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Using machine learning to recreate photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors
Artistic interpretations of the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate, created with AI and historical references.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd
Introduction I've been on a bit of a floppy disc protection odyssey recently. This will probably be the last floppy disc related post for so...
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Industrial Literacy
When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it
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Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
How to answer this question—and how not to
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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…
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2020 Leap Day Bugs
The following is a list of many bugs caught on or near leap day, February 29th, 2020. Each link below references the issue with supporting details where available.
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Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
The original Roman mile was 1000 paces (milia passuum), or 5000 feet. The modern mile was defined as 5280 feet under Queen Elizabeth at the end of the 16th century in order to reconcile multiple di…
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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.)
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Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
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London tube map made from a working circuit board
Fancy a tube map with a difference? How about one made from a circuit board - with lights that show live train movements?
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CGA in 1024 Colors – A New Mode: The Illustrated Guide (2015)
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Addendum: Crucible Steel and Cast Iron
This week, as an addendum to our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, we’re going to look at two alternative regional processes, where th…
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FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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Rescuing vintage arcade video games from an abandoned ship (2016)
Regular readers of this blog will have seen me reference “Arcade Raids” in previous articles. This might create images in your head of hooded gangs of arcade collectors breaking into warehouses in …
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
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Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry
This is my story as a game developer. It is also a story of how the Finnish game industry came to be.