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The Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets A 2021 Update:
If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 1010[sic] BASIC Computer Games. The book, published in 1973 by [David Ahl] was a staple in its day and the first computer book to sell over one million copies. Of course, if you want to run Super Star Trek or Hamurabi, you better fire up an old retrocomputer or a simulator because BASIC in 1973 doesn't look like what we have today. Or, you can head to GitHub where [coding-horror] is inviting people to help update the programs using modern languages.
[...] By today's standards, these games are pretty crude, but they are still engaging and, if you remember them, always nostalgic. There is one thing missing, though. In 1973, you had no choice but to type the programs in yourself. You couldn't help but learn something about programming in the process. Besides, you then had to debug the program to find your typing mistakes and that was definitely educational. It might seem like these games are ultra-simple, but hexapawn does machine learning and the lunar lander game is a simple physics simulation.
[...] Seeing some of these old gems is like unexpectedly running into an old friend. If you want to help out, there's a discussion board available.
NOTE: Prior to uploading to GitHub, all programs were updated to run on Vintage Basic.
Wikipedia entry for BASIC Computer Games.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by fakefuck39 on Sunday February 28 2021, @07:17AM (17 children)
one shitty non-story during the day in a 7+ hour period, on a day off. probably fifty sitting in a queue for 2 months, and about 20 good ones rejected. welcome to pipedot. but yeah, the issue is not enough people vetting stories, so we need to get more. and the issue with the horse carriage was the horses weren't muscular enough and got tired fast. it's a buzztard world where the solution is more and better horses and not, you know, getting a car. this is the way a site dies. boring bland shit, not enough shit, and the same 10 retards arguing who think they can suck a drink through a straw in a vacuum, telling all the scientists are stupid and wrong, without being smart enough to pass high school physics.
this is why this has become an entertainment site to shit on idiot clowns instead of the tech discussion site it used to be. the king isn't wearing pants, but believes the dried shit stuck to his ass is pants and everyone is an idiot for paying for a pair.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @01:06PM (16 children)
Then why are you still here ? Do you seriously think your incessant trolling and ranting is going to magically turn this site into what you want it to be ? Get a fucking life, loser.
If you were anything more than a worthless, irrelevant, powerless basement dweller, you would start your own tech-related news site.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @04:21PM (5 children)
I believe they answered your question as to why they are here.
Pretty much sums it up. Tired old Perl code that regularly hiccups (the loss off cas files on page loads repeatedly the last few days, the increase in FORMKEY errors, most people not feeling it’s worth the effort to submit stories any more, show that ultimately Buck Feta (oh how childish a rendering of Fuck Beta) is not enough on its own to sustain a site. Most people got over their outrage over D2 and Beta and moved on, so it’s mostly people still driven by stale rage running the show.
Php is shit, but far less shit than Perl. Almost nobody is using Perl for a CMS any more for a reason. Time to at least catch up to the late 90’s and make the switch, angry old men. Or you could do it in c and see huge performance increases - but it looks like the current pool of script kiddies isn’t up to the challenge of doing either.
Azusa was right - this place has gone past its best before date for its original purpose. It still serves as entertainment, as noted by the GP poster, but we all know what ultimately happened to the original consumers of Soylent. They ended up being consumed by the younger generation.
Instead of “fuck beta”, maybe you need to reboot. And Fuck Perl. Give a chance to remove obsolete features and add new ones, as well as maybe injecting new blood.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday February 28 2021, @06:26PM (4 children)
Is there any gradual way to convert from Perl to another language?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @07:45PM (2 children)
People mix programming languages often enough, but it’s usually for performance improvements (writing some code in c that you can call).
Doing a CMS in php doesn’t take a year, even for a single coder. It’s a really simple language without the screwed up line noise that typifies Perl. Perl is the very definition of a mess. Which is why Perl 6 failed.
Other languages also adopted the php paradigm of embedding code into ordinary files, but php won the race in terms of market share. So what you’d do is, if you want to keep most of the features, save the outputted HTML from a typical page in Perl, and replace anything that needs to be dynamic with embedded php. So you don’t need to generate the whole page, just stuff like:
. Which outputs Username;nobody. Files usually end in .php, and you can test it without a php-enabled server with “php - f “ and the test tile name. If you have a supported db installed, you can store and retrieve variables from it. You can also read and write data to plain text files (including using random access read-write functions) if you want to go nosql.
