HCIdivision17

Another idea that's not supported is the pathological way function scope is interpreted. The two dang functions in the MRDV flow past each other, like a case fall-through [2], but for function scopes. It makes sense artistically in the comic, but I'm not super clear on what it would even mean in terms of a real program.

[2] Only Duff's Device comes to mind here, but I think we're looking at something more pathological with the MRDV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device

I'm actually surprised this doesn't come up more often. Considering how popular syntax highlighting is, it would be neat to be able to color stuff based on context. I guess it would be some sort of bizarre unicode monster that encoded the glyph as well as color?

Regardless, I was sad about that as well. You just can't appreciate the MRDV properly without it. [1] Or without the ensuing War & Peace-sized volumes of comic/chatlog either, I guess.

[1] http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mspaintadventures/images...

Makes one wonder if it would translate nicely into ~ATH. At the very least, ~ATH's concurrency and async support would be a bit better.

Immediate edit: So on a lark I looked up "tilde ath" and found someone actually implemented some of it [0]. It's more focused on bifurcation than threading, and I think it might be improved by something like OP's `quantum`. At least we could simulate the plot a bit.

[0] https://github.com/drocta/TILDE-ATH#_=_

I immediately looked into that as well, since I'm still waiting for mine to ship. It's about two years late, and all the delays seem to be due to the fairly standard Kickstarter stuff (inexperience, shocking misunderestimatings of manufacturing, typical defect and spec failures, etc.)

The really cool thing about the Peachy Printer is the mechanism for the laser and such - sophisticated results for just a few parts. And the super cool thing about the OP printer is how simple the mechanism is. I look forward to see which ideas win in the end (or at least for which types of products - some resins are certainly better than others).

At least half of every enterprise software I have used suffers from catastrophic link rot. And when you look at the URLs that do still map or redirect to something marginally on-topic, you just know it's a single API change away from redirecting to "we don't know what you're looking for, try searching here for hundreds of completely off topic (and occasionally broken) links".

No, I am not bitter. Learning where their FTP server is and how to navigate, well, that was gold.

This has the immense advantage that there's a large corpus of games available to learn from as well. I don't think Battle.Net saves all games ever (only locally on the computer), there's still many thousands available online.

But man, if Battle.Net did save all of them, there'd likely be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, available. That'd be pretty spectacular as a training set!

Watching the zerglings somehow wash through that tank barage was just ... demoralizing. Those little buggers are not supposed to be a hard counter to tanks, dammit! Fighting against Automaton 2000 is like having your own personal Kaizo assaulting your base.

I think this really demonstrates why putting in APM limits is super important, and as brought out elsewhere also making the computer input via mouse/keyboard and get data from the screen (maybe just a filter to ease up on the CV bits?). A lot of the fun in watching a StarCraft map is seeing how the big picture is balanced against the details, and where a person's limited congnition flows from one focus to another. Limited knowledge and scope of sight play a huge part in the skill.

But mostly I'm just ranting because dodging the splash damage feels unfair; goes against everything I stand for. Next we'll start seeing 5 Skill Rays bulldoze the map! (I'm going to be looking into this a lot more after work - it seems like a super cool project!)

Totally for real, but a bit of a vaporware. You can get a demo version from this reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1izity/...

I was really pleased with the vgrep technique he used at the start to figure out what changed the map data. I often forget just how awesome our eyes are at spotting changing stuff at a glance and small datasets don't take long to manually look at.

Simply open the working RAM and look at it; lo and behold the thing is right there.

(There's some super spiffy things built on this idea, the one I was really excited to see come out was ..cantor.dust.. [0], which was never released.)

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/xxcantorxdustxx/

EDIT: formatting

Conveniently, section 1.1 of the current link [0] covers this (it's one of the earlier sections).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300075

Whelp, sounds like I'm using FTB and plonking mods in via a pack. That's exactly the answer what I was hoping for. I think a lot of my hesitancy was in regressing to an earlier version of Minecraft, but given the sheer depth you're describing, it wouldn't matter; it's a whole new game either way.

I really hope we eventually get something that is just about literally a Debian for Minecraft. That'd be even better for getting kids into the hacking spirit!

I really appreciate the link. Currently, Amazon has it available for sale for $20005.56 new or $2904.00 used (no typos there). Seems like the market-making bots have botched again...

