The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made important contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory. He was a member of Bourbaki.
Explore Claude Fable 5.1's proposed solution to Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a centuries-old cipher, with the reasoning behind the result.
A blog about software craft and quality
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
It's random, really.
Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule ov…
How a Hertfordshire research lab quietly transformed an iconic British staple food, and the complexion of the countryside - without anyone actually noticing
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
A generation of technology workers grew up using it
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
Graphics for Professionals
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiment...
A statistical test of whether the Sumerian King List's antediluvian reigns line up with paleoclimate events better than chance.
This guest post is from Jim Trageser , a long-time Goto 10 reader.
The humble Suica card was developed in the 90’s and has kept Japan moving for almost three decades. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
The original Snowboard Kids has been fully decompiled in only 84 days! In this post I delve into what changed and what lessons might apply to future projects.
A unique statue depicting a human sitting on the back of a leopard has been unearthed from the Neolithic site of Karahan Tepe near Şanlıurfa, southern Turkey. The figure is 70 cm (27.6 inches) high and was discovered in what archaeologists believe was its original location: on a stone platform along the wall of a…
People lined up around stores at midnight like they do for a new Apple product.
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum's Universal Robots (or…
It was a summer holiday, sometime in the late 1990s. I was a young kid, around 8 or so. My dad had taught me the rules of chess before and we played from time to time. But this time was different: As we were about to start he stood up and walked away from the board, sitting down in a chair across the room and facing…
