beeswax

Don't want to be _that_ guy but your loop starts with 0 instead of 1

I loved Sonic on Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive/Genesis and was completely thrown off guard when I played Sonic Generations on the 360 decades later ("whoa how can anyone keep up with that pace?").

Once you embrace that pacing (which has been there all the time) you'll be able to appreciate that special kind of game/level design. It seems that Team Sonic was able to apply that principle to Quote a good number of titles with the IP.

Back in the days the controller would have been soaked in several people's sweat ofc and there were no persisted save points. If you want to improve on persistence, priorities and quick decision making: Go play these games on their original hardware (or at least don't use the emulator's snapshot abilities).

Next to frequent flyer status I'd also assume that it's less likely to hit you if you have checked in some luggage.

In Europe even before 9/11 flight security protocols demanded that a passenger need to be present on the plane and be seated until boarding is complete.

No piece of luggage is allowed to go on the flight if the airline / the pilot / crew / airport staff has knowledge that the passenger is not on that flight: They need to open up the cargo area, remove all containers until they find this person's luggage so it can stay on ground.

'Depressing' has a variety of facets made up of sadness, textual content/lyrics, and (at least for me) the placement of the title within its respective album context.

Anecdote: When I previewed Kid A via AudioGalaxy back then (it would not be released for another two weeks in my region) I thought the stylistic choices of 'Everything in its right place' were some kind of encoding error (quite frequent back then) so I trashed the whole album after spending hours on the download.

Imagine my surprise when I listened to the album from the physical album I bought a fortnight later :)

Awesome, thanks for sharing! Took me right back there. I was soo happy to have that 2X CD drive and a 486DX to be able to play this game.

Back then we were implementing our own bitmap drawing apps (simply called a PROGRAM back then) in Turbo Pascal (bgi256 ftw). We would challenge each other to come up with faster flood fill algorithms or smaller image file formats.

Good ol' times

Thanks for sharing!

I'm currently leading the (soft) transition of a two-platform, not-so-much-shared-code code base (ObjC, Java, Swift, C++) to React Native.

We hit some snags early on (mostly wrt tooling; also prepare to alter your mind set) but as the article states RN yields an astonishing amount of code reuse between platforms as well as heavily reduced turnaround times.

It’s way too early for conclusions/doing a post mortem for our project at this time.

Nonetheless I’d say we’re able to iterate faster by an order of magnitude and the added value of discussing features and domain logic/behavior for both platforms at the same time while enabling UX/UI to get results/feedback faster is a huge win.

That said, I’m really looking forward to the challenges that lie ahead (i18n, RTL quirks, proper unit/feature/integration testing scenarios, non-trivial native bridging, …)

Can anyone recommend a tool for macOS that monitors disk usage changes over time?

I usually use Disk Inventory X but I'd really like to correlate usage increases to specific dates / app installs, so it'd be nice to see stats over time, e.g:

- Installed Android Studio on Feb 1st: Usage in /Applications increased by 850MB, usage in User folder increased by 10G (450MB for android-studio-2.x.dmg, 8.4GB in /Users/name/.android, largest leaf in /Users/name/.android/sdk etc)

I tried to do this with the 'du' tools once but simply writing the current output to disk would take ages and diffs would need some heavy lifting to make sense of.

Is this what "Breathe" on the Apple Watch tries to help doing?

I never bothered to measure the intervals, so does anyone know if there's more to it? (the watch has access to heart rate and shows a current rate result afterwards; maybe it's adjusting heart rate goals over time?)

+1 for dashing [1]

While not actively maintained by Shopify anymore it's working really well, has easy setup and allows you to get up and running quickly.

The grid system and basic widgets provide a good and clean starting point, although you probably want to invest some time to make it visually coherent if you're using a large amount of third-party plugins.

Our team is using it for polled data that is updated once an hour up to every minute and it's working great for us.

[1] http://dashing.io

Awesome! Really nice what Nicolas and the whole community of Haxe contributors are doing to push language, eco system and targets.

Thanks to all of you involved for working on this!

> Just-In-Time compilation (actually Ahead-of-Time)

Also I do like paradoxes :)

Maybe I'm late to the game but it seems Apple now allows all developers to create promo codes for IAPs as well :)

About a decade ago I was working for a smaller company that provided local IT services for a large SaaS provider which also enforced territorial protection by only allowing a number of certified service companies in the area.

95% of all field personell was only able to arrive at the client, sit down and grab a coffee to be talked through some items the first-level support was aware of, while I could actually fix most of the problems due to my deeper understanding of the underlying concepts of the stack (Windows Networking, DNS, SMB, LDAP, SQL, …) right away.

This was the problem: No other engineer was able to see through those things and of course the clients began to notice that I was able to help them way faster; with hourly billing and reduced downtimes this also meant way cheaper.

I was kindly asked to „take my time“ and to „relax, get a coffee first - go flirt with the female office staff“ so my colleagues would not look bad compared to me.

Shortly after I handed in my notice and went for a freelance gig which was the right decision for both the local market and me personally as well (I did not continue with the field service thing but got into custom software development).

Nice. For those interested in the topic Amit Patel has a great article on polygonal map generation. Also discusses features like elevation, moisture, rivers etc:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

Looks awesome! Hope I'll get around to play around with this some time.

Also: Props for your GDC Europe talk a few years ago! (better Nate than lever..)

