The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
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…
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
The Apple event tomorrow morning (US Pacific time), takes place at Town Hall, Building 4, Apple, Inc. in Cupertino. It has been almost 15 years since I visited there the last time. 'Hint: It&...
Fukushima 8 years on
Exploring the sexual symbolism hidden in paintings of weasels in Renaissance art
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Sou...
Douglas Self,
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
In 1981, the BBC set out to educate Great Britain about computers. It did a really good job.
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
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.
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
