Hacker News with Generative AI: History

Compiler Explorer and the promise of URLs that last forever (xania.org)
The history is this: back in the old days (2012), we used to store the entire Compiler Explorer state in the URL. That got unwieldy (who would have thought encoding an entire compiler state in a URL might get a bit long?), so we added support for Google’s link shortener goo.gl in March 2014. That meant short links were of the form goo.gl/abc123.

Web Development, URL Shorteners, Compiler Explorer, History

354 points by anarazel 9 days ago | 189 comments

The mysterious Gobi wall uncovered (phys.org)
A new study sheds new light on one of the least understood segments of medieval Inner Asian infrastructure: the Gobi Wall.

History, Archaeology, China, Inner Asia

70 points by bikenaga 9 days ago | 20 comments

Doge Days (sahillavingia.com)
In August 2014, President Obama and Congress created the United States Digital Service (USDS).

Government, History, Technology

72 points by sahillavingia 9 days ago | 21 comments

Monks Behaving Badly: Explaining Buddhist Violence in Asia (direct.mit.edu)
The dramatic rise in religious violence across the globe since the end of the Cold War has motivated scholars to try to explain violent religion-related extremism.

Buddhism, Religion, Violence, Asia, History

45 points by surprisetalk 9 days ago | 76 comments

Neolithic 'sun stones' sacrificed in Denmark revives sun after volcanic eruption (archaeologymag.com)
Around 4,900 years ago, Neolithic communities on the Danish island of Bornholm ritually buried hundreds of engraved stones, so-called “sun stones,” in a remarkable act to counter drastic climate changes caused by a massive volcanic eruption.

Archaeology, Climate Change, History, Volcanoes, Rituals

10 points by bryanrasmussen 9 days ago | 9 comments

Why the original Macintosh had a screen resolution of 512×324 (512pixels.net)
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512×384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512×342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic and Color Classic II used a 10-inch CRT at a full 512×384.

Macintosh, Hardware, History, Retro Computing

182 points by ingve 10 days ago | 135 comments

The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021) (ethanhein.com)
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death.

Classical Music, Music, History, Composers

133 points by xeonmc 10 days ago | 62 comments

Can It Run Doom? An Archive of All Known Ports (canitrundoom.org)
"Everything can run DOOM, but can it run you?"

Gaming, History, Software, Entertainment

19 points by thunderbong 10 days ago | 3 comments

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (nasa.gov)
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is a record of the lunar surface operations conducted by the six pairs of astronauts who landed on the Moon from 1969 through 1972.

Space Exploration, NASA, Apollo Program, History

52 points by Bluestein 11 days ago | 15 comments

Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric (gwintrob.com)
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.

Business, Finance, History, Corporate Collapse, General Electric

238 points by gwintrob 11 days ago | 163 comments

Shenandoah Students Creating VR Experience Following the Lewis and Clark Trail (su.edu)
A team of students at Shenandoah University is wrapping up work on a groundbreaking virtual reality project that will change how people learn about and experience the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Virtual Reality, Education, History

35 points by gnabgib 11 days ago | 4 comments

How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA (ourbigbook.com)
This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.

CIA, Espionage, Government, Security, History

38 points by Improvement 11 days ago | 15 comments

The Victorians, Creation, and the Dinosaur Problem (historytoday.com)
Overworked and haunted by hallucinations, Hugh Miller wrote a note to his wife Lydia and shot himself at some time between late 23 December and early Christmas Eve 1856.

Victorian Era, History, Geology, Mental Health

5 points by samclemens 11 days ago | 2 comments

Nearly Half of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today (2016) (nytimes.com)
New York City’s zoning code turns 100 this year. That may not sound like cause for celebration — except maybe for land-use lawyers and Robert Moses aficionados. Yet for almost every New Yorker, the zoning code plays an outsize role in daily life, shaping virtually every inch of the city.

Urban Planning, Zoning, History, Real Estate

8 points by loughnane 12 days ago | 1 comments

How MiniDisc Worked (obsoletesony.substack.com)
MiniDisc is often remembered as a failed format, but that misses how far ahead of its time it really was.

