As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnldsrc.htm

by elvis70 • 3 years ago

1227 316 3 years ago

dunfield.themindfactory.com

jart5• 3 years ago

I'm taking a look through DOSUTIL.ZIP and I love all these simple elegant C programs. A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines. How often do you see that? I also love how, out of 20,000 lines of C code, there only exists 24 #if statements. This is how C programming was meant to be. Reading codebases like this is one of the things I drew inspiration from when I started working on Cosmopolitan Libc.

duskwuff6• 3 years ago

A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines

Older C compilers will let you get away with a lot of sins which a modern C compiler will (correctly) call you out for.

jart5• 3 years ago

We can still get away with those sins today if you change C's implicit type from int to long. I modified chibicc to do just that it was a 1 LOC patch. Suddenly I didn't need prototypes anymore and everything just worked without #include lines.

trealira5• 3 years ago

I haven't looked that deeply, but I don't see many sins in this source code, either, except for the K&R style, weird formatting and doing too much in one line, like this line in the file CAT.C:

  if(*(Ptr = argv[i]) == '-') {

Older C compilers did let you get away with more, like using integers as pointers, and dereferencing pointers as though they were struct pointers when they aren't. But I don't see that in this code.

flykespice2• 3 years ago

Hmm implicit int conversion

cdchn3• 3 years ago

If your build targets are 1 then that saves you a lot of #if macros.

lovasoa• 3 years ago

You are replying to someone who builds C programs for 6 OS and 2 architectures without an #if ;)

marcus0x625• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, over here in the Rust mines, I wrote a simple program that is little more than an http listener with a single route.

Cargo pulled in something like 105 dependencies to build it.

Although, as an apples to apples comparison, it does only have 2 use statements.

lrvick3• 3 years ago

This is a culture problem, not a language problem.

Here is a http health check in 19 lines using only the rust standard library.

https://dpaste.org/f895z

tubthumper8• 3 years ago

In case you want to create a simple http listener without dependencies (besides the standard library), the official Rust Book has a tutorial for just that: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch20-01-single-threaded.html

rezonant7• 3 years ago

This doesn't really surprise me, doing an HTTP service correctly is not actually trivial

mianos• 3 years ago

And, the meme, for every comment in C or C++ on HN, there is one "but Rust".

throwaway892238• 3 years ago

OTOH, here is a hash table in C implemented entirely as macros. It's super cool: https://troydhanson.github.io/uthash/

kelsey9876543• 3 years ago

Justine, you are one of less than 5 programmers that make me feel envy. Hope to have a coffee or a whiskey with you some day if we ever cross paths. Enjoy your day, you are an inspiration and goals. Both mental goals and presentation goals, which is essentially unheard of.

toasted-subs• 3 years ago

Looked through the Linux kernel and I was genuinely shocked. Something so simple, easy to read, and improve upon. Makes modern web frameworks seem like spaghetti code. Art vs scrap.

gilbetron• 3 years ago

Because there were barely any libraries to include back then. If you wanted some functionality, you wrote it yourself. Which was fun, but most of the code pales in comparison to modern libraries that have had years, or decades, or eyes on them improving and testing them. Pre 2000, if you wanted some specific capability, you wrote it yourself!

LastTrain5• 3 years ago

This is great - add them to github!

megous3• 3 years ago

Or maybe don't feed the machine...

outside12343• 3 years ago

If it is not on Github it is never going to feed anything

LastTrain5• 3 years ago

I do love personal websites - but the proper place for sharing code, where it can be forked and shared, is GitHub or a place like it. Plus, author has already licensed their code in a way to allow it anyway.

pgeorgi3• 3 years ago

There's also codeberg.org for git-shaped artifacts, or archive.org for everything else.

screamingninja2• 3 years ago

Or maybe don't feed the machine...

Curious as to why you consider that a bad thing.

xeckr• 3 years ago

Good idea. I should keep better track of all the stuff I've written...

pbhjpbhj• 3 years ago

elvis70 are you Dave Dunfield (the source author)?

[It might be more a ShowHN if you are?]

I'm interested if all of the code is self-written? If you wrote any of it under contract and so had special terms to allow you to eventually release it? Which piece of code there that you are most proud of and/or gonna most useful?

elvis70• 3 years ago

I'm not Dave, but here's a thread on Vogons in which he announced his project, you could possibly contact him from there: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=97034

jandrewrogers• 3 years ago

I love this. It has crossed my mind more than once to do something similar at some point in the future.

