Detection of Airborne Viruses - <AUTHOR> https://www.kth.se/mst/research/sensors/project/detection-airborne-1.523039 <comment><USER2> Looks great until they hit the ELISA (antibody test) which requires pre- existing antibodies for the target. That's like when you search for your keys under the streetlight when you dropped them in the dark. Anything novel becomes an expensive and slow ordeal (aka, it doesn't happen in practical use) because you need "test kits" (sound familiar?) ... just imagine your malware detector would only flag code which exactly matched exploits it had seen already.

If they replace ELISA with a nanopore sequencer like Oxford's MinION then you could detect all the DNA RNA in your breath and feed that data into algorithms like BLASTN. Suddenly you can see viruses no one ever saw, and thousands of them at once. Meta genomics is more sensitive than ELISA because you can see everything and more efficient because you can use the same reagents to test for anything. Then we detect virus everywhere as soon as the sequence is available on NCBI (we had a sequence for CoV-19 two months & four days ago)

[https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel- coronaviru...](https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus- china/en/)

<comment><USER3> I don't know the technical details of MinION.

Coupling good capture with amplification and detection is required. When working on dna detection you use something like pcr for signal amplification.

But surface detection can in some cases be more sensitive, since you generally have a lot more surface fragments available than you have dna or rna. Especially since many viral diseases form have huge ratios of surface fragments per every well formed infectious viral particle.

Generally: a sequencer by itself doesn't have the sensitivity required. For example, for norovirus we're talking about detecting a few virus particles per cubic meter of air. You need insanely sensitive detection tech to be able to do that.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know the technical details of MinION.

Neither does OP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked on one of these projects. This technology has amazing potential for (near) real time detection and monitoring of the spread of airborne disease throughout society. Think shoe box sized air samplers in common spaces that send real time data to monitoring health agencies, alert when a space is contaminated, and so on. The same tech platform can also be used to inexpensively and quickly test individuals.

Unfortunately the funding for continuation was lost in the shambles of the partial collapse of Getinge a few years ago. I was not able to find anyone else interested to continue funding the prototype development when the remnants of Getinge did not prioritise the project.

Near real time in this case can mean as little as a few hours.

We had a total funding of ca EUR 5M for the first prototyping project. If anyone has interest and money, I can pull together people and ip.

</comment><comment><USER5> In "the andromeda strain" there is a scene where they try to determine the size of the particle, by selecting different filtration sizes between an infected an uninfected mouse / rat. Is this representative of how droplet sizes are measured? Has this been measured for SARS-CoV-II?

<comment><USER6> no

<comment><USER5> which no or both no?

<comment><USER7> Well if the first one is a no, then the second one is obviously a no since that method isn't used. Find more on virus measurement methods here: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article/sizes- of-viruses-and-the-methods-employed-in-their- estimation/BA71C94D73307F5CA7C63753135507F9)

<comment><USER5> "this" in the second sentence refers to droplet size regardless of measurement method. I have asked for the SARS-CoV-II droplet size distribution many times before, for example here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519323)

<comment><USER6> The droplet size distribution would be for saliva, covid19 would effect this less than say cough velocity or other variables. The volume of fluid produced does seem to change with illness and influenza may increase the total volume produced in a cough with 63% of the particles in the size range of 0.35 to 10 μm as measured by a laser spectrometer in an influenza infected patient.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4676262/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4676262/)

<comment><USER5> what I mean is that droplets produced in the lung are not necessary saliva, and droplets produced in the nose, .... all have varying viscosities depending on flu or cold, dry cough or not, ...

think about what you are saying, how could what you say be true, and some diseases be more air borne than others? if a pathogen can trigger specific immune responses that result in runny noses, or blocked noses it has some control over the viscosity of different types of mucous our body produces...

so has this droplet size distribution been measured for covid-19?

<comment><USER6> I mean it's not completely senseless to compare unknown psd to known psd of sick people. It just seems that as a diagnostic metric it doesn't seem to give you much new information and would be too error prone.

My thoughts were about fluid dynamics and what causes a particle with a mass greater than air to become airborne in the first place - force of updraft jet on surface area overcomes the force of weight, right? So that'd be determined by the velocity of the air flow and the properties of the fluids interacting. So you'd have to first either measure velocity of the ejection or make an estimate and you'd pick a sensor to measure the different particle sizes. Those sensors typically only give a range of particles as output such as <2.5u, <10u, etc in ppm. You'd be forced to group the distribution into discreet intervals and accept more inherent sensor error. Then you have a non- homogeneous fluid with insoluble solids in it launched at variable velocities each time so you probably would need multiple samples (how many to overcome this variance? Can you do it with out over powering your analysis?). Whether the data was useful would depend on some really good designs that minimize the variance of the samples.

It would be an interesting experiment, but I doubt you would find statistically significant results between the different illnesses based on runny noses vs blocked noses viscosity change. I don't think you really need to though because runny or blocked nose is already a diagnostic symptom that doesn't require particle size distribution to determine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fukushima Engineer Says He Helped Cover Up Flaw at Dai-Ichi Reactor No. 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-says-he-covered-up-flaw-at-shut-reactor.html <comment><USER2> Plato had this theory that in drama, you had to show the bad guys being bad, so that they would be morally worthy of the hero killing them. Of course, they actually get killed by the unexpected combination of sword and internal organs.

A lot of the reporting about TEPCO seems to be "Aldight alright, we get it, your plant got physically hit by a thirty foot tall wave... but _you were asking for it_ what with your shiftiness on that totally unrelated inspection years ago."

<comment><USER3> Wait, how is a coverup and botched inspection leading to an unsafe containment vessel _unrelated_ to a situation decades later in which a sister vessel is compromised?

EDIT: clarified that the vessel from this story was not the exact one that just failed; it's simply another of the same design made by the same company during the same era, overseen by the same agency.

<comment><USER4> Because the containment vessel in that reactor hasn't failed.

<comment><USER3> But the one next to it has! Do you really think the corrupt construction of one of these structures has no bearing on the failure of the others? That they're independent events in history?

<comment><USER2> Occam's Razor: was in the corrupt construction or the power interruption caused by the ten meter high wave hitting their diesel generators? Here, let's try an experiment: take a reactor not maintained by TEPCO. Turn it off. Interrupt power to cooling systems. Wait.

Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects. Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)

They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got hit with a ten meter tsunami.

Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to understanding the failure.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully we agree here that the most important goal is to understand the entire chain of events (from plant design to construction to operation to earthquake to tsunami to power failure to meltdown to vessel breach), in order to better avoid something like this happening again in the future.

Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news.

I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along".

Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise.

I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made".

In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This highlights the biggest problem I have with the rabidly pro nuclear people who insist that we now know how to build safe reactors. They always assume everyone involved has the best intentions, but we know that that is not the case.

<comment><USER6> Nuclear industry PR reminds me of NASA's attitude to space travel prior to the Challenger explosion.

The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide, representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles, nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now they look like dangerously experimental technology.

Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.

<comment><USER7> Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.

<comment><USER5> This argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many years.

<comment><USER8> The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?

Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania>

Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.

<comment><USER4> ... to say nothing of the stats for coal miners themselves; coal has killed tens of thousands of miners since 1950.

<comment><USER9> Does anybody know if coal and uranium/plutonium miners are included in those death-per-Kwh stats?

<comment><USER10> Sorry accidental downvote due to fiddly touch screen

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If the mistake had been discovered, the company might have been bankrupted, he said." ... "At the time, I felt like a hero," he said.

Tough choice. On the one hand, you have your friends, family, and your company; on the other hand, who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake.

<comment><USER12> > who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake

Your comment makes it sound like the defect had an incidence, but it's specific to reactor 4 alone, and reactor 4 was empty when the earthquake happened. For all we know putting the pressure vessel back in shape may have had little effect on its resiliency.

Still, of course, a very tough choice.

<comment><USER13> For me, the real story is the cover-up that occurred when he reported his story years ago. He did the right thing in terms of public safety and got called a liar.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this. An accidental defect may not have an incidence, but you can bet the corruption that led to it being covered up does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's what worries me about nuclear power. A well maintained plant is probably very safe but there is an incentive for operators to cover up flaws in order to save money. Let's wait until more power plants get old. They probably should be shut down but that's the time when they are the most profitable and fixing problems is the most expensive.

