The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo . About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary.
I want to speak to your manager.
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
Old fashioned sleuthing and the help of modern technology leads to discovery of manuscript with poem composed by a farm labourer 1,300 years ago.
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
Journalists are thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for journalists. This letter is coming at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.
Creating a perfect clone of SimTower in the browser
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
A blog about software craft and quality
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.
A papyrus fragment of Homer’s epic The Iliad has been discovered inside the wrappings of Roman-era mummy . The mummy was found in a necropolis the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa) in Egypt’s Minya Governorate. Archaeologists were able to remove the papyrus and identify the text as the “Index of…
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
A 13-year-old on a walk in the Spandau district of Berlin discovered a rare ancient bronze coin from Troy . It dates to between 281 and 261 B.C. and was issued by the mint at Ilion (Classical and Hellenistic era Troy). Now on display at the PETRI Museum, it is the first Greek antiquity ever discovered inside the city…
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
How a conversation on a plane in 1953 set in motion the stack that eventually processes tens of thousands of flight bookings per second, and why that stack is still here.
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
