jonjacky

17 ms·

151.
by jonjacky 3y ago
The original classic in this genre is Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, about Tom West and his team at Data General designing and building a new model minicomputer in the 1970s. It won the Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in 1982.
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by jonjacky 3y ago
There is also Joy of Computing https://joy.recurse.com/
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by jonjacky 3y ago
There is already a former church in Barcelona that now houses a supercomputer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Supercomputing_Cente...
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by jonjacky 3y ago
George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world." (I don't agree, but I see his point -- it's certainly one of the most eccentric, and it's huge.)
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Also, the Empire State Building is more recent, built 1930 - 1931. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the first picture in the article, was built 1925 - 1926.
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Date? None on the report. The most recent reference (in the GC section) is 1996.
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Forth's niche was embedded control using small 8- and 16- bit computers with from 8 or 16 kilobytes up to 64 kilobytes of memory. Its heyday was the 1970s and 80s when those were the largest, most powerful computers that were economic
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by jonjacky 3y ago
A start on something like this might already exist. Curlie [1] is a hand-built directory or table of contents to the web, something like the the old DMOZ Open Directory Project [2]. 1. https://curlie.org/ 2. https:/&
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Sure, that's fine!
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Surely you shouldn't have to install guix and info-reader just for this. SICP in info format (just a text file) has been available for many years from several sites (use any search engine). Then you can just read it in emacs, whic
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Daniel Gackel and Scott Bell in "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News", Aug 8 2019. (Yes, that's dang) Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat in "The Friendship that Made Google Huge", Dec 3 2018 Geoffrey Hinton in &q
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by jonjacky 3y ago
The Loyal Heights neighborhood in Seattle is named after the developer's daughter, Loyal Graef Treat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyal_Heights,_Seattle
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by jonjacky 3y ago
I would say: when the existing offerings completely prevent you from doing what you want to do, or require ugly workarounds that are not consistent with your goals, or when future changes in those dependencies might compel you to do extra w
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by jonjacky 3y ago
This project reminds me of the approach at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Alan Kay wrote [1]: (At PARC we avoided) putting any externally controlled system, in- house or out, on one's critical path. ... Thus, virtually all the PARC hardwar
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Don't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society: Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty
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by jonjacky 3y ago
It might not be possible anymore, due to security issues. This was pointed out here in 2018, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17194937 : ... Engelbart's system was a completely shared space in which everyone l
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Kartik Agaram [1], The paper about his Mu project [2] presents a rationale for a particular kind of minimalism, and its realization. 1. https://akkartik.name 2. https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.p
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Compare these pictures to the "West Side Story" movies - both the original 1961 version, contemporary with these photos, and the 2021 version, where they tried hard to reconstruct this look, especially the cars and clothes but als
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by jonjacky 3y ago
This one anticipates ChatGPT, LLMs etc: 92. The computer is the ultimate polluter: Its feces are indistinguishable from the food it produces.
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Sidewalk Dances: 14 Moondog compositions arranged by Joanna MacGregor, played by the Britten Symphonia and others, recorded in 2006 https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-s3gc2pdV19MwYJJTe...
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Some other git-in-python projects include Dulwich [1], gittle [2], wyag [3], pygit [4], and zit [5] 1. https://www.samba.org/~jelmer/dulwich/docs/ 2. https://github.com/FriendCode/gittle
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Possibly pertinent: Stonebraker et al DBOS, Database Oriented Operating System: https://dbos-project.github.io/
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by jonjacky 3y ago
See also, another comic in a very similar style from 2022: https://contrachrome.com/comic/page01/ "Leah Elliot documents how over the last decade, Google's browser has become a threat to user privacy and
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by jonjacky 3y ago
> I just had to skip over all the parts about entering your code into punch cards A few years ago I worked with a scientist who used a huge Fortran program with a long history. He described the lines in a text file that configured the p
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Was it KISS Linux? https://kisslinux.org/ It has been discussed here several times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=KISS+linux
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by jonjacky 3y ago
as i understand it, it had conditional jumps but no index registers, self-modifying code, or indirect jumps, so i think you couldn't build subroutines or data structures such as arrays See the links to a detailed architecture descrip
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by jonjacky 3y ago
A detailed description of the Programma 101 architecture and internals appears as Chapter 19 in the book Computer Structures: Readings & Examples edited by Gordon Bell and Alan Newell, 1971. Bell and Newell write, "The Programma
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Recently I wrote this essay/history about difficulties creating provers for Z and creating a Z standard, and the decline in the popularity of Z: https://jon-jacky.github.io/z/z-history/
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by jonjacky 3y ago
Ray Charles often said that Nat Cole was his biggest influence -- even though Charles' own repertoire and vocal style do not resemble Cole's. Ray Charles Inducts Nat "King" Cole at the 2000 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame I
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by jonjacky 3y ago
The computer scientist Stephen Kell has made an Illich-like critique of computing and software development practices. I recall Kell mentions that he ran across Illich's work after beginning the critique but was struck by the similarit

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