<comment><USER4> A missing or damaged filter on a coal plant is sufficient to contaminate the surrounding environment with uranium-235, uranium-238, and thorium-232 (not to mention arsenic). Your long term exposure to radionuclides is actually probably worse from coal plants allowed to continue operating negligently than your exposure would be if you lived 30km from Fukushima.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And then there's this.. maybe related?

Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant: <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake>

Makes you wonder what other nuclear reactors have had cover ups and what can possibly can go wrong when the unexpected hits.

</comment><comment><USER16> We have a real dilemma...

If we spread enough plutonium dust around, it will make original sin look like a walk in the park. (Which it was I believe :-)

On the other hand, if we spew enough CO2 there might not be any sinners left in 50 generations.

People are standing around waiting for a techno fix. That won't happen without incentives. We need to tax the heck out of carbon. Fine to cut other taxes and pay Grandma's heating bill. But we must change relative prices to get the right focus. Economic forces are much more powerful than a few government research projects.

Is anyone driving less at $100 oil? We need about $50-$100 of tax per barrel to get the ball rolling. And a carbon equivalent tax on coal and gas.

<comment><USER4> And so, if you live in an area of Subsaharan Africa with poor to nonexistent infrastructure, your answer is basically "die of dysentary"? You cannot look at this problem solely from the surroundings of your couch. I promise you, the dysentary entamoeba pathogen is many tens of thousands of times scarier than 100msv of radiation.

The prohibitively high cost of energy in the world is actually _a bad thing_.</comment></comment>


Tablet That Does Not Track You - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/librem-2-in-1-tablet-that-does-not-track-you <comment><USER2> What about the Intel ME? Is that on the Atom processor this uses? I only know of a few processors, mostly ARM, that don't contain this kind of insecure/privacy-invading feature.</comment>


Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/ <comment><USER2> Folks who are into this may also like the "Type Safe Neural Networks in Haskell" [https://blog.jle.im/entry/practical-dependent-types-in- haske...](https://blog.jle.im/entry/practical-dependent-types-in- haskell-1.html)

I'm also starting work on a set of bindings to libdarknet for Idris with similar properties.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that the article has a comment by Yann LeCun (hopefully it's not an impersonator).

You may also be interested in Differentiable Neural Computers:

\- [https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural- computers/](https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/)

\- [https://github.com/deepmind/dnc](https://github.com/deepmind/dnc)

<comment><USER4> > Note that the article has a comment by Yann LeCun (hopefully it's not an > impersonator).

i wouldnt be surprised if it was lecun. colah's illustrations on nonlinear transformations have made it into several lecun papers, including the following [nature review]( [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14539](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14539)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10165716).

</comment><comment><USER6> Some related work also include:

\- "Strongly-Typed Recurrent Neural Networks" [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/balduzzi16.pdf](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/balduzzi16.pdf)

\- Principled Approaches to Deep Learning workshop [http://padl.ws/](http://padl.ws/) (maybe this is in line with the meta-point Colah's paper)

\- Haskell accelerate library [https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate/](https://github.com/AccelerateHS/accelerate/). Not deep learning per se but perhaps some of the ideas are applicable

</comment><comment><USER7> This covers some of same topics plus the rapidly expanding #s of frameworks, SIMD /SIMT backends etc [https://julialang.org/blog/2017/12/ml&pl](https://julialang.org/blog/2017/12/ml&pl)

20 pg tutorial on why RNN's are tricky [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01078](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01078)

<comment><USER8> Many mentions of Python, none of Numba, which does a good job of jitting Python with LLVM.

It seems unlikely though that an entire modeling community could rally behind a single language or framework, given all the possibilities, many of which are commercially oriented. But one I've used recently with a lot of flexibility is Loopy

[https://documen.tician.de/loopy/](https://documen.tician.de/loopy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's also this take on differentiating datatypes: [https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/algebra-and- calcu...](https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/algebra-and-calculus-of- algebraic-data-types)

Reading this makes a lot of the operations in colah's article feel more intuitive. (To me, at least. I'm no expert here.)

</comment><comment><USER10> The examples are odd because he doesn't incorporate any notion of differentiability.

So a Generating RNN is not quite like foldr, since foldr has no notion of differentiability.

One needs to show examples that pulls in some kind of automatic- differentiation capability.

<comment><USER11> When you pass a differentiable function into fold -- or most higher order functions, for that matter -- you get a function that is differentiable on everything but a measure zero set.

The mechanics of how you compute the derivatives are separate from this. Obviously, the efficient way is to use backprop (reverse mode AD), as we always do in deep learning. But you could also use discrete derivative approximations. The point is that the resulting function is differentiable, which is independent of how you compute the derivatives.</comment></comment>


Lawmakers Who Aren't Making Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.govtrack.us/videos/2013-07-22_few-bills?utm_campaign=govtrack_email_blast&utm_source=govtrack/email_blast&utm_medium=email

<comment><USER2> Like not making laws is a _bad thing_? It seems a bit like judging developers on lines of code.

<comment><USER3> agreed. these metrics mean absolutely nothing. the founding fathers preferred congressional stalemates to passing laws in excess.</comment></comment>


Study finds weak participation on Web 2.0 sites - <AUTHOR> http://news.com.com/Study+finds+weak+participation+on+Web+2.0+sites/2100-1032_3-6177059.html?tag=nefd.top <comment><USER2> Odd spin to the title. The ratios they quote sound about what I'd predict. What standard are they weak in comparison to? Presumably whatever uneducated guess the writer of this article already had in his head. This kind of thing is exactly why traditional journalism sucks.

</comment><comment><USER3> However low it might be, as a ratio, isn't something I'd really be too concerned with. The ratio of Steven Spielberg to everyone who sees his movies is pretty low, for example. I don't think that's a problem.

Only 0.2% of users upload photos to flikr, probably because the number of lurkers has skyrocketed. The number of quality contributors only needs to grow fast enough to keep the lurkers and voters growing.

</comment><comment><USER4> No kidding. As much as some people around here hate to hear it, sometimes you have to FORCE your users _provide_ content before they can _receive_ their fill of content from your app. What are the benefits/costs of each approach?

Allowing users to receive without giving content:

1\. Good: Maximizes the impact of your PR/ Lets you grow really fast over a short period of time.

2\. Bad: Easy come, easy go. Since the users have no role as a content creator, they will be out of there the second your competitor has the slightest feature improvements over you.

Requiring every user to be a creator (edit- to receive full benefit from your app):

1\. Bad: The start can be rough. Expect to have to really have to use some marketing ingenuity.

2\. Good: Users will be locked in.

3\. Good: Your site will (should) be far more valuable if more people are contributing. This, along with #1 will lead to exponential growth.

4\. Maybe bad: With this abundance of content, it will be mandatory that you find a way to present the user with the content that is most relevant to him.

5\. Good: You are monopolizing access to a lot of content. You can probably charge users directly for this access.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> Another bad of requiring everyone to be a creator, which depends on the sort of site you are making:

-Not everyone wants to or has the skills to be a creator.

I'm not a photographer. My pictures are barely good enough for myspace photo albums. No amount of coercion is going to get me to take and upload photos to flikr. It's only going to make me not use the site at all.

<comment><USER4> But in your example, the absence of photo albums on myspace is punished quite heavily in practice.

Right up until they were sitting on a billion dollar valuation, you could not even make your photos private to just your friends. Sharing was mandatory.

Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the user has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least keep something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying that this practice is best for all sites or even the majority.

<comment><USER3> "Note that I am not saying that zero content should be available until the user has made a contribution to the site, just that the site should at least keep something special for people who do. Most importantly, I am not saying that this practice is best for all sites or even the majority."

I agree. On myspace, for example, much of the value is tied up in the actual user. Quality photos aren't important. What's important is that they are photos of a real person you can make comments on and send messages to. It makes sense for them to encourage participation to a greater degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found."

Wow! That surprised me. This is very, very low. For a while, blogs were quoting various stats saying that 1% of users are creators, 10% are participators/aggregators (people who vote, comment etc) and rest are lurkers. New numbers are really unnerving since I have so much energy currently invested in a social/participant site. I think it's time to seriously start planning for a plan B.. "what if" situations.

<comment><USER6> Take a careful look at the number they're measuring. They say that only 0.2% of _visits_ to Flickr are uploads.

That's very different from saying that only 0.2% of _users_ upload content. Even someone who regularly uploads photos to Flickr probably views 10 photos for every one they upload. Think about news.YC: in a typical day, I probably post 3-4 comments and submit one article, yet I read about two dozen articles and 50+ comments. And I'm #13 on the leader list, so most people would probably consider me a participant.

