Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 25 posts.
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
Is it just me? I mean, do you ever wonder about the stories behind everyday products?
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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ABSTRACT The programming language Common Lisp offers a few functions to support the concept of time as humans experience it, including GET-UNIVERSAL-TIME , ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , DECODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , and GET-DECODED-TIME . These functions assume the existence of a timezone and a daylight saving time regime, such…
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…
Scraping for AI training is killing small websites like ours. Traffic from users is drowned out by bots at a factor of 100 to 1. At times, the load on our server from bots makes our server so unresponsive we can't get in to administer it.
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
This article outlines the responsibilities of users, including employees, students, and faculty, who create and maintain personal webpages to ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and accessible to all users.
Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
We have just started using a new compression algorithm called Courgette to make Google Chrome updates small. We have built Google Chrome to ...
In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800’s view several times. It is well-known that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800’s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: It’s Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of…
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
Unfortunately I’m short on time at the moment (trying to launch a project this week) but I have to say, at least, a few words about the hacker and artist _why .
