4 ms·

Ironic that JWZ takes offense to the link since the code in question is by Trevor, who is a cofounder of YC. Mirror here: http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/

• alayne 11y ago
  I think he's had that HN redirect for years. He is blocking hotlinking directly to files. Try https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
  • DanBC 11y ago
    That redirects to imgur.
    • hellbanner 11y ago
      Copy and paste the url.
  • nitrogen 11y ago
    No, he blocks/redirects all traffic with HN as referrer. Kind of a jerk move, which sucks because his site is full of useful stuff.
    • mryan 11y ago
      Correct. Even / redirects to imgur if the referrer is HN.
    • dekhn 11y ago
      jwz is a smart guy, but ultimately ... a bit inflexible and jerkish. I used to argue with him over using C++ in xscreensaver (I wrote a couple savers, glplanet, pulsar and glextrusion). I wanted to write a full scene graph implementation, a physics library, and a bytecode VM to implement screensavers without having to write a ton of low-level C++ code. Unfortunately, jwz's constraints include "Every screensaver must be a single C file" and "no C++", which while possibly wise when he first expressed it, has become a canard.
      • maxerickson 11y ago
        What would be the problem with releasing all that stuff with some other name? (he seems to port xscreensaver to all the things he uses, so I can understand not wanting to accept a huge pile of someone else's code in a different language than the rest of the package)
        • dekhn 11y ago
          I am not an expert on licenses, but since jwz chose the X11 license, it may be possible to take the screensavers and releasing them under another name. I don't know what that would achieve. I was able to port many of my screensavers to other platforms easily; in most cases, the savers just have two functions: setup() and draw(), the first of which does any one-time initialization, the second which does all per-frame rendering. One can write a simple wrapper for any platform that initializes the GL contexts and handles user input, as well as any locking/unlocking code. However, I don't think that would achieve much. Most of the savers were written in very terse, nasty form to achieve the various constraints the authors worked under. I think it makes more sense to make NuSaver: the design I described (a scene graph, a physics engine, and a bytecode VM, then rewrite the good savers in the VM). In this case, I would probably just adopt an existing C++ scene graph (Qt has one built-in), a physics engine (I adapted Box2D to Qt, but you need a 3D engine), and a VM (I would use javascript).
          • maxerickson 11y ago
            I think it makes more sense to make NuSaver Yes, this is what I meant. How big a justification does he need to refuse code when such a thing is possible?
            • dekhn 11y ago
              It's not worth it. Most ppl screenblank so savers are mostly for nostalgia these days.
              • 11y ago
  • deleted 11y ago
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