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
2362

A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)

So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…

2364

Assembly Nights

Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…

2368

Computers Built to Last

I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…