1711
The Myth of Bananaland
The marketing and reality of the United Fruit Company
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
1712
1713
1714
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
1715
A small collection of text-only websites
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
1716
How old were the inventors of major inventions?
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
1717
Pentium on a 386 Motherboard
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…
1718
H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
1719
Medieval Desktops
We are used to having multiple books open at the same time when looking things up at home or writing an essay for class. Whether PDFs, e-books or old-fashioned paper volumes, switching between book…
1720
1995 Programming on the Sega Saturn
This is a document I wrote in 1995, while working on Neversoft’s first game: Skeleton Warriors. It was the first game I’d worked on where I did not use 68K Assembly.
1721
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, Day 6: Fixed a chip, data read from disk
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
1722
Discovery's Teardrop
They are perhaps the most easily recognizable tiles in space shuttle history. For shuttle watchers, when you see them, you know exactly which shuttle you are looking at. Only space shuttles Columbia and Enterprise are more recognizable. The four other shuttles — Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — aside…
1723
The purge of German science in 1933
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
1724
Version Control Before Git with CVS
What it was like using version control before distributed repositories and commit graphs.
1725
Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
1726
The Lost Apps of the 80s
In an email conversation, Ray Ozzie and I talked about all the writing tools of the 80s that didn't transiiton to the web.
1727
1728
Flash is dead. Long live the internet.
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…
1729
1730
1731
Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
1732
1733
Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
1734
Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
1735
The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
1736
What Google Learned from Wave and Buzz
สล็อตเว็บตรง แตกง่าย ด้วยการเล่นผ่านโทรศัพท์มือถือสามารถเล่นได้ทุกที่ทุกเวลาตลอด 24 ชั่วโมง ทำให้ได้รับความนิยมอย่างแพร่หลายเหตุปัจจุบัน
1737
Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
1738
50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
1739
The Problem That Built an Industry
How a conversation on a plane in 1953 set in motion the stack that eventually processes tens of thousands of flight bookings per second, and why that stack is still here.
1740
Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”