retro64

Neverwinter Nights nwsync tools are written in Nim and the source is available to tinker with. I've compiled and used the tools on my FreeBSD box to break apart the modules and prepare them for nwsync distribution (nwsync is used for client/server asset management mostly for persistent worlds, but is handy for just running a one-off server with your buddies).

Now you can learn a bit about Nim and have fun doing it :)

A couple of links:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eYRTd6vzk7OrLpr2zlwnUk7m...

https://github.com/niv/neverwinter.nim

¡pǝǝɹƃ∀

Orion is one of my favorite constellations. Where I grew up, the winter sky was often clear and I spent many hours as a youth gazing up, wondering about it all.

Even now, when I saw a pic of Orion after following links from the article, I again couldn’t help but think about how awesome the universe is, and how whatever is going on out there just dwarfs our petty, shitty little Earthy problems.

Ok, here’s one for you. This is almost too painful to repeat it’s so bad. When I went to college, the university implemented at 4 digit prefix that students would use when dialing from a campus phone so they could charge long distance calls directly to their university bill. With only 9999 numbers allocated to 6000 students, it was comically simple to use a random number and make that long overdue call to mom.

Right. It lasted a month before it was scrapped.

Maybe a cultural thing? For me, "you're over thinking it" is a familiar/friendly way of expressing an idea, similar to how you would approach a friend. It was not intended to be dismissive.

You’re overthinking it. I have had a similar experience. The worst were the “stop light” questions. Does it mean the pole, the light, the tiny corner overlapping another square? I used to try to include everything as it was technically true. Very frustrating – until I finally started to not care. Click on the most obvious pictures. Click click click. Done. Get it wrong? Click click click on the next one. Way faster with a much better success rate doing so. It usually only takes a couple of tries now.

Thanks for posting this. For myself, as an aging coder who has zero plans of moving into management, I find his story inspiring.

I bow to your paranoia. Although I have often wondered if retro computers will become more valuable in the future as the final bastion of electronic privacy.

This reminds me of something that happened to me several years ago.

I was in living in a small town and a new cop moved in. He became very diligent about enforcing the law, and I was pulled over for a rolling stop along a lonely country road. He didn’t give me a ticket (I wasn’t even sure what I had done wrong), but he gave me a stern warning and let me go. I continued on my way (mildly fuming) and came to the next stop down the same road. So I “stopped” and began taking a left. I was still thinking about this when I looked to my left, then right and began to pull out. I realized I just did another rolling stop, so I hit my brakes and this time I actually stopped.

And to my surprise a fast moving car emerged out of my right side blind spot. He was right at the crossing, and had I continued he would have smacked into me.

I was in my pickup truck, and the blind spot was caused by an aftermarket plastic detail that was attached to both windows, so it made the ‘A’ frame 3 times as wide as it should have been, and the angle of the road and speed of the vehicle perfectly matched the location of this plastic piece, effectively hiding the oncoming vehicle so I didn’t catch it when I first looked right.

I met that same cop some weeks later at a social gathering and of course went out of my way to shake his hand in gratitude.

I've been coding heavily in C++ for now over 2 decades, and when I interview someone I typically can get a pretty decent picture of within a general 3 - 5 year range of how long they've been coding based on the various details they gave when answering the questions about the language. And yes, of course someone could have 10 years experience, or the same experience for 10 years and never grow, but in general I found I am pretty spot on.

So I agree, 1 year doesn’t even begin to cut it. You need more than book knowledge, you need the experience of watching your masterpiece crumble under its own weight (sometimes several times) or have the joy of hunting some obscure bug because you failed to recognize the trap you had set for yourself.

I certainly wouldn't want to scare anyone off from C++, because personally I find the empowerment is worth the pain. It just takes time to learn what to avoid.

Here's an interesting tidbit from my experience. My son was looking at purchasing a Udemy course. He was asking my advice about it as we chatted over the phone (he lives a short distance from me). I visited the site and found the course he was referring to. "Oh, the one for only $11.95?"

"No, it's $19.95"

After going back and forth for a moment we verified it was the same course, but for him it was offered at a higher price. He was using an Android phone to visit the site, and I was on a Linux box. He had never visited the site before searching for this course, and I had never heard of it.

The difference? Not exactly sure? Is it profiling based on OS? Doesn't seem likely. I suspect the price was based on cookie residue he picked up or profiling based on prior surfing. He had been searching the web for a while looking at similar products. Was his surfing behavior calculated into his price, scoring a more likely chance for him to purchase at a higher rate?

I have not yet found out (does anyone here have a reasonable explanation?), but it's a definite turn off to use any more of their products.

Or won't again in the future. I finally bailed on MS completely (at home only unfortunately) when 10 came out and telemetry was first reported. I let myself get too comfortable with Windows 7, and will not make that mistake again.

Now, for example, it feels great to happen to notice my harddrive spin up when I'm sitting idle at my desk, and relax knowing my OS is just doing what it's supposed to, not covertely spying on me or installing some crud I didn't ask for.

I certainly don't condone plagiarism, but I've come to appreciate that people fail and as an outsider it is doubtful you will ever make sense of everything that is going on in their life that led to their failure. A repeat offense is one thing, but a single offense should be allowed some consideration.

And here is the book. First edition published in 1992:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920637.do#top

No joke, I have a printed book somewhere that lists out the entire World Wide Web, and it is actually quite thin.

Of course it was published in 1995.

(I will have to verify the date)

Funny, I was just researching this very thing this morning. I don't think it's as bad as you may believe.

Here are a couple of quick links that contain all the data you may want on the current understanding of population growth.

