Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 545 posts.
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
Question for Quote Investigator: There is a popular humorous maxim about history that is usually attributed to Mark Twain. But there is so much uncertainty about this ascription that a top business columnist for the “New York Times” wrote the following: 1
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
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Churchill didn't invent the famous remark, concluding that democracy worked best despite its faults; but he certainly made it famous.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020263 points74 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
Do not be misled. The many "atomic time" wristwatches you see on the market today are merely cheap quartz wristwatches with a built-in radio receiver. The watch sets itself from 60 kHz VLF radio time signals transmitted by NIST from station WWVB near the US atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. At least once a day…
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022176 points45 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
