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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
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Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
It is now ??????????.??? ( ????-??-??T??:??:??.???Z ) in Unix time , according to your local system clock.
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The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
What if you could counterfeit so much money that it stopped being illegal?
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Simulating History with ChatGPT
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
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Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)
Do you know what got black currants banned? They nearly destroyed a huge part of American forests. Find out how this healthy berry became a threat.
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Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...
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HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
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The Development of the C Language (2003)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
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Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Not many people remember this 2005 documentary featured early interviews with Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman.
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AOL pretends to be the internet
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […]
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Remembering Doug Lenat and his quest to capture the world with logic
Stephen Wolfram shares memories of Doug Lenat, early AI pioneer and developer of the CYC system. Their discussions around AI & logic and the potential combined uses of their respective discoveries.
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Google was incorporated 25 years ago on September 4 1998
Find out where it all began. Read the history of how Google has grown since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998.
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Ford 021C Concept Car (1999)
Marc Newson has been described as one of the most influential designers of his generation. He has worked across an extremely wide range of disciplines, and his clients include some of the best-known and most prestigious brands in the world spanning diverse sectors from manufacturing and technology to transportation…
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Man, Myth and Magic
Collect the set! I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagin…
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A Test Suite for the Intel 8088
In a previous article, I revealed one of the secrets to MartyPC 's accuracy, hardware validation . To summarize, it is a method of using a m...
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The curl-wget Venn diagram
In my view, wget is not a curl competitor. It is a companion tool that has a feature overlap with curl. Use the tool that does the job. Getting the job done is the key. If that means using wget instead of curl, then that is good and I don't mind. Why would I? To … Continue reading The curl-wget Venn diagram →
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Plastic Money
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that…
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The History of Windows 95
The Dawn of Microsoft's Golden Age
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Everything I know about floppy disks
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic "floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far.
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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
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A History of the Amen Break: From the Winstons to Futurama and Om Unit
How did a six second drum sample go on to inspire entire sub-genres of music? Let's examine the history of the Amen Break.
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
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Shining a light on the digital dark age
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?
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Doug Lenat has died
AI has lost a giant
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Wii Architecture – A Practical Analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes
A popular path to protected mode.
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C.R. Rao: A Life in Statistics (2020)
Presently into the 100th year of his life of vast experience, living in his Buffalo residence, here is a video message communicated by his daughter when he turned 99, at the beginning of a year-long celebration, with conferences in his honour at various places.
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Film Review: BlackBerry
The Greatest business film ever made... in Canada