're going to turn around and praise it. OED sez “wildly irrational and out of touch with reality”. How about “whimsical”? I love this stuff and think we need to bring this kind of whimsy back to computing.

> There's a scantily dressed lady in armor

Author neglects to mention that ATi/AMD had a named ongoing marketing character for many many years — Ruby!

- Agent Ruby Demo Compilation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUAuj0Jn8UI

- 2008 Ruby demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjXCae4Gu0

- Ruby origin story https://web.archive.org/web/20071023192128/http://game.amd.c...

- ATI Agent Ruby™ Usage Guidelines 1.0 http://www.barbaraburch.com/portfolio/whitepaper6.pdf

- She even stuck around long enough for the ATi name to entirely disappear from AMD Radeon branding: https://i.imgur.com/uBWfzCA.jpeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwIMHX7rW8Q (2013)

- AMD-exclusive Ruby skin for Quake Champions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LRSqC9n0Tc (2017)

> GeForce 6600 GT was enclosed inside a box featuring a lovely lady

nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ had several named demo characters too, but they removed all the pretty lady ones some time in 2020. Compare:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20200921115422/https://www.nvidi...

- https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/

Adam Sessler voice I give this article a two… out of five.

aunty_helen•5m ago
Ahhh reminded me of my sapphire 3870 toxic edition. Cool box art and one of the coldest running cards I’ve owned with the Vapor x chamber.
rpcope1•3m ago
I loved the weird boxes back in the 90s and 2000s. I remember dad would always take us to computer trade shows and ham events, and occasionally you'd see someone from ATi or Nvidia (or one of the integrators) demoing their wares with all sorts of bizarre and funny demo software and renders. I don't know if it was just me or what, but they always sent real nice sales or marketing people and it was fun to talk to them about the GPUs as a kid. I think they were as mystified (I recall several of them laughing about it) about the box art as everyone else was.