Technology, Music, History

25 points by ecliptik 12 days ago | 10 comments

Can LLMs Aid in Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript? (viao.co.uk)
The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious and undeciphered text, has been a subject of fascination for centuries.

Linguistics, History, Cryptography, Voynich Manuscript

5 points by hoyd 12 days ago | 0 comments

Bitmap Images in 1965 – Mariner 4 (oliverkwebb.github.io)
On July 14th, 1965, the Mariner 4 spacecraft flew by Mars, the first to ever reach the planet successfully.

Space Exploration, History, Image Processing, Mars

5 points by oliverkwebb 12 days ago | 0 comments

Historic England Launches Local Heritage Hub to Unlock Hidden Histories (historicengland.org.uk)
Coinciding with this year's Local History Month, Historic England has launched a new Local Heritage Hub. With nearly 400 locations, every county, city, district, major town, and national park in England now has a dedicated digital page that uncovers its rich and layered history.

History, England, Local History, Digital Resources

5 points by gnabgib 12 days ago | 0 comments

TCP/IP on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 2025 under QEMU (uninformativ.de)
Just taking some notes here, so I won't forget. And it's always nice to see that old GUI, hence the large amount of screenshots.

Networking, Operating Systems, Virtualization, Legacy Software, History

16 points by zdw 12 days ago | 4 comments

There was a time when the US government built homes for working-class Americans (theconversation.com)
In 1918, as World War I intensified overseas, the U.S. government embarked on a radical experiment: It quietly became the nation’s largest housing developer, designing and constructing more than 80 new communities across 26 states in just two years.

History, Housing, Government, United States

86 points by pseudolus 12 days ago | 125 comments

The 44 Year Old Computer Magazine That Changed Everything [video] (youtube.com)

Technology, History, Computing, Media, Video

20 points by xkriva11 12 days ago | 14 comments

Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today (scientificamerican.com)
The Nazi regime urged German mothers to ignore their toddlers’ emotional needs—the better to raise hardened soldiers and followers. Attachment researchers say that the harmful effects of that teaching may be affecting later generations

Parenting, History, Germany, Psychology, Social Science

7 points by burgerrito 12 days ago | 1 comments

The length of file names in early Unix (utoronto.ca)
If you use Unix today, you can enjoy relatively long file names on more or less any filesystem that you care to name. But it wasn't always this way.

Unix, Operating Systems, History, File Systems

77 points by ingve 12 days ago | 64 comments

Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq (spytalk.co)
Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends.

Politics, Journalism, Intelligence, History, Iraq

93 points by nabla9 12 days ago | 118 comments

20 years of NetBSD code bloat (blogspot.com)
I started with NetBSD in the mid-nineties, on a Sun SPARC ELC with 32Mbyte of memory, where I used GCC and Emacs on X11 with FVWM as the window manager. I'm still using GCC, Emacs, and FVWM with the same configuration files (updated for pointless changes in Emacs and FVWM), but I now need much more memory and CPU performance... I thought it would be interesting to investigate why.

Operating Systems, Software, History, Computer Science, Linux

8 points by hxorr 12 days ago | 1 comments

Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role (angrystaffofficer.com)
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic.

Politics, Democracy, Military, History

125 points by tkgally 13 days ago | 97 comments

The Soviet plan to reverse Siberia's rivers with 'peaceful nuclear explosions' (bbc.com)
In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north. The project was a grand failure – but 50 years on, the idea still won't completely go away.

History, USSR, Environment, Nuclear Weapons

9 points by pseudolus 13 days ago | 3 comments

Sharp X68000 (wikipedia.org)
The X68000 (Japanese: エックスろくまんはっせん, Hepburn: Ekkusu Rokuman Hassen) is a home computer created by Sharp Corporation.

Home Computers, Japan, History

25 points by bill38 13 days ago | 9 comments

Return to the Text (2022) (im1776.com)
It’s no coincidence that the modern understanding of propaganda can be traced back to the use of new technological media in the era of the World Wars.

Propaganda, Media, History, World Wars

5 points by Tomte 13 days ago | 0 comments

Java Turns 30, a Retrospective (theregister.com)
It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere – and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++.

Java, Programming Languages, History, Software Development

7 points by TeaVMFan 13 days ago | 0 comments