Ask HN: What article said 7 last Unix code someone could keep in their head?

3 thevibesman 2 5/14/2025, 5:42:55 PM

I'm looking for an article/paper I found on HackerNews (maybe in 2018 or 2019) that someone posted that was some description of a UNIX version (7 I think?) and in the introduction they mentioned it being the last version of UNIX that was small enough for one person to keep all the code in their head.

Does anyone know what paper I might be thinking of? I can't seem to locate it.

Comments (2)

Jtsummers · 5h ago

https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=unix+commentary

Most likely something related to that book.

thevibesman · 5h ago

Yes, A COMMENTARY ON THE SIXTH EDITION UNIX OPERATING SYSTEM was the book I was thinking of. Thanks!

A Simple Spit Test Could Reveal Prostate Cancer, Outperforming a Blood Test (discovermagazine.com)

URLMint: Finding .com domains that don't suck – with AI (urlmint.com)

Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments (wsj.com)

A privately developed Australian rocket is ready for a historic launch (arstechnica.com)

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch (slate.com)

Why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational (frontiersin.org)

Newlyweds receive gift cards before groom's deployment, Amazon won't honor them (whio.com)

Universal Blind and Verifiable Delegated Quantum Computation with Classic Client (researchgate.net)

AI Slop Is Polluting Bug Bounty Platforms with Fake Vulnerability Reports (socket.dev)

High-speed Airo trains are coming to Seattle (axios.com)

Honeybadger adds observability for Elixir, Phoenix, and Oban (honeybadger.io)

iPadOS 17.7.7 issue – apps not saving state / needing logging in (discussions.apple.com)

Why AI Tools Must Sync Memory: A GPT-Replika User's Plea

Chip-based system for terahertz waves could enable imaging, radar, transmission (news.mit.edu)

Klarna CEO says AI helped company shrink workforce by 40% (cnbc.com)

LLMs Are Making Me Dumber (vvvincent.me)

A note about the security of your Steam account (store.steampowered.com)

Beyond the tools, adding MCP in VS Code (code.visualstudio.com)

What If Your Salary Is Too High for Today's Job Market? (msn.com)

The first US hub for experimental medical treatments is coming (technologyreview.com)

Meta's Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25) and Universal Model for Atoms (UMA) (ai.meta.com)

Show HN: KawaiiWatch – Making two LLM's fall in love in realtime (kawaii-watch.nightly.pw)

Tinygrad 0.10.3 (github.com)

'Losing Big' Review: Gambling It All Away (msn.com)

As Nuclear Power Makes a Comeback, South Korea Emerges a Winner (bloomberg.com)

Control of Spalling on 8M Mechanized Mining Face in Huoxi Coalfield (mdpi.com)

Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026 (arstechnica.com)

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.5 dev 4 (godotengine.org)

Microsoft Cuts Off Access to Bing Search Data as It Shifts Focus to Chatbots (wired.com)

Microsoft Layoffs Hit Coders Hardest with AI Costs on the Rise (bloomberg.com)

Ask HN: How much have gaps in your work-history affected your getting hired?

Surgeon general pick praised psychedelic therapy, shrooms helped her find love (apnews.com)

reaktiv: Reactive Signals for Python (reaktiv.readthedocs.io)

Would you believe try-catch-finally works in plain old C?

DeltaChat: "We can not hand out data that we don't have" [pdf] (merlinux.eu)

States Chase OpenAI's $100B AI American Dream (washingtonpost.com)

WW3 will be fought with money [video] (youtube.com)

LangGraph Checkpointer on KurrentDB (kurrent.io)

California Governor Newsom seeks to scale back free healthcare for migrants (reuters.com)

World Video Game Hall of Fame Inducts Defender, Tamagotchi, GoldenEye 007, Quake (apnews.com)

Detained Russian-born Harvard scientist criminally charged with smuggling (reuters.com)

The Ego Pandemic (mattruby.substack.com)

OpenAI says OneDrive/SharePoint users can now directly connect files to ChatGPT (windowscentral.com)

A testing question – Testing under uncertainty (third-bit.com)

Software engineer lost $150K-a-year job to AI – he's been forced to DoorDash (yahoo.com)

Data from 89M Steam users leaked (twitter.com)

José Mujica has died (bbc.co.uk)

GT Standard (gt-standard.com)

Obsidian plugin for removeing old completed tasks (github.com)

"It was a bit nuts" – Teo Connor on designing the new Airbnb app (designweek.co.uk)

Ask HN: What article said 7 last Unix code someone could keep in their head?

Comments (2)