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The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape
How a scrappy "misfit" engineer with no college education revolutionized the world of tape.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 44 posts.
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Flying with Machine Guns?
Dynamics of shooting machine guns downwards, and the actual forces, velocities and heights that could be achieved. Modeled with Wolfram SystemModeler.
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FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read...
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The Invention of Sliced Bread
Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.
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Celebrating 10 Years of Firefox
10 years ago we built Firefox to give you a choice. The Web was a monoculture and the only way in was through the company that controlled your operating sy
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FreeBSD turns 21
FreeBSD is a rapidly developing operating system. Keeping up on the latest developments can be a chore! To keep on top of things, check this page periodically. News is also announced on the freebsd-announce mailing list and the RSS feed .
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The Man Who Writes His Dissenting Opinion in All Caps
Terence Faulkner wrote 1/3 of the opposing arguments in this year's SF voter guide. And large chunks of them read like he's yelling at you.
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Porsche: The Hedge Fund That Also Made Cars
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
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Xerox Alto Source Code
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the…
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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
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CSS: It was twenty years ago today
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources"
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain"
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Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981)
The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education. It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.
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Boeing Flies on 99% Ada
A discussion of how Boeing used Ada in its new 777 jet to run a complete fly-by-wire system that technicians backup and monitor with on-board floppy disks. The Ada Information Clearinghouse is the Ada Resource Association's official Web site on the Ada programming language and on software engineering.
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The Lava Lamp Just Won't Quit
In the 1960s, a British nudist invented a lamp that inadvertently became the poster child for psychedelia. Thirty years later, it came back with a vengeance.
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Slackware is 21 Years Old
A blog about Slackware Linux
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Fatal Dose – Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors (1994)
How a series of simple computer errors sabotaged a state-of-the-art medical wonder.
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Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler
Harry was born in 1932 and died in 1996. He was a school teacher, educational consultant, inventor, and magician. A web search will tell you a little about his many talents but in summary:
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Why Ada isn't Popular (1998)
Rick Thorne writes: > In truth, I like Ada too. I'm a former Ada man myself, as I believe I > mentioned. There are great things about the language, and since we're all > aware of them there's no point in going into them. I also prefer Beta to > VHS. Mathew Heaney responds: This is actually a specious comparison…
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We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft
The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is pleased to announce that our team has established two-way communication with the ISEE-3 spacecraft and has begun commanding it to perform specific functions. Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft’s overall health and refine the techniques…
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Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States
In the mid-1800s, the United States had an emperor -- and he was supreme.
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A History of Tug-of-War Fatalities
Ignore simple physics and your appendage could be amputated by a tug of war rope.
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Hello from 1978
We rescued two PDP-11/34 computers and their associated equipment from a storage unit in the Bronx and have been working on getting them running again. The