alt Hacker NewsPaged Out Issue #8 [pdf]
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I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal, and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me. Life just wasn’t so heavy back then.
Awesome! Was looking forward to the next issue. Paged Out reminds me a lot of the old-school 2600 Hacker Quarterly periodical back in the 80s.
> Query based compilers are all the rage: Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Haskell, and Clang all structure their compilers as queries.
I've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into details.
I love Paged Out -- it's basically the only modern equivalent to 1980s BYTE or Dr. Dobbs Journal today.
It has a little bit of a "2600 vibe" but with a more modern look and feel. This is the first issue I've read, and I like it.
Some nice art in there too.
Thank you. I love the wallpapers of Paged Out and always set it as my default wallpaper on MacOS.
I feel like this tweet suggests that the PDF is a polyglot or an embedded second PDF.
They've got a new web viewer in this issue that can be used to link to individual articles and might be nicer than reading a PDF on some screens: https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=1
The one-page limit enhances the quality of this zine. It compels authors to simplify complex topics, which can be more challenging than writing a lengthy paper. I maintain a printed binder of past issues for quick reference during CTFs, and the reverse engineering articles have saved me hours of searching through documentation.
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our hands.