IMHO, the article chose a very meaningless number and then reported it as a big find. Reads _always_ outnumber writes, by a large margin. Your top contributors don't just post things, they're also usually voracious consumers, probably reading dozens of items for every one they submit.

It's like saying that novelists read 100 books for every one that they write, and therefore they aren't really contributing anything to literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is more important is where the trend is going rather than where it is right now.

From personal experience, I'd say this has good chance of not being accurate. Almost everyone I've run into has uploaded or thought of uploading a video or picture to YouTube or Flickr or Facebook.

\--Zaid

<comment><USER8> My personal experience is the contrary. In fact, I found this article eye- opening, which is funny, because the result seems so obvious.

It seems most people who join social networking sites are essentially voyeurs, and this has consequences for the kind of business I'd like to start.

What is the trend? I bet it's pretty constant, or slowly increasing. -But I have no data to back any of my statements up :)-

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was one of the main points of Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell in "Citizen Marketers" where they talk introduced what they called "The 1 Percenters", named for the average contribution rate of the sites they studied.

</comment><comment><USER10> Even if users are not uploading movie clips, they are still providing content by adding comments and ratings and social network nodes (for whatever purpose). So I think the study doesn't really understand Web 2.0).</comment>


HTTP Status Code XSS - <AUTHOR> http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?url=security.gracey.ca

<comment><AUTHOR> Approximately 3/4 of the top 30 status code checking tools are all vulnerable against basic XSS. Thought I'd share this rather fun method. Checkout "netcat security.gracey.ca 1500" for details.

</comment><comment><USER2> Always sanitize your input, people.</comment>


Show HN: CentUp - Launching in late February - <AUTHOR>

We put together an Indiegogo campaign and fun video to get early users. Thoughts?<p>http://www.indiegogo.com/centup <comment><USER2> I remember a company that was doing the same thing a few years back. It was tip.. something.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is actually really interesting..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you</comment></comment>


Hardening Perl's Hash Function - <AUTHOR> http://blog.booking.com/hardening-perls-hash-function.html

<comment><USER2> > An attacker could precalculate one or more suffixes such that H(x) == H( > concat(x, suffix) ) which would then allow an attacker to trivially > construct an infinite set of keys which would always collide into the same > bucket. We hardened the hash by mixing in the length of the key into the > seed.

This prevents making an infinite set of keys that collide, yes, but does not fix the problem completely. It only increases the request size required to perform the attack. But even with 8 character UTF-8 keys, you could generate 2^64 unique keys with the same length.

Note: IANAC (I am not a cryptographer.) But if I was looking for guarantees for worst-case performance, I'd (pretty much) never use a HashMap. If nothing else, because of the array resizing.

<comment><USER3> > But if I was looking for guarantees for worst-case performance, I'd (pretty > much) never use a HashMap.

I wonder why none[1] of the major dynamic languages offer the option of running with the built-in associative-data structures implemented using a Red- Black Tree. Seems like an obvious thing to do.

There are interface issues, of course. In particular, for a new type to be usable as a key, it would need to provide an ordering rather than a hash function.

But if only built-in types are used as keys, then there might be no reason to change the interface at all. Just re-run the same program with a different option and you've traded some average-case performance for a guarantee on worst-case performance. And the Red-Black Tree is already written (somewhere out there ...). So why not?

[1] To my knowledge.

<comment><USER4> _> I wonder why none[1] of the major dynamic languages offer the option of running with the built-in associative-data structures implemented using a Red- Black Tree. Seems like an obvious thing to do._

It's not a command-line option, but Perl lets you "tie" a hash to a different backing implementation, and there are some tree-based ones:

        use Tree::RB;
        tie my %hash, 'Tree::RB';

<comment><USER3> Wow, I had no idea. That's a nice feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thats why I like Lua's hash implementation that adds a random seed to the hashing algorithm to limit those pathological side effects...

<comment><USER6> Wait, does that mean that iterating across the members of a Lua table is not in deterministic order? I assume it just uses the naive hash ordering for iterators... this is relevant because Lua is used as a scripting-engine SpringRTS which uses a lock-step-based multiplayer approach so anything non- deterministic risks breaking sync.

<comment><USER7> > Wait, does that mean that iterating across the members of a Lua table is not > in deterministic order?

Yes. And it is documented as such. Any dependency on repeatable iteration order is a bug.

<comment><USER6> Huh. I'm not involved directly in SpringRTS, but I'm going to take a look at the code... I assume there's a compilation flag for Lua to disable that, or they've hacked it up and are using a custom interpreter, because protecting sync is paramount.

<comment><USER8> Just using "sort(hash-keys())" instead of "hash-keys()" should be a trivial patch that fixes this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Room 77 raises $10.5M innovate in hotel search - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/search-engine-room-77-raises-10-5m-for-personalized-hotel-room-recommendations

<comment><AUTHOR> We've got open positions for Software Engineers & UI/UX front-end developers. We're adding new hotels every day to our database and our focus is on building a new way to help travelers find the right hotel based on room data.</comment>


What do you listen to while hacking? - <AUTHOR>

I never found a good playlist hacking playlist so I put one together and posted it (blog.Phaxio.com). What do listen to and what would you add? <comment><USER2> I actually don't listen to music, very much. I was checking my last.fm tracking a couple weeks ago and if you average it out, I've listened to about one song per day for the last five years. Usually, I listen to podcasts or nothing at all. Very occasionally, maybe even just white/brown/pink noise.

Edit: Actually, I just realized that I _do_ listen to some 'music'. I play EVE-Online which has an extensive in-game track of like six hours of ambient and sometimes techno-ish/industrial tracks that are perfect for thinking. Since I usually have the EVE client running in the background on any machine I'm on (never know when you might need to make a big Heavy Water trade in Jita for your player owned structures), I usually let the music play the entire time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Armin Van Buuren, Dune, i.e. any electronic trance. The State of Trance (<http://www.astateoftrance.com/>) is available as a podcast if you want a playlist that rotates every week.

<comment><USER4> And if you like A State of Trance, give the <http://di.fm> Trance channel a try. A State of Trance is just one of the recurring sets they play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anything that I've already listened to at least 10 times. If it's new, it's distracting. If it's familiar, it helps put me in the zone.

<comment><USER6> I have a playlist set up that filters out songs I have not listened to multiple times, otherwise as you said it's distracting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Currently, virtuoso keyboard music by Alkan to warm up, viol music by Marin Marais for intense thinking, and Albinoni concertos for moody hacking at night.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pete Namlook "From Within III", Siriusmo, vhshead, metheny, Hanna soundtrack, Mount Kimbie, Joy Orbison

</comment><comment><USER9> I go to mugasha.com and hit up the Myon & Shane 54 International Departures sets. Gets the blood flowing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Trance Around the World podcast. Two hours of trance every week, mixed by Above & Beyond.

</comment><comment><USER11> Gotan Project.

Is a sort of Electronic Tango. Will get you on the mood right away!

</comment><comment><USER12> The Tron Legacy Soundtrack. Makes coding feel more intense :D

<comment><USER13> LAWL i was just thinking about that. Specially The Grid hehe

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Revisiting my youth: OMD, Kraftwerk, Fisher Z, New Order

</comment><comment><USER15> Sigur Ros, Pixies, Explosions In The Sky

</comment><comment><USER16> BTTLS</comment>


Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?  - <AUTHOR> http://m.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/1 <comment><USER2> Instead of trolling from wired about Narrative Science, how about we see how an _actual_ reporter uses tools to automate his job?

Here's Ben Welsh of the L.A. Times talking about "Human Assisted Reporting" (which itself is a play on "Computer Assisted Reporting"): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-On8PzEy8>

Oh, and here's the slide deck: [https://docs.google.com/a/knowtheory.net/presentation/embed?...](https://docs.google.com/a/knowtheory.net/presentation/embed?id=1sW3iLUDXs7NTdo7EUUxD7X3vnIWYo7G8orMf5FT05Zk&start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.p)

<comment><USER3> I found Ben Welsh himself to be interesting, and his opinions, but the overall premise was talking about using computers for simple tasks that frankly I assumed they had all been doing for a long time, stuff like "now we can run a search to see if somebody has been arrested before!"

<comment><USER2> Well, you have to remember two things.

First, publishing (whether it's papers, broadcast, whatever) is a big lumbering business. There are entrenched interests, people who fear or loathe technology, egos, and all of the other perils which modulate large scale human endeavors.

