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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 92 posts.
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Google Multivac
In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows" ). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world's…
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Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts
Super Phénix: Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Station, River Rhone (Sur le Rhone) Creys-Malville, Isere, France, Centrale Nucleaire Europeen...
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The C Programming Language: 4.10 (HP Lovecraft version)
C functions may be used recursively; that is, a function may call itself either directly or indirectly. Uninquiring souls may take this as just another peculiarity of those C folk, of whose ways their neighbours speak little to outsiders but much among themselves.
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Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
This is a story about how it's essential that you think of all the possible failure modes when you install a fix. Just because you've fixed the problem, that doesn't mean you haven't introduced a new one.
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The Capacitor Plague
I woke up from a nap to a loud pop and a smell of burning plastic. The source turned out to be one of the most precious and important to me digital devices: a ReadyNAS NV+, a small silver box with over a terabyte of hard drives that store my backups, music, and photos. Network attached storage (NAS) is an engineering…
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The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…
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Greybeard Stories: The Bouncing Torpedo
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
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Greybeard Stories: The Black Team
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
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Web Sockets Now Available In Google Chrome
Starting in the Google Chrome developer channel release 4.0.249.0, Web Sockets are available and enabled by default. Web Sockets are "TCP f...
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Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found.
As you probably know, in the late 70’s Panic was writing VAX/VMS automation code for the textile industry. Cotton attenuators, zipper sublimation, loom dynamics, that sort of thing. What you might not know is that, once the early 80’s arrived, Panic got hit hard with two things: unkempt mutton chops, and Pac-Man Fever.
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Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?
Earlier this year, we heard from many of you on how important speed is to your daily activities on the web. We kicked off a series of disc...
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Partmaps.org
All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.
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Development Journal for Price of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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The Making of Prince of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball
Will…You…Play…Black Knight Again?? There is a reason I live in Winnetka and not in Evanston. And it’s not because, as Sandeep would put it, I like to get up 30 minutes earl…
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A 2x Faster Web
Today we'd like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of...
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be human
Scraping for AI training is killing small websites like ours. Traffic from users is drowned out by bots at a factor of 100 to 1. At times, the load on our server from bots makes our server so unresponsive we can't get in to administer it.
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Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
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Feynman, Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
On January 28th, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched at 11:38am on the 6-day STS-51-L mission. During the first 3 seconds of liftoff the o-rings (o-shaped loops used to connect two cylinders
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Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
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The original IBM Thinkpad
This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company's new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full-time Apple and the Chinese