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rmbryan

1,790 karma · joined March 12, 2018

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rmbryan··on CS Alert (1890)
Maybe wikipedia should be exempt from the dating rule, since, what's the publication date on a wikipedia entry?
rmbryan··on CS Alert (1890)
I wonder if there are cases where it's better to cut an enemy cable, as opposed to tapping it. I can't think of any, but this isn't my field.
rmbryan··on Ask HN: Has NH become too well-known to provide any signal?
Is there a newer channel to compare to?
rmbryan··on Are people who make $200k middle-class?
Yes, that's exactly the point. You _can_ create a product at near-zero marginal cost.

If you do, and it sells, you're an owner / producer. If you don't, you're a worker / consumer.

rmbryan··on Are people who make $200k middle-class?
This is the only definition that matters.
rmbryan··on Tell HN: I came up with an interesting way to do decentralized account recovery
What process leads to a PDF of such low quality? Was that printed and scanned?
rmbryan··on Developers don't understand CORS
Maybe we don't understand CORS.

Here's a fact-based starting point to learn about CORS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

rmbryan··on Ask HN: Getting a Job Without Leetcode?
What do you see as the set of differences between "LeetCode" and the coding style you prefer?
rmbryan··on Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel
Article missed the MOST important part of Evernote's collapse, IMHO: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote-privac...

That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without mentioning that.

rmbryan··on Radioactive water at Fukushima Daiichi: What should be done? (2018)
Here's Part 2: https://blog.safecast.org/2018/06/part-2-radioactive-water-a...
rmbryan··on Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking
I understand reminders as a generalized practice, but this metaphor is one I'll have to meditate on:

"Every day, he wears a silver bracelet that symbolizes a handcuff. “Remember, you are handcuffed to God. Remind yourself to not do bad things,” Pal says. It reminds him to be kind in the face of ignorance and hatred."

rmbryan··on The Simple Genius of Checklists
I've invested enough time in a personal checklist for a daily process to get to the point where I feel like the checklist is "helpful", "minimal" and "complete". If I had a printer, I would print out a stack of them and record my compliance on paper. I don't have a printer, and I'm not buying one just for this. What's the electronic equivalent for recording checklist compliance?
rmbryan··on A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans:

Thirty years ago today, I was at my Apple II, crunching on a six-week deadline to finish Prince of Persia by mid-July to ship in September.

I know this because I wrote it in my journal. If I hadn't, those details would have long since faded from my memory, along with the 6502 hex op codes I once knew by heart.

In 1989, I could never have imagined that Prince of Persia would last this long -- much less have foreseen it being ported to a future generation of game consoles from the makers of the Walkman. (Or to the big screen by the producer of Beverly Hills Cop.)

To all of you who've played, watched, and supported PoP over the years -- thank you! I've been especially moved by the things you've shared about the ways PoP has touched your lives. Your kind and encouraging words have been an inspiration to me.

Many of you have asked when there will be a new PoP game (or movie, or TV series). If you feel that it's been a long time since the last one, you're not alone. I wish I had a magic dagger to accelerate the process -- it would have been poetic to time a major game announcement with this 30th-anniversary year. But I'm only a small part of a bigger picture.

There is one PoP announcement I can make, and am happy to share with you. Stripe Press, an imprint specializing in books about innovation and technological advancement, will publish a hardcover collector's edition of "The Making of Prince of Persia" -- my 1980s original game development journals, newly illustrated with notes, sketches, work-in-progress screen shots, and as many visual features as we have the bandwidth to add by our target "gold master" date of September 2019 (30 years after Apple II PoP signed out of Broderbund QA). Oh, and there'll be an audiobook.

What I cherish about books:

For me as a kid who dreamed of creating mass entertainment, in the pre-internet days, when you still needed a printing press to make a book and a film lab to make a movie, the Apple II was a game-changer: a technological innovation that empowered every user to innovate. Suddenly, I didn't need adult permission (or funding) to tell a story of adventure that might reach thousands -- and ultimately millions -- of people.

That direct connection between author and public is still possible today for small indie games -- and for books. By contrast, making a major movie or AAA game requires millions of dollars and hundreds of people. It's a thrilling ride, and the rewards can be great, but by nature it's beyond the scope of what one person or even a tight-knit creative team can accomplish alone.

