Derpdiherp

I began learning Rust in my spare time - as a C++ dev it seemed like the right thing to do. I ended up using Ratatui for a hangman implementation. I really liked using it, I ended up with an itch to make an oldschool roguelike with it. Perhaps some day I'll carry on and do it.

Interesting - it's been a long time since I used / looked at it. There was a big uproar in the company though and a drive to move away from it due to licensing and cost from there. Maybe they where misinformed.

---Was talking about a previous company who made steps to shift from it for pricing reasons. Seems they where misinformed.

Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth.

I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a family, I value my free time. I spend work time growing my skill set as it's required, anything else I do is rarely related.

I have a feeling that there's a silent majority of developers such as myself, that do enjoy programming and have a "passion" for it, but do not let this passion dissuade them from family time, or having more varied down time.

I think for a lot of people it's a dangerous game to be spending every waking moment working for a company, then spending your down time scraping together stuff for open source contributions etc.

I salute those that can and do though.

I retract that - if you use the search bar you can get modes of any scale you want, this is fantastic!

You never see the modes of the harmonic minor in these things - always the major modes ( aside from the relative natural minor of course ), as a metal head it'd be useful to see one. Still very cool.

Given the ones you suggest in your post, I'd say:

  Agricola
  Race for the Galaxy
  Tiny Epic Galaxies
  Splendor

Would all be good for the same kind of player counts as them, without any occult theming.

The Arduino IDE is fine to begin with. Eventually you may want to grow into dealing with more of the family of Atmel chips, tiny85s can be fun for miniature projects for example. You'll start to outgrow the Arduino libraries at some point though and may want to switch to the Atmel compilers directly.

For resources the Arduino.cc forum and tutorials are a great place to start. Should be able to find some project ideas as well.

No the criticisms are still valid. There's still severe frame rate issues under quite a few circumstances. The military thing is more subjective though, it's still a complicated system, but such is the way of DF.

As much as I can see why Tarn wants to keep the code closed source, I really wish he'd allow someone to help him with some optimisations.

C++ Developer - must admit I used to use spaces, then switched to tabs.

This was for several reasons - firstly - makefiles will not be parsed correctly if you start using spaces rather than tabs, so it's a good habit to get into to use them elsewhere to save headaches. Secondly, almost every developer I've met will want to use a different amount of spaces for indentation. When using tabs they can set whatever they want using the text editor or IDE of their choice.

This is my line of thinking anyway.

It's really going to depend on what you're doing with the graphics. As soon as you start emulating basic shaders for effects on the CPU by comparing and writing to a screens worth of pixels you'll see where the bottleneck ends up.

On the other hand if you're wanting to make something with the graphical complication of Mario or Mega Man ( purely sprites - no effects - lighting and other things maybe done with alpha blending ) then you might find it makes sense to stick to working with the CPU.

Thanks very much for the paper, I'm always more than happy to be proved wrong, I'll have a read.

It's an interesting point about India, but I'd say there is much more of a focus on getting enough food to survive there than in overpopulated first world cities - which is closer to the subject matter.

By no means do I think the situation we are in are comparable - nature does play a role for us unlike in the experiment and there are hardships for some.

But I think examining extreme overpopulation and it's effects on individuals is important - and is relative to a lesser degree to problems we have the potential to face, and may be facing in diluted forms in certain areas. Maybe not as much today, but who knows where we could be tomorrow.

The other glaring difference is the difference in behaviour between people and rodents - you can't draw conclusions and act upon them, but you can at least study the connections.

I wouldn't call that dangerous at all, I'd say it was dangerous to ignore.

I think you're reading into the term "utopia" too much. The experiment was a utopia of the body perhaps where there are no biological needs that aren't satisfied with no external forces of nature acting to reduce population aside from the size of the habitat that the rats lived in - as you mention we do not live in a utopia as people do grow hungry and are lacking jobs.

It also was not a utopia because the rats clearly where not happy.

I'd disagree and say that in overpopulated areas there is a higher rate of depression, obesity and psychological problems than in places with lower populations - but I haven't provided numbers there and neither have you - so both of our arguments are anecdotal.

As an aside I was more referencing the hikikomori phenomenon when I mentioned NEET's - whilst they are NEET, they are extreme cases of social withdrawl and other mental problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

"Newer generations born in the now dysfunctional mouse utopia became withdrawn, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating , drinking and sleeping. This generation, for all the emphasis they placed on grooming, would not reproduce. Moreover, these mice were noted to be unintelligent compared to previous generations."

Intelligence has surely risen in our population, obesity is becoming a real problem in successful populations. The "selfie" self absorbed cultural shift we're seeing at the moment is another parallel.

