Hacker News: JoeDaDude

New comment by JoeDaDude in "The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100"

JoeDaDude — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:43:59 +0000

For those interested in the subject, animation has quite a history before Disney came onto the scene. I suggest this book:

Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 by Donald Crafton

Personally, I remain impressed to this day with the pioneering work of Winsor McCay, the cartoonist who created Little Nemo. Perhaps the best example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW71mSedJuU

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

JoeDaDude — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:55:37 +0000

* Must be willing to perform human sacrifices during select astronomical events?

Space race: Why Portugal is reaching for the stars

JoeDaDude — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:38:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dw.com/en/space-race-why-portugal-is-reaching-for-the-stars/a-77303795

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362327

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by JoeDaDude in "The Science of Weather and the Nature of Science"

JoeDaDude — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:52:57 +0000

The article states that "Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms" to describe the clouds unlike Luke Howard whose Latin names such as cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, etc., which stuck and are still with us.

What were Lamarck's names for the clouds?

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

JoeDaDude — Fri, 22 May 2026 03:01:33 +0000

Cool! How would navigation actually work? Dead reckoning? Inertial? Stellar reference? Pulsar navigation?

Also, the dashed red line is --- SPOILER ALERT! ---- only part of the trajectory in the film, as there is another leg of the voyage not shown.

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Train Your Own LLM from Scratch"

JoeDaDude — Tue, 05 May 2026 07:18:14 +0000

Coincidentally, I just started on Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), a repo/book/course by Sebastian Raschka [0][1][2]. Maybe it is a good problem to have to have to decide which learning resource to use.

[0] https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

[2] https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/coding-llms-from-the...

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"

JoeDaDude — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:47:25 +0000

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We create an image of a human musician and too often become disappointed fans because, for example, we disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

New comment by JoeDaDude in "The Overtom Chess Computer Museum"

JoeDaDude — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:26:04 +0000

I realize this museum is more about hardware but software that implements the game also deserves its place in history. To that effect, here is a writeup on Microchess made for the Kim-1 microcomputer:

https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html

New comment by JoeDaDude in "The Overtom Chess Computer Museum"

JoeDaDude — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:12:32 +0000

Very cool! Wouldn't it be even cooler if the museum could score a couple of the very oldest machines? I'm talking about the El Ajedrecista machine (1912)[1] and Caissa [2][3] (named after the goddess of Chess[4]) built by Claude Shannon.

[1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista

[2]. https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/

[3]. https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?qu...

[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa

Technically, these electro mechanical machines may not qualify as computers, but still, what a scoop it would be to get them!

New comment by JoeDaDude in "MemPalace, the highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked"

JoeDaDude — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:52:02 +0000

One more meme: Missed the chance to call it Multi-Pass

New comment by JoeDaDude in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

JoeDaDude — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:14:37 +0000

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

New comment by JoeDaDude in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

JoeDaDude — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:53:12 +0000

I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"

JoeDaDude — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:32:37 +0000

For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device.

The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Learning Creative Coding"

JoeDaDude — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:24:58 +0000

Did any other old timer like me get reminded of Creative Computing magazine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Computing_(magazine)

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play"

JoeDaDude — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:05:53 +0000

How about opening up the game for humans to play? Can you beat your AI?

New comment by JoeDaDude in "A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment"

JoeDaDude — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:55:00 +0000

Yes, he is the same author. You will recognize his drawings in the Stars book.

New comment by JoeDaDude in "A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment"

JoeDaDude — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:32:19 +0000

Even if you don't have a telescope or binoculars, you can still enjoy naked eye star gazing. The book that got me started and which I highly recommend: The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars:_A_New_Way_to_See_Th...

https://archive.org/details/stars00hare

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production"

JoeDaDude — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:18:30 +0000

Just to get your nostalgia juices flowing again, someone recreated the Defender sound engine in the browser.

https://www.zapspace.net/defender_sound/

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Television is 100 years old today"

JoeDaDude — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:44:05 +0000

I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.

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

New comment by JoeDaDude in "Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant"

JoeDaDude — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:35:14 +0000

Making AI companions is becoming a widespread little hobby project. Many have created them and shared instructions on how to do it. My preference would be to use local resources only (say, with ollama), they can even be made with voice recognition, TTS, and an avatar character.

While I have not interfaced my AI with all the services that Clawdbot does (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) I don't think that is too much of a stretch from my very simple build.