Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 37 posts.
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
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[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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…
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.
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain.
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
I've just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) -- and he showed me (and a couple of other friends) right…
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
If you haven’t heard of Alan Kay you’ll likley have heard one of his many famous quotes, the most popular, likely his 1971 gem: The best …
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
