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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 98 posts.
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The THX Sound
The essential, funny guide to retro and future synths, guitars, music making, gear, gadgets and techology.
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The Art of Computer Typography
Ever since I came across Jürg Lehni’s essay on typographic technology and digital fonts, Typeface As Programme, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Donald E. Knuth and his unexpected contributions to typography. You see, Knuth is a professor and computer scientist well known to pr…
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A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)
Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions , and successfully bloc...
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When Rob Pike first met rms
I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career. === There's no such thing as ba...
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
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Common Lisp: The Untold Story
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986
Update: Date typo in post title fixed! I came across this on Google Books, going through some old issues of InfoWorld I’d read back in the day: Click = big For those who want text, see after …
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Jef Raskin's final gift to Aza (2010)
Studying how an individual's thoughts, emotions, ideas, and aspirations are formed through their interactions with others is the focus of social psychology as
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Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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Prof. dr. N.G. de Bruijn, 1918-2012
Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics
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John Nash's Letter to the NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
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Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal - Letter to the editor, Datamation July 1983
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
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The Future of JavaScript
The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as " Harmony ". It is due by the end of next year...
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Star Trek as a purely symbolic artifact of past times
Back to: I had a blog entry for you, but I eated it | Forward to: Beer, Boston (and books)
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My foxhole radio
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
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UK government declines to pardon Alan Turing
There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...