Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 155 posts.

History & Retro Computing
9

A Requiem for Ian Murdock

I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere, after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems' founding was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF meetup was actually a briefing on his…

11

Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome

Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…

14

The Unix Philosophy

The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.

26

NES graphics – Part 1

Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…