There are people within the news world who have been working on computer assisted reporting, doing all sorts of cool stuff for decades now. What _hasn't_ happened is a uniform and widescale adoption of all of these practices, because much of the workflows involved in the business are tied to their legacy business, and those legacy components are really difficult to shed for a pile of reasons.

Ben may be talking about this stuff as a good idea, but it's not that nobody's been doing this stuff... it's that stuff like this isn't standard practice across the industry (yet).

Also, please remember that Ben is talking about _automating_ these processes. Reporters have been filing FOIA requests manually, and getting info from the government essentially for as long as there has been a government and foia laws. That's where part of the tepidness about technology comes from. The government isn't particularly friendly to efforts to stream line processes that get more information to reporters.

<comment><USER4> A third thing to remember: the folks you're getting information from (governments) are often reluctant to provide that information, and there's no legal requirement for it to be a particularly useful format.

It'll often be a CD of some 1970s mainframe database format with no information on what format it is, how to open it, etc. They'll do a little happy dance if you just give up and move on to another story.

<comment><USER2> My employer still has two DAT readers which we use to process records from the Department of Labor.

I had never seen one in action before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In this economy, software developers are in extremely high demand and journalists are a dime a dozen. What's the value in building software to do the job of journalists?

That said, it's a really neat idea and I'm curious to see this technology mature.

<comment><USER6> It's much more fun to code a robot than to hire a journalist :-)

But also, once you get to massive robot production, then the amount of journalists will seem small. Think of content personalized to each user. Real time description of things around you in your software. In our startup we plan to have a robot write the plot for user generated games based on their custom settings. Hiring a writer for each use would certainly increase our costs.

<comment><USER2> Explain to me why this isn't techno-utopian claptrap?

The thing that frustrates me about the way that Narrative Science is discussed and some of the unhinged techno-futurism stuff that people write, is that it's never about making _people_ or _individuals_ more effective.

Automated processes and people have different strengths. Computers really aren't that great at pretending that they're people, and people are bad at accuracy on repetitive tasks.

That people keep on talking about "replacing" so-and-so misses the point. Change their market, change their workflows, make them better at accomplishing the function journalists or whomever play in society.

Endeavoring to make them obsolete is both unnecessarily inflammatory and also not terribly sensible.

<comment><USER6> We don't wanna replace them as the end goal. We simply have repetitive tasks that could be automated. Whether that automation will, in fact, replace journalists or assist them. Is another problem that depends on your specific implementation details and economics.

For our company specific use. Hiring a writer to be assisted by our robots would just add unnecessary cost to the process and delay to the end user experience. Versus pretty much little to no gain in quality. We only need a simple transformation from structured data to narrated english, and we want lots of it to be delivered instantly to our users.

It just makes more sense for applications like ours to have robots replace humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good journalists write stories that are not solely based on data but also on experience and observations. I personally hate it when a game summary of a sporting event is just the box score in sentence structure. Yes, rote descriptions of data are replaceable by software, but is it even worth replacing? Maybe it's just because I'm a data-oriented person, but I would rather look at a table of data or a graph than read these types of stories.

I want to read details that can only come from being there in person. I can look at a box score to see Lebron James scored 27 points or missed a free throw at the end of a game. A journalist's job is to tell me that he appeared distracted by the crowd loudly booing a controversial call or that Andrew Bynum pouted on the bench after getting into a heated argument with his coach during a timeout. Those kinds of observations are what makes a story come alive and it will be a long time before software can replace this human element.

<comment><USER6> Robots have much better memory and access to want you call "experience" than a human.

Robots only do what they're told and are only as good and creative as the coder. If you can write an emotional heated narrative. Then you can code a robot that does the same. There's nothing intrinsic to programming that makes it impossible for good writers to coffee a robot that mimics their style.

<comment><USER8> I think you are missing the grandparent's point. It is easy(-ish) to get some structured data and turn it into sentence format.

Unless you have structured data that represents all human experience someone present at an event could muster (smell, sound, emotional feeling...) I don't see how a robot could replace it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> See the talk by Kriss Hammond (founder of Narrative Science) at Stanford's ee380 on January 18. See [http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/winter- schedule-20112012...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/winter- schedule-20112012.html) .

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems to me that the current state of the art here is getting a computer to write a couple of paragraphs to describe a data set. While that's a neat trick its not a very valuable one in this context.

Congratulations you've replaced the absolute bottom of the barrel of reporting, that which could and probably should be replaced with a table or two.

Until the software actually attends the event somehow to gather the information and add additional context its just a clever trick. If you want to save money on this kind of reporting id probably stick to outputting some nice tables of data in the sports section.

</comment><comment><USER11> How about the opposite: I assume high frequency traders use algos to interpret whether news stories are good are bad for stocks and trade accordingly

<comment><USER12> People do use news stories, blog posts, Twitter, pretty much anything to algorithmically generate profits. But that's not really the domain of HFT.

<comment><USER13> Are you certain about that?

I thought the whole point of HFT was to use small shreds of information to play the liquidity gap between sell and buy orders.

<comment><USER12> Someone should confirm this, but my understanding is that HFT typically monitors events on the stocks themselves to drive actions. I also believe that HFT is something that happens with response times on the scale of microseconds, which obviously scraping CNN.com for content isn't suited for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't say with any certainty about how much you could automate the job of a featured journalist or editorialist for a big journalistic institution like the Economist or maybe the Times, but I'd say at the current quality network and cable news reports are going...automating the "what's up right now" news is probably already doable. That's not necessarily saying a lot about the algorithm, though.

</comment><comment><USER15> 5 years to get a computer winner of a Pulitzer prize is ridiculously optimistic.</comment>


FBI: Pedophile Symbols - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/wiki/FBI_pedophile_symbols <comment><AUTHOR> The symbols appear in movies

[https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/cbw7d4/keep_pla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/cbw7d4/keep_playing_dumb_second_image_is_from_the_movie/)

An actor (Corey Feldman) from this movie said he was abused.

The symbols also appear in many other odd places that are eerily connected to each other.

If it's a coincidence, it's the greatest of all coincidences.

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting side bit: Wikileaks' certificate is expired.

> Not After : Aug 2 12:16:38 2019 GMT</comment>


Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing? - <AUTHOR> I found this post about ARPA Net a few months ago and finally had time to read it.  Anyone have other great reads or know of books on computing technology?
I think knowing the history of how we got to where we are helps to understand ot more.
Link: https://technicshistory.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/arpanet-par... <comment><USER2> Top of my head, here are some books on specific histories I enjoyed. All old, but there are timeless nuggets in them.

Soul of a new machine, previously mentioned. Where I first learned about mushroom management.

Just for Fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary [0] was fun bio on Torvalds from 2001

The Mythical Man Month [1] offers some insight into the management and thinking that went into OS/360

Masters of Doom [2]: offers an enjoyable history of the shareware years and the rise of id software

The multicians site [3]: is a collaborative history of Multics, one the most influential operating systems.

The Mother of All Demos [4]: even better than Steve Jobs keynotes

Steve Jobs iPhone introduction [5]: I'm not a huge fan of Mr Jobs, but this is one of the best presentations ever. It's not history, per se, but very interesting through our eyes.

0: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun)

1: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13629.The_Mythical_Man_M...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13629.The_Mythical_Man_Month)

2: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146.Masters_of_Doom](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146.Masters_of_Doom)

3: [https://multicians.org/](https://multicians.org/)

4: [https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY](https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY)

5: [https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ](https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really enjoyed the Idea Factory, by Jon Gertner: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea- factor...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory)

It was exciting and inspiring and fun. It covered a ton of different inventions that came out of Bell Labs from its inception through the 1960's. It had some fun factoids like how they selected the wood for the telephone poles. Just an awesome book.

Another is Dealers of Lightning, by Michael Hiltzik: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Light...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1101290.Dealers_of_Lightning)

Exciting and inspiring like the first, but with a different feel. It's about Xerox PARC and all of their work and the people there.

<comment><USER4> Could not agree more with The Idea Factory, his talks are also great. I also came away feeling inspired, nostalgic and the book is very fun. They are some real characters.

There's some good picks in the similar books I've been looking at: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/16750267-the-idea- fac...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/16750267-the-idea-factory-bell- labs-and-the-great-age-of-american-innovation)

If you haven't read Ben Franklins autobiography it's also pretty fun and inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier_

Published in 1992, released on the Internet as a free ebook in 1994.

