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Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
101•theblazehen•2d ago•22 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
654•klaussilveira•13h ago•189 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
944•xnx•19h ago•549 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
119•matheusalmeida•2d ago•29 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
38•helloplanets•4d ago•38 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
48•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
228•isitcontent•14h ago•25 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
14•kaonwarb•3d ago•17 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
219•dmpetrov•14h ago•113 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
328•vecti•16h ago•143 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
378•ostacke•19h ago•94 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
487•todsacerdoti•21h ago•241 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
359•aktau•20h ago•181 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
286•eljojo•16h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
409•lstoll•20h ago•276 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
21•jesperordrup•4h ago•12 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
87•quibono•4d ago•21 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
59•kmm•5d ago•4 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
4•speckx•3d ago•2 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
31•romes•4d ago•3 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
251•i5heu•16h ago•194 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
15•bikenaga•3d ago•3 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
56•gfortaine•11h ago•23 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1062•cdrnsf•23h ago•444 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
144•SerCe•9h ago•133 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
180•limoce•3d ago•97 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
287•surprisetalk•3d ago•41 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
147•vmatsiiako•18h ago•67 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
72•phreda4•13h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
29•gmays•9h ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

DOS Days – Laptop Displays

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/laptop_displays.php
92•nullbyte808•2mo ago

Comments

dolbex•2mo ago
I read this title and immediately got "Dance Hall Days" in my head.
sys_64738•2mo ago
I remember my 800x600 Toshiba laptop back in 1997 then one of my colleagues got a posh 1024x768 HP Omnibook. I suddenly felt like a dinosaur computing user.
JoeBOFH•2mo ago
And what’s kinda sad is we only recently moved past 1280x720 as the “standard” for entry and cheap laptops.
iamnothere•2mo ago
I wish large greyscale LCDs were more available. Since the decline of monochrome LCDs, it’s very hard to find these cheaply. I miss both the PDA aesthetic and the low power consumption, and the e-ink ghosting issue is much worse, so it isn’t a great substitute.

LCDs were indestructible as long as you didn’t leave them out in extremely hot or cold weather.

AlanYx•2mo ago
My favorite display era was the short-lived period of 4-bit greyscale X-terms. Just enough shades of grey to be usable, few distractions.

There are a lot of greyscale radiology monitors available in the used market these days, but they tend to have a relatively high white point and aren't easy on the eyes.

XenophileJKO•2mo ago
I still have nostalgia for my Hercules monochrome adapter with an amber screen.
lproven•2mo ago
Agreed.

I have good colour and stereo vision, but I'm very shortsighted. I'm also nearly 60 and now wear varifocals with 3 focal lengths for books and phones, computers, and distance.

But 1980s long-persistence-phosphor CRTs looked good to me, were restful to my eyes, and I could and did look at them all day.

On today's flatscreens I can't see the difference between SD and HD, let alone on a TV across the room where it's imperceptible. I can't tell different refresh rates apart, let alone variable ones. I read excited product releases about tear-free video and fixing things I never was able to perceive in the first place and so which did not need fixing.

Now I am losing my choice of good X11 desktops with rich standards-driven keyboard UIs, replaced by phonelike toy desktops which take 10x the RAM and 100x the CPU and GPU and require a whole new display server, and which can't do nine-tenths of the stuff I used in desktops 15 years ago.

Apparently, because of kids with keen eyes who see things I never could.

I suspect all this stuff about HDR and VRR and gamer screens that refresh at 100s of Hertz are just the same as audiophiles who pay absurd sums for gold-plated 100Mb Ethernet cables.

I want to see double-blinded randomised controlled trials to prove that these people can see what they claim to see -- because I don't believe them -- and to prove to them that the bulk of the population can't tell.

kjs3•2mo ago
I was sold on greyscale (2-bit) on the NeXT. I ran many NCD Xterminals back in the day, and the greyscale ones were awfully nice.

