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Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 326 posts.
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Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
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Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 was awarded jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
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How machines learned precision
How do you make an accurate machine without one to copy? Explore flat surfaces, screw-cutting lathes, and millionth-of-an-inch measurements through interactive 3D figures.
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The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
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Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
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2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
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Woking Electrical Control Room (2016)
An unused railway electrical control room in Surrey.
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Dutch computer museums (2022)
Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands
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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
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Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
A blog about software craft and quality
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
100% cotton paper. 100% crazy.
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Boards of Casio
While working away on the CZP-1 , which was at least initially an effort to create a Casio CZ-101 on a web page I happened to see this YouTube video by oliveoil22:
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Amiga Screens: A Primer
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…
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Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
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Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
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A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
Right-clicking and shift-clicking.
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Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
Colin's things that might be useful or interesting2026548 points116 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
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RAM: the forgotten history (2024)
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
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The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
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The "Windows XP Box" (2003)
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
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Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
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What Sun got wrong
We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies.
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MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
A blog about software craft and quality
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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.