Whilst we're not cannibalising each other or becoming any more aggressive than we have been in the past (although we are still plenty aggressive), I think we are starting to see some of symptoms for lack of a better term that are highlighted above to some degree or another.

Edit - perhaps there are also similarities between the hikikomori NEET lifestyle that's arisen in Japan as well.

This is purely an opinion without any statistics to back it up though, I'd be interested to hear counter arguments.

The mice utopia experiment.. There are a surprising amount of small parallels between it and some of our recent cultural phenomenon.

Interesting thought.

Population control with the right to children is a very delicate subject and hard sell.

My thoughts on the matter was always that nature itself will eventually take care of the numbers if we keep going the way we are without some form of measure to keep control - every population explosion has had it's eventual decline - sharp or smooth. We seem to believe that we're different but we're not.

If we self regulate by choice - whether it's the lack of income, lifestyle or a lack of want to have children that has brought us here it's always going to be preferable. As unsavoury as it may be in some regards.

Surely this is a good thing? We (as a species) have been growing exponentially in an unsustainable manner. It'll be tough as we transition into looking after more elderly with less of a young population to support them - but in the long run it's for the best.

An art director? Ascii in itself is entirely it's own aesthetic. There's a huge roguelike community that much prefer graphics like that.

Previous posting of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11908942

And potentially creating a heap of new problems seems as there is a good deal of research which suggests that carbon nanotubes are genotoxic and carcinogenic.

Disposal of it could be just as costly as Asbestos with just as adverse side effects.

I fully understand that some people getting cancer is less of a problem than our planet becoming uninhabitable, but it most certainly can't be swept under the carpet and forgotten about.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23751780 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16686422 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20795897

Didn't know that - thanks for the information. Was it wear against the side of the casing that led to the issues then?

Perhaps they could come up with some system like what we see in traditional piston engines piston seals - a replaceable seal that goes around the rotary triangular err piston for lack of a better word.

If I remember correctly all the other wankel / rotary engines have just had a lump.

To be honest I think Tarn isn't wanting to release the source for a couple of reasons:

A - He wants complete control of the direction that the game is heading,

B - He's not proud of the source code, from interviews and such and the length of the project I think it's rather a mess, and due to the fact that the game gets new features all the time, it's not getting refactored any time soon.

In a way it's a shame - the dwarf fortress community has been fighting "FPS death" of fortresses, when the simulation of all the stuff on your fortress reaches the point where the game crawls along so slowly it's unplayable. And this happens sooner than you'd think. People have been pushing to get the game multithreaded for years but unfortunately it's just not happening. Yet on the other hand I respect Tarns decision to want complete control over the direction of the game - yet there are already mods out there that completely change that anyway.

Although they're out of date now, captain duck's tutorials on youtube demystify the entire thing a great deal. And most of the core concepts haven't changed much since he made the tutorials.

Believe it or not once you "get" the interface it's really not all that bad. There's one or two incredibly annoying intracacies - but get the lazy newb pack with dwarf therapist and you'll be in for an easier time.

While an interesting concept -

"The motorcycle is driven by a 6kW electric motor and battery. It reaches a top speed of 80kph and hits 45kph in three seconds."

Considering they're pushing this as the strongest possible, lightest possible frame - you'd think they'd focus on more impressive statistics.

I'd argue that a company should be able to take a little criticism - style based ones like mine will likely be ignored, as you mentioned before it's down to the culture of the company - for every function like the one outlined in the OP I'm sure there's countless examples of good style in the code base, engines are huge.

I really hope that companies don't view criticism as a negative thing, it's cause for discussion and change which are most certainly positive - I hope some bugs are found and they start to feel the benefit of the community a little.

I was a game dev for 3 of my 6 years. I just got sick of the layoffs after project ends - and my university tuition was in fact games development specific.

*Edit - Yes though - by no means do I think I'm some big shot know it all. But I do have strong feelings about readability after having had to deal with code which is awful to grok.

Seems as you've picked up on the same thing -

"I've worked in the Games industry with age old engines, I currently work in embedded development with a code base over 10 years old - I'm fully aware of what "real life" code is like. There is no excuse for not writing well commented code - or even code with well named variables and functions that reduce the need for as much commenting. If you suffer from code like this in your workplace, perhaps actively comment it as you reach an understanding of what it does."

Relatively experienced 6 year C++ dev - I mainly mentioned university because things where much stricter - but having an environment with decent code reviews and maintaining a little self discipline goes a long way with the sanity of your co-workers.

I've worked in the Games industry with age old engines, I currently work in embedded development with a code base over 10 years old - I'm fully aware of what "real life" code is like.

There is no excuse for not writing well commented code - or even code with well named variables and functions that reduce the need for as much commenting.

If you suffer from code like this in your workplace, perhaps actively comment it as you reach an understanding of what it does.