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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
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Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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The History of Windows 2.0
Success and Litigation
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Early Days of AI
Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past "AI", it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
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I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)
What helps a programming language gain traction? Patrick Martin remembers why he used to use Delphi.
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Unix is both a technology and an idea
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project
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MacPaint and QuickDraw 1984 source code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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UCLA floor tiles decoded, pay homage to first internet message (2013)
A hidden message left by a UCLA architect in 2011 was recently uncovered in Boelter Hall, where sharp-eyed passersby can spot a coded note in the pattern of floor tiles.
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Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography (2016)
Thought we’d try something different this week. For the record, I am definitely a ‘point and click’ photographer – my mobile phone has always been my camera of choice. The e…
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How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIb: Imperium
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023158 points44 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second section of the third part of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries, t…
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Railway Safety Posters (2022)
These are posters warning of potential hazards on the railway. They were used for public relation relations at various stations to alert passengers and the gene
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The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
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The IPv6 mess (2002)
Each computer on the Internet has its own public IPv4 address, similar to a phone number: for example, 131.193.178.181. The target of each packet of data is identified by a public IPv4 address.
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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
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20 Years of Vim
Create and share beautiful and engaging annotated charts2023212 points76 commentsTools & Productivity details
The hard work from maintainers turned Vim into a completely new editor, while still maintaining its spirit.
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Reading Ancient Scrolls
This is an elaboration of my submission for the letter detection prize as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in June. It gets technical and esoteric but the first few paragraphs are of general interest…
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The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
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How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIa: Starting Down the Path of Honors
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023109 points48 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the third of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries. Last time we discussed Rome&…
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The time SUSE, the German Linux company, banned mentioning Jewish holidays
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
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Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
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This code smells of desperation
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
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Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
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