Hacker News: russtrotter

New comment by russtrotter in "Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow"

russtrotter — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:35:22 +0000

That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.

New comment by russtrotter in "Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect co-creator, has died"

russtrotter — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 23:52:02 +0000

Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University. She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.

New comment by russtrotter in "NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars"

russtrotter — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 01:47:32 +0000

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.

New comment by russtrotter in "XCurl"

russtrotter — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 10:24:49 +0000

i'm thinking two themes here: the X in xcurl and the famous MS-ism "embrace, extend, extinguish"

New comment by russtrotter in "For BSD Unix, It's Sayonara (1992)"

russtrotter — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 23:44:35 +0000

I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.

New comment by russtrotter in "Ron: Rusty Object Notation"

russtrotter — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 15:59:55 +0000

Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers working at every layer of a tech stack using it as a low-friction means to an end.

New comment by russtrotter in "The 4th Year of SerenityOS"

russtrotter — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 14:56:29 +0000

Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from the molecules up, but as I watched more, I realized that he's a journey guy, not necessarily a destination guy. To his credit, he's attracted a similarly-minded following of contributors along the way.

New comment by russtrotter in "John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round"

russtrotter — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 22:48:27 +0000

agreed, Carmack's work ethic, opinions on work and opinions of how those around him work are legendary!

New comment by russtrotter in "Google Launches Carbon, an Experimental Replacement for C++"

russtrotter — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 14:01:13 +0000

The first half of the article started to feel like the XKCD "15th standard" meme, but at the end, the more nuanced point was presented: If you're already using Rust, stick with Rust. Carbon is positioned as successor language for those with large C++ codebases difficult to convert to Rust.

Interesting tact, and at face value that concession might undermine adoption given that Rust has a big head start and not hinged to a corp with a well-earned reputation for killing projects.

New comment by russtrotter in "The State of WebAssembly 2022"

russtrotter — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 18:27:38 +0000

Technologies like WASI are coming on right now to do exactly this kind of access in the context of a sandbox. From what I can tell, they're going through a lot of the same progression of JVM and .NET IL back in the 90's and early 2k's but for whatever reason seem to be more openly embraced in all the places where WASM is gaining a foothold.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this one sticks .. oh and, please make WASM run in a browser without JS :)

New comment by russtrotter in "Shopify invests in research for Ruby at scale"

russtrotter — Mon, 16 May 2022 18:36:35 +0000

Yours is a fair question. Theories: * Cheaper to invest in your tools than overhauling your people/codebases/etc * Sense of wanting to give back to your core tooling * The decision maker(s) for the investment just really love Ruby?

New comment by russtrotter in "NPM Vulnerability Discussion on Twitter"

russtrotter — Tue, 10 May 2022 18:35:16 +0000

The old C bum in me says this should really be a bitwise AND with 1 but I'm sure modern compilers and JS JIT/V8 runtimes optimize MOD 2 to the same.

New comment by russtrotter in "I fell in love with low-JS"

russtrotter — Wed, 04 May 2022 22:19:08 +0000

haha! glad somebody linked this! i love how the site presents itself just as any "framework" would :-) well-played vanilla-js

New comment by russtrotter in "Xfig"

russtrotter — Sun, 01 May 2022 12:28:37 +0000

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't .docx, or .ppt or whatever. Maybe SVG supplants fig in all the ways, but I still hope tools like xfig keep their place for quite some time.

New comment by russtrotter in "Bill Jolitz has died"

russtrotter — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 14:10:58 +0000

I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants.

Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.

New comment by russtrotter in "AWS Lambda function URLs: Built-in HTTPS endpoints"

russtrotter — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 22:55:11 +0000

Reference to the movie quote in "Tropic Thunder" from Robert Downey Jr.s character.

New comment by russtrotter in "Pay attention to WebAssembly"

russtrotter — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 23:59:35 +0000

To continue the Java bytecode prior comment, at one point, java was in all browsers of the time (i.e. Applets). However, it lost, and seemingly removed with extreme prejudice with no nods to backwards compatibility.

Java also enjoys multiple HLLs that target its bytecode (Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Jython, etc) and there's nothing in the runtime capabilities that tie it to any kind of constrained platform (threading, IO, async)

Don't get me wrong, I'm really hoping that WASM succeeds but I'm concerned that the same set of slam dunks we thought back in 1996 don't result getting posterized (again) by DOM/JS.

New comment by russtrotter in "The joy of building a ray tracer, for fun, in Rust"

russtrotter — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 14:55:09 +0000

The early Doom 1 and 2 being software renderers, used ray casting (386 protected mode FTW to boot!) The later versions though, were part of the first wave of games to leverage GPU cards. I don't know if those newer releases still kept any ability to render purely in software though.

New comment by russtrotter in "Do not use 'week year': YYYY"

russtrotter — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 14:43:21 +0000

In the context of the original article addressing Java 8, in the java.time.format package, there's a DateTimeFormatterBuilder that removes the sub-language element of the issue. With those builder methods, you can construct the fields in the order you want, with whatever precision, with padding, etc.

New comment by russtrotter in "The $11B Webb telescope aims to probe the early universe"

russtrotter — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 21:46:42 +0000

Fair point, but the software that eventually ends up in flying space hardware has usually been put to a similar test.