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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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NES graphics – Part 1
Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…
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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
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When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
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The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
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50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)
I was asked to give a toast in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of [The Mother of All Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos) so I spent some time reflecting on Engelbart's w...
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ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
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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A History of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) still feel a bit like magic to me. Of course, I understand the general machinery enough to know that they aren’t, but the gap between my outdated knowledge of the field and the state-of-the-art feels especially large right now. Things are moving fast. So six months ago, I decided to close…
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Why old games never die, but new ones do
It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers a…
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Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...
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A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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“WarGames” Magazine Identified
As per Jargon File [1] definition number seven of Hacker [2] : "7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.", I have performed a real world hack of the movie "WarGames [3] [4] ." Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other…
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Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. In short the idea…
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Slack client for Commodore 64
Slack is great. Many smarter people than me also think that Slack is great. Slack is great because its simple and easier to deal with than emails. With all t...
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The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
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A file format uncracked for 20 years
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
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Did the early medieval era ever take place?
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
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Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in p…
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When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets
SVG Phone Home
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The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers”
Akron and Macon were flying aircraft carriers designed for long-range scouting. Both crashed at sea, ending the U.S. Navy's rigid airship program.
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The Roots of Lisp
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of…
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John Nash's Letter to the NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified an amazing letter that John Nash sent to it in 1955. It seems that around the year 1950 Nash tried to interest some US security organs …
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A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…