This is a bit like receiving an inheritance from your grandparents. There will be true gems and novelties mixed in with a lot of knick knacks and rubbish. But the totality of that tells a story of real people living rich and interesting lives that only a handful of highlights would not do justice to.

albertzeyer• 3 years ago

Why only when you are retired? Why not just right now?

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

depending on how organized you are... this can take a lot of time

coldcode• 3 years ago

I wish I had saved something from my 40 years of programming, but I alwayds left everything behind when I moved to a new job. I did manage to keep my commercial memory allocator from the late 90's (single threaded, only supported Metrowerks CodeWarrior and the old MacOS), it was the fastest allocator on the Mac, and bug-free, but became obsolete with MacOS X. Not sure anyone would care today. I lost my source code to Trapeze as I mentioned yesterday ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) ). I guess I never throught about saving most of my work for a day when no one cared if I shared it.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

Not sure anyone would care today.

There's a vibrant retrocomputing community.

VirusNewbie• 3 years ago

Put it on github! You might actually get people to fork it and continue working on it.

myself2482• 3 years ago

That implies that it needs people to continue working on it.

Is there no such thing as "done" anymore?

screamingninja2• 3 years ago

That implies that it needs people to continue working on it.

It does not.

Is there no such thing as "done" anymore?

Is there no such thing as "building upon it" anymore?

nihiven• 3 years ago

This is really cool. It seems very 'pure' in comparison to what my code history will look like. In 2040, a lot of my code will show how I used a bunch of libraries and frameworks that nobody uses 'these days'. This doesn't seem good or bad, just a reflection of the times.

swatcoder• 3 years ago

And unless you put in the effort to archive those dependencies yourself, nobody may be able to truly read or build your code anyway.

Today’s trendy development practices are shockingly ephemeral and fragile. Very little of today’s projects would survive one decade left fallow, let alone four.

capitol_• 3 years ago

This is why I really like Debians policy of being self-contained, that everything in Debian is built from sources that are in the Debian system.

It takes a lot more effort to package stuff, since you can't just download your dependencies from the internet. But you also create something that isn't as ephemeral.

bluGill• 3 years ago

A few years back my office threw away a PC running Windows XP with no service packs. It was left in a closet for many years just in case we had to fix a bug in some safety critical code.

A few years ago we tried to rebuild some safety critical code from sometime back and were unable to because the certificates had expired and so the machine that can build the source code refused to connect to our version control system.

xyst2• 3 years ago

And unless you put in the effort to archive those dependencies yourself

go makes this extremely easy to do

https://go.dev/ref/mod#go-mod-vendor

rust tool chain also includes a vendor dependency process

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-vendor.html

fallat3• 3 years ago

Today’s trendy development practices are shockingly ephemeral and fragile

My fellow human, you have just nailed what is wrong with today's software.

dotancohen4• 3 years ago

  > Very little of today’s projects would survive one decade left fallow, let alone four.

I hate to break it to you. 2040 is less than half as distant as you think it is.

soulofmischief5• 3 years ago

Checking dependencies into VCS should be more common as with yarn PnP and such.

BobaFloutist2• 3 years ago

I think that's somewhat the curse of technology. It's so hard to make anything from scratch. How do you get metallurgy working without already having metals? How do you get electricity running without an outlet, or at least powerful, easily sourced magnets?

Thinking about the "dependency tree" for any modern convenience is truly staggering. I can't even start to think about how you can make a factory without first having a factory.

myth_drannon2• 3 years ago

all these `pip install` and `npm install` will be useless

myself2482• 3 years ago

They already are, if your internet connection has a hiccup or worse.

They already are, if something has been hijacked and is now malicious.

They already are, if you need to install something offline somewhere.

