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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
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Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
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“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results”
Albert Einstein? Al-Anon? Narcotics Anonymous? Max Nordau? George Bernard Shaw? Samuel Beckett? George A. Kelly? Rita Mae Brown? John Larroquette? Jessie Potter? Werner Erhard?
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Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
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Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
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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…
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Live Not by Lies (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
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The Resilience of Costco (2018)
For 40 years, Costco has succeeded with a simple formula: reinvest merchandising profits into lower prices and better products; be a disciplined operator; and treat customers and employees well. But with greater share of shopping moving online, it’s fair to wonder if the company's best da
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A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
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The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021125 points79 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
Who were the Romans? How did they understand themselves as a people and ‘Roman’ as an identity? And what were the implications of that understanding – and perhaps more importantly…
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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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8088 PC Speaker MOD player: How it’s done
The last 100 seconds of 8088 MPH sound very different to the rest of the demo. The end tune is actually a 4-channel Amiga MOD file (which you can download here ) composed by coda . Playing back a MOD through PC speaker on such a slow machine has never been done before. Here is how we did it.
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
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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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The Dogma of Otherness (1986)
The Dogma of Otherness insists that all voices deserve a hearing, that all points of view have something of value to offer.
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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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Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020112 points12 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food product…
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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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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.
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A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.