1
The IPv6 mess (2002)
Each computer on the Internet has its own public IPv4 address, similar to a phone number: for example, 131.193.178.181. The target of each packet of data is identified by a public IPv4 address.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 40 posts.
2
The Story of Mel
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
3
Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
4
“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
5
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
6
The story of ispc: origins (part 1) (2018)
This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...
7
RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
8
Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
9
Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
10
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
11
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
12
A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
13
Burning a NeXTCube (1993)
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
14
Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
15
Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
16
Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
17
Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
18
Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
19
Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font (2009)
VT220 TrueType font
20
Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
21
Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
22
Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
23
DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs
Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world. I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for y…
24
Remembering Doug Lenat and his quest to capture the world with logic
Stephen Wolfram shares memories of Doug Lenat, early AI pioneer and developer of the CYC system. Their discussions around AI & logic and the potential combined uses of their respective discoveries.
25
Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
It is now ??????????.??? ( ????-??-??T??:??:??.???Z ) in Unix time , according to your local system clock.
26
Modern TLS/SSL on 16-bit Windows
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
27
USB-C done cheap: when 2 ports become 1 (2020)
How PC hardware is implementing USB-C in a way that may or may not violate standards.
28
The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
29
Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
30
Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally