chasote's comments

chasote | 6 years ago | on: Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp

Have you explored Arcadia at all? It uses the Clojure CLR port to hook into Unity with some sweet repl goodness. https://github.com/arcadia-unity/arcadia There seems to be some active development and I hope it works out great.

chasote | 6 years ago | on: Level Design and Shaping a Roguelike Experience

By a fun coincidence, I stumbled on the r/roguelikedev subreddit this weekend and they are just today starting a "how to make a roguelike" read through. (It is a different tutorial than what you linked.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/c1xj5b/roguel...

chasote | 6 years ago | on: The rise of few-maintainer projects

I'm curious how the new Github Sponsors development plays into the one or very few maintainer "issue." My gut instinct tells me it will be an added incentive to keep the governance of such projects small or solo because how do you deal with distributing the funds over numerous maintainers with vastly different levels of contribution? I guess one could argue that a project valuable enough to attract a large sponsorship would also be too unwieldy for some to handle alone.

But I haven't given that much critical thought and I hate to default towards cynicism immediately after getting presented with a way to help get open source developers some financial support.

chasote | 6 years ago | on: Why I don't play mobile games on my smartphone

https://web.archive.org/web/20110926012139/http://insertcred...

Haven't read it yet and not too sure how to use the Internet Archive but this seems to be it's first capture of the story.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Books I Recommend

The author seems to have taken this desire into consideration too but I don't think he has figured out the way he wants to solve it.

I did find this: https://github.com/pim-book/exercises but it doesn't seem to have taken hold quite yet. Maybe if you and others are so inclined, a nice community effort can solve this issue together and maybe that interactive discussion helps mediate some of the other reasons people give for not providing the solutions up front.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Nasa makes final attempt to communicate with Mars rover

You might just like this short story I read in Wired a while back: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/jon-rogers-a-martian-goes-hunt...

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Liquid: Vim and Emacs-inspired editor written in Clojure

I'm so impressed it can just be launched with the Clojure cli tools (not sure if I'm phrasing that correctly). Very cool project. I've recently admitted to myself I don't actually like modal editing (but love keeping my hands on the keyboard) so I'm happy with default emacs (caps-lock to control always!) but I hope this project gains some appreciation.

Clojure has been so fun to learn and I really like the community. The various projects and tools coming out seem to really jibe with my wanted approach to learning this whole software game.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: In Praise of Mediocrity

Your comment reminded me of this quote even though it might not entirely fit the topic at hand:

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine.” John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780.

As I said, it might not apply to this overall discussion but I've always found it quite poignant. Sadly society is more apt to ridicule those who still pursue liberal arts due to it's economic opportunity costs. While technically correct I believe that should come from the viewpoint that this could be considered a sad failure in humanity's progress.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Chemists discover how blue light speeds blindness

ChromeOS has this feature for chromebooks now as well under the experimental flags section in case those users miss f.lux too. You can go to chrome://flags and search for Night Light to enable. As others have mentioned, I would rather use f.lux but (and my memory is hazy on this) I think the f.lux creator said the ChromeOS folks were not providing something he needed to get it working right.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: NES Party – Online Multiplayer NES Emulator Using WebRTC

Well they do have A mapped to Z and B mapped to X which makes sense I guess but is flip flopped positioning from what the original NES controller was if I recall correctly. You might have to fight your muscle memory on this one.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: NES Party – Online Multiplayer NES Emulator Using WebRTC

That was the first thing I tried! And it worked! Cool project.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Paul Graham on SICP (2000)

I also like this free HTML5 (and EPUB3) version as well. It just feels really clean. https://github.com/sarabander/sicp http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/index.xhtml

chasote | 7 years ago | on: 'Cash cow' sales model for a macOS app

Fair enough, you both make good points. I have been exploring how to make a simple living off one's creations and trying to fight my own cynicism on all the seeming trade offs. Right now that just means staying focused on the creating part and hoping some of you smart folks figure out the best mix of financial feasibility and doing what is right by everyone. These discussions help.

And yes, "cash cow" seems a little uncouth in light of that discussion, haha.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: 'Cash cow' sales model for a macOS app

I agree that subscription fatigue is a problem and most will opt out but I feel you are projecting too much malice onto the developers in your last sentence.

Why does asking for the subscription automatically entail they are hoping people will stop using the product but stay subscribed or are charging far more than they think the service is worth?

I think it is too jaded an outlook to see it all as a zero sum fight. The service might just be worth a subscription and the developers want to continue providing it and not be able to with a different business model.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Toshiba to Close the Book on Its Laptop Unit

I'm still beating the drums that the mid range chromebooks are the best Linux computer deals around. Take a look at something like the Asus C302 (and it won't come with the bloatware you mentioned about your previous Asus). Google's Pixelbook is a really impressive piece of hardware and you can currently get that for $675 (down from $1000).

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks

Some of my pessimism is not just with Microsoft, itself, even though I do have that. I think an argument can be made that we should not want all the decent software companies to be bought up by the same big five giant companies, no matter who it is.

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Nighthawk: A stealthy, simple, unobtrusive music player

Yes, I am new to all of this so I see the electron hate because of the resource usage but then never see any meaningful discussion on what people would rather be used.

It seems to be this Qt thing which appears to have it's own tradeoffs (which are?) and then...is that it? So is it going to be a case of not having any cross platform desktop apps or having something that uses 2-300mb of RAM that developers won't give you street cred for?

Maybe the focus should be on making electron more performant. Sounds like MS has found a way to do it with VS Code so doesn't that sound like a better alternative than to not have any cross platform apps?

chasote | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Short stories that take advantage of the web as a medium?

I think this might be close to what you are thinking about:

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

I'm hoping your post gets more responses too because it is an area of storytelling that I am interested in as well. I have been wondering why such stories and even interactive fiction elements have not made there way to the web. I assume I am actually just ignorant of some great communities and stories out there though.

chasote | 8 years ago | on: A Visual History of Eve: 2014 - 2018

I'm curious what you folks think of things like Racket and it's ability to create DSLs for various problem spaces. This seems like it would let you stay in one language yet have the flexibility to still create the right tool for specific jobs.

The same goes with the abilities of its macros too. Does that give you the ability to define what you want and have the language create the code for you?

Caveat, I'm new to programming and just now learning Racket so it has me all excited but I barely know what I'm talking about. This thread has been very interesting to read so I'm curious what others think of languages which have the flexibility to adapt. Maybe it creates a maintenance or understanding other people's code nightmare or something. I'm just curious why Racket's approach or something like it hasn't taken off.

chasote | 8 years ago | on: Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is failing'

I'm in full support of net neutrality (as it seems everyone but the telecom companies is yet here we are, but I digress) but I like to think if this "doomsday" scenario were to happen then the outcry would finally be swift and effective in tearing that down for good. People won't accept it because they have already experienced what the open web can be.