From one perspective, you could say that I had a mental illness caused by a combination of issues from my childhood that caused me to have a serious problem with exhibitionism from 5 until 30 years old.
From another perspective, I was just a morally evil person for all of that time.
I think both are correct. It's more complicated. I have my own thoughts on what caused everything to happen the way it did and why I was the way I was. But what I can say is that I'm no longer that person. But that doesn't matter to most people.
Part of my just punishment is that my reputation is forever ruined. That's why I adopted this handle, 90s-dev. My plan was to use this to make money anonymously. But then at the last second I had the idea to go public and hope for a public redemption, partly because I needed money and knew that the product wouldn't sell and was running out of savings, and partly because I strongly felt like I was being deceitful, which is an awful feeling. So I revealed my identity in my Show HN post.
Unfortunately many people will stop at your past, and it ends there. They will not consider or appreciate you coming forward. Personally, I could not care less. I care about the project, not the person behind it. Of course when it comes to funding the project (or someone with a past like yours), that complicates things. Maybe you should be as transparent as possible with the money? In any case, I am not sure what I would do and I do not have the means to donate anyways.
Have I not paid my price by going to jail? By being homeless and sleeping in my car in the cold of winter? By having people show up at my door in January trying to cause physical violence to me? Are you the same person you were 9 years ago? Would you rather my children not have food and shelter because of mistakes I made 9 years ago and paid for in abundance? Should I put up a gofundme so that they can have their needs met? I'd rather work to earn that money. But nobody will employ me. So this is all I can do. Do you have a better idea? If your best answer is "oh well, you committed an atrocity, therefore your children should suffer," then fine, that's on you. But I won't settle for that. I will do everything I can to provide for them.
weird to parlay someone making publicly available information known to those who you are asking money from into an accusation of wanting harm to come to your kids. least of all given that you harmed a kid. "nobody will employ me", well, probably because they have the benefit of the knowledge being shared here.
> paid for in abundance
its my opinion, shared by many in our society, that you did not pay for it "in abundance". in fact, harming a child incurs a debt that can never be truly "paid for". your reward for time served was to no longer be in jail, not to have your history erased.
I'm aware that many people will not be happy even Hell really does exist and I go there for eternity. Many people have expressed this sentiment in the most gory terms. Those people will never be happy, and I think that's fair. I'll pray for them though that they can have a change of heart, so they can have a chance at happiness.
> A jury has convicted a Woodstock man for putting a child in a headlock, pulling him to the ground and striking him repeatedly, leaving him injured in Woodstock.
That is not a black and white situation, and I received only 10 days in jail because of the circumstances, despite the prosecutor asking for the full 365 days. The statues of Illinois do not permit any evidence prior to the day of the incidents to be presented. I could not provide the jury any evidence that my son was becoming a very real danger who I had to protect myself and my other children from for at least a month beforehand. I am not and have never been a violent person, so he didn't get that from me. I could not present to the jury that I had called 911 on him several times, that he threw sharp objects at me, that I did everything I could do disarm him with as least physical force. I did not know about crisis hotline and the police never told me about it or suggested it, they simply said I'd have to figure something out. All I could present to the jury was his own testimony, under oath, that he had in fact harmed me and caused me physical harm. I used as little force as necessary to restrain him from another episode of dangerous behavior. I'm not sure what I could or should have done differently. And anyone commenting this or that solution, I would just say, I agree violence is rarely the answer, but I'm not sure what you would have done differently either. He has since been arrested at least once for similar violent behavior, so I am vindicated at least somewhat, because he didn't learn that from me, and I tried everything I could to prevent and stop it for the month before my arrest, and I haven't seen him since the arrest 4 years ago. And I was never violent. He didn't learn it from me. In order to protect another person's reputation, I will not say where I think he learned it.
He had a great time in school, was very popular and had lots of friends. I know what led to his violent behavior. It didn't come from imitating me. I filed with the courts to protect him from someone, and the judge agreed with me that it was alarming what he was experiencing from others. But I failed to use the courts to protect him before it was too late. I tried and I failed. That's all I can say.
I'll just comment here and say that I support your right to participate in society. I don't think this entire thread is especially relevant here.
I don't have a clear comprehensive theory on what justice is (and if I did, it would be too large to fit in this margin), but forever being haunted by a criminal record for the rest of your life is not it.