Variables are preceded by a $. Chech out php.net for more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @08:26PM
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 01 2021, @04:51PM
You mean, like this. [soylentnews.org]
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 01 2021, @12:51AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @05:03PM
I admit am here for the shits and giggles. Stop modding it down, asshole.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Sunday February 28 2021, @06:58PM (8 children)
I have a life, which unlike yours includes no part of this site, which is not life, it's equivalent to watching TV. Yes, for you it's apparently so much a part of life that you abuse the mod system, and post any negative comments as AC to save your karma so you can downvote politically, and explicitly against the rules on threads you are in.
I was here for the discussion and contributed 4 digit sums. I then offered to literally pay for development of a better system for submitting and vetting stories, and was repeatedly met with "why need a car, we need stronger horses - why don't you become an editor."
What you consider trolling and ranting, is me making fun of you, and people who are purposely dense and double down on being wrong, while calling everyone an idiot. They (you) are clowns, and solely here for my entertainment, which is what I use this site for. There are sometimes enjoyable technical discussions I get into, but that's decreased greatly in the last couple of years - due to normal people leaving, and people like you remaining, in addition to the lack of good stories making it through the dumbass editorial system.
Oh look, the guy being laughed at is complaining he's being laughed at. I'm here specifically to make fun of you to get my kicks. No, that does not turn the site into what I want it to be (what it used to be). I still use the site for what it is now. I explained that pretty well in the post you replied to. But you do need to be able to read before replying. Something you are too dumb to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @07:42PM (7 children)
It costs 6 figures to pay someone to work on the site professionally.
So if you want to improve quality, contribute enough to hire an employer, follow the given advice and volunteer your time, accept what you're given for free, or finally just fuck off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @07:50PM
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Sunday February 28 2021, @08:19PM (4 children)
It does not cost a full year of a senior dev salary to develop a more automated system for vetting spam from articles and reducing the workload. It costs about 10k to hire a good perl dev to do that in about a month. Which I literally offered to do. So why don't you go fuck off with your strawman and return to your autistic spam - you seem to be good at that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @08:45PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Sunday February 28 2021, @09:04PM (2 children)
This was the decent competitor. Dicedot got the competitor - pipedot, where people went. Then this place opened up and pipedot died.
Best technical discussion is on hacker news. The issue there is one guy, who seems to be an incel on a powertrip. Their main feature is censorship of comments. They grey them out, then just delete them completely. So if you say something people disagree with, it literally gets deleted. This results in lack of good discussion, but instead becomes a very technical, very apt, nerd echo-chamber. That's cool for an article with a single viewpoint. It however means the discussion is not worth reading.
The problem with opening up yet another site, is it needs to have no censorship - like this one (moderation is literally meaningless, we read at -1). Voat tried that. What happens is it becomes a troll echo-chamber.
There is no solution to this, because of the way social network dynamics work. You need a large userbase for the discussion, people don't jump ship all at once. Only the outcasts go there, and it turns to shit overnight.
A better solution is to restore this place to its previous glory. My suggestion was to take the editor work that can be automated, and do it, so they only have to spend 30 seconds glancing at a submission. Bam - more content. Buzztard, while ethical and a good man, is a very, very stupid person, who thinks he is smarter than scientists, and has won at life by finding a way to be happy with being poor, and sitting on a shitty little boat all day. Explaining logic to him is pointless - it's like arguing with a wall. So the site slowly starts dying, and there is no solution to save it. Like slashdot. Like pipedot. Like everything else.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday March 01 2021, @11:44AM (1 child)
There was no "and then" between the Slashcott and SN. We opened up within a month after?
Pipedot never got off the ground in the first place, for values of "off the ground" much over 10 comments per article.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday March 02 2021, @02:32AM
right, as I literally said, slashdot had no competitor, and got one when the boycott hit. which was pipedot, which never took off and people went here. not sure why you need to reword my original statement, but i guess you agree.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 28 2021, @08:50PM
"and contributed 4 digit sums"
- "accept what you're given for free"
"hire an employer"
Learn Words.
You are a failure of the American school system, and of life.
"fuck off"
First thing you've ever been right on. You should absolutely fuck off. The articles are "ok" - offtopic spammers who failed reading class like yourself are not. You are the biggest problem here, not the articles. Improving a site does not mean blindly do what the owner suggests. It is also suggesting new and improved ways to do things. I find it absolutely a buggy-horsewhip scenario that an actual person has to spend a lot of time on each submitted story, when most of the work they do can be automated. Rejecting automation, on what is supposed to be a tech forum, and suggesting amazon m-turk manual work to filter spam submissions, and manually formatting stories... It means the dense management don't care if this site dies. We're half way there now.