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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 311 posts.

History & Retro Computing
2020
37

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…

40

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…

44

Racket is 25

posted by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt The First Thoughts [Matthias]: Wednesday 25 January 1995: POPL used to be a Monday-through-Wednesday-noon affair. Cormac Flanagan presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate i...

48

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our…

55

Bullfrog After Populous

I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture. And then there’s me. I had the…

60

Lisping at JPL (2002)

This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)