The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post. Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
The Apple event tomorrow morning (US Pacific time), takes place at Town Hall, Building 4, Apple, Inc. in Cupertino. It has been almost 15 years since I visited there the last time. 'Hint: It&...
In late April of 2019 Adam Bradley and Chris Blackburn were sitting in a pub on a Monday night when Chris happened across a somewhat unusual eBay listing for an IBM 360 Model 20. This eBay listing was unusual mainly because it didn’t actually list the computer as an IBM 360, but rather as an “seltene Anlage “Puma…
The international standard measurement of the kilogram is being officially changed on May 20, for the first time making all standard units defined in terms of basic physical principles instead of particular human-made objects. MIT professor and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle explains the change.
Fukushima 8 years on
Exploring the sexual symbolism hidden in paintings of weasels in Renaissance art
3.6.2 is a general patch release. It includes a large number of fixes to the 3.6.1 version, beyond the Windows issue fixed at the time of that release.
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Sou...
Douglas Self,
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
This week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced that a 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle was just solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than MIT scientists expected.
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
