151
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 337 posts.
152
Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
153
Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio
154
The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
This blog post explores the historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games.
155
Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
156
Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
157
Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…
158
Life before smartphones (2020)
An essay about life pre-iPhone addiction, why you're wrong about Salt Bae, an Indian butter chicken Instant Pot adventure, and a new Hell & Wellness pod discussing Marie Kondo.
159
Restaurant prices in the 19th and 20th centuries (2009)
Restaurant prices in the 19th century (followed by 20th, below) Note: Until the mid-19th century prices were often quoted in shillings and pence, or in Spanish dollars. One Spanish bit = 12½¢; One …
160
The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
161
Amazon EC2-Classic Is Retiring
Update (August 23, 2023) – The retirement announced in this blog post is now complete. There are no more EC2 instances running with EC2-Classic networking. Update (July 29, 2021) – Added link to the Support Automation Workflow document & clarified link to AWS MGN pricing. Also updated the list of recommended instance…
162
Monkey Island PC-speaker music player
The Monkey Island (TM) PC-Speaker music player
163
Columbo: an origin story (2018)
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first airing of Prescription: Miurder, here’s a little bit about the origins of the Columbo character – and the actors who played him before …
164
Japanese Typewriters
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
165
Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
166
Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
167
168
The Dig
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
169
Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
You have to open the file anyway to make it useful, so why not just open the program directly?
170
The History of the Dot Com Era
I graduated from college in 1997. While at college, the Netscape IPO, Yahoo IPO, eBay IPO, and Amazon IPO all happened. When I graduated, I…
171
Full Throttle
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.
172
The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano?
It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that…
173
Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)
Background
174
Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
175
The Death of the Festival
<p>(Part 1 of a multi-part series)</p> <p><em>We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters,</em> <em>wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous.</em> – Hans Von Hentig</p> <p>The…
176
Nicole gets a real computer – the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard (2020)
So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy micr...
177
Inside a 20-Watt Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier from Apollo
How did the Apollo astronauts communicate on their trip to the Moon, 240,000 miles back to Earth? They used a 32-pound amplifier, built ar...
178
The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 and VAX
Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. Its entitled First new vax in ...30 years? Someone posted it on Hackernews . One of the comments said, roughly, that they didnt see the significance and…
179
The Secret Life of Machines
SERIES 1 The Vacuum Cleaner The Washing Machine The Sewing Machine The Refrigerator The Central Heating System The Television
180
Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.