421
300k airplanes in five years
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
422
Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s
I spent my childhood in France, playing a lot of soccer and watching way too much TV. In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons. My generation grew up with Captain Tsubasa, Saint Seiya…
423
424
425
426
Assange Hearing Day 2
This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage…
427
Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
428
Dick Smith Is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time
Want to know how to turn $10m in to $520m in less than two years? Just ask Anchorage Capital. The private equity group has pulled off one of the great heists of all time
429
Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
430
Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
431
432
433
Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle
Center for the Study of the Public Domain2023368 points208 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle by Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain. The first…
434
435
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
436
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
437
The girl with the ANSI tattoo
I enjoyed the David Fincher remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo more than I thought I would. Rather than a shallow and cynical Holly...
438
Lode Runner
It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented…
439
440
441
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014
Center for the Study of the Public Domain2013365 points160 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1957 The books On the Road, Atlas Shrugged, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Bridge on the River Kwai, Funny Face, and The Prince and the Showgirl, the play Endgame (“Fin de Partie”), […]
442
A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
443
I assure you, medieval people bathed (2019)
I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…
444
What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
445
A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
446
The sound of the dialup, pictured
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
447
How transportation technologies shaped empires
For thousands of years, a hidden rule limited the size of empires, unbeknownst to their rulers.
448
Ten Years of ThinkPadding
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
449
450
The Insane Innovation of TI Calculator Hobbyists
In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vaccuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to…