I'm still alive. But I've retired or at least taken an extended hiatus from my writing hobby, which in retrospect was probably a pandemic coping mechanism more than a lot of things lol.
I only came here because my in box is blowing up due to the traffic hacker news is driving to my site, and so then I see that this article is like #3 today. Not bad considering I don't really remember writing it!
haha yes, excellent suggestions! I did think about ternary logic actually but I don't know of an FPGA that supports it. I considered creating like a primitive that burns 2 register bits to approximate it even, and just throw away the 4th state and pretend I have 3-state logic on all the layers above. but i have enough on my hands just trying to get the stupid timing working on a simple CPU. Im not actually a CPU designer so I dont really know what I'm doing lol.
Thanks Scott - I'm really enjoying sitting back and reading all the great discussions you've been having here and interesting questions people have, nothing makes me happier as a writer than to be able to spark something like that.
I was really honored for a chance to talk with one of computer gaming's true pioneers, Scott Adams. His text adventure games launched an entire game genre and influenced and inspired a lot of other programmers and game developers.
If you read the interview and come away thinking, "why didn't he ask him about X?", today's your lucky day, because Scott has graciously agreed to stop by here and answer a few questions. He's new to HN, so be sure and give him a warm welcome!
You may not have played the game Empire, but if you've played any computer wargame, you've played something influenced by it. I'm very honored to have had the chance to discuss the development of Empire with Walter!
As mentioned in the article, he is a sometimes-reader of Hacker News, so if people have any follow-up questions, we may just get lucky and have him drop by to answer a few.
I don't like them either, but I always want to.
I wonder if e-paper or whatever will eventually get so cheap and so good, you could have a physical book full of e-pages, then after you read it, press a button, and it becomes a different book.
i spent a good long time writing code in emacs but our current project uses an IDE, and I found I could be pretty productive in it and learned to leverage its advantages. But I could not live without a solid text editor, and still use emacs for texty stuff, like config and log files and such (even though in theory i could do that in the IDE as well)
But as a result, a lot of the cool stuff I had set up in emacs never gets used anymore. not even sure how to run many of the .el's anymore i have in my .emacs tbh. I could probably get by just fine with nano but run full emacs just out of habit.
possible, maybe not likely. our school for instance had a modem line you could dial into, that let you access this one program that was for career counseling, it was like a buzzfeed quiz that asked you questions, and then recommended a career for you. I think I got plumber. we tried to hack past this to get at the general OS, but no luck. I suppose someone could set something like that up for the school record access, but would they? (like I claim in the article, it was the 80s so maybe)
I would say, not letting go when I disagreed with some decision I knew was wrong. Younger me would tend to tenaciously fight those, to my detrement. You end up getting a reputation for being argumentative or hard to work with. Later I learned waiting things out and more subtle ways to affect change.
I only came here because my in box is blowing up due to the traffic hacker news is driving to my site, and so then I see that this article is like #3 today. Not bad considering I don't really remember writing it!