Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

news.ycombinator.com

131–140 of 555 posts

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#131

!!please get in to anti-cheat engineering for multi-player networked games. the battle between game developers and funded cheat orgs is cold war-esque

I used to be on the side of cheaters, but mostly for fun. Was never funded but could have made profit from it. I know several people who went in that direction and made good money. As teenagers with no qualifications, getting a blue collar job wasn't really an option.

Attempts at protecting a game client from reverse engineering are mostly a waste of time. These protections can be beaten faster than they can be developed. Once a hacker has reverse engineered your wire protocol and cryptography your game client is just one of potentially several.

Has probably changed a lot over the past decade or so, but the developers at the time were wasting their efforts on tightening their software clients rather than using AI, honeypots and other techniques on the server to detect and ban bots. I recall offering to work for a couple of the companies whose games I had developed cheats for, but they rejected me right away without even an interview.

One of the issues is: MMOs are often very repetitive. The actions of your real users are somwhat bot-like to begin with. This means bot developing isn't that difficult. Adding randomness to the behaviour of the bot can make it look like a regular player. I suspect there are some differences which some well trained neural networks might be able to classify, but you need to be really careful of false positives because anything which gets in the way of regular players enjoying the game will lose you customers.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#133
I was thrilled to see Walter Bright (@WalterBright) on here a few days ago! I don't think he's been working for 57 years but he certainly has a few stories to tell.

57 years is an amazing innings in such a relentless field - congratulations, and long may you continue.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#134

!!please get in to anti-cheat engineering for multi-player networked games. the battle between game developers and funded cheat orgs is cold war-esque

I used to be on the side of cheaters, but mostly for fun. Was never funded but could have made profit from it. I know several people who went in that direction and made good money. As teenagers with no qualifications, getting a blue collar job wasn't really an option. Attempts at protecting a game client from reverse engineering are mostly a waste of time. These protections can be beaten faster than they can be devel…

Interesting. For the cheaters, how does the business side of it work?

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#135
post #18

given the numerous posts about age discrimination on hn, i'm delighted to hear your story and wish you many more years of happy programming. as a whipper-snapper 40-something developer, it gives me hope and motivation.

The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one?

Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience.

A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don't have any taste. Their surplus physical energy could be a liability, as they'll just write more code that's hard to maintain. Of course there are exceptions. Don't discriminate by age in either direction. Ask for experience, and make your final judgment after examining their portfolio (just as you would an architect or photographer), looking for signs of good taste.

Further reading: "Taste for Makers", by Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#136

Serious question: How do you sit and type? What chair and what angle has worked best for your back and neck all these years?

I sit in an office chair (tilted back slightly) with 3 large HD monitors about 3 feet from my eyes - I have special glasses for that range. The monitors can be switched among 3 computers, and the wireless keyboard/mouse has a switch to move from one computer to another. Most importantly, I have a dog that needs walking several times a day, and that forces me to get up and walk a couple miles every day.

What do you use three different computers for? Running different OS’s I assume?

A true inspiration, thanks for sharing.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be on the side of cheaters, but mostly for fun. Was never funded but could have made profit from it. I know several people who went in that direction and made good money. As teenagers with no qualifications, getting a blue collar job wasn't really an option. Attempts at protecting a game client from reverse engineering are mostly a waste of time. These protections can be beaten faster than they can be devel…

Interesting. For the cheaters, how does the business side of it work?

The revenue is mostly from selling in-game money and rare items which are farmed by bots. There are many trading websites you can use, just search "buy WoW gold" for instance. (I just looked and this market looks incredibly saturated compared 15 years ago).

Selling the bots themselves was an option, but people can just reverse engineer your bot and redistribute it. The bot typically ends up posted on some public forum and becomes a target for the developers to patch against. Also, the more people who are running the bots in game, the less profit you are going to have from selling your items because they're more abundant, so it is better to keep it confidential and just have many accounts farming.

Before the bots were commonplace, there were Chinese "sweatshops" where people were paid scraps to play the games for 20+ hours a day in horrific working conditions. Would hear stories like "man dies from playing MMORPG for 36 hours straight".

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sit in an office chair (tilted back slightly) with 3 large HD monitors about 3 feet from my eyes - I have special glasses for that range. The monitors can be switched among 3 computers, and the wireless keyboard/mouse has a switch to move from one computer to another. Most importantly, I have a dog that needs walking several times a day, and that forces me to get up and walk a couple miles every day.

I have the same 3 monitor, 'computer glasses' setup... Did your optometrist give you grief about them? The first time I said I wanted a pair of single focus lenses for the computer (so I could use my whole field of view..), I got a lot of flak about "you should get bifocals". I haven't needed to drive anywhere in the last couple of years, so I basically never where my distance glasses anymore. lately though.. Seems l…

I hate bifocals. Hate them. Hate hate hate.

I've got the computer glasses, and then the regular ones. I swap as needed.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#139

I'm happy to see that you've kept up with new fields and changes in the industry. I've worked with several older programmers and they've usually been very set in their ways and shown little interest in developing new skills.

I know what you mean. Many of my contemporaries never got past the mainframes. I'll have to admit that it took me a little while to accept the PC to be more than any intelligent terminal. I was lucky in that I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1976 to 1982 - they pioneered distributed computing.

And then over at Google it's mostly VIM and browsers, deploying on machines hardly anyone ever sees. I'm pretty sure they exist, but I have no hard evidence of that.

The PCs really aren't much more than intelligent terminals. You were right, and you should have held your ground and been eventually correct.

Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?

#140

What do you think about all of the advances that happened in your time, especially with what machine learning is capable of these days (fully artificial human faces, for one)? Any advice (technical or life) for us younger people?

Please don't say implementing JavaScript on punchcards.

No. Coding JS on keyboard is already bad enough.
Post reply on HN