Best of 2009

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2009. 71 posts.

History & Retro Computing
52

Keynes, Explained Briefly

If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat…

54

Google Multivac

In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows" ). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world's…