wernsey

10 ms·

61.
by wernsey 5y ago
The first time I heard of Thinking Machines was on The Daily WTF [0]. It's quite a fascinating story of engineers building an amazing pie in the sky supercomputer but then having the company helmed by someone who was woefully unqualifi
62.
by wernsey 5y ago
Wow, I've bookmarked this. I also wrote an Markdown to HTML converter in Awk once, though my purpose was to convert marked down comments in source code to documentation. I started with an Awk script to extract the comments and then sys
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by wernsey 5y ago
I like to point people to the Rational Wiki for their articles on topics such as these, which tend to be very entertaining: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Seasteading
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by wernsey 5y ago
Basically the Atari 2600 didn't have any mechanism to prevent third parties from creating games for the system, and this led to a lot of games that were pornographic in nature. Nintendo placed a lot of value in their family-friendly im
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by wernsey 5y ago
Then there's this guy who writes his code as Dr Seuss poetry [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/24g6al/i_have_...
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by wernsey 5y ago
Seconded. I received this book as a gift earlier this year and I thought it might be one of the most incredible books I've ever encountered. What I liked about it is how it paints everything in very broad strokes so that you get to see
67.
by wernsey 5y ago
Fun read. This Jan Sloot reminds me of a conversation I once had with my dad, an electrical engineer, where he told me how many lay people he encountered throughout his career that proposed perpetual motion machines to him. My dad would see
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by wernsey 5y ago
The MilkyTracker homepage's Downloads section has some links to sample archives in torrent form that I looked at last time I played with trackers. https://milkytracker.org/downloads/
69.
by wernsey 5y ago
Reading your comment reminded me of the blog by Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/our-programs-are-fun-to-use/ Surely if some company focussed on making software that puts the user at the centre they'd be
70.
by wernsey 5y ago
I still keep Notepad++ around on my Windows machines because of the all the plugins. I regularly use the JSTool (for Javascript/JSON), MIME tools (for Base64 and URL encode/decode) and Markdown++ plugins. There is also a NppCalc c
71.
by wernsey 5y ago
Since the start of the year I've been on a meal plan given to me by a dietician, and have lost nearly 20kg. She did a genetic profile which guided her. In my particular case it is mostly seafood and green vegetables, but I can see how
72.
by wernsey 5y ago
Some narrative-driven adventure game with some light RPG elements. I came across Ink because I imagined that integrating some concepts from old Adventure Game Books might make for richer role-playing experiences than we typically see in mai
73.
by wernsey 5y ago
I heard the name Jon Ingold a while back because I wanted to do something with their company's Inkle system, which is a tool for interactive fiction and dialogue trees. This talk of his https://youtu.be/_vRfNtvFVRo is
74.
by wernsey 5y ago
I actually came from learned Perl before I learned Awk, and the reason I switched is because Awk is a much smaller language, so I can keep it all in my head. I just about never have to refer to the man page. I also found that I can go for m
75.
by wernsey 5y ago
In my day job I use Java, and all the items you list are good ideas to maintain my sanity. But I sometimes use Awk scripts to quickly analyse a log file to get information you need or to generate a configuration file or something. I think o
76.
by wernsey 5y ago
Wow, the thedailywtf.com sure brings back memories. I used to read it daily (no pun intended) until I discovered HN, and I actually picked up a lot of knowledge about best practices and so on by reading the criticisms in the comments.
77.
by wernsey 5y ago
My parents also got me that book as a teenager. I learned C from that book: I knew Pascal which we were taught at school and once I realised that you just substituted BEGIN and END with { and } it was easy to learn the other aspect. I reall
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by wernsey 5y ago
Since people are sharing their favourite small bitmap fonts, allow me to share Tom Thumb, a tiny 4x6 font: https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
79.
by wernsey 5y ago
So what you're saying is that IW had a commercial license for IdTech3 and made several proprietary changes to it and Id kept getting royalties. I'm not privy to the details of Id's licensing contracts, but I imagine that they
80.
by wernsey 5y ago
> Id wouldn't have open sourced a second engine if the first was freely taken by a dozen companies and sold in competition with for game sales, giving no source improvements back. I don't agree with this statement, because they
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by wernsey 6y ago
Oh, I gather the website is satire. Well done.
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by wernsey 6y ago
Just wow. The wording in that is just dystopian. I think it's the use of the exclamation points that gets me. Will NREs attract union attention? No! Will NREs save me money? Yes! Can NREs improve my share price? Yes! Do I have to invit
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by wernsey 6y ago
I'm picturing Rasputin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin#/media/File:R...
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by wernsey 6y ago
Gabriel Gambetta's book Computer Graphics from Scratch is available freely online and was discussed here just the other day: https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/ Another link I found interes
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by wernsey 6y ago
I have this page bookmarked in my list of bitmap fonts. Allow me to share some more: https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=87880&sid=bef3cfd8... - A collection of fonts ripped from some NES games http://p
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by wernsey 6y ago
The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ Even though it is mostly about gaming history, his writings on the history of Atari, Commodore, Apple, IBM and Microsoft, and the people behind them are absolutely fascinatin
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by wernsey 6y ago
I broke my own rule against pre-ordering for this one
88.
by wernsey 6y ago
...and we don't talk about Star Citizen
89.
by wernsey 6y ago
Let's build a browser engine! [1] by Matt Brubeck is a good place to start. I see Kosmonaut cites it in its README I once took a stab at rewriting it in C99 using reference counting for memory management [2], so I recognised the screen
90.
by wernsey 6y ago
What you say is true. The thing is just that I've been obsessed with computers my whole life and can't imagine myself being, for example, an aqueduct engineer or a blacksmith. Where Buffet's quote struck a chord is that I&#x2

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