Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
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?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
What did people's desktops look like?
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.
I tend to use a lot of retro software, partly because I’m a big nerd but also because I just prefer to work in a terminal. There were a ton of major commercial software products for MS-DOS that were highly polished, and can still be used effectively in an xterm today.
X11 client and server. DOS. Windows 3.1. All with preemptive multitasking.
Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
Aristocratic tutoring I: Explaining the decline of genius
40 years ago today, I joined Apple Computer on April 27, 1978. It was a big turning point in my life and I am glad I said "Yes".
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
Unfortunately, Rocket Lab does not seem to be named after seed investor/aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket .
Tracing the long lineage of software that brought us Vim.
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
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.
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.
Artistic interpretations of the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate, created with AI and historical references.
