Viewing profile — richardjdare

Its fascinating to me. I grew up in the UK home computer scene of the mid 80s-early 90s. After this, the Frutiger Aero aesthetic seemed to me redolent of the total corporatization …

For me what's inspiring about lisp machines is not any particular implementation detail, but the very idea that working with a computer can be this immersive, holistic experience w…

Mark created Blitz Basic on the Amiga, and then Blitz3d, BlitzMax and Monkey programming languages on the PC. He also published several games including Guardian and Gloom on the Am…

I've had a similar problem trying to renew my Apple developer account. Had it for over 10 years. I had an email a few weeks ago telling me it could not automatically renew (same ba…

I agree, why do so many think that an immersive computer environment that makes the full power of the machine ergonomically ready-to-hand is some kind of retro thing? It sounds lik…

Personally, there were many things going on with the Amiga that I really enjoyed, things that have diminished or been left by the wayside as computers developed. I don't just mean …

Yeah, I distinctly remember the exact issue of the magazine that previewed it. ACE Magazine issue 35, August 1990 [1]. It featured Wing Commander and several of the upcoming new VG…

Yes, I grew up on the Amiga and think about this a lot myself. I think the Amiga occupied a sweet spot in the history of computing. You could kick out the operating system and hit …

When I got that leaked Genera image going in Linux I felt like I'd found a crashed UFO. It was incredibly inspiring and I don't think its true at all that we have surpassed it. Why…

heh, also at that time, there was little else to scratch that itch, other than going back to Frontier: Elite 2 on an emulator or something. That's how I got into Noctis all those y…

yes, I was a keen follower of the demo scene in the 16 bit days. not so much the C64, but the Amiga, and then the mid-late 90s PC scene. Back then, it wasn't so much about limitati…

I've always struggled with these notions that the self, or individuality is some kind of construction, or a matter of linguistics or political economy or whatever. I can comprehend…

There's a good book on these kinds of dreams from a Jungian point of view: "On Dreams and Death: A Jungian Interpretation" by Marie-Louise Von Franz. It can be hard going though, a…

There was another Jünger piece[0] on HN a few months ago. It was written by Jessi Jezewska Stevens who wrote the foreword to the new edition of "On the Marble Cliffs" discussed in …

For me, the appeal is not so much that Emacs is customizable, but that it's basically a live coding environment for working with text, seamlessly integrated with all the usual func…

lol I'm English and have lived amongst football fans my whole life. Yet I have always felt that even if I spent a year studying football, learning the history, the techniques of th…

I use Emacs now but I used Textpad ( https://www.textpad.com/home ) for a long time. It's a very light editor with syntax highlighting and large file handling.

I sometimes recommend Borges (Labyrinths) and Kafka (The Trial, Short Stories) to tech people looking to get into literature.

I only spent a few years in Mac-land when I was working on an iPhone game, but having grown up on the Amiga and being blown away by Symbolics Genera, I seek out and suppport such v…

Similarly, one of the things I often do is imagine the finished result. I habitually pretend I am demonstrating the software to friends (or rivals!) I walk them through it, and exp…

When I upgraded from an Amstrad CPC to an Amiga in 1989, I gained access to a higher level of abstration, like you said. Unlike the Amstrad, the Amiga had a GUI and a proper comman…

My Amiga back in the day had a very snappy gui. But I remember it took 1 minute for a 512px jpeg to decode using FastJpeg which was written in assembly language, and I'd leave my c…

When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most access…

The end of an era. I used the iPod Touch to develop and use iOs apps without spending money on an iPhone. It was a relatively reasonably priced gateway into the Apple app ecosystem…

The thing is, in many cases "Roguelike" is not a helpful description. It's like calling Megaman an "R-Type-like" because it's a side scroller with a beam-up weapon. The things that…