So it felt very much in the magical 8-bit spirit when Stripe's co-founder Patrick Collison emailed me to propose this book, and less than two months later, we're doing it. For me personally, in the midst of longer-term projects whose announcement is still a ways off, it's refreshing to add one whose timeline is reckoned in months rather than years.

In 2012, when the PoP source code disks I thought I'd lost turned up in my dad's closet, I discovered that an incredible retro-gaming fan and archivist community has been keeping the flame of early game development knowledge alive. The Internet Archive and Strong Museum of Play (which houses work materials and artifacts from my past projects) are already on board to help us make the collector's edition of "The Making of Prince of Persia" as feature-rich as possible.

As we move toward beta, we'll document and share our progress online via facebook, Instagram and Twitter. With luck, we'll be able to bring boxes of printed hardcover books to PAX East in spring 2020 -- 30 years after the PC release of Prince of Persia (which is the one most people remember). I hope to see many of you there in person.

Until then, here's a fateful time-capsule post (and photo) from the week PoP went alpha, thirty years ago. Reading it now, the drollest part is that I still thought (as usual) I was about two weeks from the finish line.

And then there's the mullet.

----- July 26, 1989

Left a stack of disks three inches high on my desk for Brian. Eleven for sales, three for QA, plus seven more. Hope they work.

I played the whole game straight through for the first time ever, start to finish, cheat keys turned off. Made it with seconds to spare (my hour ran out while I was fighting the Grand Vizier).

You know what? It was fun!

There’s a level of tension generated when you know you can’t cheat, which is completely absent from the normal playtesting I do. By the time that final battle rolled around, I had a solid hour invested, and damned if I was going to lose!

Still a few bugs -- two weeks of work, like I said -- but it’s a game, and a damn good one. I’m content. I’m ready to go river rafting.

rmbryan··on Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011)
And then there is this beast: ع a consonant pronounced so far back in the throat that you must wait two hours after eating to safely attempt it. Naturally it's one of the most common sounds in the language.
rmbryan··on What’s New in Apache Kafka 2.3
Much better source: https://blogs.apache.org/kafka/entry/what-s-new-in-apache
rmbryan··on A new look, logo, and website for Fastmail
Here is our discussion of fastmail vs. protonmail from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19372882
rmbryan··on Regulatory Capture at ICANN
Here's the brief itself, which is where I started from: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/org-renewal-2019-03-18...
rmbryan··on Wootz steel
How strange we are. I've read every other Stephenson book more than 3 times and loved every minute of all of them. Never could get into Anathem.
rmbryan··on Wootz steel
Oh, yeah. As amazing as the Baroque Cycle Movie or series could be, or Cryptonomicon, or Diamond Age, etc... I'd vote for Seveneves over everything else.
rmbryan··on Wootz steel
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has about 35 enjoyable pages on this process, if anyone's interested.
rmbryan··on Civic honesty around the globe
That's a fun study. Shame their protocol selects for people who are likely to get stuck working the front desk at a city office building.
rmbryan··on Al-Maʿarri
"Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce." -this guy
rmbryan··on Getting 2FA Right in 2019
TIL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_a...
rmbryan··on Alpine 3.10 Released
https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/versions/133 49 days late?

Does anyone know the meaning of "late", if any, in this context?

rmbryan··on Show HN: I wrote a book on GNU grep and ripgrep
Please please please hire an editor. You have good content that needs editing.
rmbryan··on SerenityOS – a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s aesthetics
best kind of decision
rmbryan··on MIT 18.065 Matrix Methods, Spring 2018 [Gilbert Strang]
Here's the text, if you'd like to follow along: http://math.mit.edu/~gs/learningfromdata/
rmbryan··on Close to 735k Fraudulently Obtained IP Addresses Uncovered and Revoked
UPDATE May 15, 2019: "Charleston Man and Business Indicted in Federal Court in Over $9M Fraud" – United States Department of Justice issues a statement annoucing Amir Golestan, 36, of Charleston, and Micfo, LLC, were charged in federal court in a twenty-count indictment. The indictment charges twenty counts of wire fraud, with each count punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment.
rmbryan··on Show HN: Hacker News Front Page Trends
Rust vs. Go : https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/hacker-news-trends/?q=...
rmbryan··on Supreme Court Rules Against Apple in App Store Antitrust Case
Skip the "analysis": https://www.scribd.com/document/409788583/Apple-Supreme-Cour...
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