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The girl with the ANSI tattoo
I enjoyed the David Fincher remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo more than I thought I would. Rather than a shallow and cynical Holly...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The THX Sound
The essential, funny guide to retro and future synths, guitars, music making, gear, gadgets and techology.
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When Rob Pike first met rms
I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career. === There's no such thing as ba...
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
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Common Lisp: The Untold Story
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986
Update: Date typo in post title fixed! I came across this on Google Books, going through some old issues of InfoWorld I’d read back in the day: Click = big For those who want text, see after …
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Jef Raskin's final gift to Aza (2010)
Studying how an individual's thoughts, emotions, ideas, and aspirations are formed through their interactions with others is the focus of social psychology as
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Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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John Nash's Letter to the NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
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Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal - Letter to the editor, Datamation July 1983
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
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Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times
Back to: I had a blog entry for you, but I eated it | Forward to: Beer, Boston (and books)
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My foxhole radio
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
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UK government declines to pardon Alan Turing
There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...
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Plan 9: The way the future was
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
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The /bin/true Command and Copyright
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
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Tim Berners-Lee Confirms The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented: France
[ Update, Feb 2014. Plaque placed outside room where web was invented.] Success (of sorts)! ARS Electronica have given an award to Tim Berners-Lee and CERN for the invention of the web. They had he…
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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
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Scouting An Abandoned Cold War Missile Base Hidden In The Adirondacks
Quick note: Though you may have read about this property before, most articles have simply reprinted the same stock real estate photos over and over. As always, all pictures are my own work, and I don’t think you’ll find a tour like this anywhere else.
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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.