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When did Google get so weird?

https://sancho.bearblog.dev/google-weird/
128•sancho-panza•48m ago•55 comments

Ember-1

https://fireworks.ai/blog/ember-1
209•gmays•3h ago•120 comments

Alan Kay's answer to "Did the ENIAC have a BIOS"?

https://www.quora.com/Did-the-ENIAC-have-a-BIOS/answer/Alan-Kay-11
26•midnightfish•1h ago•13 comments

The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026

https://shnatsel.github.io/state-of-simd-rust-2026/
38•verdagon•2d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

https://loficities.com/
76•safaelmali•2h ago•29 comments

What I did at Recurse Center

https://thill.me/2026/09/11/what-i-did-at-rc.html
14•bingden•1h ago•4 comments

In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/science/motel-science-discovery.html
171•danso•6h ago•66 comments

Imp is a full port of DSPy to the BEAM

https://github.com/deepfates/imp
17•mpweiher•1h ago•4 comments

Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Xn3030IvM
20•Rochus•2h ago•4 comments

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

https://iain.rocks/blog/dont-couple-your-go-code-to-github
55•birdculture•4h ago•26 comments

Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)

https://asawicki.info/articles/writing_efficient_cpp_code.php
118•ibobev•2d ago•67 comments

Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/09/27/replacing-the-old-battery-on-rechargeable-bike-lights/
110•surprisetalk•7h ago•57 comments

Show HN: TinyAIArena watch AI agents battle it out

https://tinyaiarena.com/
79•hp6•5h ago•36 comments

The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers

https://generalroboticslab.com/cartesian_handv1
32•AareyBaba•1d ago•6 comments

Fragment of oldest known peace treaty found in Turkey

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/we-have-found-traces-of-peace-thousands...
33•gmays•6h ago•5 comments

Allegations of US interference in Quebec election

https://globalnews.ca/news/12073854/quebec-election-u-s-interference/
18•Teever•43m ago•9 comments

The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures

https://www.ihatethefuture.com/2026/09/the-normalization-of-inexplicable.html
209•pxx•5h ago•85 comments

Flip Fluid on Flip Dots

https://mitxela.com/projects/flipflip
328•blutack•1d ago•22 comments

John Coltrane Centenary's – Impulse Records Release the Legendary Tiberi Tapes

https://www.jazzwise.com/content/news/john-coltrane-centenary-celebrations-see-impulse-records-re...
29•gregsadetsky•2d ago•6 comments

Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests

https://fakecloud.dev/
87•theanonymousone•1d ago•44 comments

On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

https://unsung.aresluna.org/they-had-no-concept-of-a-duty-of-care-to-their-users/
318•jandeboevrie•6h ago•277 comments

Kicki: A DECsystem1060 – Interim Computer Museum

https://icm.museum/blog/?p=207
13•rbanffy•1d ago•2 comments

Video CDs Break Windows Explorer

https://clydesnotes.blogspot.com/2026/08/video-cds-break-windows-explorer.html
65•ClydeN•1d ago•23 comments

Faster prompt lookup drafting in llama.cpp

https://jadidbourbaki.github.io/blog/prompt-lookup-llama-cpp/
45•pptadversary•1d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web

https://www.markdown.beauty/
54•thiagoperes•7h ago•38 comments

Improving site performance by shipping more CSS

https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/improving-site-performance-by-shipping-...
72•torutofu•1d ago•59 comments

Wiki Deep dive into Standard diving dress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_diving_dress
10•sans_souse•1d ago•1 comments

C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake

https://pikuma.com/blog/c-integer-sizes-not-a-mistake
61•ibobev•2d ago•95 comments

PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura

https://nura.eco/blog/2026/09/27/nura-rename/
132•HotGarbage•5h ago•28 comments

Go Concurrency Distilled

https://antonz.org/go-concurrency-distilled/
357•chmaynard•1d ago•163 comments
Open in hackernews

Alan Kay's answer to "Did the ENIAC have a BIOS"?

https://www.quora.com/Did-the-ENIAC-have-a-BIOS/answer/Alan-Kay-11
26•midnightfish•1h ago

Comments

octoberfranklin•1h ago
www.quora.com Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot.
Apreche•57m ago
If you have too much adblock, as I do, you can never visit quora.com. The security check will just loop infinitely.
LargoLasskhyfv•32m ago
Funny. Just tested that because I'm always told: too complicated, nothing will work!

And got no check at all.

Edit: Maybe it depends on where you come from, or what they think you come from. Or using VPN. Wrong browser with insufficient base for uBo. uBo configured wrong. (Not?) using an ad-blocking DNS-Server, so that shit doesn't even make it to your local uBo?

