History & Ideas
- Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)
- The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
- The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
- Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
- Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
- 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
- Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
- One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
- A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
- Three important steps in my maturation process
- The weekend is 100 years old
- A spectre is haunting Unicode
- The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
- Incentives are for losers
- Nobel Disease
- The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
- Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)
- My falling-out with the rationalist community
- Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
- I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64
- Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
- Backtrack-Free Cursive
- Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)
- Late Bronze Age Collapse
- The revenge of the philosophy majors
- America, 1926: A forgotten 100-year-old report
- This blog is written in en-GB
- Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
- 5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)
- Om Malik has died
- An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
- AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
- What the fuck happened to nerds
- Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
- What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
- The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
- Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
- It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
- We've made the world too complicated
- Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer
- What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)
- The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
- David Attenborough's 100th Birthday
- The Vatican's Website in Latin
- What British people mean when they say 'sorry'
- Ted Turner has died
- IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
- Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
- The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced
- Is my blue your blue? (2024)
- If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive
- Interview with Bob Odenkirk
- A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
- Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
- Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
- Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others
- Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
- Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
- Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years
- French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?
- Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
- A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder (1992)
- A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
- Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar
- Tony Hoare has died
- Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died
- The American Nations regions across North America
- What is it like to be a bat?
- The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb
- Why are there so many rationalist cults?
- Being full of value‑added shit
- Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights
- How friction is being redistributed in today's economy
- How the US built 5k ships in WWII
- Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
- A Map of British Dialects (2023)
- The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil
- The hardest working font in Manhattan
- The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray
- The South Vietnamese pilot who landed a Cessna on a carrier to save his family (2019)
- Building a Medieval Castle from Scratch
- Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History
- Why is zero plural? (2024)
- 'Once-in-a-century' discovery reveals luxury of Pompeii
- Divers recover Phoenician shipwreck that sank 2.6k years ago off coast of Spain
- How can a top scientist be so confidently wrong? R. A. Fisher and smoking (2022)
- Bunkers in Albania
- The Sikh Practice of Langar, a Free Meal Where Everyone Is Equal
- The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
- You can't optimize your way to being a good person
- Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
- What Is To Be Done? The book that helped spark the Russian Revolution
- A data table thousands of years old (2020)
- Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
- Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps
- In Defense of Y'All
- What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
- Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance (2013)
- Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
- The age of average (2023)
- Colour in the Middle Ages
- A liar who always lies says "All my hats are green."
- One of the last Navajo code-talkers died on October 19th, aged 107
- The world of tomorrow
- Notre Dame Cathedral reopens
- Why did clothing become boring?
- ’Brain rot‘ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024
- The Influence of Bell Labs
- A washing machine for human beings, from 1970
- Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
- Marshall Brain has died
- Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
- The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
- What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)
- German WWII Soldier Grave Found with Mesolithic Tools, Roman and Byzantine Coins
- The shrimp welfare project
- Gandhi's Letter to Hitler (1940)
- The Structure of a Worldview
- Russian family lived alone in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years (2013)
- Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)
- The Silurian Hypothesis
- Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
- Review of Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World
- Is the Q source the origin of the Gospels?
- Alexander the Great's tunic identified in royal tomb at Vergina?
- PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle
- How Gothic architecture became spooky
- The 1600s were a watershed for swear words (2022)
- Character amnesia in China
- ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST
- Post World War II Food
- How to grip Bronze Age swords
- The Japanese word ikigai refers to a passion that gives joy to life (2022)
- An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker
- Scientists working to decode birdsong
- Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing
- Code that helped end Apartheid
- Life is not a story
- The Fifth Generation Project in Japan (1992)
- The Shroud of Turin: History and Legends
- The Rise and Fall of Matchbox's Toy-Car Empire
- Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says
- Indian entrepreneur, industrialist, and philanthropist, Ratan Tata, dead at 86
- Turkish language has a gossip tense
- Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
- The Nazi of Oak Park
- The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)
- The Naming of America (2023)
- What is the history of the use of "foo" and "bar" in source code examples? (2012)
- The other British invasion: how UK lingo conquered the US
- Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)
- The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia
- Is English a “creole Language”?
- Everything we know about spies is wrong
- 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web
- What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
- Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
- Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
- 1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place
- The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
- The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
- The PERQ Computer
- Asking the wrong questions (2017)
- Mapping 20k ships that sank during WW II
- Is My Blue Your Blue?
- Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
- Sainsbury Wing contractors find 1990 letter from donor
- NSA releases 1982 Grace Hopper lecture
- Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean
- Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)
- In pre-WWII Berlin, the shape of your roof was a political decision
- Hacker Purity Test (1989)
- Euphemisms are best changed frequently (2016)
- We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad
- Calling All Hackers
- Basic Mechanisms In Fire Control Computers (1953) [video]
- Aristotle – How to live a good life
- Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)
- John Rawls, liberalism and what it means to live a good life
- Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be
- Antifragility in complex dynamical systems
- In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality
- The Third Atomic Bomb
- Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road
- Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)
- Missing Henry VIII portrait found after random X post
- Göttingen was one of the most productive centers of mathematics (2019)
- Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
- Warsaw came close to never being rebuilt (2015)
- The Elegance of the ASCII Table
- What is the significance of the character "j" at the end of a Roman Numeral? (2013)
- The Objects of Our Life (1983)
- Human history in the very long run (2021)
- The Right Kind of Stubborn
- Why Italy Fell Out of Love with Cilantro
- Tao Te Ching translated by Ursula Le Guin (1997)
- What if everything is conscious?
