Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 5,567 posts.

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3070

Remembering Conway

Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.

3072

Vitamin D: the New Covid-19 Chloroquine?

Welcome to this post, in which we’ll be taking a trip through the wild and bumpy ride that has been Vitamin D & sunlight research over the past few decades, and what it might mean for COVID-19. As with my previous post, before any non-specialist attempts to write something on COVID-19, we should wonder: are any actual…

3073

Assange Hearing Day 7

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH This morning we went straight in to the evidence of Clive Stafford Smith, a dual national British/American lawyer licensed to practice in the UK. He had founded Reprieve in 1999 originally to oppose the death penalty, but after 2001 it had branched out into torture, illicit detention and…

3080

ThinkPad 560E

I’ve been idly looking for one of the mid-90s ThinkPads known to have perfect OpenStep/Rhapsody support for years as a fun collector piece, but been unwilling to pay eBay prices. The other week I scored a pristine IBM ThinkPad 560E for $20 in a Shopgoodwill auction, below is notes on getting it up and running, plus…