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When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
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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How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
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The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space
Many CPUs have been used in space craft, space stations and other such probes. Such CPUs must be highly reliable, and very durable. The temperatures in space, even with heaters, can vary widely. The radiation that a system is exposed too can be immense. So when designing one of these systems designers don't always use…
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Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' Memo (1953)
Rickover's famous speech about the distinction between academic (paper) reactors and practical reactors.
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A new compression algorithm to make Google Chrome updates small
We have just started using a new compression algorithm called Courgette to make Google Chrome updates small. We have built Google Chrome to ...
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Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful desig...
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Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Dick Smith Is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time
Want to know how to turn $10m in to $520m in less than two years? Just ask Anchorage Capital. The private equity group has pulled off one of the great heists of all time
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Porsche: The Hedge Fund That Also Made Cars
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
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Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest (2015)
While most of the Beinecke’s holdings are by their nature dead — their original purpose being fulfilled — the water bond still pays annual interest.
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A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)
Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions , and successfully bloc...
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The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
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Why do Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? (2011)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
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The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers in Visual C++ (2019)
Getting ahead of the standard, which went a different way.
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The outside investigation of SoftRAM 95 (2021)
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
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Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was ...
83
Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
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Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
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A Brief History of the UUID
Discover the evolution of UUIDs. Explore cloud communication trends, customer stories, and tips for scalable apps with Twilio's APIs. Learn more now!
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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Chromium Blog: A New Crankshaft for V8
Today we are introducing Crankshaft, a new compilation infrastructure for V8, Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine. By using aggressive optimi...
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Apple II DOS source code
Unlike the Apple I, the Apple II was fully assembled and ready to use with any display monitor. The version with 4K of memory cost $1298. It had color, graphics, sound, expansion slots, game paddles, and a built-in BASIC programming language.