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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Feynman, Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
On January 28th, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched at 11:38am on the 6-day STS-51-L mission. During the first 3 seconds of liftoff the o-rings (o-shaped loops used to connect two cylinders
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Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
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:
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The original IBM Thinkpad
This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company's new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full-time Apple and the Chinese
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Keynes, Explained Briefly
If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat…
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Dmitry Medvedev declares official holiday in Russia: Programmer's Day
Russia's President Medvedev has decreed a new holiday for the country: Президент России Дмитрий Медведев своим указом установил профессиона...
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Blu-Ray Still Blows
Some time ago I wrote an entry that got some attention about the Blu-ray format and why I refuse to release anything on it. It’d be nice to release the text adventure documentary in what Blu-…
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Unqualified Reservations: From Cromer to Romer and back again: colonialism for the 21st century
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
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Eulogy to _why
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 .
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In which I switch on a 30 year old computer and it just works
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting my parents and getting out an old computer. One of the first computers I used a lot was the Shar...
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ha ha only serious
[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…
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How To build a radio in a POW camp -- the real life King Rat
QRP(Low Power Amateur Radio)
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The story of Mel (1983)
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing
When I started writing The Geek Atlas there was one name that was getting in the book no matter what: Alan Turing . Alan Turing matters on ...
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A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996)
WASHINGTON - One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has "left." "Left" is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for "died." "Died" is the word he used to signify "stopped doing math." Erdos never died. He continued doing math, notoriously a young person's field, right…
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Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995)
The Noam Chomsky Website.