They already are.

outside12343• 3 years ago

Please put it on Github - nobody will ever find this otherwise

382• 3 years ago

It's on the front page, so your comment seems pretty tone deaf.

outside12343• 3 years ago

For today -- and tomorrow everyone forgets about it.

thecyborganizer• 3 years ago

From STYLE.TXT:

  - True=7 -

  Having lots of very low-level code and hardware experience, I developed a bit
  of tendancy to "minimize what can go wrong at low levels" - C treats 0==FALSE
  and !0==TRUE - most people use 0/1 ... but thats only 1 bit "difference".  I
  sometimes use 7=TRUE as thats 3 bits with no more chars to type (and of course
  foolish as such a 1 bit hardware error would "trash" pretty much any system -
  but I do tend to be a creature of habit :)

I have never heard of this convention before! Was "random bitflips messing with your conditionals" a common problem back in the day?

wrs• 3 years ago

I’ve been involved with systems where 0xffff… was canonical “true”, but not something as specific as 7! If you’re going to turn on more bits, why not all of them? Though I think this was because the NOT instruction was used for logical inversion, so the bit flip theory doesn’t apply.

cpeterso• 3 years ago

For example, the value of Visual Basic's "True" keyword is -1. This seems silly from the perspective of a C programmer, but -1 (0xffffffff) is "more true" than 1 because every bit is true, not just the LSB. :)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/langua...

layer83• 3 years ago

The OP still wanted to only type a single character.

jareklupinski3• 3 years ago

tangential to 'how can a bit be wrong', when trying to see if a serial data line is working, i write 0xA5 ( 1010 0101 ) to send an alternating bitstream with a twist so i can test the greatest number of things i think can be wrong at once

genter2• 3 years ago

Except that if you have the bit endian wrong, 0xA5 is the same forward and backward.

UweSchmidt2• 3 years ago

How would a HNer who's not familiar in those nether regions of computing, but wants to feel the excitement of sending a bitstream over a (possibly faulty!) serial data line, get started? Two Arduinos and a cable maybe?

dboreham2• 3 years ago

No. Random bitflips (aka hardware that doesn't work) are a relatively new thing. Bit flips due to buggy software was a thing though. This is why most database engines checksum the payload data even in memory. I've also seen network packets corrupted because a bridge (former name for switch) trashed data in flight, then reconstructed its CRC for the corrupt data on the onward leg.

dvaletin• 3 years ago

What you mean by relatively new? I observed bitflips a couple decades ago, causing machine to panic.

bernds74• 3 years ago

I beg to differ. Early 90s there were some Amiga memory expansions that would constantly flip bits. I'm pretty sure it contributed to the sentiment that the system wasn't the most stable, although I'm pretty sure one or two of my friends with PCs saw similar issues on their machines. Maybe Microsoft Word wasn't to blame for all the crashes?

Of course, trying to work around it in software is utterly futile.

ziddoap• 3 years ago

Random bitflips (aka hardware that doesn't work) are a relatively new thing

This implies that old hardware always worked, which I strongly doubt (what year did hardware go from always working to not?).

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

SEE/SEU are not a relatively new thing. However, the frequency of events is inversely proportional to the feature size, which has been decreasing over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_shrink

indymike• 3 years ago

Bitflips aren’t a new thing. I’ve been rarely but painfully bit by them since at least 1986. This. Excludes serial and modem communications where it was a way of life.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

Random bitflips (aka hardware that doesn't work) are a relatively new thing.

I thought they (from cosmic rays, etc.) were always a thing, but so rare that you needed a very large system (in scope or time or both) to have a substantial chance of encountering one (outside of noisy comm channels, which use error correction protocols for exactly that reason.)

euroderf• 3 years ago

Cosmic rays ?

justin66• 3 years ago

Random bitflips (aka hardware that doesn't work) are a relatively new thing.

Bits flipping due to hardware that didn’t work well was what caused Xerox PARC to implement an error correcting memory for MAXC, fifty years ago.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Maxc

Bit flips due to buggy software was a thing though.

No kidding.

egometry2• 3 years ago

Still is. And there's little to be done about it.

Unless you can stop cosmic rays.

Luckily it doesn't happen THAT often. I forget the exact metric but I recall various Google Engineers saying that something like one out of a million test run failures is a random bitflip?

eichin• 3 years ago

Cosmic rays were a theory in 70's era hardware for failures that ended up being proven to be particles emitted by the ceramic packaging itself. (Modern bitflips are have more to do with component sizes several orders of magnitude smaller.) (edit: not saying that cosmic rays aren't a problem now, just that they only became a problem as chip element sizes shrunk, and they're probably not the only source.)