I do have a radiology setup I use for writing sometimes, but yeah it's not a general purpose solution. I didn't think about it being the white point so thanks for pointing that out.

leejoramo•2mo ago
My all time favorite laptop was the 1994 Apple PowerBook DUO 280 with active greyscale screen. These screens actually looked the best in direct sunlight with no backlighting

The battery life was listed as 2-4 hours. Normally it was under 3 hours. However, with no backlighting and booting a stripped down Mac OS and apps off a RAM disk, I could get close to 6 hours in BBedit or WriteNow. I would spin up the HD to save data and turn it off again.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...

CamouflagedKiwi•2mo ago
I remember my father having a work laptop with what seems to have been a gas plasma display (it looked pretty similar to the one in the article). Crazy to think how far we've come.
Dwedit•2mo ago
Windows 3.1 had a color scheme called "Plasma Power Saver", and that would be what it was for.
danishSuri1994•2mo ago
The old STN/FSTN monochrome panels had surprisingly good power efficiency and excellent static contrast.

We lost that niche when the industry fully committed to color TFT,and e ink never quite replaced the responsiveness.

bluedino•2mo ago
Mousetrails, anyone?

I was talking with someone about a post we saw on social media, a $4999 laptop from 1992 or whatever, and it had something like an 8" screen.

"How did people even use those laptops!?"

Then you remember everyone didn't have a laptop for surfing Facebook and Amazon. You probably only had one of those if you were an executive or traveling salesperson.

ge96•2mo ago
Something about the older beige laptops that is fascinating, I had gotten some Libretto C50s but sadly they are outdated, also keyboard is too small
shevy-java•2mo ago
> The orange gas plasma display from a Toshiba T3200SX (1989)

For some reason I love the computers of the 1980s era, plus minus some more years, even up to about 1995 or so.

Today's computers are of course much more powerful and cheaper per calculating unit, but also more boring. Those things in the 1980s were so wild. Also before that, 1970s. 1950s and 1960s look outright alien - also very cool.

Of course having all that in a small smartphone is epic too, but the hardware today just doesn't interest me anymore. It seems like a "problem solved" whereas in the past, people were trying harder, including micro-optimising all available resources. That required a different kind of creativity.

Perhaps this will come back one day in the future but I doubt it. Quantum computers would mean people don't care much about maximizing everything to the bare metal if things are already mega-fast for most tasks to solve.

proee•2mo ago
In 1997, I paid $500 extra to upgrade my Toshiba 420CDT laptop to the "active display". The contrast was mind blowing. Totally worth it! ;-)
RajT88•2mo ago
I loved my old Toshiba Tecra 780-DVD back in the day. I bought it used as laptop prices were falling, and got a lot of kit with it. A web cam (unheard of for its generation), DVD drive and hardware decoding (also very baller), and a docking station where I could chunk in PCI and ISA cards and full size desktop drives (I put in a DVD burner and a large desktop HDD - I forget the size, but probably tens of gigabytes).

I told my wife that in today's dollars, the whole kit would have cost about $11k. It's hard to sink that kind of money into a laptop with OEM accessories today even if you tried hard.

brk•2mo ago
>It's hard to sink that kind of money into a laptop with OEM accessories today even if you tried hard.

Apple has entered the chat.

A fully specced current-gen MBP gets to about $7,500. Not $11k, but still a pretty expensive device to tote around.

RajT88•2mo ago
I'm sure they will get there.
neilv•2mo ago
The coolest use of a gas plasma display I saw in person was at my teenage software engineering internship.

We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.

IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger counter sound effects.

A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)

pjmlp•2mo ago
Feeling old, I remember seeing all those models on sale at computer stores.
nosrepa•2mo ago
Expired certificate?
vivzkestrel•2mo ago
just a headsup to the author, your SSL certificate has expired and is giving me warnings on the browser, you might wanna look into fixing it
hulitu•2mo ago
I get this error: "Your clock is ahead A private connection to www.dosdays.co.uk can't be established because your device's date and time (Friday, November 21, 2025 at 8:10:19 AM) are incorrect. net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID Turn on enhanced protection to get Chrome's highest level of security"

on mobile, with clock syncronized automatically from mobile provider. Programming is hard.