jonjacky

There's the time a student was misled by an error in the Feynman Lectures and wrote to him about it. Here's the story and the recent HN thread about it.

https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2020/feynmans-advice-to-wm-s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30417660

These kits do include generating the video:

https://gigatron.io/ "... low resolution video had come within reach of our design, without adding chips. This was possible by taking the unconventional step of bit-banging video signals from software, instead of designing a standard video generation circuit. ..."

https://basicengine.org/ "The VS23S010D-L ... is a static RAM chip ... (that) comes with a video controller. ... It comes with 128 kB, some or all of which can be used as a frame buffer ... has a "block move" feature, more commonly known as a blitter. It allows you to copy sections of video memory ... provides a dramatic performance boost in ... text screen scrolling and rendering of tiled backgrounds."

http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page - Uzebox - "retro-minimalist homebrew game console. ... video sync generation, tile rendering and music mixing is done realtime by a background task ... easy and fun to assemble and program ... contains only two chips: an ATmega644 and an AD725 RGB-to-NTSC converter."

http://www.breatharian.eu/hw/atx80/index_en.html - " VGA and PAL/NTSC video signals are generated by software running along with the BASIC interpreter on the same processor."

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/michalin70/the-arduino-... - Photos and schematics show the Arduino plugged into a solderless breadboard along with a few passive components to mix the software-generated video signals from the Arduino pins,

Besides the content, this web page design itself is interesting, with dramatic use of color, empty space, and typography.

Yes. The author Edmund White writes [1],

"... As a true American I do believe in identity politics, I believe that the personal can be political and I believe that, for better or for worse, my sexual identity is crucial to who I am. ... But I hold this view only because I feel that to grow up in a religious society that oppresses and stigmatizes homosexuals creates a gay identity, and that one can only liberate oneself by affirming that identity, by transforming what was despised into what is valued.

I'm not an essentialist ... I certainly don't think that this essence must be declared or avowed. I do, however, believe that a definition that has been imposed on the individual must be defended and transcended.

[1] Lost in the Funhouse by Edmund White, in TLS May 19 2006

MIT Open Courseware: Street-Fighting Mathematics

"This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. ..."

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-098-street-fighti...

Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael J. Neufeld (2007)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-authored with Alex Haley, 1965)

Seen here last week, exactly what you are asking for: Linux, Apache, PHP. No database, no Javascript, no framework, no AWS (or other cloud service). Part-time project by one person:

Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30302819

(2012)

I would add London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 1805 - 1851 by James Hamilton, from 2007. It's about the whole scene including Ada and Babbage and many others -- where the worlds of science, the arts, and literature overlapped and mingled more than they usually do now.

From Chapter 5, around pages 110 - 115:

"Ada Byron began to make a habit of going to Babbage's with the Somervilles (mathematician and popular science author Mary and her husband William). Ada Byron was intense by nature. A highly articulate, overwrought mathematical genius from a high social background, she attended lectures at the Royal Institute, routs in glittering ballrooms, soirees at Babbage's, and, aged seventeen in 1833, was presented to the King and Queen at court. Her natural brilliance in the abstract language of mathematics that few understood, her disturbed upbringing as Byron's daughter, and the elevated position in society it was her lot to display and maintain created a confused and uncertain young woman. ... It was the rare piece of real good fortune for Ada, however, that she had the sensible and structured example of Mary and William Somerville's family life to balance her self-absorption, the insistence of her many suitors, and Charles Babbage's frantic self-certainty. ..."

Notable because this was one of the first descriptions of hacker culture when it appeared in 1976:

"Wherever computer centers have become established, that is to say, in countless places in the United States, as well as in virtually all other industrial regions of the world, bright, young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours—then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. They are an international phenomenon."

The author, Joseph Weizenabaum was a computer science professor at MIT. He was the author of the famous Eliza program. This is an excerpt from his Computer Power and Human Reason, one of the best books ever written about computing.

(1986)

The obvious answer is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman, often called SICP. It is often discussed on HN and is generally regarded as a classic with great staying power. It appeared in 1985 so it already has a good start on a hundred years.

It has some features in common with The Feynman Lectures: It presents a very personal, not always mainstream, view of its subject. It was originally written as a first-year textbook (for MIT instead of Caltech) but many in its orginal intended audience found it too difficult or just too weird, and it is most appreciated now by experienced programmers and computer scientists.

(2003)

A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101358

From Feb 2016, with just 2 comments. The paper is much better than the comments would suggest.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803799 and the linked paper, which proposes DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System, and describes a prototype.

It has some similarities to the data center OS proposed in this post.

SICP is known to be quite difficult - it was originally written for MIT students who also had college-level training in other math, science, and engineering subjects including calculus - as I recall SICP assumes you know something about these.

Most of the exercises, even the seemingly easy ones, take me immense amount of time to solve - This is not unusual for college-level problems in science and engineering. If you can solve them at all, that's a reason for pride, not discouragement.

To restore your confidence, you could have a look at Brian Harvey's textbook Simply Scheme. It is intended for students from a wider range of backgrounds and does not assume a heavy science/math background.

In 1959 LIFE magazine ran a pictorial feature on RAND, with pictures by the noted photographer Leonard McCombe. [1] Some pictures from the LIFE article appear in [2], pages 130 - 133.