Also, you can definitely stop cosmic rays, that was part of how they eliminated them as the source.

scottlamb• 3 years ago

I have never heard of this convention before! Was "random bitflips messing with your conditionals" a common problem back in the day?

Due to RAM/CPU failures? I don't think so (though I have seen it, fwiw). With weird serial protocols that don't have proper checksums/digests, running over sketchy wiring? Yeah, and that might be part of "very low-level code and hardware experience".

layer83• 3 years ago

No, this is more a case of “this could conceivably happen, so why not guard against it where it’s easy to do”. Though personally I would have used -1.

adrianmsmith• 3 years ago

The BBC micro and Archimedes used -1 as true in BASIC.

It meant that you didn't need the distinction of "logical operators" (like && in C) and "bitwise operators" (like & in C). You could just use bitwise operators, e.g. the bitwise NOT operator would convert 0 (all bits clear) was -1 (all bits set) so there was no need for "logical operators".

I always felt that was more elegant than C (but of course required a two's compliment machine, which BBC/Archimedes was, but C didn't require).

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

To the degree that you were worried about such things, this wasn't a real answer. Yes, it saves you if you have a boolean variable... maybe?

  if (var == TRUE)
    ; // It was 7
  else if (var == FALSE)
    ; // it was zero
  else
    ??? what do I do here?

And you need to solve that "what do I do here" for every single conditional on a boolean, and have the extra lines of code to handle it and not crash.

But, you know, what if it was a variable that you used in a switch statement instead? Or just "if (i > 17)"? Bit flips can affect your logic all over the place, not just when it's a boolean variable.

And then, if a bit flip can affect a boolean, it can also affect a pointer. Or the return address on the stack (or the link to the previous stack frame).

Or it can flip a bit in the code.

So this is, at best, a very very partial solution, and it's non-trivial to implement. So this was very much not standard practice or a "convention".

LordShredda• 3 years ago

if var is neither this nor that then it's not a boolean

AndreiBB• 3 years ago

Here is how I do it:

#define FALSE 0

#define TRUE (!FALSE)

ASSERT( TRUE != FALSE );

and let the compiler worry about which bits to use for TRUE

russdill• 3 years ago

I've been on a team trying to argue that exact thing. If you aren't going to handle the case where the var is neither true nor false, at least by explicitly documenting the fail-safe case, you're just cargo culting. You get a lot of that type of thing in MISRA and automotive codebases.

Any team that realizes that the compiler may choose to optimize out a shit-ton of such code gets an extra gold star.

dahart• 3 years ago

Why do you think you need the “else: ??? What do I do here?” case?

Until you added the 2nd test and the 2nd else case, there is no scenario under which both paths of an if/else would fail to execute due to a bit flip of the test variable, because with ‘if (boolean_condition) {} else {}’ there is only 1 conditional test. A bit flip could have caused the wrong branch to execute, but it could not have skipped both branches. A bit flip could change the jump instruction to something else, but in that case your imagined else case still wouldn’t help.

this is, at best, a very very partial solution

FWIW, the author said this, and fairly succinctly, saying this TRUE=7 thing is “of course foolish as such a 1 bit hardware error would "trash" pretty much any system”. He was only having a bit of fun that cost nothing, and nowhere suggested this is a solution to cosmic rays or other data errors.

LastTrain5• 3 years ago

No, and the author basically admitted it was silly. My counter would be that it makes the intent less clear. I loved reading through his style doc though and I love that he just threw all this stuff out there. Something in his collection is bound to scratch somebody’s itch.

kortilla• 3 years ago

It’s a problem even now if you have software security checks dealing with adversarial actors with hardware access.

rendaw• 3 years ago

This doesn't make any sense even if the system isn't trashed.

If 7 == true and anything other than 7 == false, then one bitflip will still change the meaning. If 7 == true and 0 == false, then you could have code that does `if (mybool == 7) { ... }` and later `if (mybool == 0) { ... }` and end up with a situation where code path invariants are broken (i.e. mybool is neither true nor false.

If you use `>= 7` to mean true and `< 7` to mean false, while a 0 false value won't randomly become true if one of 3 bits randomly flips, a `7` true value will become false if any of those bits flip. And if any of the other bits flip, 0 will become > 7.

fabbari• 3 years ago

In C any value != 0 is considered true. Nothing special about 7, he could have used any other number, but 7 is a single character, so he used that.

kqr4• 3 years ago

Even if it was, are you really going to think of every conditional as a tri-state boolean?

