I recently went through the HN posts I upvoted/saved this year and maybe someday will get around summarizing the ones that taught/inspired me the most...here are two technical ones that stuck out for me:
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris...
This to me was the epitome of a great HN post: the author decides he wants to learn how to build Chrome extensions and implement WebSockets and builds a chat app from scratch. It becomes a runaway hit and he leaves it alone, only to rediscover later that it developed into its own online civilization of sorts.
Did you know about a "hidden" page: http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Looks like an experimental feature to me but it will be nice to have something like this.
I don't know if this is from 2012, but I just found out about this page -- it's the best papers from computer science from 1996 to 2012 http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html (based on awards given by committees at the top conferences)
Apropos Engelbart’s Violin, I'd be interested to try a Microwriter. I think I'd pick it up quite well as I played piano for years. Did they ever make it into widespread production? Though I suppose you could make one quite easily with an Arduino.
Try Plover, the open-source steno software. http://plover.stenoknight.com/ You can download it from the wiki. The author has a demonstration of typing 250 words per minute using Plover and her stenography knowledge.
If your keyboard has N-key rollover (and the $50 Microsoft Sidewinder USB keyboard does), it will work well with Plover.
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society. http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris... This to me was the epitome of a great HN post: the author decides he wants to learn how to build Chrome extensions and implement WebSockets and builds a chat app from scratch. It becomes a runaway hit and he leaves it alone, only to rediscover later that it developed into its own online civilization of sorts.
How We Nearly Lost Discovery http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost... A former NASA engineer describes how Discovery nearly ended up as tragedy, and "how I found out that we were never really as smart as we thought we were."