The pictures show RAND staff including nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter [3, 4] lounging in modernist furniture, or reclining on the floor, in a dimly lit seance-like circle among bookshelves near a spiral staircase, where a young woman sits taking notes. The pictures really capture the mid-century prestige and mystique of think tanks and defense intellectuals.

[1] LIFE Magazine May 11 1959 Pg 101 PICTORIAL ESSAY: Valuable Batch of Brains: an Odd Little Company Called RAND Plays Big Role in U.S. Defense. Photographed for LIFE by Leonard McCombe.

[2] http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/issu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wohlstetter

[4] https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/w/wohlstetter_albert.html

Many many suggestions two years ago in this Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

As Jtsummers linked Wikipedia article explains, the term 'Think Tank' was originally applied to the RAND corporation, which was started by the Air Force in 1947 as an R&D organization within Douglas Aircraft, but soon became an independent company which was still largely funded by contracts from the US Department of Defense.

RAND was enormously influential in US and world politics and technology in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. People who worked at RAND included the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, who wrote a horrifying book On Thermonuclear War and become one of the models for Dr. Strangelove (in that movie it's called the BLAND Corportation), Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers secret history of the Vietnam War he found at RAND, and Paul Baran, who proposed a national packet switched computer network, which provided the technical foundations for the Arpanet and later the Internet.

The book The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan tells the story of the early days at RAND.

http://www.fredkaplan.info/wizards.htm

Availble tech reports from RAND include some of Herman Kahn's early work:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/k/kahn_herman.html

and Paul Baran's computer networking proposal, as well as some remarkably prescient essays on the social and political implications:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

Reports like these (as well as the secret ones that are never released to the public) are the products of a think tank. Think tanks exist to produce these reports, and to support their authors and other spokespeople who publicize and advocate for them.

PS - If you are interested in drawing, you might look up books and especially pictures of ENIAC, often called the first electronic computer. It was programmed with patchcords so it's visually more interesting than all the gray boxes that came after. It looks more like a giant Moog synthesizer.

Try an image search on: Eniac monte carlo patch cords

Or look in the book Eniac in Action by Thomas Haigh et al. Lots of ENIAC-related diagrams linked to this page:

https://eniacinaction.com/the-book/supporting-technical-mate...

for example this flowchart:

https://eniacinaction.com/docs/MonteCarloSecondRunFlowDiagra...

The standard textbooks by historians are:

A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray

There are good books by journalists and popular writers. Favorites on HN are:

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by W. Mitchell Waldrop

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthey Lyon

These and many many other books are recomended and described in this HN thread from two years ago:

Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

That link didn't work for me: "Article identifier '0303352' not recognized" A working link, found by ArXiv search on the title, is:

http://search.arxiv.org:8081/paper.jsp?r=math/0303352&qid=16...

Somerville was also a helpful influence in Ada's life, according to this passage in London Lights by James Hamilton, a fascinating book about scientists and artists on the London scene in those days:

Ada Byron began to make a habit of going to Babbage's with the Somervilles ... Her natural brilliance in the abstract language of mathematics that few understood, her disturbed upbringing as Byron's daughter, and the elevated position in society it was her lot to display and maintain created a confused and uncertain young woman. ... It was the rare piece of real good fortune for Ada, however, that she had the sensible and structured example of Mary and William Somerville's family life to balance her self-absorption, the insistence of her many suitors, and Charles Babbage's frantic self-certainty. ...

His autobiography Naturalist (1994) is a very readable introduction to his life and work -- and to his personality. He writes there about the controversies in his life, including his disputes at Harvard with his nemesis James Watson, and the Sociobiology controversy in the 1970s.

Algorithmics by David Harel is not much mentioned anymore, but it's really good if you can find it. An easy and inviting read, it was written as a popular book not a textbook but nevertheless covers many topics with very thorough and clear explanations, and also touches on history and culture. I recall there were several versions with different titles - Algorithmics: The Soul of Computing was, I think, a cut-down version.

Seconding Petzold's Code for hardware and low-level programming. Also seconding Downey's Think Python (which has appeared in several versions with different titles). It is an easy read but is a bit deeper than many introduction to Python books.

Also seconding Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs but it requires a lot more concentration and study than the previous suggestions. It is also old-fashioned, from the late 1970s I think, uses Pascal as its programming language. It teaches and celebrates a rigorous, economical programming method and coding style which is not much in vogue any more.

We had one of these at work. A friend observed, "It's silent when it's off."

Essays, notes and memoirs going back to the 1950s by Norman Hardy, one of the developers of GNOSIS and its successor KeyKOS, at

http://cap-lore.com/

Title should include (2015) - the linked article shows that the word 'hypertext' was introduced in 1965, not 1971.

These may be a bit far afield, but they are fun to watch anyway:

The movies Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Artist (2011) are both about response to technological change: the introduction of sound into the movies. The classic noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) touches on a dark side of that.

The musical My Fair Lady (1956) is about education, science, and technology for personal and social transformation. The movie version (1964) shows some early sound recording technology to comic effect.

Evgeny Morozov. His recent book To Save Everything, Click Here and earlier book The Net Delusion could be exactly what you are looking for. (I haven't read them myself, have only read reviews.)

Seconding Shoshana Zuboff also. Her latest book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Also seconding Jaron Lanier, for the books You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?