"The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987–1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of "Knight Lightning" (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, can't believe nobody has mentioned the classic, _Hackers_, by Steven Levy.

Another book I found interesting, but is focused more on the early history of Silicon Valley as a whole, not just computing, is _Valley of Genius_, by Adam Fisher.

<comment><USER7> Valley of Genius is a fun way to become acquainted with some of the Valley's history (for those who haven't read it, it's an oral history comprised of interview snippets from a bunch of key pioneers and people who were at the right place at the right time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not an article, but Kirk McKusick (a very longtime developer of BSD) gave a few talks on BSD and UNIX history (and the beginnings of TCP/IP), which are on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSXXeiFLgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSXXeiFLgk)

If you prefer text, you can find it in Chapter 1 of his book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System": [https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD- Operati...](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating- System/dp/0201702452) (the chapter seems to be available in the book preview)

Eric S. Raymond also wrote a nice chapter on UNIX history in "The Art of Unix Programming": [http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/historychapter.h...](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/historychapter.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, looks very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder is fantastic. The story of developing a Data General mini-computer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

<comment><USER2> The tech is dated, but the story, timeless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Digital Antiquarian - A history of computer entertainment and digital culture

[https://www.filfre.net/](https://www.filfre.net/)

It's a treasure trove of computer history, gathered from countless sources. I've spent many happy hours in the company of the author, amused and educated by the stories.

\---

To give a glimpse, some of my favorites:

Will Wright's City in a Box - [https://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity- part-1-will-wrights-c...](https://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will- wrights-city-in-a-box/)

The Lemming Effect - [https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/games-on-the-mersey- part-5-th...](https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/games-on-the-mersey-part-5-the- lemmings-effect/)

Xerox PARC - [https://www.filfre.net/2013/01/xerox- parc/](https://www.filfre.net/2013/01/xerox-parc/)

Macintosh - [https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/](https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/)

The BBC Micro - [https://www.filfre.net/2012/10/the-bbc- micro/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/10/the-bbc-micro/)

A Tale of Three Languages - [https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/a-tale-of-two- languages/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/a-tale-of-two-languages/)

Pascal and the P Machine - [https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/pascal-and-the-p- machine/](https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/pascal-and-the-p-machine/)

Eliza - [https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza- part-1/](https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Check this thread[1] from a few weeks ago. The Dream Machine is a great book that goes into great detail from the very beginning, and how we got here.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281)

<comment><USER12> Also _List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore (2018)_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22841022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22841022)

[https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer- history](https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While much more on the technical side of things, both Ken Shirriff and Curious Marc are great resources for a lot of the historical and technical aspects of things.

I'd highly recommend both of them for looking at specific topics of how the computing hardware worked:

\- Marc's videos on old HP computers, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn2Zz8X41dI&list=PL-_93BVApb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn2Zz8X41dI&list=PL-_93BVApb5_IHrbl- QkstMt24MZHmk1b) \- Marc's videos on restoring some old IBM hardware, that includes a good bit of the history that went into them, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS- WtjwAAO0&list=PL-_93BVApb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS- WtjwAAO0&list=PL-_93BVApb5_9vpvd1UYkFQCgBLlhM4DF) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg&list=PL-_93BVApb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg&list=PL-_93BVApb5-F-M6WhZwwuQWpvo8LqAor) \- In fact just look at his playlists directly, [https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/playlists)

For Ken, I'd look at his chip teardowns and explorations, the AM2901 is on HN this very moment, [http://www.righto.com/2020/04/inside- am2901-amds-1970s-bit-s...](http://www.righto.com/2020/04/inside- am2901-amds-1970s-bit-slice.html)

A lot of his articles dig into why the different chip technologies were made and fell out of favor eventually too. [http://www.righto.com/](http://www.righto.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan is excellent. It traces the history of Unix from the early days at Bell Labs through the period where it reached widespread use in the rest of the world. It's a fascinating history of people building the command line tools that we still use today, and the environment that allows those tools to be combined in powerful ways.

I came away with a much clearer picture of how these systems were developed, and I am a little better on the command line for understanding the original philosophy better as well.

[https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian- Kernighan/d...](https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian- Kernighan/dp/1695978552/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I am pretty proud of this piece that I wrote on my employers blog. It started out as training material to help newbies understand why email is so broken. It took tons of research, and goes way back to pre-ARPANET days. It's a high level, for sure, but goes deeper than most high level writings do:

[https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/how-email-became-an- important...](https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/how-email-became-an-important- yet-complex-abused-solution/)

<comment><USER16> I didn't know that story about the DEC salesman. That was neat, thank you!

<comment><USER15> I'm so glad you enjoyed it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not exactly an _article_ but Grace Hopper's 1978 HOPL keynote makes for good reading: [https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800025.1198341](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800025.1198341) .. she rails against the then 'Establishment' and thinks back to days when people thought assembly language was a bit fancy and modern. There's a _lot_ about the earliest days of programming in her keynote.

</comment><comment><USER18> We interviewed the inventor of PowerPoint for our blog, and he gave a fascinating inside story of how he almost sold to Apple before eventually sealing a deal with Microsoft:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2016/06/10/deal-of-the-century- how-m...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2016/06/10/deal-of-the-century-how- microsoft-beat-apple-to-buy-powerpoint-for-14-million/)

We also recently interviewed the creator of Microsoft Word who talked about working with Bill Gates in the 1980s:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2020/03/20/an-interview-with- richard...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2020/03/20/an-interview-with-richard- brodie-creator-of-microsoft-word/)

For books I'd massively recommend:

\- The Cuckoo's Egg, a first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory[1]

\- Founders at Work, for early Silicon Valley startup stories[2]

\- The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson, for similarly wacky late '90s/early 2000's startup stories[3]

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

[2] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work)

[3] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119751.The_Nudist_on_the...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119751.The_Nudist_on_the_Late_Shift)

<comment><USER19> In addition, the inventor of Powerpoint has written an entire book on its development including this anecdote in great detail called _Sweating Bullets_ [0].

[0] [https://amzn.to/2wPhmtU](https://amzn.to/2wPhmtU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The innovators by Walter Isaacson is also good.

Start from the first attempt to automate calculation in a human history.

Move to transistors, PC, Apple, windows, linux, google, and so on.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21856367-the- innovators](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21856367-the-innovators)

</comment><comment><USER21> "Computer Lib/Dream Machines"

> ...is a 1974 book by Ted Nelson, printed as a two-front-cover paperback to > indicate its "intertwingled" nature. Originally self-published by Nelson, it > was republished with a foreword by Stewart Brand in 1987 by Microsoft Press.

> In Steven Levy's book Hackers, Computer Lib is described as "the epic of the > computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. [Nelson] was stubborn > enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines)

Buy directly from the author: [https://computerlibbook.com/](https://computerlibbook.com/) it says it's "sold out" for now.

</comment><comment><USER22> Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk is very interesting - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

<comment><USER23> Learned something new - the time before Shockley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Folklore [1] has many stories and first hand accounts, especially Apple and Mac related.

[1]: [https://www.folklore.org](https://www.folklore.org)

</comment><comment><USER25> This 13 page paper that revolutionized the world (TCP/IP).

[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/p...](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER26> _The Soul of a New Machine:_

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

</comment><comment><USER27> Anything from Oxide's On the Metal podcast, especially the first five episodes.

[https://oxide.computer/podcast/](https://oxide.computer/podcast/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Just finished The Computer Boys Take Over, by Nathan Ensmenger: fascinating read about the deep roots of computing culture. Many of the debates we have today were already raging in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, including:

* professionalism vs individual creativity * the value of credentials * terrible interview practices * gender roles / biases * theory/academia vs pragmatism/industry

Recommend the book for getting some historical perspective on these topics.

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computer-boys-take- over](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computer-boys-take-over)

</comment><comment><USER29> I can recommend to get a copy of

* Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution, by Lamont Wood.

* The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

* Books by George Dyson (son of ...): Darwin Among the Machines, Turing's Cathedral. (unrelated, but also give Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship a go)

* The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin.

* Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA)

* Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a lecturer who teaches history of computing, here are two of my video lectures, maybe of interest:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7VjiMVRQ6M&list=PLjrJD5nSYN...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7VjiMVRQ6M&list=PLjrJD5nSYNjonK0V57vNutXx- VjyyqVs-&index=7&t=0s)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQO6jWSVz0&list=PLjrJD5nSYN...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQO6jWSVz0&list=PLjrJD5nSYNjonK0V57vNutXx- VjyyqVs-&index=7)

</comment><comment><USER31> I highly recommend "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop ([https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/722412.The_Dream_Mach...](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/722412.The_Dream_Machine)), without a doubt the best non-fiction book I've ever read and a fascinating insight into the history of computing and most of all the visionary people involved in this endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER32> Here's another entry that's a bit unorganized. It's also a bit more of a recent (and sometimes older) history related things that I learned about mostly through HN. Replies / additions to this are welcome.

__Lisp (programming language)__

The Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs (you need to use a search engine for this, there are many different versions of it).

Anything Paul Graham wrote about Lisp (e.g. [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html))

__Hacking__

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker- howto.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)

__Smalltalk (programming language)__

Alan Kay Smalltalk is not about objects, it's about messaging: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852444)

Smalltalk is awesome and one of the historical predecessors of Objective-C.

__Xerox Parc__

Unfortunately, I don't know of any seminal paper or media piece. I just know they were hugely influential. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_\(company\))

Alan Kay worked there.

<comment><USER33> For Xerox, Hiltzik's _Dealers of Lightning_ is a good source.

(The opportunities that Xerox lost because of short-sightedness, political shenanigans and just plain incompetence will probably make you mad. It's a good cautionary tale).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > I think knowing the history of how we got to where we are helps to > understand ot more.

This is a great attitude, especially in our largely ahistoric industry. I wish I thought this way when I started programming.

The book "The Dream Machine" [0] does a fantastic job going into the ideas driving the pioneers. It especially focuses on ARPA and PARC, so you'll get a nice overview of the ideas explored there. And it is a fun read too.

It was out of print for quite some time, until Stripe Press bought the rights and brought it back to print [1]. They also give it away at conferences, as they want more people to be exposed to the ideas of the book.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell- Waldrop/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell- Waldrop/dp/1732265119/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1534249753&sr=1-4&keywords=the+dream+machine)

[1] [https://press.stripe.com/#the-dream- machine](https://press.stripe.com/#the-dream-machine)

</comment><comment><USER35> The Most Important Software Innovations

link: [https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html](https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html)

hn: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691399)

 _Too many people confuse software innovations with other factors, such as the increasing speed of computer and network hardware. This paper tries to end the confusion by identifying the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. This paper presents its criteria for the most important software innovations and sources, the software innovations themselves, discusses software patents and what's not an important software innovation, and then closes with Conclusions.

The results may surprise you._

</comment><comment><USER33> Some of my favorites, that haven't been mentioned yet -

 _The Supermen_ (Charles Murray), essentially a biography of Seymour Cray.

 _A Few Good Men from Univac_ (Lundstrom and Aspray), similar thoughts about the same era of computing.

 _Showstopper_ (Pascal Zachary), essentially a biography of David Cutler, plus a bunch of the development of Windows NT.

</comment><comment><USER36> That _Creatures of Thought_ blog [0] is great. I recommend starting at the beginning as the author gives a pretty strong history of the development of electronics and communications starting around the discovery of electricity to the modern day. I've been working my way through it for weeks and it's been consistently interesting. One of the key themes is how much technological development is intertwined, each person or team building on or coincidently paralleling others.

[0] [https://technicshistory.com](https://technicshistory.com) [1] [https://technicshistory.com/2016/11/13/about-techno- history/](https://technicshistory.com/2016/11/13/about-techno-history/)

</comment><comment><USER37> The gendered history of programming is particularly interesting for anyone who wants to understand the nature of office culture for software engineering/IT and of computer science academia.

[https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming- th...](https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-then-men- took-their-industry-over-c2959b822523)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180110125934/](https://web.archive.org/web/20180110125934/)

[https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans- job-...](https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it- was-paid-less-and-undervalued) (Please forgive the tone.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Check out two bit history! [https://twobithistory.org/about.html](https://twobithistory.org/about.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> I guess you already have seen this article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing)

Here some other interesting books and articles:

[https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds- Compu...](https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds- Computer/dp/0802713483)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse)

[https://computerhistory.org/timelines/](https://computerhistory.org/timelines/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Let's not forget the history of shareware:

[https://www.filfre.net/2020/04/the-shareware-scene- part-1-th...](https://www.filfre.net/2020/04/the-shareware-scene-part-1-the- pioneers/)

<comment><USER41> Or, you know, pretty much anything else from his blog. For example, the 6 part history of Atari and Amiga, The 68000 Wars: [https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars- part-1-lorrain...](https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars- part-1-lorraine/)

Or the history of the game Tetris, A Tale of the Mirror World: [https://www.filfre.net/2017/06/tales-of-the-mirror-world- par...](https://www.filfre.net/2017/06/tales-of-the-mirror-world- part-1-calculators-and-cybernetics/)

Or the 8(?)-parter about Civilization -- the game _and_ the philosophical concept --, The Game of Everything: [https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game- of-everything-part-1...](https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of- everything-part-1-making-civilization/)

Don't miss his articles about the old Infocom text adventures, like the ones about the less-well-known gem Trinity, in which he also talks about nuclear weapons and the 80s in general: [https://www.filfre.net/2015/01/trinity/](https://www.filfre.net/2015/01/trinity/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> History of Programming Languages conferences — HOPL II and HOPL III proceedings are temporarily free online. [https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766](https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766) [https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844](https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844)

And of course many 'primary source' classic papers published by ACM are temporarily free.

</comment><comment><USER43> I highly recommend _Secret history of Silicon Valley_ series by Steve Blank:

[https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%e2%80%99d-...](https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told- you-i%e2%80%99d-have-to-kill-you-the-story-behind-the-secret-history-of- silicon-valley/)

Steve has written in detail about how early signal intelligence came to be, how eventually they shaped the Silicon valley and modern tech.

Other posts on Steve's blog are interesting too.

</comment><comment><USER44> BBC's The Computer Literacy Project is a great resource

[https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/](https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Linus Torvald's biography, Just For Fun, is a great read. I liked that it's both the history of Linux and also showcases his personality and how he thinks.

</comment><comment><USER46> Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book!

And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original!

Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure).

Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find.

As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great.

1 - [https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html](https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html)

2 - [http://worrydream.com/refs/](http://worrydream.com/refs/)

3 - [https://www.folklore.org/](https://www.folklore.org/)

4 - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark)

5 - [https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htm](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htm)

6 - [https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw](https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw)

</comment><comment><USER47> Not sure what's your location but if you are in the US then make sure to visit computer history museum. They also have an online tour - [https://www.guidigo.com/Web/CHM-Revolution- Tour/DHTH2i2fYjA/...](https://www.guidigo.com/Web/CHM-Revolution- Tour/DHTH2i2fYjA/StreetView/1/Calculators-Abacus)

</comment><comment><USER48> If you're into listening to podcasts, I highly recommend Sean Haas's Advent of Computing podcast, which bills itself as "the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing."

[https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/](https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/)

</comment><comment><USER49> See the late Michael Sean Mahoney's writings (Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University): [https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/computing.html](https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/computing.html)

I am thankful to have taken a course with him in the 1980s.

</comment><comment><USER50> Not a link, but a video. A computer from 1959 (IBM 1401) at the Computer History Museum, compiling FORTRAN.

The Youtube user has a lot of good material on restoring historical hardware.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM)

Also, be sure to read the email thread linked in the video comments. It's a conversation between the restoration team and the compiler's _original authors_ (now in their 90s).

If you're in SF and you want to see the 1401 in action, the Computer History Museum used to show it to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Hopefully those demos will resume once the coronavirus situation's resolved.

</comment><comment><USER51> In the Beginning… Was the Command Line, an essay by Neal Stephenson:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line)

</comment><comment><USER52> I wrote a paper about the earliest history of programming notation that was recently published in ACM CHI and received an award: "To Write Code: The Cultural Fabrication of Programming Notation and Practice" [http://ianarawjo.therottingcartridge.com/docs/To_Write_Code_...](http://ianarawjo.therottingcartridge.com/docs/To_Write_Code_Arawjo_CHI2020.pdf)

It speaks to the cultural influences at play in the early history of programming, and how situated the designs were. A visit to Von Neumann and Backus archives at the Library of Congress informed the work (an experience I would highly recommend!).

I hope to make a blog post about the paper soon if there's interest.

