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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
The Source History of Cat
A tour of the many historical implementations of the Unix cat utility.
The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." (1999-2015)
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
Quote Origin: Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times
Question for Quote Investigator : There is a great quote by Plato or Socrates about the misbehavior of children in antiquity that I read in the New York Times. The quote shows that the problems between generations are not just a recent occurrence. Instead, the conflicts between parents and offspring are timeless: 1
Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038
In a stuffed apartment filled with hydrofluoric acid, oscilloscopes and a transistor curve tracer, Jeri Ellsworth carefully places a hand-cut silicon wafer into a 1000 degree furnace. The ambient noise of police sirens can be heard in the background: "Ugh, the police are coming... So the instructions for the…
Soup – Alan Kay on Objects
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic
As Atari’s best-selling arcade game of all time, Asteroids was literally a game changer. Released in December 1979, it was responsible for catapulting Atari into mainstream public consciousne…
Quest for Glory III and IV
The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I . By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.
Duckspeak vs. Smalltalk: Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple (2011)
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
This Old Lisp
This is the keynote talk that I gave at the 2018 European Lisp Symposium in Marbella, Spain.
Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House
Socolive là địa chỉ được nhiều người hâm mộ bóng đá tìm đến khi muốn cập nhật và theo dõi trực tiếp bóng đá trên nền tảng trực tuyến. Nội dung tại Socolive được xây dựng xoay quanh nhiều giải đấu và cuộc đối đầu đáng chú ý, giúp người xem dễ dàng tìm thấy trận đấu đang được quan tâm. Cách phân loại thông tin theo từng…
How the Sears Catalog Undermined White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South
Sears has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to close hundreds of stores in an effort to keep the company afloat. The Sears catalog is perhaps one of the
How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers
TL;DR: what I learned about the Bomb Jack arcade machine while writingan emulator for it.
Myth Busting Banksy
The recent incident around Banksy embedding a shredder into the frame of his Girl With A Balloon has caught the world’s attention. As a nerd obsessed with the intersection of art and tech, I too was sucked in over the weekend in trying to unravel the mysteries behind Banksy’s self-shredding paint
The Prolog Story (2010)
I’ve told this story in person dozens of times, it’s time to write it down and share it here. I’ve again experimentally recorded a video version (below), which you can view on a non-Flash device here .
A History of .NET Runtimes
Recently I was fortunate enough to chat with Chris Bacon who wrote DotNetAnywhere (an alternative .NET Runtime) and I quipped with him:
What Made Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem Hard to Prove
Roughly speaking, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proven. When I was in 11-th grade, my geometry teacher Mr. Olsen, my friend …
Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.
The printer that wouldn't print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
An unabridged history of RSS' triumphs and failures.