1741
The McDonalds Monopoly Fraud (2014)
From 1995 to 2001, it really was impossible to win a grand prize from McDonalds Monopoly promotion. Unless you knew "Uncle Jerry."
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
1742
Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron paved the way for AI 60 years too soon (2019)
As the Faculty of Computing and Information Science celebrates its 20th year, Frank Rosenblatt’s prescient research into artificial intelligence underscores Cornell’s pivotal role in computing history.
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
1744
Yesterday's Pixels, Today
In August I finished work on a game called Restricted Airspace for the Wonderbundle, a bundle of new games by NYC game designers available as a reward to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter . It is a 3rd person aerial shooter in the style of the original Star Fox set in a city modeled on Beirut in the 1890s. It was…
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Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet
Why has Ethernet endured as a ubiquitous data framing protocol over all these years?
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How Blender started, twenty years ago
Celebrating 20 years of Blender code!
1748
Reverse Engineering Wipeout
In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…
1749
Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
1750
What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
1751
Satoshi leaked his Los Angeles IP address (2016)
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
1752
How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea
1753
How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
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NetHack 3.6.7
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4, 3.6.5, and 3.6.6. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security . You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.7 as soon as possible.
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NetHack 3.6.6
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.1, 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4 and 3.6.5. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security. You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.6 as soon as possible.
1757
Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
This guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other…
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Generation Nintendo
In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…
1760
The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]
1761
Another World
The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than…
1762
A Norwegian who knew his tortoises so well that he changed history
This article has previously been published in Norwegian in Aftenposten Historie no. 6, 2015 and Biolog no, 1, 2014. Due to several reques...
1763
The First 15 Years of PyPy – A Personal Retrospective
A few weeks ago I (=Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick) gave a keynote at ICOOOLPS in Amsterdam with the above title. I was very happy to have bee...
1764
Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview
A never-before-seen 1996 interview
1765
Skate Warrior 1992, 1999, 2020
In The DV Rebel’s Guide, I used this still frame as an example of guerrilla filmmaking taken too far. Which may also be an apt description of the entire film from which it was taken.
1766
Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller (1975)
Everything I Know During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. Jump to Sections Introduction These …
1767
Photographs of the Old West
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
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