It's actually kinda hard to find - at least harder than I'd expect for such a well recommended book. Time to start rummaging through my local book stores :)

EDIT: Nevermind, I'm going to see what I can do to port my current server to one running AE2 and Computercraft. That stuff is just too cool not to have.

I would still love your suggestions on what mods are excellent though (there are so very many...). Cheers!

----

I gotta ask: do you cram mods into your Minecraft server, and if so which ones? If not, which do you keep?

And how the heck do you keep up with the version mismatching? Like, should I just not update the server, or should I stick with just one engine?

By way of mea cupla, I have tried to look into it and figure it out, and came away with that it's such a mess maybe I shouldn't bother. No reason to make my day job my fun time as well; hours of glitchy wonkiness ain't my way of destressing.

(I gave Aloglia's API a cursory try and haven't found you listing your favorites, but whenever minecraft comes up I recognize you seem to be in the know. I've been playing vanilla for a while enjoying the tedious relaxation of just being able to use command blocks, but it's getting to the point I think programming a robot to build my skybride and tunnels would be a wise investment of time :)

Here's the really cool bit: today we can have both. I get to play Chrono Trigger - a masterpiece of artfully taking a system to its limits - and I can play The Witness - a gorgeous game that would lose so much if it couldn't be rendered so well.

To me, the only hope is to have lots and lots and lots of games made. Whenever we wax philosophical about old games, no one ever mentions the absolute piles of junk that were made. And then some were good, but not great (compare Super Monkey Ball to Marble Madness) I loved Marble Madness as a little kid but couldn't really wrap my head around the controls, whereas SMB was fun right off the bat (and I was still terrible at it - but for actual gameplay reasons now).

Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? The whole game felt rock solid and hand crafted. The 3D version added the ability to ride. But the world was so much less pretty. By contrast, look at the evolution of 3D in the Myst series; the game was supposed to be played like Uru, but computers could only handle HyperCard at the time. And contrast again with Into the Manhole, which really ought to be flash cards (or like flipping pages in a book - I remember the animations surprising and delighting me as a kid).

TL;DR: don't worry, it's not all bad. Some games need constraints, and people will build engines just for that. And some don't. But the important thing is: more games! (So more amazing ones trickle out).

There aren't lines; every case is so specific to that person's needs I don't think it's fair to pigeon-hole too much. For me, my coworker's change in demeanor was enough. You may find that medication smoothes the swings for you (and for all I know, my coworker would swing even harder without the medicine - I think that was mentioned once). Or not.

See a doctor and try it out in a safe dosage. If you find it helps, great! If not, well, maybe something else will work. Or perhaps you're just quirky.

It's hard to tell sometimes :)

There was a comedian who said something along the lines of: "I got got glasses the other day, and it shocked me. How could instantly improved eye sight not be at the top of everyone's To Do list?!" So when people talk about medication like it's a debate, I get confused. How could instantly improved mood and cognition not be at the top of everyone's list? (I'm a hyprocrite in that respect, but I'm just onery and enjoy the struggle.) If you don't want it, but the medicine helps, work your way off it slowly enough that you train your body to compensate (a number of people have told me that it's geometric: you can cut a third, then another third, then another until finally it's a negligible amount, but linearly tends to give poorer results).

But most importantly: do what improves your life. I wear glasses, and I've never felt shame for it. No reason to feel bad about a biochemical imbalance - that's even more complicated!

Plonking that idea into a brawler-style melee game would be great. Especially if you could change the game dymanics: big players have more health, but small players can't be hit; two players fighting over one object tug-of-war style; guns shoot bullets with odd distance mechanics.

I could see that being a fun one-off game.

The Museum of Simulation Technology may actually turn out pretty good [1]. There's a sort of paradox with game development that revolves around a gameplay mechanic. The mechanics really have to be rock solid, so that gets polished out first; polishing takes a long, long time. But it also has to be engaging or else it isn't worth playing. The direction taken for SuperHot is so unexpected (to me at least) that I was hooked.

