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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
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"Inspector Dangerfuck", ANSI art comic from 1994
In 1994, a teenager wanted to be noticed in the ANSI art scene. So he created "Inspector Dangerfuck": a profane, stoned, gray-skinned cartoon detective.
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A small collection of text-only websites
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
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What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
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The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network
subsea cables, internet infrastructure, telecom infrastructure, 2Africa, new subsea cable projects, layer 1 pricing on key international routes,
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Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
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RoboCop – Breaking the Law. H0ffman Cracks RoboCop Arcade from DataEast
It’s time to take down the future of law enforcement. Following on from my discovery that RoboCop arcade has bootleg protection, see here , I decided it would be fun to crack it. TL;DR –…
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How Lewis Carroll computed determinants (2023)
Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) developed a method of computing determinants which has some practical advantages.
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The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago
The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
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Help My c64 caught on fire
Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.
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The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
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A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
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A brief history of Times New Roman
Typography for Lawyers
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Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
Wherein we figure out how to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun
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2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.
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The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
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30 years of <br> tags
Three decades of making things on the internet
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50 years of proof assistants
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
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Nokia N900 Necromancy
Building a fake battery, adding a USB-C port, booting from SD card, and giving a new life to a classic Linux smartphone.
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30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
I want to wish everyone happy Yule festivities! Midwinter in the northern hemisphere has passed, the days are now slowly becoming longer.
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Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Same people, 13 years later.
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The past was not that cute
Aesthetics are not history.
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Typewriter Plotters (2022)
Did you know there were typewriters that used ball point pens to draw not just text but also graphics? I’ve collected several of these over the years. Read on to discover a world that you didn’t know existed.
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I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary