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Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
By Nick Szabo, 2002
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 156 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
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ACLU History
In the years following World War I, America was gripped by the fear that the Communist Revolution that had taken place in Russia would spread to the United States. As is often the case when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties paid the price. In November 1919 and January 1920, in what notoriously became…
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The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly
I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but one thing or another has gotten in the way. It’s important to me to provide an accurate history, ...
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Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb, the first Web client
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).
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Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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Notes on Nationalism (1945)
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'."
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MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read...
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So what’s wrong with 1975 programming? (2006)
Varnish is a powerful, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up web applications by caching content and optimizing delivery.
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MacPaint and QuickDraw 1984 source code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster
We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…
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A History of HTML (1998)
The events and circumstances that led to the World Wide Web's current popularity
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Xanalogical Structure
Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning and Deep Re-Use
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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
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How much did the Apollo program cost?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…
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Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...
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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
The technology industry is still young, but its history is already rich with myths and legends.
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Boeing Flies on 99% Ada
A discussion of how Boeing used Ada in its new 777 jet to run a complete fly-by-wire system that technicians backup and monitor with on-board floppy disks. The Ada Information Clearinghouse is the Ada Resource Association's official Web site on the Ada programming language and on software engineering.
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Experimenting with QUIC
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The SPDY protocol , which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, i...
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before - with simple files written in HTML that could…
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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!