The jury is still out on tMoST, but it's still rather early in, and you can already see a lot of improvement and style between the early tech demo and the small trailers. Notably, I think there is a bit of a genre trap, where this kind of mind-warp game is stuck playing out in certain stories. I'm utterly a sucker for this sort of game, so I'm getting it no matter what. But it'd be nice if it knocks it out of the park.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rN1jmsnq-iM

I work with someone with ADHD. It is plain as day when the medication starts to wear off. They can focus and program with diligence in the morning to early afternoon, but then later have a difficult time following longer trains of thought. It's not mere laziness - this person buckles down for even the most tedious of tasks, but rather their attention sorta slides off the topic. If you took the way a person's eyes slide off something shielded by a SEP-field, or the opposite of how your eyes are drawn to police flashers.

It's hard to describe, but it's certainly not just a goofy bandaid. They develop a routine around the process: harder or deeper problems in the morning, and small quick tickets/tasks in the afternoon. Or: as the day wears on, the work gets more granular (and thus more resilient to inturruption).

Mind, this is from my outside viewpoint. What actually goes on in their head can only really be described by them. But quite a few months of routine give me this impression.

Oh man, SimCopter was an enormous amount of fun for just that reason. You could even edit cities using SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit) and build your own ideal place to zoom through. Nothing's ever really captured that fun - some come a bit close, but never with the in-person feel of it.

I just started watching videos on opening locks, and I instantly caught the reference. It really reinforces the old hacker mentality, I think, where you're doing kiiiinda in the grey area, but just because it's interesting. Whitehat-ish, I guess.

For those of us who live fairly far away from our most excellent friends, yes, I need video games to play with them. I look forward to my weekly game sessions to drink a beer and hang out with them. Even something as simple as a board game is well suited to a video game with voice chat, and those often are primarily and only built/tested/supported on Windows, making fpgaminer's notes very welcome.

I would imagine you could also similarly find the things you either stay away from or actively dislike. Sort of a topical noise cancellation. Train it to know your preferences, but to occasionally give material outside the comfort zone. I think you'd really need a substantial map of topics to have a good understanding of where contrasts lie, but we're likely on track with the datasets currently being built in public sites like Reddit.

Really, I'm surprised this feature isn't implemented anywhere, since one of the joys of the Internet is being delighted by a new idea you haven't seen before. I certainly would appreciate filtering of the obvious rubbish like Fry is exasperated with, but having quality dissenting opinions available is precious.

Each community specializes in something (which may be a bit tautological), but they do not do so well in the other things, too. So when I see some sort of political post on HN, I go in knowing it's going to be a little bit pants. Probably not terrible, probably a bit noisy as an echochamber, but certainly not what this community is good at. By contrast, if there's a bug writeup for how a screen redraw glitch was fixed by bitfiddling, well, that's the cake I came here for.

I don't know about this particular issue, but the Internet Archive actually has a special exemption from the DMCA for bypassing copyright protection in the games it holds. It's actually designated a library in California and no doubt has a few lawyers who would happily represent them if something untoward happens.

Most likely, at worst, the Archive will be notified that it can't host the material and take it down (and I strongly suspect that Burke wouldn't do that). I find it hard to think there will be any major assault on it after all these years and it's long-standing reputation.

It was just so delightful when I saw his face fade in and snark at the puzzle. The clip reminded me about Connections, and I just figured it was unavailable online (dumb assumption, but it can be a hassle navigation all those broadcaster sites). Finding out it's on Archive.org is just a great way to welcome the weekend!

That right there may be the most succint and acerbic summary of the issue I've ever heard.

When I got a Das Keyboard back in college, it was largely to break myself of the habit of looking down (also it looked cool). I wasn't slow, but looking as I typed always ended up tripping me up. Removing the letters was the only thing that broke me of the habit. Best money I spent on my machine, silly as it was.

I think it's clear that his career as spokesman for the retro-encabulator was limited. Rockwell really dropped the ball on that project, and we can see many on the team fell a bit further than hoped.

You're spot on, but there is a use. It's sometimes handy to have a chunk of your life where you're forced to be idle for blocks of time. I loved taking the bus for that reason, because there was always a distraction at home, and I was busy at school. So the long (1.5 hour each way) bus commute was great for reading or just clearing out the mind (I'm an introvert, so long periodic stretches of isolation are nice).

Of course, I like being only 15 minutes from home. But I miss having that external crutch a bit.

Like, literally? I could see a question like that being asked, but I have no idea what a possible answer would be for anyone. Perhaps "7.2" might be pretty ok, but otherwise I can't fathom a single answer that isn't sarcastic, snarking, or arrogant.

I'm plonking that alongside "when did you stop beating your wife"-style trap questions.