Hacker News Reader

pmcjoneson “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

Any suggestions for how this could be scaled up to the general public (the vast majority of whom aren't comfortable reading code and have no idea what github is)?

pmcjoneson Fortran Assembly Program (FAP) for the IBM 709/7090 (1961)

It was probably typeset by typing it on an IBM Executive typewriters which had proportional spacing and a carbon ribbon.

pmcjoneson Is it a Ponzi? A framework for evaluating crypto projects

The ARMs in the 1980s in the United States were well-documented and the potential interest rate increase was both "rate-limited" and capped. They were not fraudulent.

pmcjoneson Xerox PARC’s engineers on how they invented the future and Xerox lost it (1985)

That version of the Cedar source was on a CD-ROM accompanying the blue-and-white version of this SOSP'93 paper:

Carl Hauser, Christian Jacobi, Marvin Theimer, Brent Welch, and Mark Weiser. 1993. Using threads in interactive systems: a case study. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 27, 5 (Dec. 1993), 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1145/173668.168627

pmcjoneson Ask HN: What's your greatest enjoyment in life?

Ditto. Fifty-two years and counting.

pmcjoneson The History of Franz and Lisp

I think Fenaughty must have been involved with a much later project: the LISP 2 project at SDC (with III) started in 1963.

pmcjoneson ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile

Here's a good place to start: https://amturing.acm.org/lectures.cfm

pmcjoneson ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile

I've been a member since February 1971 (I was still in college), and signed up for the ACM Digital Library when it launched. So you can thank people like me for the existence of the ACM and the availability of all those papers that you can now read for free.

pmcjoneson What's the risk from fake Yubikeys?

It is sometimes possible to register at least two hardware keys with a particular online service, and then specify that you want the other fallbacks to be disabled.

pmcjoneson Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

For a very short list, see this from Alexander Stepanov (C++ STL, etc.): http://stepanovpapers.com/#Civilization

pmcjoneson Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer (1980) [pdf]

I'm an author of the Pilot paper (and also a participant in the much earlier capability-oriented CAL TSS for the Control Data 6400: https://www.mcjones.org/CalTSS/). Pilot was a long time ago, but as I recall its capabilities were just Mesa records with some "option" bits plus a unique identifier for the file. So a malicious program could easily fabricate one.

pmcjoneson Ask HN: Why are relational DBs are the standard instead of graph-based DBs?

More history here: https://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/

pmcjoneson Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_D._Green

pmcjoneson Millennials Control Just 4.6 Percent of US Wealth

Is that normalized by the number of people under 40 in 1989 versus the number of people under 40 in 2021? There are a lot of baby boomers (first group).

pmcjoneson The Programmer as a Young Dog (1976) [pdf]

> Our programming group consisted of Peter Kraft, Charles Simonyi, and me. Peter was an experienced programmer, who had learned his craft during the Gier-Algol project. Charles was a long-haired teenager, a refugee from Hungary who was fascinated by everything in the western world. Later he went to the United States and worked for Xerox in California.

At Xerox, Charles and Butler Lampson designed Bravo, perhaps the first WYSIWYG word processor. Charles's later career at Microsoft is well known. Before going to Xerox, Charles earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley. There he and I designed a Snobol4 implementation that was strongly influenced by his study of Gier-Algol compiler (see https://www.mcjones.org/CAL_SNOBOL/).

pmcjoneson How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of)

Gimbals -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal#Rocket_engines

pmcjoneson A public archive of media from or about the Capitol Hill Riot on Jan 6

Could someone apply software such as is described in this paper to create a "virtual reality" walk-through of the riot?

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/icmew/2018...

pmcjoneson The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976) [pdf]

Actually, this is the original (non-mirrored) link and it works fine: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/stanford/cs_techReports/STAN-CS-76-...

bitsavers.org, maintained by Al Kossow, is a very important resource for computer history.

pmcjoneson Edsger Dijkstra – The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

An open-access copy is here:

MR33, Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, 1960. https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/9253

pmcjoneson Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management

Oops -- my apologies; I wasn't correctly following the discussion.

pmcjoneson Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management

If you use the Album>Write Metadata to Files command, it will do so. (I just tested adding a Face Tag to a photo. In Settings>Configure>Metadata, I also checked the box next to Face Tags under Write This Information to the Metadata. This latter action didn't seem to be enough by itself.)

pmcjoneson Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management

Being able to specific a particular sequence for the photos in a "virtual album" that is different than, say, their capture date or filename.

pmcjoneson Isetta

In 1965 I took my driving test in a BMW 600, the two-cylinder big brother to the Isetta. Here's a photo of the car and the rest of my family's fleet of cars and motorcycles as of 1966: https://imgur.com/a/ria9buN

pmcjoneson The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT

I believe this is the first paper to describe reference counting:

George E. Collins. A method for overlapping and erasure of lists. Commun. ACM 3, 12 (Dec. 1960), 655–657. https://doi.org/10.1145/367487.367501

pmcjoneson Algol 60 implementation (1964) [pdf]

LISP more like 1960 for LISP I -- see http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp15_fam...:

J. McCarthy, R. Brayton, D. Edwards, P. Fox, L. Hodes, D. Luckham, K. Maling, D. Park and S. Russell. LISP I Programmer's Manual. Computation Center and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 1, 1960.

    Copy 1: Computer History Museum Lot X????.200?, George Michael donation. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_lisp/LISP_I_Programmers_Manual_Mar60.pdf
    Copy 2: Science and Technology Collection, M.I.T. Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, catalog number 1993.053, donated by Timothy P. Hart. Missing cover and Acknowledgements. http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%20I%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf
    Copy 3: From Supplementary Materials for Oral History of Phyllis A. Fox. The History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). http://history.siam.org/sup/Fox_1960_LISP.pdf

pmcjoneson Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

https://computerhistory.org/oral-histories/

https://computerhistory.org/blogs/

http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory

HOPL I: https://dl.acm.org/toc/sigplan/1978/13/8

pmcjoneson ACM has made 'Concurrency: the Works of Leslie Lamport' free to download

Andy => Andrew

pmcjoneson Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?

Metropolis, N., J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, 1980.

https://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Twentieth-Nicholas-...

This is based on papers presented at a 1976 conference by many of the original pioneers.

pmcjoneson Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?