- Let's stop counting centuries
- Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery
- The impact of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" on Noam Chomsky's path to anarchism
- Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
- Why is Chile so long?
- Should this be a map or 500 maps?
- A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications
- Coffee helped the Union in the Civil War
- The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]
- The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
- A buried ancient Egyptian port reveals connections between distant civilizations
- Not everything is behavioral science
- Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items
- Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
- The short, happy reign of CD-ROM
- Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago
- Horses may have been domesticated twice
- Bouba/kiki effect
- Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
- Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine
- Lynn Conway has died
- POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)
- Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'
- Högertrafikomläggningen
- D-Day, as told by paratroopers
- Alan Turing died 70 years ago
- Roman Roads (2017)
- Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
- Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?
- The Moral Economy of the Shire
- If English was written like Chinese (1999)
- What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
- Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
- Armor from Mycenaean Greece turns out to have been effective
- Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
- What's the difference between a motor and an engine? (2013)
- Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
- Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
- The Reign of Alexander III of Macedon
- Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile
- A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history
- What’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986)
- It’s an age of marvels
- Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
- Jim Simons has died
- Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? (2011)
- The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound (2019)
- Was the Stone Age the Wood Age?
- Insects and other animals have consciousness
- Globalization was supposed to align the values. They're diverging
- Unique volumes of Brothers Grimm fairy tales discovered in Poland
- The LaserDisc
- The Scientific Method Part 5: Illusions, Delusions, and Dreams
- What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
- World Wide Web (1991)
- The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language
- 'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue
- Daniel Dennett has died
- A former slave who became a cowboy, a rancher, and a Texas legend
- The forgotten war on beepers
- How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
- A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
- The purge of German science in 1933
- I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals
- Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home
- British Placename Mapper
- Re-creating Disney's sodium vapor process [video]
- What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)
- Ask HN: What is the biggest thing you've changed your mind about?
- Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science (2011)
- The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
- Science fiction and the death of the sun
- Los Alamos Chess
- Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?
- Century-old stone "tsunami stones" dot Japan's coastline (2015)
- Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
- Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)
- Daniel Kahneman has died
- New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
- My grandfather Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian
- Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019)
- Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?
- On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
- How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
- The Best Essay
- Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]
- Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
- A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)
- French artists in 1899 envisioned what life would look like in the year 2000
- On the trail of the Denisovans
- Shave and a Haircut
- Antarctic English
- Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion
- Neanderthals' use of complex adhesives shows high cognitive abilities
- Punk is dead and so are we
- Pleasures by Aldous Huxley (1920)
- What do we get wrong about the Byzantine Empire?
- Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011
- Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]
- How did the settlers of the Canary Islands survive a millennium of isolation?
- What if I’m wrong? (2023)
- Detroit's abandoned tunnel systems open door to another world
- It was almost impossible to make the blue LED [video]
- On whether we're living in a simulation
- John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died
- The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better
- Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
- Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)
- Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?
- How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
- A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)
- Does fermion doubling make the universe not a computer?
- Could our Universe be a simulation? How would we even tell?
- An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it
- The missing apex of Maslow's hierarchy: self-transcendence
- The Plot Against Einstein
- How French was medieval England?
- Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)
- Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)
- The Dark Forest hypothesis is absurd
- Another Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in England
- The man who coined the word "robot" defends himself
- Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
- What Happened to David Graeber?
- Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?
- A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note
- Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
- Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
- Inner Speech
- Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
- AI or Ain't: Eliza
- Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
- "Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
- Everything will be alright in Iceland
- Internet Sacred Text Archive
- Niklaus Wirth has died
- Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
- Woman with rectifier and electric car (1912)
- Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
- War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape
- Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)
- Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
- Anselm's Ontological Argument: A Guide for the Perplexed
- The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier
- Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?
- 0% of the phrases of the original Wikipedia "Ship of Theseus" article remain
- How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
- Possible to detect an industrial civilization in geological record? (2018)
- Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)
- Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower case?
- There Once Was an Empire
- Hunter-gatherers' work was play
- Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia
- How did Christianity change the Roman Empire?
- Ask HN: Why do half of Internet users think we are living in a simulation?
- Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
- Apostrophe Protection Society
- Orthodox Privilege (2020)
- Qanat
- Albert Einstein in 1939 composed a message for the people of AD 6939
- Ivan Illich’s radical critique of modern certitudes (2021)
- Ken Burns chronicles the sad fate of the American buffalo