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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 21 posts.
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Tough times on the road to Starcraft
The road to StarCraft was a brutal sequence of bad breaks, hard pivots, and near-disasters. This is the part most people never heard.
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Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
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Engineering Pornography (2002)
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
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The /bin/true Command and Copyright
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
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Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal - Letter to the editor, Datamation July 1983
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
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The KindleBerry Pi
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.
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Plan 9: The way the future was
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
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Common Lisp: The Untold Story
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
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What “Worse is Better vs The Right Thing” is really about
I thought about this one for a couple of years, then wrote it up, and left it untouched for another couple of years.