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Anecdote Origin: Knowing Where To Tap
A Fired Machinist? Charles R. Wiers? Hubert N. Alyea? Charles Proteus Steinmetz? Henry Ford? Anonymous?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 545 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022cited by 16History & Retro Computing details
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
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Partmaps.org
All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.
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wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors , Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward…
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The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
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Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022121 points49 commentscited by 15History & Retro Computing details
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
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The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
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The Story of Mel
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
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Erik Naggum — A Long, Painful History of Time
ABSTRACT The programming language Common Lisp offers a few functions to support the concept of time as humans experience it, including GET-UNIVERSAL-TIME , ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , DECODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , and GET-DECODED-TIME . These functions assume the existence of a timezone and a daylight saving time regime, such…
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Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…
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The Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
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Message threading (1997-2002)
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
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The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
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The Emacs Problem (2005)
The Emacs Problem Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Charles G. pointed out in an email discussion recently: Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java
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Book Review: Albion’s Seed
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
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Quote Origin: Computer Memory: 640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone
Bill Gates? James E. Fawcette? Nancy Andrews? Jerry Pournelle? InfoWorld? Apocryphal?
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Quote Origin: Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded
Yogi Berra? Rags Ragland? Suzanne Ridgeway? John McNulty? Ukie Sherin? Anonymous?
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1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
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Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
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Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
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