New

The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 92 posts.

History & Retro Computing
2009
72

Zawinski's Law

“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…

73

P.S.: The Best of Intentions

Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.

78

Some AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…

84

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 released

[08 Oct 2009] Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition [07 Oct 2009] Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD port [23 Sep 2009] First Debian Mini Conference to be held in Taiwan [05 Sep 2009] Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 updated [06 Aug 2009] 2009 Annual International Debian Conference finished…