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Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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Lemmings 2: The Tribes
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
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Book Review: Hoover
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
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Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead
The history of defect tracking databases in Windows.
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Looking inside a vintage Soviet TTL logic integrated circuit
This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, ...
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Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
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Wiring and Cabling: How to Lace Cable Harnesses (1962)
From OP 2230, "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment" , published by the direction of the chief of the Bureau of Naval Weapons , 1 December, 1962. pp. 7-9 --- 7-14.
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NetHack 3.6.6
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.1, 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4 and 3.6.5. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security. You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.6 as soon as possible.
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How early American inventors funded their ventures
From Colt's traveling show to the Wrights' bicycle shop
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Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
Or, the JAM stack.
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The History of the URL
January 11th, 1982, 22 computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).
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The core memory inside a Saturn V rocket's computer
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) had a key role in the Apollo Moon mission, guiding and controlling the Saturn V rocket. Like most...
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Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
How to answer this question—and how not to
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Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)
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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2020 Leap Day Bugs
The following is a list of many bugs caught on or near leap day, February 29th, 2020. Each link below references the issue with supporting details where available.
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Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
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Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson
AdGuard dives into the history of ad blocking, from the very first banner on the web to present days, and we even have a peek into the future of ads and ad blockers. Let's look back together to better understand what awaits us ahead.
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Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
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The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
To survive in the big bad world of business, you need staying power. We wanted to know which businesses around the world have stood the test of time and were
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Assange Hearing Day 2
This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage…
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Was Knuth Really Framed?
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
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Peter Montgomery Has Died
Peter was born in San Francisco, California, on September 25, 1947. He went to UC Berkeley in 1967 and received a BA in Mathematics in 1969 and an MA in 1971. Peter’s undergraduate advisor was Derrick H. Lehmer, an excellent match given Peter’s research interests since high school: integer factorization.
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How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
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Apple's long processor journey
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld-ROM…