Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,024 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
Chrome Developer Tools: Back to Basics
It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existin...
American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
Researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals textile revolution
UA researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals key aspects of textile revolution in the Bronze Age
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 was awarded "for having explained innovation-driven economic growth" with one half to Joel Mokyr "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" and the other half jointly to Philippe Aghion…
Paul Erdős (2000)
Erdős posed and solved problems in number theory and other areas and founded the field of discrete mathematics.
WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project (1990)
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already…
Lost “canceled” Squaresoft game 3156 Coro Coro located and preserved
Hello, Gaming Alexandria readers! It is me, Chris Kohler, former journalist, current game developer and forever fan of obscure old games. The good people at Gaming Alexandria have given me this space to make a fortuitous announcement: A long-lost Square game, previously thought to have been canceled, has now been…
The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music.
ZX Spectrum Next Laptop
Having created a laptop style case for my ZX Spectrum Next dev board previously, I wanted to re-visit the idea of a Spectrum laptop and address some of the issues faced in the previous version.
CRT Manufacturing
Explore CRT lamp history at vintageTEK. View TekTalk and TekWeek articles, photos, and PDFs documenting CRT lamp and gun assembly production.
A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge
There are thousands of books in print today about starting a business, but only a handful about ending one and moving on . Tamburri2020 is a deep dive into one particular (and not yet complete) ending: the decline of SourceForge , which was the first (and for many years the largest) open source software forge. Over…
Google Chrome for Linux goes stable
Since the initial beta release of Google Chrome for Linux last December , we've been hard at work adding the polish necessary to upgrade th...
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.
Google's "Chrome Frame" plugin for IE no longer requires admin rights
We released Google Chrome Frame in September 2009 to expand the reach of modern web technologies and help developers take advantage of HTML...
Arch Linux turned 20 years old today. It was released on 11/March/2002
About Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX , a great distribution developed by Per Lidén. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades…
What ever happened to webrings? (2015)
Before search engines were what they are today, webrings were a great way to find websites that interested you. So what happened to them?
Savings and Loan Crisis 1980–1989
In the 1980s, the financial sector suffered through a period of distress that was focused on the nation's savings and loan industry.
My First Death Threat (2004)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” inside of the case?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Ultra High Resolution Photo of Night Watch (2022)
Op 8 juli 2019 start het Rijksmuseum Operatie Nachtwacht, het grootste en meest veelzijdige onderzoeks- en restauratieproject van Rembrandts meesterwerk in de geschiedenis. Operatie Nachtwacht heeft tot doel het schilderij optimaal te behouden voor de toekomst.
History is just one damn thing after another
This is a short story about what happened to the U.S.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"