Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 61 posts.

History & Retro Computing
32

The Slide Rule

At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical orbits with two foci, and then set out to prove it mathematically. 4 years and 900 pages of…

48

Intel’s Chipped Chips

Typically when collecting something, be it coins, cars or CPU’s having the most pristine unblemished example is highly desirable. However, sometimes, the best example is one that isn’t perfect, in coin collecting it may be a rare double struck coin, or some other flaw that actually makes the coin more valuable.