Absolutely this.

This year I have been growing Bhut Jolokia (ghost peppers), Habanero, Scotch Bonnet and Jalapeños both in a small greenhouse and outdoors. I afterwards dehydrate the fruits to prevent mold and so I can store them over the winter.

My favourite blend for DIY chili powder is Scotch Bonnet mixed with Bhut Jolokia for both taste and heat.

bit of context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798

Wow, I was about to comment on the first-worldishness problem statement wrt the OP title alone, but this...

I sort of missed that one. Not sure whether I should start weeping in the corner or burst out in laughter ( I've had my fair share of ruby gem hell during the past 8 years and this is exactly the reason I am sceptical about every minimal piece of JS code to be packaged into a standalone node module to begin with..)

For me it helps getting a feel for new languages / environments so I can get up to speed and tinker without losing too much momentum. Also camelCaseMethod completion (e.g. via ccm) can speed up progress dramatically if you know the exact method you want to call.

It's all nice as long as those features don't get in to my way (slow autocomplete, method and block templates that are harder to navigate than writing without help, massive method lists like Xcode shows for every possible message you might want send to that object etc).

I always liked the IntelliJ IDEA autocomplete for Java code as well as e.g. Spring/Hibernate Annotations; it was way more responsive than Eclipse and indeed a productivity feature saving time, alongside its impressive refactoring tools.

Man we were proud when we soldered our own Covox DACs for the LPT; Our MODs sure sounded awesome on those :)

And I didn't know DOSBox has an emulation for those, nice!

I did not get around to use haXe in a production env yet but it is one of the very few language/ecosystem/target areas where there has been a huge amount of both innovation and consolidation during the past n years.

Shouts to Nicolas and all contributors!

Apple recently rejected a tvOS app of mine due to the 2.12 no long lasting value item.

I sort of anticipated that and while for some users the amount of content and long lastingness is sufficient in that build I think the features I had initially planned for the first update will really make a better 1.0 with appeal to more users.

When I first browsed the Apple TV app store I was really disappointed by the vast amount of crap, so from a consumer's perspective I'm glad they started taking their guidelines serious now.

yeah but some team selection dropdowns still don't distinguish between the Enterprise and App Store teams, so you end up with two "MyCompany Inc." entries. Using any "fix issue" magic becomes an even more risky gamble then.

you never did; enterprise distribution is usually done via mdm/OTA provisioning or by installing the .ipa directly via iTunes

you might want to recheck, they recently allowed to use one apple id for multiple itc organizations/teams

yeah you are right in terms of concept art; I figured that unfortunately more often than not the lines between concept, mood, detailing etc tend to be blurred depending on who looks at it; Also this is not going to replace individual character design or other specific assets, but might remove scalability issues w/ project that require a huge number of different backgrounds, texture variations.

Of course the originial craft to producing high quality output is still needed - and just one image is not going to be sufficient anyway.

As you mentioned, I can also think of giving lesser experienced folks the ability to tinker with scene setup, dimensions, ratios etc and get faster 'final' results, although the 'old school' approach to getting those right before actually detailing something is quite important.

That's pretty cool. Might speed up asset creation for games by orders of magnitude: Train with concept art, generate the variations via these networks; adds consistency to the output and helps loosen the asset bottleneck / content treadmill esp for smaller studios/individuals.

One of the really sad/annoying things here is the obvious misdirection: editing a swift file does not disable the Refactor context and submenu entries, so clicking on any one option will trigger that nasty message essentially saying "You tried to do something we actually know you shouldn't even be allowed to click on, but we'll just resort to telling you this feature is ObjC only".

I'm fine with the IDE displaying such messages temporarily when it's figuring out whether or not there is an actual super class implementation a method can be "pulled up" to or not, but not disabling those context menus after the context clearly has been established isn't exactly good UX in my opinion.

slightly OT but: 1) the whole article reminds me of A Clockwork Orange and 2) all those Eastern Europe Warez Collections that found their way to central/west Europe in the early nineties. If it wasn't for 3DStudio 3/4 on DOS, I think my visual/spatial thinking would be way worse, making it even harder to wrap my mind around view/projection matrices etc.. edit: typos

Jumping to conclusions here but: - André has been involved with audiotool, as joa did quite a while ago - They are (former?) colleagues - André has quite a background in terms of applied signal processing, harmonics etc (I believe I first learnt about Karplus-Strong by a talk he gave in Cologne a few years back)

I "remember" that place from the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez (not going to spoil anything). Looks exactly like I imagined it back then.

It's amazing that in a metro area apparently struggling with affordable housing huge properties like this can exist unconverted for such a long time.

Exactly - Lemmings is one of the games I still enjoy playing in DOSBox (along with e.g. Lost Vikings, Monkey Island 1+2, …).

If it weren’t for those titles roughly between 1991 and 1994 I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have started to get deeper into DOS and pick up programming later on (remember messing with config.sys and HIMEM.SYS, EMM386 etc to fine-tune memory? using memmaker was so lame :) ).

Last year I was fortunate enough to be working on Meerkatz Challenge, a heavily Lemmings inspired puzzle platformer: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meerkatz-challenge/id7328540...

I think some of the original Lemmings concepts and controls simply don’t translate to platforms with touch input and high resolution graphics. Too bad that the PC versions don't seem to be available on archive.org.