The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925! By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle[1]CC BY 4.0Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[2] On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930…
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
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 –…
Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) developed a method of computing determinants which has some practical advantages.
We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…
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.
Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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?
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.
Typography for Lawyers
Our project to preserve the history of Sega Channel — including over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs.
Wherein we figure out how to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun
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.
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…
Three decades of making things on the internet
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…
Building a fake battery, adding a USB-C port, booting from SD card, and giving a new life to a classic Linux smartphone.
I want to wish everyone happy Yule festivities! Midwinter in the northern hemisphere has passed, the days are now slowly becoming longer.
Same people, 13 years later.
Aesthetics are not history.
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…
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.
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
One little used type of DNS record is the LOC (or location). It allows you to specify a physical location. CloudFlare handles millions of DNS records; of those just 743 are LOCs. Nevertheless, it's possible to set up a LOC record in the CloudFlare DNS editor.
