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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. 30 posts.
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Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
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Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology
I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because their production depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
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Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
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The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
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NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
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When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
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Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019404 points166 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
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Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
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The soul of a new computer company
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle , we have started Oxide Computer Company .
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The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock (2014)
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 (2011) alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it.
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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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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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N-Wheeled Cars
Douglas Self,
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“Bicycle of the Mind”
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
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The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
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The Founding of Google Maps (2015)
How four partners took an idea from a whiteboard to the browser