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The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Previous: Lisp's Apparent Failures Up: Lisp's Apparent Failures Next: Good Lisp Programming is Hard
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 33 posts.
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Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
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The Roots of Lisp
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of…
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Knuth and the Unix Way
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2011231 points97 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Another great post
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Quote Origin: The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent
Question for Quote Investigator: The gyrations of financial markets can be startling. You may have unassailable information indicating that a stock is overpriced or underpriced, but you can still lose money because the market price may not accurately reflect the underlying verities for years. Here is a pertinent adage:
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Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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History of the Open Source Initiative
Development based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history essentially as long as software development itself. In the late 1990s, interest and participatio…
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nasal demons
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
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And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
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Quote Origin: If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels
Milton Friedman? William Aberhart? Walter Augustus Wyckoff? Unemployed Worker? Businessman in China? UK Minister of Agriculture?
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He Who Controls the Bootloader
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
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Unladen Swallow Retrospective
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
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The Netscape Dorm (1994)
If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.
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Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
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Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online. It took some doing. There is comedy. First, the fun stuff: Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected…
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Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…
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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…
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Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was ...
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IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?
It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.
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Perlis Languages
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
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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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"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
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The secret history of the about:jwz url
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
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The strange story of etherpad
I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at making...