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
“Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition
1i1 “Xanadu ® ” and the Eternal-Flaming-X logo are registered trademarks of Project Xanadu .
Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
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.
New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
MS Paint is here to stay
MS Paint fans rejoice: The original art app isn’t going anywhere – except to the Windows Store for free!
FreeBSD turns 21
FreeBSD is a rapidly developing operating system. Keeping up on the latest developments can be a chore! To keep on top of things, check this page periodically. News is also announced on the freebsd-announce mailing list and the RSS feed .
It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
HyperCard On The Archive
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated
[press: boingboing] The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane…
Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
The Invention of the AeroPress
How one inventor went from making Frisbees to one of the world's best coffeemakers.
JSTOR Statement on Aaron Swartz
We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.
Can I Talk to that William Fellow? He was so Helpful (2009)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)
In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.
Filling in some gaps in the story of Space Cadet Pinball on 64-bit Windows
The story as I experienced it.
The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
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 […]
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…