Classic HN: A Story About 'Magic'
The article recounts a humorous incident involving a mysterious switch labeled 'magic' and 'more magic' found in the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10. Despite having only one wire connected, flipping the switch caused the computer to crash on two separate occasions. The author and other hackers speculated about the switch's effects, ultimately concluding that it was 'magic' and left it in the 'more magic' position.
- ▪The switch was found in the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10 and had only one wire connected to it.
- ▪Flipping the switch caused the computer to crash, despite its apparent inoperability.
- ▪The switch was eventually removed, and the computer ran fine afterward.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Catb |
| Canonical URL | http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 15:48:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T16:07:38.273Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T16:07:38.273Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | q6dGkKJJj4S8 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Story About ‘Magic'Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Catb.
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