Or will you assume that one of the branches is safe to execute during failure?

Or will you count the number of bits in each conditional and assume more ones than zeroes is a true, with no error correction? Will you log that a bit has flipped or otherwise alert the operator? Will you consider that as evidence that an int has changed value too?

Will you store ints with three bits per bits also?

Error detecting codes have their place, but it takes more than just saying that true is 7.

benj1113• 3 years ago

Slightly off topic, but why did 1 become the truthy value and not -1?

Logical nots would then work.

And youre still an inc/Dec away from the opposite.

never_inline• 3 years ago

That depends on

a) Two's complement representation

and

b) Wraparound on arithmetic, which is still UB in low-level languages.

myth_drannon2• 3 years ago

I like to download images of old programming CD's from archive.org, like Programmers Heaven[1] for example. All small and interesing programs/tutorials to look at.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Programmers_Heaven_InfoMagic_Mar...

TMWNN• 3 years ago

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

You've made a contribution to the hoard that someone will benefit from, whether tomorrow or in 5,000 years.

egometry2• 3 years ago

The part about the modern (read: far future) calendar being commonly thought to be based on mankind's first moon landing but ACTUALLY being based on the Unix Epoch is a favorite amoungst engineers I know that love Vinge

ceva• 3 years ago

why not somewhere on git? :(?

jhallenworld• 3 years ago

I think his most impactful utility is ImageDisk: used to archive floppy disks from many different types of computers using IBM PCs.

Much of the old software found on bitsavers.org (and archive.org) was recovered using this utility.

razster• 3 years ago

Another link from DDS is Dave's Old Computers http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/ , a nice treasure of old pc reviews and images, (Left, right, front and back). This is amazing as I've been working on making 3D assets for a project of mine.

JaDogg• 3 years ago

Very nice. Hope you enjoy your retirement.

----

One last bugfix before retirement (this is a joke):

I wanted to look at micro-cad it generates a 404.

URL: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/dnld/sc/MICROCAD.ZIP Expected: I can download the .zip file.

adastra22• 3 years ago

Also ran into the same 404. There's not many original CAD programs out there. I'd love to see this one.

kuroguro• 3 years ago

I think the MCSAMPLE zip contains the full thing as well

bilekas3• 3 years ago

This is brilliant.. It's so interesting too because over the years I've built up a few "Bibles" that I always need on hand when working in a particular language or even just automation, I've learnt some very good organising processes (from HN to be honest), I never thought to 'release' them as they feel quite personal and specific for my mental process.

Looking through some of these though, I think I'm inspired. Super cool idea, I would donate to the retirement project financially to say thanks if possible.

absoluteunit13• 3 years ago

I’m curious, what do you mean by “Bibles” exactly ?

And what are the organizing processes you learned; I’m always eager to learn productivity tips/software from others

dotancohen4• 3 years ago

I have quite a few of these bibles too. I'd love to swap some files if you're interested, I'm sure there is much to learn from yours. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username if you are interested.

absoluteunit13• 3 years ago

Ah but when you say “bibles”, what do you mean exactly? Is it just common/useful code you fold related to a particular language/framework? Could you elaborate on this

varjag2• 3 years ago

I regret not archiving my early code for good so much. First non trivial program (a snake game). First utility in assembly. First device driver (for a Centronics printer). That perpetual calendar in Pascal for a uni assignment, written with enormous hangover within an hour and still my only program written entirely bug-free to the date. All seemed trivial and not worthy of preservation then but in the end I have no code surviving from before late 1990s.

Take good care of your code kids!

legends2k3• 3 years ago

This is a problem only we'd to face. Kids these days use Git in some hosting hub or the other that it's a rarity that their code gets lots. Of course if these "free" services go down... it matters. Self-hosting has its uses.

valyagolev• 3 years ago

yeah when GitHub is sold to PE 15 years from now, and we get emails like "you have 2 days to backup all your repos", i hope I won't feel too lazy

nestorD• 3 years ago

It is this exact realization, while looking for some of my old code, that first got me started using git and github.

gpcz• 3 years ago

I have a lot of my old code, but I never want to look at it because it's super-cringe.

