First language I learned while in college in the 1990s. While I enjoyed the class, I have a funny picture of me kicking the FORTRAN book across my dorm room after I turned in my final project.
Readit NewsRyanOD commented on Learning Fortran (2024) uncenter.dev/posts/learni... · Posted by u/lioeters
But also, a lot of the dot com companies that people invested in in 1999 went bust, meaning those specific investments went to zero even if the web as a whole was a huge success financially.
Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio.
Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.
RyanOD commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin
I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.
For ideas that are already well established, you can ask it to evaluate an idea against generally accepted best practices. I don't have a background in game design and I'm more of a hobby developer so I used to do this when I was building retro game clones.
RyanOD commented on What will enter the public domain in 2026? publicdomainreview.org/fe... · Posted by u/herbertl
Swallows and Amazons is on the list? My favorite book; when I was a kid I read Czech translation published in 1930s, so I shouldn't be that surprised it's entering public domain.
Read this to my daughters. What a great story! Wish I had known of it as a kid.
I make up all my passwords on the spot and never write them down. Every service I use has a different password I may or may not remember. If I need to reset it, so be it. I consider changing my passwords frequently a good thing. Yes, it slows me down from time to time, but whatever.
And for something I use every day like email, I just leave myself signed in on my main devices. But eventually that even gets reset...probably a few times a year.
RyanOD commented on Microsoft makes Zork open-source opensource.microsoft.com/... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
Nice. Yep, we wrote our own adventure games in BASIC as well. There were a couple problems with that, however. First we weren’t able to come up with a sophisticated parser like Infocom had. We ended up with basic “verb object” parsers, ala Scott Adams adventures. Second, we didn’t have many rooms as it was difficult to fit it all into memory and we didn’t have the sophisticated incremental loading that Infocom did with the Z-machine. Still, it worked.
When I was around six years old, my older brothers convinced me computer games were written in paragraph form. I wrote a lot of games! Asteroids went something like this, "You fly around in a ship that is a triangle. When you shoot asteroids they break up into smaller asteroids."
My brothers got a lot of laughs out of those "programs".
Fast-forward 45 years and whose laughing now?! :)
RyanOD commented on Microsoft makes Zork open-source opensource.microsoft.com/... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
This literally gave me goosebumps. It's hard to convey how much Zork (and the rest of the Infocom portfolio) means to me. This was my first entry into gaming on my Commodore 64.
For anyone out there who had anything to do with bringing these games to market, know that you impacted so many lives in a fun, meaningful, heartfelt way.
RyanOD commented on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla manualdousuario.net/en/mo... · Posted by u/rpgbr
Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.
For me, it's exactly what you said...asking specific questions. That's what I use search engines for and much of the time I'm online, it's asking questions and seeking answers. And, as near as I can tell, AI does that very well and very fast.
RyanOD commented on The Useful Personal Computer technicshistory.com/2025/... · Posted by u/cfmcdonald
We had a Commodore 64 and an Amiga back in the 80s. I used to type up books reports and research papers which was really nice.
Once, I got in trouble and had to go home and write sentences. I used the word processor to copy/paste the sentence 500 times (or whatever it was). The teacher was dubious of this, but not fully understanding personal computers, gave in and accepted it.
Win! Win! Win! ...