This one is full of data and graphs. The population rate of growth is declining and shows an expected peak in 2100 of 10 Billion people.

https://ourworldindata.org/future-world-population-growth/

This one is more fun and shows the real time population and breaks it down into countries. It’s scary and fascinating to watch India’s population steadily ticking upward relative to pretty much every other country. So if the population eventually tapers, it will not be an even distribution (no surprise). Where will the people in India go, I wonder? If you scroll down to “World Population by Country” and look at the migrants rate, it appears net migration is out of India, higher than any other country, but not high enough to compensate for the growth.

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Haha! If only it were true. I think it was more like once every 2 months.

(I'm kidding of course, just in case anyone else is offended by my lame attempt at humor)

I used to do this for years, just because I realized it didn’t matter (to me). It drove my colleagues nuts though and they tried to pressure me into “changing my shirt” or making fun of me because I could care less about wearing jeans on Friday. I told them I took a shower once a month whether I needed it or not, so let me be.

Anyway, I no longer do it because I just grew tired of the same look, but I have been considering going back because I found the plain white shirts I used to wear turned out to be very high quality and lasted forever. I can’t seem to find a variety of colored shirts with the same longevity. It seems the mix of cotton/polyester and weave is different depending on the color die, but the white shirts with a 60/40 (cotton/poly) were really a good deal in the long run. Coincidentally, I’m wearing one right now :).

A couple of years ago I was misdiagnosed with lung cancer. It was only a preliminary diagnosis from an x-ray, but after several nodes were circled on my chart with “malignancy suspected” written next to them, I thought I had late stage cancer with weeks to live. What else could it be?

It turned out to be histoplasmosis shotgunned through my lung system, but for about 3 weeks while I underwent further testing, I was preparing to die.

At the time I wished I would have spent more of my life giving to others. I also wished I was more financially prepared; my kids, who would take care of them? I would never see their weddings or even graduation. How would they go to college? And for those of you reading this who really are in that situation, my heart goes out to you. For me it was a nightmare I could wake from, at least for now.

Anyway, after I found out it wasn’t terminal, my perspective on priorities shifted in a major way. One thing in particular was focused on technology. I sat back and realized what a stooge I’ve been over the years. As a developer, one thing I always detested was chasing the latest tech, always trying to decipher the tea leave to make sure I wasn’t out of work in 5 years when the wind changed direction. Feeling not much more than a pawn to large tech companies.

I realized I had so many unexplored areas that I wanted to research that were slipping away, and would always slip away if I didn’t do something about it.

So I did. I now spend my free time diving into areas that I find interesting and have even reached back in time to finish a project that I dared not before. Funny thing is, I’m still learning new things (some a complete waste of time), yet I’m much happier doing it and I’m building a new world around me while discovering new interests at the same time.

Exactly. I'm older than you by a few years and I don't even waste my time considering my age.

Too much to do to worry about this nonsense. This constant rumination about age discrimination in the industry is the only thing getting old from my perspective.

Welcome to HN! I feel hopeful when I see passionate comments like this from newly minted adults :)

I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Are you implying the US didn't have cell phones in the late 90's?

Even I had a cell phone, and still have my original (looks the one midway down on this page (http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/motorola/motorola_list.p...) - a Motorola flip (MicroTAC)).

Notice the timelines as well. These were analog networks at first, but mobile was very popular here in the 90's.

Wow – why the downvotes? I agree 100%. You do need to make a real choice and sacrifice when it comes to open source. You will not have commercial support like Windows or a Mac. Depending on what you do, even your future career and job opportunities may be impacted by this choice.

And at least we have a choice, thanks to the thousands of faceless individuals who have contributed to make it possible.

I used to run a few miles a day, almost every day for about a year. During that time I had runners high exactly 1 time. It was truly amazing - I felt like I could run forever. Had no muscle pain, no shortness of breath, it was like running on air. I only stopped because I was at the end of the run, and normally I would have collapsed, but I could have kept going that day no problem. I have never been able to repeat it.

I wonder if I would have eventually died like a horse if I kept going? ;)

Whoa now friend. The 1541 is a computer onto itself. The slow loading was because of Commodore’s desire to keep backwards compatibility with the VIC-20 drive, which used a buggy 6522 chip, not because the 64 couldn’t go faster.

BTW, if you want to run GEOS faster, get an REU and let the DMA transfer fun begin. This is 2016 after all; you must keep up with the times :)

I find this statement hard to imagine. I've been coding professionally in C++ for just shy of 20 years now (and in C for a few years before that) and have only resorted to assembly when I needed to actually use assembly for performance reasons.

Actually - not completely true. I do like to look at the assembly from time to time for other reasons, but this is rare.

I have been coding in straight C lately on an embedded personal project and have loved it immensely. I know what is going on and have a good shot at predicting the resulting assembly.

However, for me, C falls down on large projects. I know there a lot of hate on objects lately, but the complexity of a project decreases while the maintainability increases when you use properly designed interfaces. You “force” the new guy to do it right because the interface makes it obvious. I know there are ways to enforce encapsulation with C, but I’ve never worked on a (large) codebase where this has been successful.

It's funny - reading through some of these interviews he seems like someone fairly easy to work with. I always imagined him to be like a typical rockstar, but he presents himself rather humble and introspective.

That's...horrible. This is not a comment on you or your experience, but is this typical for Python? I’m used to working in C++ code bases with several million lines of code. Does Python really begin to fall down that early? I’ve been looking at using it in an upcoming small project, but I expect it to be larger than 20K. Now I’m reconsidering.

>TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space.

Hold your control key down while hitting right/left arrow. This will jump to the beginning or end of the next word (effectively skipping the tab/spaces).

Now you can remove an extension! :) 