Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 122 posts.

History & Retro Computing
121

nasal demons

Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…