I fully support looking at older publications. There are a ton of great older ideas which were unjustly ignored. Or maybe they were rightly ignored at the time, but the situation has changed and now those ideas are relevant now. As an example of the latter, Koopman operator theory comes to mind, though I personally am not a fan of Koopman stuff. Koopman operator theory didn't become relevant until computers became powerful enough.
During my PhD, I did some deep literature reviews and found tons of valuable papers that were ignored. I was naive at the time. I'm sorry to say that almost no one cared, and my PhD advisor thought it was a waste of time. I get some appreciative emails every once in a while, but that's it. Many academics seem to implicitly assume that if a paper is older than X years, it's not valuable. I hope that attitude will change within my lifetime.
DoesHaveManyCasesOf80sMagazinesStackedFloorToCeilingForSeveralYards == YES They're part of the alternate universe before the series of unfortunate events (MFNforDaCCP, MS-DOS, FSF, PPP/MSRAS, The Sculley, The Gould, The Cutler, That Face and InfoSys) that left us in the current dystopia: Three trillion dollar what? who?
I love reading old magazines computer related or not. It really feels like a time machine when you read them, with the articles and advertisements taking you back to when they were current. And it is always interesting to read articles from 40 years ago that debate the merits of portable virtual machines (the p-system back then) versus native code that aren't very different from the same debates today.
I really resonated with the link to the MacUser article on word searches.
> Word Search will generate and print the sort of word puzzles where you have to look forwards, backwards and diagonally to Find a given set of words. Even though you can only dis¬ play and solve a puzzle of 32 X 16 on your screen, larger puzzles can be created for printing. To give you an example of what can be done with the program, a set of 10 puzzles including states, mouths and composers are on the disk.
It later goes on to describe something I've personally experienced.
> And printing seems to take a while, but when others sit and fuss over your creation, you’ll say the wail was worth it.
Over the last couple of years I've been working on a side project involving mazes and also... word searches! Last Christmas I printed off a bunch of Christmas themed word searches I generated for the family to play on Christmas day. Seeing real people have real fun with something I created felt like remembering what programming was supposed to be about – bringing actual joy to people, instead of adding another forgettable feature to some product manager's roadmap.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadDuring my PhD, I did some deep literature reviews and found tons of valuable papers that were ignored. I was naive at the time. I'm sorry to say that almost no one cared, and my PhD advisor thought it was a waste of time. I get some appreciative emails every once in a while, but that's it. Many academics seem to implicitly assume that if a paper is older than X years, it's not valuable. I hope that attitude will change within my lifetime.
I'm afraid even https://jonudell.net couldn't save us.
Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002
> Word Search will generate and print the sort of word puzzles where you have to look forwards, backwards and diagonally to Find a given set of words. Even though you can only dis¬ play and solve a puzzle of 32 X 16 on your screen, larger puzzles can be created for printing. To give you an example of what can be done with the program, a set of 10 puzzles including states, mouths and composers are on the disk.
It later goes on to describe something I've personally experienced.
> And printing seems to take a while, but when others sit and fuss over your creation, you’ll say the wail was worth it.
Over the last couple of years I've been working on a side project involving mazes and also... word searches! Last Christmas I printed off a bunch of Christmas themed word searches I generated for the family to play on Christmas day. Seeing real people have real fun with something I created felt like remembering what programming was supposed to be about – bringing actual joy to people, instead of adding another forgettable feature to some product manager's roadmap.
I posted it to HN at the time, but I have a small writeup of it here. https://www.lloydatkinson.net/posts/2024/year-in-review/#-wo...