The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
It says much about Sid Meier, a born game designer if ever there was one, that he tended to get some of his best work done when he was allegedly on vacation. A few years after his significant other had lost all track of him on what she thought was a romantic getaway to the Caribbean but he came to see as the ideal…
This article describes the inner workings of Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch ( MISC ), a new C64 demo effect introduced in my demo Lunatico .
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
The Crazy Eddie fraud may appear smaller and gentler than the massive billion-dollar frauds exposed in recent times
Vintage computers and retro gaming
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy… actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than …
This, as I probably don’t need to tell you, is a banknote. To be specific, it’s a 10-afghani banknote printed in 2004 (my thanks to Dr Amelia Dowler of the BM for that astonishingly pre…
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
On August 25, 1835 the <i>New York Sun</i> announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle. Over the course of the next week the <i>Sun</i>…
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
This is a map showing where all of the characters originated in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. I know Greece is small by today’s standards, but it was surprising
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
C ard punches of various types, models and makes featured an option to print the characters encoded by the holes punched in any of the columns in human readable form onto the top of the card. While it is well known that these characters were printed by a 5 × 7 dot matrix, comprehensive information on what these…
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
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Over the new year holiday time I had a chance to get away from it all, and snuck up to Finland to sit in a lodge on the Gulf of Finland, sip coffee, take saunas and read. I brought along a few books, the only programming one being Brian W …
