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East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
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The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…
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The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...
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The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
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Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine
Introduction During the late 1980s, Namco set out to create the world’s largest arcade game. The result was Galaxian3: Project Dragoon; a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the …
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A Map of British Dialects (2023)
This map took me a long time to make, and is very detailed, but will always be incomplete and inaccurate due to the nature of language. Why this map is so detailed The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous. It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or […]
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How a Forgotten Battle Created a More Peaceful World
The legacy of Solferino is in more danger than ever
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How the U.S. became a science superpower
Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ…
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Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim
The history of Vi & Vim goes hand in hand with the history of open-source software. This article looks at the historical events that shaped the evolution of these text editors.
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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
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Modern 6502
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
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Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
Visual Effects Supervisor - Scott Squires Visual Effects Director of Photography - Patrick Sweeney The effects for this movie were orig...
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Photographs of 19th Century Japan
A world of dew
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Obituary for Cyc
After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence.
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20 years of Git
Twenty years ago, Git was born. How did this unlikely "information manager" take over the world?
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Decoding the 90s: Cryptography in Early Software Development (2023)
In August 2020 we were commissioned to recover a cache of locked QText documents from the mid-90s. This is the process of analyzing the encrypted documents and reverse engineering a DOS-era Hebrew-English word processor written in Turbo Pascal.
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The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)
A comprehensive study of the machine-tool industry in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy. The study analyzed the causes of the U.S. decline and offered policy options for aiding the industry's recovery.
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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
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Blacksmithing and Lisp
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
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Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
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Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from c. 1300
Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from the 1200s discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library.
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A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices
It's a purely mechanical adapter that relies on smarts in the mouse itself.
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