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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
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…
And why French is full of them
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ev
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 was awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Frederick J. Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance"
25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications <gerald [at] … > To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0 Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT) Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively…
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
His famous 1931 paper identified the fundamental limits of math, logics, theorem proving, computing, AI.
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
Happy 27th birthday to the GNU Image Manipulation Program
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…
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…
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
