Posted by azhenley 21 hours ago
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I was working at Company X around 2013, and we had a Rails ecommerce site. Trivial in the algorithmic sense. Had a contractor that pushed a change that somehow made everything crawl. When we did profiling together, it turned out he had written an O(n^2) algorithm when looking up country codes or something. Sometimes, there's no off-the-shelf library, and it's the minimum a dev should know not to do.
I'm not saying it should be a maniacal focus, but it should be taken into account. Of course, it's with judgement. We get shittier and shittier software if it's not taken into account at all.
Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.
To each their own.
Also, didn't the parent comment say he went back to college?
I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!
Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/
It's certainly a niche but important part of internet history
Newgrounds
Armor Games
Addicting Games
Miniclip
Kongregate
CoolMathGames
I wonder if AI could help in reviving these.
With my zero knowledge of flash is it possible to somehow bridge it into modern browsers using web assembly or something?
[1] - https://www.nitrome.com
The money people probably just told them "more ads. I don't care how you do it - more ads"
I bet it's only because they forgot they had such a feature. Like RSS feeds on Reddit.
And a legendary one at that!
I remember spending so many hours playing little flash games on Newgrounds and other sites like it in lower secondary school during the breaks. Running up to the library room where the computers where, to get the most amount of computer time squeezed into the short and long breaks.
For a while, my class teacher had me banned from using the computers because she said I shouldn’t use every break to just run to the computers. Maybe she was right that it wasn’t completely healthy. But it’s not like I was alone in running to them, my friends did too, and even though I may have been particularly excited to use the computers I still did things together with my friends both in front of those computers and other socialising with them after school etc.
I remember being absolutely stumped trying to use the game maker at first. But I followed in-game tutorials, and it finally clicked how it worked. It was mostly just creating sprites and setting logic on them, i.e. “if you tap this sprite, set a flag”, “if this sprite collides with another, do Y”, etc
But I do credit it with first opening my mind to the fun and possibility of making computers do things.
I wonder if Mario Maker served similarly for the next cohort. Or even if Tears of the Kingdom, with such a flexible play style, encourages a similar spirit.
Even the same old games are still there
That was the creepiest thing ever when it came out.
Rusty spoons.
And I am saddened to this day that no one I've worked with professionally has gotten the reference. One day.