Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,253 posts.
I've been on many projects that get canceled. We're building cool stuff. We're going above and beyond, and we're excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on. But what if I didn't let a project…
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
A periodic table chart discovered at the University of St Andrews is thought to be the oldest in the world.
Update: Date typo in post title fixed! I came across this on Google Books, going through some old issues of InfoWorld I’d read back in the day: Click = big For those who want text, see after …
"Just say whatever comes into your head each time..."
I've previously come to the conclusion that there's little reason for using bytecode in the modern world, except in order to get more compact code, for which it can be very effective. So, what kind of a bytecode engine will give you more compact code?
Read this Magazine article to learn about the history of Fedora, the original Fedora Core 1 release, and how much has changed over 15 years.
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The SPDY protocol , which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, i...
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering tha…
Bill Gates was as aware as everyone else of the abundant deficiencies of his own company’s hastily procured operating system for the IBM PC. So, in September of 1981, before the PC had even shipped and just a handful of months after VisiCorp had started their own similar project , he initiated work at Microsoft on a…
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
In October this year I had the privilege of speaking at the GothamGo conference in New York City. As I talk quite softly, and there were a few problems with the recording, I decided to write up my slide notes and present them here.
Whose Creators They Failed to Credit
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
How to navigate North Korea's home-grown Linux distribution.
[ed note: this article is also available in pdf and postscript and as a Microsoft Word document . ]
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
