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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
In September 2005 the kids and I took several very accurate cesium atomic clocks from home and parked 5400 feet up Mt Rainier (the volcano near Seattle) for a full two days. The goal was to see if the clocks actually gained time, even if billionths of a second, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity…
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The time I hacked my high school
When I was in high school, I started the Chess Club. I needed money to buy chess sets and chess cl...
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How the pantheon has lasted 2000 years without steel in its concrete
This famous building stands in the business district of Rome--much as it was built some 18 centuries ago. Amazingly, it has withstood the ravages of both the elements and war permitting a firsthand view of a unique product constructed by Roman hands. Now, it is exposed to acid rain and fumes from passing automobiles…
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The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, l…
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Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP
Nothing in the news media yet, but many folks on Twitter and colleague Nassim Taleb are reporting that the father of fractal geometry is dead at age 85. We’re n
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2010 Nobel Prize for Peace Awarded to Liu Xiaobo
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
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2010 Physics Nobel Prize (Graphene)
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"
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How a WWII Jet Fighter Was Designed in 150 days & shipped in six months
Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed …
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Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
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The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
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Why the iPhone will fail (2007)
The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself aga...
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The sad evolution of wikis
I set up my first wiki in 2001, in preparation for hiring our very first software developer employee. Until then, software development at N...
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Who killed Prolog?
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
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The Tragic Death of Practically Everything
Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flak for the magazine's current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I'm not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank he
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Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1
No hackerspace is complete without it's own rockin' supercomputer - and when a Gibson isn't available, a Cray-1 will have to do. My 1/10-scale,
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Satoshi Kon's last words
Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at the age of 46. ( NY Times obituary .) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document , which his family has posthumously posted…
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Chrome will use gpu to render pages
For some time now, there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system. New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS tr...
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