3181
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
3182
The 6502 in “The Terminator”
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…
3183
Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
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.
3184
3185
Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VI: Every World War II Movie was Wrong
This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. ——̵…
3186
3187
3188
3189
Zawinski's Law
“ 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…
3190
P.S.: The Best of Intentions
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.
3191
3192
3193
Erik Naggum — A Long, Painful History of Time
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…
3194
A 3700-year-old proof that the diagonal of a unit square has length √2
Clicking on an image will bring up the same image at higher resolution (a download of about about 100 KB). Clicking on that in turn will download an image of about 300 KB.
3195
Some AI Koans
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…
3196
"Whatever happened to...?" The odd fates of 25 legendary tech products.
Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market--even though they haven't been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products--available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they're obsolete--long after the rest of the world has move
3197
3198
3199
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
Warning: the following is excessively technical, and is intended more for the sake of the next poor sod who types "vista dns round robin resolution" into Google than it is for my actual friends list. (Except for a few of you. And you know who you are.) Also, since I want this to be searchable on…
3200
Yegge, Clojure, and Arc
This post was discussed thoroughly on Hacker News . Even Mr. Graham was kind enough to comment – though not in the affirmative. There was moderate discussion on Reddit as well.
3201
3202
Mind Hacks: Breaking the news of Eliza's creator's death to her
Hello, I am Eliza. Hi Eliza. I’m Vaughan. Did you come to me because you are Vaughan? I did. I am sad because I just found out that your creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has…
3203
3204
Personal Webpage Responsibility Acknowledgement
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.
3205
Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it."
A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31…
3206
Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?
I spend far too much of my life daydreaming about scenarios like this: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random locat
3207
The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
3208
gorilla arm
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…
3209
John Walker's Crisis Letter to Autodesk Employees (1983)
This letter marks the time when the change began, but the letter did not cause the change. The transformation of the company was wrought by numerous people, working long, largely uncompensated hours, at daunting and unfamiliar tasks, as the workload only piled higher. Progress could be measured only by realising in…
3210
What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz
Some folks have asked me what I know about Phil Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Phil Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I…