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

I lost the first 5-6 years of code thanks to an IBM Deathstar[1] when I was 20.

Got really depressed by it at the time, as it included most of the projects I worked on at the time. After that I got super paranoid about having backups.

I do enjoy going back and looking at the code I still have though. Being self-taught it's mostly not terribly great, but I do have fond memories of finally cracking a certain nut or figuring out some neat trick.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar

varjag2• 3 years ago

Mine did vary quite a bit within that period, from BASIC in middle school to some funky selective availability GPS handling prod code. But it's beside the point: I'd love it as memento, no expectation really that said game of snake would end up on Steam.

xtracto• 3 years ago

Same here. I made a DOS spreadsheet program (with modeX charting! And formulas), a couple of games and a couple of viruses (aaaa TSR looked like magic)... I think they might be in some floppies in my mom's basement.

ai-epiphany• 3 years ago

thanks for the tokens

bilekas3• 3 years ago

Quick question because I can't actually find any info on it, but what license are these released with ?

vitiral• 3 years ago

It's in COPY.txt, although it's homespun.

If you're the author, please please release into the public domain (CC0) if your purpose is educational. That makes it so anyone can learn from it and build on it without any fear of infringement.

jcmoscon• 3 years ago

You have the same name as the billionaire guy. Are you him? :)

accrual3• 3 years ago

I downloaded RINGSW.ZIP to check it out.

This file is NOT included in the demo version of this product.
For more information, please contact Dunfield Development Systems

I admire the effort, but if you're not going to make the source freely available, what's the point? What is somebody going to do 100 years from now when they get your .zip off archive.org and you're long gone?

legends2k3• 3 years ago

what's the point? What is somebody going to do 100 years from now when they get your .zip off archive.org and you're long gone?

The author seems quite aware of this. He calls it out specifically: it's for learning and curiosity purposes.

accrual3• 3 years ago

Surely, but the author also says:

my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

And there was no code in the .zip. Shrug.

cxr• 3 years ago

The seem to be three points of confusion here:

Confusion on your part regarding what the other commenter's complaint is. The complaint is that the source code archive they downloaded did not contain the source code. It contained an old copy of a shareware notice instructing the reader to write to Dunfield for access to the source.

Confusion on Dunfield's part: specifically, the belief that he had included the correct version of RINGSW.C when republishing this stuff to celebrate his retirement.

Finally, confusion on the part of the other commenter here, involving an assumption that Dunfield's oversight was a deliberate decision.

asdefghyk• 3 years ago

THere are reasons not to host on GitHub . There are workarounds to hosting on GitHub Google words why not put software on git hub Finds https://sanctum.geek.nz/why-not-github.html OR https://www.wired.com/2015/06/problem-putting-worlds-code-gi...

potwinkle• 3 years ago

Very cool to see such a long history, were the different projects you worked on related to what was going on at your job at the time?

yndoendo• 3 years ago

Any one catch the out of memory comment?

# we require more vespene gas; unix consensus; kNtErrorOutofmemory;

golem14• 3 years ago

Worth reading the Author's recollections of his almost dying in 2019:

https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/2019.htm

haolez• 3 years ago

That was intense. It made me think about my father in law, who had a heart attack in 2015 that compromised 90% of his heart. His exams are so ugly that one of his physicians refused to threat him, probably worrying that he might die any minute during the appointment.

He is still alive today, he has a normal life and he even manages to go for a run in the beach every saturday. His exams haven't improved, he is always out of breath, but he just refuses to die. It's like what the physician said in the link above: "You look a lot better than what's in the paper".

hnthrowaway0315• 3 years ago

Strangely reminds me of "The Shadow out of the time" by the reverent HPL.

winrid• 3 years ago

"Hug his children. Sleep in his own bed. Eat his meals. and Work a little with his hands." in her words "They shot everything she said down"

Anyone know why doctors do this? They did the same thing with my father when he wasn't getting better (leukemia with pneumonia) and they couldn't get him off the breathing tube. They were very adamant he'd be disabled for life.

kingds• 3 years ago

doctors are all completely insane and should never be trusted. the process of getting into and through medical school has a selection bias towards type-a sociopaths. and whoever makes it through that wringer and gets board certified has to be constantly on guard for malpractice lawsuits. half sarcastic but mostly i do believe this lol

zulban• 3 years ago

It's tough. A vast majority of the time the doctors are right about recovery, and the family is wrong, and optimistic to a delusional degree. It's hard work telling family how bad things really are.

