frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone
16•baruchel•4h ago

Comments

rvz•3h ago
Unfortunately, if the subject doesn't have "AI", no one cares.
xattt•1h ago
It has IA in its name so that must count for something.
embedding-shape•1h ago
That's AI in Spanish, so checks out in large parts of the world :)
gerikson•1h ago
> The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.

Surprisingly light though...

Rochus•53m ago
Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both interesting to read and very informative. Also the review of the book by the late Jean Bartik, one of the "computers" and thus an eyewitnmess, is very interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazo....

Though the article is very US focussed, keeping quiet that German engineer Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in May 1941, five years before ENIAC, effectively creating the world's first working programmable and fully automatic digital computer. While ENIAC required days of manual cable patching to program, the Z3 was quickly programmed by a punched tape ("Lochstreifen"), and Zuse also has invented Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945, which is widely recognized as the world's first high-level programming language. The cooperation between Zuse and ETH Zurich eventually led to the first self-compiling compiler and eventually Algol 60 (see "The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur in ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Languages" from 1978). And there was also the British Colossus, which successfully utilized vacuum tubes for code-breaking by early 1944.

klelatti•40m ago
ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.

Conway's Game of Life, in real life

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/conways-game-of-life-in-real-life
126•surprisetalk•6h ago•29 comments

Nvidia greenboost: transparently extend GPU VRAM using system RAM/NVMe

https://gitlab.com/IsolatedOctopi/nvidia_greenboost
327•mmastrac•3d ago•68 comments

Warranty Void If Regenerated

https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated
343•Stwerner•13h ago•194 comments

OpenRocket

https://openrocket.info/
560•zeristor•3d ago•99 comments

Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/03/18/austins-surge-of-new-housing-con...
537•matthest•10h ago•634 comments

A sufficiently detailed spec is code

https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-spec-is-code
356•signa11•7h ago•196 comments

LotusNotes

https://computer.rip/2026-03-14-lotusnotes.html
83•TMWNN•4d ago•37 comments

Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/5998/5998D.pdf
12•ivanbelenky•1d ago•3 comments

Autoresearch for SAT Solvers

https://github.com/iliazintchenko/agent-sat
125•chaisan•9h ago•24 comments

Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web

https://susam.net/wander/
281•susam•1d ago•71 comments

Show HN: Duplicate 3 layers in a 24B LLM, logical deduction .22→.76. No training

https://github.com/alainnothere/llm-circuit-finder
118•xlayn•12h ago•38 comments

Nvidia NemoClaw

https://github.com/NVIDIA/NemoClaw
310•hmokiguess•18h ago•211 comments

Why Cloudflare rule order matters?

https://www.brzozowski.io/web-applications/2025/03/11/why-cloudflare-rule-order-matters.html
23•redfr0g•3d ago•3 comments

RX – a new random-access JSON alternative

https://github.com/creationix/rx
85•creationix•10h ago•36 comments

Cook: A simple CLI for orchestrating Claude Code

https://rjcorwin.github.io/cook/
196•staticvar•7h ago•52 comments

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone
16•baruchel•4h ago•6 comments

The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-explains-why-bell-curves-are-everywhere-20260316/
127•ibobev•2d ago•67 comments

Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste

https://www.svgbackgrounds.com/set/free-svg-backgrounds-and-patterns/
267•visiwig•18h ago•53 comments

Show HN: Pano, a bookmarking tool built around shareable shelves

https://www.panoit.com
16•uelbably•4d ago•7 comments

The Serial Safety Net: Efficient Concurrency Control on Modern Hardware

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-serial-safety-net-efficient.html
5•ingve•4d ago•0 comments

Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149

https://cyberinsider.com/mozilla-to-launch-free-built-in-vpn-in-upcoming-firefox-149/
130•adrianwaj•6h ago•83 comments

Show HN: Browser grand strategy game for hundreds of players on huge maps

https://borderhold.io/play
32•sgolem•3d ago•15 comments

Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?

224•bblcla•16h ago•290 comments

Book: The Emerging Science of Machine Learning Benchmarks

https://mlbenchmarks.org/00-preface.html
120•jxmorris12•4d ago•6 comments

What 81,000 people want from AI

https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews
126•dsr12•5h ago•102 comments

Czech Man's Stone in Barn's Foundations Is Rare Bronze Age Spearhead Mold

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-czech-man-used-this-stone-in-his-barns-foundations-it...
45•bookofjoe•2d ago•11 comments

Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP590-059-f24/robsrules.html
931•vismit2000•1d ago•433 comments

CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root

https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/2026/03/17/cve-2026-3888-important-snap-f...
137•askl•18h ago•87 comments

OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

https://om.co/2026/03/17/openai-has-new-focus-on-the-ipo/
229•aamederen•23h ago•206 comments

An x86-64 back end for raven-uxn

https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2026-03-15-uxn/
32•dcre•3d ago•6 comments