</comment><comment><USER53> Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?`

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556208)

My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4)

</comment><comment><USER54> This timeline of the Internet is great and has many sources to dig deeper: [https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/](https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/)

</comment><comment><USER55> [https://computerhistory.org/oral- histories/](https://computerhistory.org/oral-histories/)

[https://computerhistory.org/blogs/](https://computerhistory.org/blogs/)

[http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory](http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory)

HOPL I: [https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8](https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8)

</comment><comment><USER56> The Jargon (published as The Hacker's Dictionary) is a great source: [http://catb.org/jargon/html/](http://catb.org/jargon/html/)

</comment><comment><USER57> A couple years ago I attend this talk by Paul Wesling at Stanford. It's the most interesting, exhaustive account I have heard. It goes all the way back to the early days of Ham Radio enthusiasm in the Bay Area around the early 1910s, following the stories of three pioneers: Jack McCullough, William Eitel, and Charles Litton to modern days.

It was a special day that day... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDB_W6POys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDB_W6POys) you can see me sitting on the floor at 1:40 :^)

</comment><comment><USER58> Maybe not just "history of computing" but I do enjoy the Kevin Mitnick books alongside with Ira WInkler. There's that subculture right alongside "Steal this book."

</comment><comment><USER59> Also worth mentioning is "Turings Cathedral" by George Dyson

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm most familiar with BBN for their contribution to acoustics, but the firm is best known for its development of ARPANET among other contributions to computing. Here is a PDF of collected stories by employees.

[http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/pdf/CultureInnovat...](http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/pdf/CultureInnovation_bbn.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER61> This isn't one post, but it was on HN a while back:

[http://computer-history.info/](http://computer-history.info/)

</comment><comment><USER62> James Gleick - "The Information" pop sci about theory of information and information systems at large. Starting from "0 & 1"

<comment><USER63> I strongly agree with this recommendation. And though it isn't meant to be related, I think of "Decoding Reality" by Vlatko Vedral as being a spiritual successor and deeper dive into information theory (from a theoretical physicist's point of view).

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

[http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete- and-m...](http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly- wrong.html)

</comment><comment><USER65> [https://yarchive.net/comp/index.html](https://yarchive.net/comp/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER66> not a read but a youtube channel

Computerphile [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA)

especially all the videos with professor Brailsford are great with many references to history of computing and there are some with Brian Kernighan too

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a pretty easy question to answer ... here are the links to history articles that I thought enough of to bookmark (note that a few are NOT computer/tech related) - [https://pinboard.in/u:smoyer/t:history](https://pinboard.in/u:smoyer/t:history).

</comment><comment><USER68> I would like to recommend "Go To - Software Superheroes" By Steve Lohr. It has great span from Fortran to (from memory) Word. Really enjoyed it and learnt a few things

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1861972431](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1861972431)

</comment><comment><USER69> I found this quite interesting:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283709219_Beards_Sa...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283709219_Beards_Sandals_and_Other_Signs_of_Rugged_Individualism_Masculine_Culture_within_the_Computing_Professions)

</comment><comment><USER70> I did a little research on microcomputer history in China. There is very, very little information.

[https://ecc-comp.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-quiet-history-of-c...](https://ecc- comp.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-quiet-history-of-chinese.html)

<comment><USER71> I have uncovered early mid-20th century imported machines in China in the past, in fact I had an exchange with an HN user who plans on visiting one I found in a mining museum in Gejiu, Yunnan recently. I have seen many interesting domestic products using cheap processors. There were certainly entire Chinese domestic TV entertainment platforms based upon cheap chips (ca. late ~1980s/early 1990s), unsure if they were locally produced but suspect so. Personnel at the current foundries would be a good source of oral history, it would be a great project (but _be careful not to conduct it in any way that could be conceived as national security related research_ ). I believe a lot of the chip producers are currently using last-generation gear purchased from Taiwan (who allegedly have a policy of offloading last gen stuff to the mainland but keeping bleeding edge 'at home' on the island).

Also interestingly, Asia is rife with great history with respect to pre- Unicode input systems, romanization systems, glyph and font development, sorting, and so forth. Premodern international script efforts such as Phagspa are awesome, the use of Farsi as a lingua franca, Tamil innovations in keeping giant-keychain style records in lieu of inscribed palm leaves, abugidas, the development of the Korean script, non-Chinese pictographic scripts such as Nushu, Naxi and Yi, etc.

For early calculating devices and automata in China, especially hydraulic and astronomic, look no further than Needham's amazing _Science and Civilisation in China_ , which is ultra expensive to get hold of in print but thanks _for great glory of Kazakhstan_ many volumes of which are now available on libgen for your home learning pleasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Saw this on YouTube last night;

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE)

A facinating video that is part of a series going into the restoration of a 1930 Model 15 Teletype. In this video, they use it as a terminal for Linux.

</comment><comment><USER73> Several books on the history:

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer 3rd Edition by Michael Swaine (Author), Paul Freiberger (Author)

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet Paperback – January 21, 1998 by Katie Hafner (Author)

</comment><comment><USER74> _The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution_ by Walter Isaacson is a must-read

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_\(book\))

</comment><comment><USER75> Here's a small interesting tidbit:

[https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/51018/was- donald...](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/51018/was-donald-knuth- the-first-person-to-typeset-a-book-using-a-computer)

</comment><comment><USER76> For the past few years I've been reading [https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/](https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/) Really cool to see different groups and technologies and how they moved the web!

</comment><comment><USER77> I am reading Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98610.Colossus](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98610.Colossus)

</comment><comment><USER78> Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace - [https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling- the-t...](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of- ada-lovelace/)

</comment><comment><USER79> Triumph of the Nerds! From 1996, but has pretty much everyone who is someone in it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds)

</comment><comment><USER80> [http://www.cbi.umn.edu](http://www.cbi.umn.edu)

</comment><comment><USER81> For more recent history, Alan Kay gave a couple talks at Stanford that are on Youtube. He goes over much of the work done at PARC. It might spark an interest in one of those topics to dive deeper into.

</comment><comment><USER82> This is a lovely 30-minute read on the history of the C programming language, written by Dennis Ritchie (dmr), one of its authors.

[https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html](https://www.bell- labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html)

Here's a comment I wrote about it elsewhere:

[https://lobste.rs/s/hba9nn/development_c_language_1993#c_hw6...](https://lobste.rs/s/hba9nn/development_c_language_1993#c_hw6bay)

One other essay that comes to mind is the 1945 piece by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", that lays out the vision for a "Memex", or memory extension device, in the direction of what PCs and smartphones eventually became.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

I think it's nice to reflect on a time, not too long ago, where these devices were a mere figment of a scientist's imagination, only to materialize decades in the future. What can you dream up today?

</comment><comment><USER71> The article draws from [https://sci- hub.tw/10.1145/1464291.1464336](https://sci-hub.tw/10.1145/1464291.1464336) (1966) which is worth a read in its own right.

</comment><comment><USER83> Ran across this a couple of days ago:

"The History of Email" [https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of- email/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-email/)

</comment><comment><USER84> There are some great recommendations here. I like RFC 2468: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468)

</comment><comment><USER85> Stan Veit opened one of the first microcomputer stores and saw many interesting things in the 1970s to early 1980s:

[https://www.pc-history.org/](https://www.pc-history.org/)

</comment><comment><USER86> What Is Code: [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is- co...](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/)

</comment><comment><USER85> I have just found this page, but it looks very promising:

[https://ethw.org/Category:Computing_and_electronics](https://ethw.org/Category:Computing_and_electronics)

</comment><comment><USER87> Does anyone know anything about the history of Java's Keytool/Ketstore?

I've always been curious as to why this pattern was adopted, because it seems to be unique to Java, and I don't know why.

</comment><comment><USER32> What I'm about to link considers the multimedia aspect of computing and a bit the history of the world wide web.

__Vannevar Bush__

Vannevar Bush is the person who came up with the idea that one could link information as opposed to methods that physical libraries use (catalogs, indexing, etc.). His implementation details are funny to read in hindsight. His conceptual ideas are nothing but amazing and a reality at the moment. It also highlights why we should separate conceptual ideas from implementation. The biggest reason is: despite the fact that you can't implement a certain system yet, having the conceptual ideas ready means that other people can be inspired by it when the technological requirements catch up.

Read his seminal essay "As We May Think" here:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

__Douglas Engelbart__

If Vannevar Bush is considered the grandfather, then Douglas Engelbart is considered to be the father of multimedia.