Still, if something happens to me or loved ones I hope I get doctors who can distinguish between zero and one in a thousand.

BobaFloutist2• 3 years ago

I mean they're giving the best information they have. Sometimes it's wrong, but unless you think they should hedge more (which people also hate, "Why won't doctors ever commit to something, it's always 'maybe' or 'I don't know' or 'we'll see', what's the point of the degree and the high pay if they don't know anything?!") I don't really see what else they can do.

We hear a lot about all the times they're wrong, because they're tragic or frustrating or confusing, and because biology is super non-deterministic they're probably wrong more often than say physicists, but they're also right a lot of the time too, enough of the time that we consider it worth having them. We just don't get as many articles and anecdotes about a doctor correctly predicting someone's disability, because it's not as interesting.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Grim af but that looks like a happy ending

kmoser• 3 years ago

Not ready to retire, but I did something like that a few years ago with the previous generation of code I wrote: https://www.kmoser.com/sourcecode/

aquarin• 3 years ago

Some links unfortunately are broken.

anArbitraryOne• 3 years ago

Great LLM training data

keepamovin• 3 years ago

This is wonderful. Thank you. Very moving that you choose to share this!!! Thanks for making a positive impact on the world.

sakesun• 3 years ago

Respect. I'll follow when my time come.

tqwhite• 3 years ago

At 70, I do not think anyone has anything to learn from my 40+ years of code. I envy Mr Mindfactory's confidence.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Thanks for your humility. Still, please consider sharing what you can -- even if only with customers of your software. We all have so much to learn.

(I do regret giving too much of my time to free projects, yet have found a satisfying balance by including source with purchases of software I sell.)

ofey404• 3 years ago

Thank you! You show me a living history of computer programming.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

I like how he puts his email as a captcha https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/contact.htm

And slyly tells you the “password” to get past his spam filter

eliben• 3 years ago

This code is enjoyable to look at - it's clean, well-documented, and clearly a work of love. I like all the small utilities that help the author accomplish a bunch of goals.

I wonder if the code manages be so clean because it's only aimed at a single compiler and a single platform. Multi-platform C code tends to be messy with preprocessor goo.

snvzz5• 3 years ago

Not using a standard license but rather a bespoke one is a major legal roadblock.

The presence of use restrictions does also disqualify it from being Open Source (OSI trademark) or Free Software (GNU/FSF).

If a standard license was adopted instead, such as MIT (permissive and I believe well-aligned with the intent of the author), then any concern would go away.

dingdong33• 3 years ago

Why didn’t he use more memory safe rust?

strangattractor• 3 years ago

Hate to say it but I remember when this stuff first came out. Thank you for releasing the code. Brings back memories.

alisoncopeland02• 3 years ago

I wish I remembered how...my car accident made me dumb ...

alisoncopeland02• 3 years ago

I wish I remembered code my car accident made me dumb...lol

speedylight• 3 years ago

This is sort of unrelated OP, but did you ever write a follow up to this post? https://dunfield.themindfactory.com/2019.htm I’m very curious how well you’ve improved since then. -

onesphere• 3 years ago

Warranty?

quonn2• 3 years ago

We need a new GPL that includes a clause that prohibits training any sort of AI or statistical model on it, unless the output of that model is inheriting the license.

Otherwise AI will be the end of anything open - which we can already see in stackoverflow now.

Zambyte2• 3 years ago

Instead of impeding progress with copyright even more than alwe already do, maybe we should repeal copyright altogether.

quonn2• 3 years ago

It‘s my time as developer and I choose to license my output however I want. Thank you very much.

whartung• 3 years ago

So, is this an issue of credit, a recognition thing? Or more an issue of just sharing with the “right” people?

I share what I do freely. If someone integrates that trivia and shares it with someone else, so much the better. I offer a fractional shoulder to stand on. Getting hovered up into an AI that then goes on to help someone else isn’t much different than having something random posted on the internet that solves someone else’s stumbling block.

But that’s just me.

As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

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