Tested from Hamburg, Germany via private tunnel from my home in Colorado, which also works.

cgio•24m ago
Maybe the times are changing. Went through with Adblock and vpn. No looping.
tombert•53m ago
Man I didn't even realize that Quora was still around, let alone prominent people still answering questions on it. I deprioritized it in my Kagi searches months ago and even then I didn't notice that much of a change in the quality of my searches.
Insanity•9m ago
Yeah this is the first time in months if not years that I’m seeing the website.
wildzzz•5m ago
Quora is such a gamble when it comes to accurate or relevant results. Either you get something incredibly insightful from someone with real experience or you get misinformation and stupid opinions. It's really only slightly helpful when I'm looking for subjective opinions or a personal perspective on some topic. It's very much a negative result when I'm looking for factual, verifiable information.
jshier•50m ago
I'm pretty sure Kay's not quite correct about the Eniac not being a stored program computer. In it's original form it obviously was not, as it had to physically reconfigured to solve different problems. However, after the war it was rebuilt to operate like any other stored program (von Neumann architecture) computer, as it was the first recipient of the design philosophy seen in the EDVAC report. It operated in that mode from '48 to '55, when it was decommissioned.

ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer is an excellent summary of the initial design and redesign of the Eniac.

lacedeconstruct•33m ago
Apparently Eckert (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed the ENIAC) claimed that von Neumann basically stole their idea of the stored program and that they had already came up with the idea and he just took it and ran with it as if it was his

> And John Von Neumann? He came and looked at our stuff and went back to Princeton and wrote a long document about the principles. He gets a lot of credit but the inventions were ours. Someday I’ll write a book on who really invented the computer.

>Johnny learned instantly, of course, as was his nature. But he chose to refer to the modules we had described as “organs” and to substitute hypothetical “neurons” for hypothetical vacuum tubes or other devices which could perform logical functions. It was clear that Johnny was rephrasing our logic, but it was still the SAME logic. Also, he was introducing different but equivalent symbols; nevertheless the devices still did the same things. Johnny did NOT alter the fundamental concepts which we had already formulated for the EDVAC.

>Small wonder, then, that computer history gave von Neumann the credit. Eckert and I, who left the Univ. of Penna. In 1946, no longer had access to the documents which might have helped to show “who did what, when.” But after many years, litigation has unearthed some of those documents, and historians can read what was once classified. But, even after declassification, those reports are not accessible to most people, since they were reproduced in such small quantities. Nevertheless, we hope that more historians will refer to them.

jshier•
retrac•47m ago
EDSAC as early as 1949 had an "initial orders" module. A boot-up ROM. There was a bank of rotary selector switches, to set the octal digits in each ROM word.

David Wheeler (of subroutine fame) figured out the most sensible thing to put in the tiny ROM was a paper tape loader and mini-assembler that loaded the rest of itself from paper tape. So at switch-on the machine would start reading the tape input and run. Programs could be written on the teletype with mnemonics and relative addresses in octal.

It seems a little strange that more advanced later machines like the original PDP-11 from 1970, couldn't "autostart" from ROM like that. You had to toggle in a bootloader.

I think that was because core memory was non-volatile. (EDSAC didn't use core; it had a refreshing DRAM-like delay line memory.) With core, you only had to toggle the bootloader into once and, provided your software didn't accidentally overwrite it, it was still there after a power cycle. So re-toggling in the boot loader was not really that common, despite how much lore surrounds it.

TheOtherHobbes•23m ago
DEC supplied optional boot rom cards for UNIBUS, starting with the BM792, which arrived as a 32 x 16 matrix of diodes. You had to remove some of the diodes by hand to set the boot code.

Later cards used PROMs, and were pretty fancy. The M9312 had 512 words and included some basic CPU diagnostics. Different variants handled boot from disk, paper tape, console, etc, and you had to specify the options you wanted when you bought the card.

adamddev1•18m ago
Alan Kay answering questions on Quora. What a cool gift to the world!

This is one of the thing we lose as more and more of the conversations turn to people privately asking LLMs things, who do their best to scrape out answers from the existing info or make up a best guess. People are losing the ability to ask experts with real, unique knowledge and then share that knowledge with humanity.

12m ago
Eckert and Mauchly weren't reliable narrators of the history of their work, given how much they needed to claim in order to get the patents that were later invalidated. They claimed quite a few things that were later disproven in court or through historical study. At the least, Eniac was designed by the team at the Moore School.

von Neumann's "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" was both a summary of discussions by the Eniac team as well as von Neumann's own original work proving and expanding on various aspects of those discussions. It's called the von Neumann architecture because he was the author of the seminal paper, not because he laid any particular claim to the ideas. Eckert and Mauchly were mostly upset about the paper's existence, regardless of author, because it made it impossible for them to patent the stored program idea in general.