Read Douglas Engelbart his seminal paper from 1962 on how multimedia would help humans process information faster. It's called:

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

[https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138)

Check out the mother of all demo's: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

and here: [https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/](https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/)

Engelbart just blew my mind. He basically prototyped a simple version of TeamViewer + Skype in 1968! And even still, it has features in there that I still haven't seen (dual mouse control when using TeamViewer).

I wonder if Bill Gates read about him because if he did, then it was either too hard to implement some of Engelbart's his ideas in Windows 95, or he simply didn't read about it and now we're lagging 10 to 20 years behind on certain aspects of our multimedia experience.

__Ted Nelson__

The "younger brother" (= same time, related but not the same ideas) of Douglas. Ted Nelson is a bit of a controversial figure. Nevertheless, I do think he deserves a spot on this list. I'll leave it at that.

__I wrote a bit more about this stuff__

If you like this stuff, I invite you to read some of the introductory stuff of my thesis [1].

[1]

First 3 paragraphs of: [https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/](https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/)

and

1.3.1 "In the beginning" of [https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/ma...](https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/master_thesis_melvin_roest.pdf)

The thesis itself zooms in on an old concept called hypermedia (not hypermedia APIs, that came way later), which is a bit of an alternate reality of HTML5. While that's not really important to know about, it shares the same history up until the early 90's.

</comment><comment><USER88> _Timeline of computers and the Internet_

Very high level, but it spans 100 BC to 2018 CE, and it covers highlights from the Antikythera mechanism to the _Mother of All Demos_ to _Hypercard_ to the GDPR.

[https://www.geek.no/noroff/timeline/](https://www.geek.no/noroff/timeline/)

</comment><comment><USER89> Relatedly I'm interested in the history of computing and information sciences in preindustrial times, ie how they scaled out record keeping in the Byzantine empire or Islamic golden age.

</comment><comment><USER90> "Racing the Beam", on the technical history of early Atari games. It also does a great job of contextualising them in the social history of the time and the company.

</comment><comment><USER91> Some internet stories from the past:

[https://dbrgn.ch/stories-from-the-internet.html](https://dbrgn.ch/stories- from-the-internet.html)

</comment><comment><USER92> The Elements of Networking Style, by Michael Padlipsky - an (extremely!) opinionated critique of the OSI model vs the Arpanet (TCP/IP) model.

</comment><comment><USER93> The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll

Dreaming in code, Scott Rosenberg

The Information: A history, a theory, a flood, James Gleick

Turing's Cathedral, Dyson

The longitude prize, Joan Dash (for kids)

Soul of a new machine, Tracy Kidder

</comment><comment><USER94> If you want to read more about ARPANET, check out _Where Wizards Stay Up Late_... covers the whole development... great read!

</comment><comment><USER95> Check out On The Metal podcast for great interviews around computing history since the 70s

</comment><comment><USER96> A classic for me is Fire in the Valley. Really great history of computing up to 1999.

<comment><USER97> Just finished it. It is funny that it ends just shy of the big dot-com crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> The EDVAC report

"Thunks"

</comment><comment><USER99> It depends on what you're looking for. Do you want popular "fun" accounts or "serious" historical scholarship? Heavy on technical specifics or lighter on details and stronger on the historical big picture? All of those are fine, but the answer will mean you'll want to look in different places.

There is a active subfield of academic history of technology that deals with the history of computing. It's generally populated by professionally-trained historians who rigorously employ archival sources and tend to focus on the bigger picture, i.e. linking computing to wider historical trends and events (examples: the Cold War, Capitalism, the rise of programming as a profession, etc.). Some notable historians in this area are Mar Hicks and Nathan Ensmenger. The field is still growing and has a lot of ground to cover, but if you seek a deeper understanding (as readers of HN tend to do) then this is the place to go. Writing accurate history that also grapples with the big picture is hard, and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that it takes specialists to do it.

There's of course an abundance of popular accounts of innovation, along the lines of Walter Isaacson's _The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution_. Academic historians of technology generally dislike these accounts because they focus on a small set of "heroic" individuals at the expense of the bigger picture. To pick on Isaacson a bit, he's generally most interested in personalities (Steve Jobs, say) and must less interested in digging deeper into the economic and social history that lies behind the "Digital Revolution". Nonetheless, these accounts sell very well, there are also tons of articles out there written in a similar vein, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying them provided you are aware that you're only getting one version of the story.

I also like some practitioner-accounts, really more memoir than history; they give you a nice sense of what it was like to live through a particular set of changes and to be part of building systems that we now take for granted. A good recent example, if you are interested in the genesis of UNIX, is Brian Kernighan's _Unix: A History and a Memoir_. Some excellent journalistic "on the ground" accounts also fall into this category of giving you a sense of what it was like to be there. The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder is a good example.

Finally, there is some very good general history of technology that doesn't focus exclusively on computing. An example is the superb _The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900_ by David Edgerton (polemical, controversial, easy to read, and even if you disagree with his argument it will likely change how you see technology forever).</comment>


Ask HN: What group activity can I do to get students interested in CS? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm giving a talk at a college with a NSF funded program to keep students pursuing STEM (science, math, computer science) majors. There are very few CS majors in the group, and I get the opportunity to lead an activity for an hour. Does anyone have any ideas for activities I can lead a group of 8-15 people that will get them more interested in CS? Or maybe a presentation or video I can show them?
Thanks guys. <comment><USER2> Well i think at that age kids are more interested in playing games and things like that..You could show them how cool games are made, show them some of the programming that involves, the design of the characters, all that stuff...Put them some examples of video games like Angry birds, Plants Vs zombies, Fruit ninja and so on..kids of this age are more interested in smartphone games than console, so this could be good examples, they just don't know the magic behind those games...Maybe they could get motivated and start their own game someday... Good luck!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions guys. I think I'm looking for something more scientifically demanding. I'm basically trying to convert a bunch of kids pursuing medical school, most of which probably do not have the chops to get in. I would love to teach them some basic data mining that has to do with health science, or dig up some data startups to talk about. I'll keep researching.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest you perhaps review the impact systems make by reviewing google search engine, facebook app platform, adroid/ios/windows8 apps and their intricacies.

After all, these are the stuff people use daily. You'd have a better chance if you go into high and low details of implementations ex. algorithms, math and relevant areas related per system.

</comment><comment><USER4> Umm, you can go over Facebook's IPO and Zuckerberg's take, perhaps?</comment>


Fashism, a Social Shopping Site, Gets Cash - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/social-shopping-site-fashism-gets-cash/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who thinks that this website is ridiculous? A post like <http://www.fashism.com/look/view/31295> just feels very post-modern and weird to me.

<comment><USER3> I look at it and wish I owned the site. It works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am launching (soon) a webapp in this space. As far as I am concerned, this only validates the idea and proves there is a need for this type of webapp.

Is the line of thinking correct?

</comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that the New York Times comments about that site are so negative merely because of the name.

I am totally against fascism, but I think the name is clever and catchy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only person who has some qualms with the name?

<comment><USER7> One commenter said it's creepy; but you gotta admit: It's clever and memorable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is indeed clever. People need to get over themselves.</comment>


Show HN: The first such advanced template builder for the Bulma CSS Framework - <AUTHOR> https://bulma.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> ### Part I. Bulma Builder

Hi everyone!

I am the co-creator of Bulma Builder, which accelerates the work of developers using the Bulma CSS Framework (v0.7.5).

We have released 170 components (and it grows!) and 460 Sass settings in thematic grouped categories that can be used in a user-friendly interface (drag & drop editor, color/font/shadow/size pickers).

We based the project on a technology we created and released six months ago for Bootstrap Shuffle, which does the same thing, but for Bootstrap.

(BONUS) Every account created at [https://bulma.dev](https://bulma.dev) is automatically active at [https://bootstrapshuffle.com](https://bootstrapshuffle.com) \- and vice versa!

### Part II. The Builder and The Offer

We spent last months on preparing the builder to work with any CSS framework based on Sass.

That's why Bootstrap Shuffle works with Bootstrap 4.3.1 and Material for Bootstrap 4.1.1, and Bulma Builder with Bulma 0.7.5.

And now We are looking for CREATIVE people (especially the experts in creating UIKits) who would like to start their template builder, with their library of components and styles, with their landing page, domain, user base, but using our technology and infrastructure.

Interested? Contact me: email@example.com (Dawid Andrzejewski)

PS. I am considering two settlement options:

Option A) 50/50 revenue split (great for freelancers, no upfront costs)

Option B) $999 / mo and 5/90 revenue split (great for companies/influencers with large user base)</comment>