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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 1777. At the end of a daylong battle, George Washington’s right flank has completely collapsed. British troops are closing in. A dashing Polish cavalry officer reports to Washington’s bodyguard that they are in danger of being surrounded. Washington orders Casimir Pulaski to gather as many…
21 November 2020 The story goes that all spiral* staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. It is a particular favourite of tour guides, appears in castle guidebooks (Hodgson…
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
Dedication asks each of its adherents to have faith even as time and energy pass through from one year to the next. Dedication brings with it a variety of challenges, but also rewards. Dedication is something most people claim to have, but few …
This time we will talk about one unique Intel processor, which did not appear on the retail market and whose reviews you will not find on the Internet. This processor was produced purely by special order for one well-known manufacturer of computer equipment. Also in the framework of this article I will try to assemble…
Back in 2008, Sequoia Capital shared with its portfolio companies tips for surviving the economic downturn. Here's the original RIP Good Times presentation.
[10 Nov 2012] Help us to release Wheezy : participate to our BSP marathon [29 Sep 2012] Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.6 released [16 Aug 2012] Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday [13 Aug 2012] Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city [10 Aug 2012] Help the Debian Installer team: test the new version of the…
Archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger has made an incredible discovery.
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
Two different, but somewhat related additions to the archive you might want to check out. First, I was contacted earlier this week about a project to recover information off of an old Cray-1 supercomputer hard drive. Unlike, say, trying to get your old floppies to read or pulling an old mix tape off of a
A comprehensive study of the machine-tool industry in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy. The study analyzed the causes of the U.S. decline and offered policy options for aiding the industry's recovery.
The MV Ruby, a ship carrying a highly explosive Russian cargo, is damaged and looking for a port. The threat is clear.
By literally stretching materials science to the limit, Gore invented Gore-Tex, a lightweight, waterproof fabric made from the expanded form of the polymer PTFE.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos" with one half to James Peebles "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology", the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an…
The international standard measurement of the kilogram is being officially changed on May 20, for the first time making all standard units defined in terms of basic physical principles instead of particular human-made objects. MIT professor and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle explains the change.
Asking nicely, and asking a lot of people.
The most successful computer ever to come out of the UK celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was awarded with one half to David J. Thouless, and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter"
Hello! If you’re still here reading this blog, I’m impressed. We haven’t posted anything of note for some years now and frankly, thats because we haven’t done anything of note with the project. The machines have been sitting in their home, virtually untouched, for 4 years now. Chris & I (Adam) are just too busy with…
Today marks the 54th anniversary of the moon landing. In retrospect it has almost unanimous support and adoration in the US: pleasing the left as an example of the power of public funding and the right as a triumph of the capitalist west against the
From a software engineering perspective, 10 years is indistinguishable from infinity, so I don't care what happens 10 years from now -- as...