There are no details on that page. No one here is in any position to judge anything because you need the full details of the case. But it's pretty obvious this is not Jeffery Epstein or Marc Dutroux we're talking about here.
I find many comments here unpleasant, hysterical, and even cruel.
Thanks, that's actually my screensaver project Bubbles[1] which I created to mimic as much as possible the Windows 95 bubbles screensaver. It's a one-line include for any website, which is why I put it in this one. Maybe it'll catch on!
I get the bubbles page too after a minute or so, but the main page is just white with two black lines on it.
When I move my mouse around it, I get a click pointer and can see the links show up in the status area, but nothing is displayed. on latest version of Vivaldi
actually the content is there, it's just showing as white on white - when I select with the mouse I can see things - but my guess is that its still not displaying correctly
That's very odd. Not sure what os/browser you're using, but I'm using standard HTMLCanvas stuff to draw them. Could you file an issue in the repo with that info? Thanks!
Short version: I want to work on 90s.dev, but have no time to. I could do it for $25/hour, using GitHub Sponsors as a way for everyone to chip in a little towards its development. Just an idea.
The vision of 90s.dev is to be a retro os environment entirely in the web, that's suitable for making all the apps you'd need to make a game, from code editors to sprite editors to animation tools to debuggers. And it's decentralized too, so the apps don't have to be built in, you can import them from anywhere on the web, as long as the app speaks the 90s.dev API. This would recreate a retro development environment similar to what many of us grew up with in the 90s.
Please take this as some unsolicited friendly advice, but I don't think you'll be able to live off this project with that funding model.
GitHub sponsors is more like a tip jar than a paycheck.
This project is rather niche and your description of it is somewhat confusing. Maybe you could use the open source framework you've created to produce a paid game or app that would be easier to monetize.
Oh sorry, I kind of skipped over introducing what the project is, mainly because when I wrote this, the intended audience was the people who showed support on the previous Show HN thread. But here's a better explanation of the project's purpose, the one I posted via Show HN two months ago: https://90s.dev/blog/finally-releasing-90s-dev.html
I do agree that this is a new way of using GitHub Sponsors. And I do agree that it might entirely not work out the way I'm thinking. But to my knowledge, this way of using GH Sponsors hasn't been tried before, so it's worth at least trying it once I think. Besides, there was significant interest in this project, which is what made me think of trying this at all, otherwise I would not have. Thanks for the feedback.
> the intended audience was the people who showed support on the previous Show HN thread
Your previous Show HN had 113 comments. That's a nice accomplishment but even if 100% of those commenters paid $25/month you aren't going to get to the equivalent of $25/hour.
> there was significant interest in this project
Are you referring to the Show HN? Was there significant interest in paying?
I don't mind not getting full time payment. That's not the goal of this. The goal is to try an experimental method of funding open source projects, something we have all been thinking about for a while. This is just one variation. If it doesn't pan out to full time employment, then fine, that's expected. I'd be surprised if it did.
[Edit to clarify] I'm not trying to pressure or guilt anyone into donating for personal reasons. My only goal in this post is to propose a way to experiment with open source funding. Other details are just me answering unrelated questions.
I have not used GitHub Sponsors so I cannot tell, but GitHub Sponsors may be more accessible to developers. So you should probably use whichever is more accessible to others, less friction = better. That said, having more options is probably better either way, I assume.
I've been working a ton on some variations and ports of it over the last couple months, but the problem is that I need funding.
So my plan is to setup github sponsors, where for each project people want me to work on, they can donate any amount, and for each $25, I'll work one hour on that project. It'll have a few related projects that all come from a unified vision I have for 90s.dev -- to be a full platform that recreates 90s-era development, from dos and qbasic, to win3 and vb3, not to mention assemblers for those who want it (see my show-hn about hram.dev).
The reason I started hram.dev was so I could have a native platform to port 90s.dev to. I love the idea of having native host for retro GUIs. But I am not a huge fan of html/css/js combo. It feels tacked on because it is. I came up with a relatively novel and I think truly innovative GUI methodology in 90s.dev that I did not know how to explain so I haven't truly shared with people how exciting it potentially is. Tomorrow I plan to put up a github-sponsors link with a few different projects, where for each $50 that I receive for a given project, I will work two hours on that project. This way the community can help sponsor me turning these things into realities.
