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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 27 posts.
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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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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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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Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
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Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
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A Proposal For the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on A.I. (1955)
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
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DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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Die photos and analysis of the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor, 45 years old
Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago. 1 This chip, Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancesto...
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SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
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A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
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Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer…
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A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI
Updated February 2, 2016: Once you learn about our team and who we are, come take a trip down memory lane with us! Yesterday morning, the Hosted UI team, responsible for VMware’s Workstation …
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One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz
an extremely simple processor design
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Russian ship loitering near undersea cables
**Russian ship loitering near undersea cables** Updated: Original article 9th Oct. 2016. The Russian Navy’s Project 22010 mini-sub host ship Yantar is known for loitering near undersea internet cables (known as Submarine communications Cables - SCC). It may have other special missions also…. Read More >….