Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
I am updating volume 2 of Core Java and got stuck on the section on text files in the internationalization chapter. How hard can this be in 2016? Surely everyone uses UTF-8 these days. Or do they? Make a file Test.java
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
"REAL stories. REAL history."
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
I rarely re-blog, but this one deserves being spread far and wide. Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records Please read the whole post included above – but the …
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
I’ve made some modern games in retro style, and one thing people will always tell you is, make sure your pixels are the same size. When your base resolution ...
Part 1 and part 2 described CHR data, nametable based backgrounds, sprites, and scrolling. Combined, these cover nearly everything a basic NES cart can do without using additional hardware. To go any further will require a quick tangent to discuss, in detail, how rendering happens.
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire. You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth ...
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley …
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
In 1996, Japanese toy designers Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro debuted the first ever Tamagotchi.
History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…
The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games. Like any platform, however, the number of truly great games within that range is much smaller. If you ask any former (or…
A while ago a came across an old Compaq LTE 286 laptop. When they were first released around 1989, these PCs were somewhat groundbreaking because they were the first to be compact enough to resemble the “notebook” form factor that we take for granted today. Unfortunately this particular unit was pretty much beyond…
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the si…
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
In which I go digging into source archives from 40-50 years ago, to figure out why we use XXX to mark dodgy code.