Got one report on reddit that it's not creating the default file in appdata and just using the one in memory that it thinks it's writing. If you have the same issue, here's the whole sample asm file that you can write to appdata\hram\hsig.s before you open hram.exe:
; switch on arg
cmp cl, 4
je MouseDown
cmp cl, 5
je MouseUp
; if mouse not down then just skip
mov al, byte [0x33000]
test al, 1
jz Skip
; draw green at mouse
mov rax, 0
mov rbx, 0
mov al, [0x30007]
mov bl, 128
mul bl
add al, [0x30006]
mov byte ptr [rax+0x30100], 0x0f
; call blit()
sub rsp, 24
call [0x30030]
add rsp, 24
Skip:
ret
; store mouse-down info
MouseDown:
mov byte ptr [0x33000], 1
ret
MouseUp:
mov byte ptr [0x33000], 0
ret
Fwiw I do not know assembly! This is the most complicated asm I've ever written! So if it's got dumb errors, please let me know and I'd be glad to fix them in the sample code!
Hi again HN. You said I should release early and release often so here I am.
HRAM is a computer simulator that runs real native assembly in the context of a 128x72 pixel screen with 8-bit colors (4 bits for red, 4 for green, no blue).
The idea is that you program it using your own assembly, in the same way they might have had to 50 years ago. It's almost like love2d but with assembly. You write an asm function that responds to events like mouse/keyboard/etc.
It takes your code, located at appdata\hram\hsig.s (it creates one for you on the first run) and runs it when it loads. I plan to add hot reloading soon, maybe later today.
And it's not an interpreter! It uses asmjit under the hood to compile your code into actual assembly and then just runs it. Which means this is literally as close to the metal as you can get writing games!
This is maybe the coolest and most exciting thing I've ever built. I'm really excited to see what you all think of it!
As far as I understand, there was a similar mess with CPUs some 50 years ago: All computers were different and there was no such thing as portable code. Then problem solvers came up with abstractions like the C programming language, allowing developers to write more or less the same code for different platforms. I suppose GPUs are slowly going through a similar process now that they're useful in many more domains than just graphics. I'm just spitballing.
The first portable programming language was, uh, Fortran. Indeed, by the time the Unix developers are thinking about porting to different platforms, there are already open source Fortran libraries for math routines (the antecedents of LAPACK). And not long afterwards, the developers of those libraries are going to get together and work out the necessary low-level kernel routines to get good performance on the most powerful hardware of the day--i.e., the BLAS interface that is still the foundation of modern HPC software almost 50 years later.
(One of the problems of C is that people have effectively erased pre-C programming languages from history.)
> I suppose GPUs are slowly going through a similar process now that they're useful in many more domains than just graphics.
I've been waiting for the G in GPU to be replaced with something else since the first CUDA releases. I honestly think that once we rename this tech, more people will learn to use it.
And yet, we are still using handwritten assembly for hot code paths. All these abstraction layers would need to be porous enough to allow per-device specific code.
> And yet, we are still using handwritten assembly for hot code paths
This is actually a win. It implies that abstractions have a negligible (that is, existing but so small that can be ignored) cost for anything other than small parts of the codebase.
Complexity is not inherently bad. Browsers are more or less exactly as complex as they need to be in order to allow users to browse the web with modern features while remaining competitive with other browsers.
This is Tesler's Law [0] at work. If you want to fully abstract away GPU compilation, it probably won't get dramatically simpler than this project.
> Complexity is not inherently bad. Browsers are more or less exactly as complex as they need to be in order to allow users to browse the web with modern features while remaining competitive with other browsers.
What a sad world we live in.
Your statement is technically true, the best kind of true…
If work went into standardising a better API than the DOM we might live in a world without hunger, where all our dreams could become reality. But this is what we have, a steaming pile of crap. But hey, at least it’s a standard steaming pile of crap that we can all rally around.
I hate it, but I hate it the least of all the options presented.
I swear, if I had 2c for every <insert computer guy surname> supposed "law", I would be a millionaire now. Slogans make no law, but programmers sure love "naming things." In all fairness, the obsessive elevating of good-sounding slogans into colloquial "laws" is a uniquely American phenomenon. My pet-theory is that this goes back to old days when computer science wasn't considered a "real" science. That is, in "real" sciences there are laws, so the American computer science guys felt like inventing "laws" to be taken seriously.
