Hacker News: chaoticmass

New comment by chaoticmass in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

chaoticmass — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:05:55 +0000

Donkey running on a PC 5150:

https://youtu.be/kmCMkD1vv0E?si=RqGhqIC-EHVhXnDI&t=145

New comment by chaoticmass in "How the Atmos clock functions"

chaoticmass — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:50:47 +0000

I’ve seen so many of these clocks at antique stores, estate sales and such with with IBM plaques on them with someone’s name. Apparently IBM used to gift these to employees for 25 years of service or something to that effect. Given the cost and the potential longevity of the clocks it’s quite a statement for a loyalty gift.

New comment by chaoticmass in "But yak shaving is fun (2019)"

chaoticmass — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:28:56 +0000

When I was in highschool I started writing a game in Qbasic. Along the way, I wanted it to have a console (like Quake) where you could enter commands and modify the game as you were running it. This lead me to create a scripting engine in Qbasic, and long story short, I’ve been on a yak shaving epic quest now for almost 30 years now. No game, but I have a hybrid C / Lua game engine/general purpose application platform. Still tinkering and still no end in sight. I’m having fun though!

New comment by chaoticmass in "Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair"

chaoticmass — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:17:13 +0000

I don’t know if it was just me but I had bad luck with my holy pandas from them. I build 3 different boards using them and they all started having issues within a few months of use. Double bboounce, and keys nt htting. This was several years ago mind you, so maybe they eventually did get the quirks worked out, but by then I’d gotten over the custom board hobby.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Men are ditching TV for YouTube as AI usage and social media fatigue grow"

chaoticmass — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:51:45 +0000

I consume a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube and have for years now. I’ve had Premium since the beginning (still only paying $7.99 a month). At least there’s studies that show directed consumption that I do when I manually search and find stuff to watch is less harmful than the idle scrolling for shorts that you get on TikTok and YouTube shorts.

New comment by chaoticmass in "California needs to learn from Houston and Dallas about homelessness"

chaoticmass — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 14:40:09 +0000

Not really fair to compare the two geographic regions. Nobody wants to live on the streets in Dallas or Houston. It’s way too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. That said, living in Dallas I have seen the odd tent city pop up under some freeway overpasses but they don’t stick around very long so I guess the city does do something about it.

New comment by chaoticmass in "A QBasic Text Adventure Still Expanding in 2025"

chaoticmass — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:25:35 +0000

My own project is on there still!

http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/89_exshell.html

New comment by chaoticmass in "Kids Love Landline Phones"

chaoticmass — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:20:23 +0000

When growing up watching Americas Funniest Home Videos my brother and I would run to the kitchen phone to press 1, 2, or 3 to ‘vote’ for our favorite finalist.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Older adults disproportionately hindered by touch screen interfaces (2023)"

chaoticmass — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:20:59 +0000

I have slight nerve issues that make precise double tap gestures difficult. One of the reasons I switched to an iPhone is the accessibility features are quite good and let me work around the issues I have more easily. Given how many older people I see who have the same issue I have but worse, I can imagine this is a very common problem for a lot of people.

New comment by chaoticmass in "PHP Docker image just hit 1B pulls on Docker Hub"

chaoticmass — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 22:05:00 +0000

All the PHP jobs I saw while job searching required Laravel experience. Despite having 19 years experience with PHP and other frameworks, I was out of the running for those jobs.

New comment by chaoticmass in "POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)"

chaoticmass — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:17:47 +0000

https://hof.povray.org/images/mcintoshhdri3.jpg

New comment by chaoticmass in "POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (2021)"

chaoticmass — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 15:16:22 +0000

There was a POV ray render of a McIntosh tube amp that I used to show people and nobody knew it was computer generated.

New comment by chaoticmass in "FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal"

chaoticmass — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 22:36:37 +0000

If I don't know the number, I answer with "Hola. Buenos días."

New comment by chaoticmass in "Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?"

chaoticmass — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 16:50:34 +0000

1) Wolfenstein but reskinned so you kill Barney the purple dinosaur instead of Nazis 2) Descent on 3 floppy disks 3) Some primitive CAD/3D modeling thingy, can't remember the name

No doubt I had a ton more, including a lot from magazines that came with CDs, but those top three were some of the earliest and most memorable.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Show HN: I've built a tool that summarizes 3-hour YouTube videos"

chaoticmass — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 15:01:57 +0000

I like long videos, too, but I could see this being useful to let it summarize a video beforehand so I can see if it's worth spending the time to watch it myself. Could also be good if you have a long video and you want the text transcription to use for reference later.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Google podcasts is shutting down"

chaoticmass — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 19:38:22 +0000

I've been paying $7.99 a month.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons in New Cars"

chaoticmass — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 15:07:09 +0000

I bought a 2011 4runner last year and one thing I really like about it is the lack of a big infotainment touch screen. Lots of physical buttons.

New comment by chaoticmass in "American Employees Reinvent the Sick Day"

chaoticmass — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:11:59 +0000

At least where I have worked, the attitude is your PTO is yours and you can use it for whatever you want, no questions asked. How can an employer be mad for an employee using the PTO they were given? It's Personal time off.

-- edit, I know it's actually "Paid time off"

New comment by chaoticmass in "Patlabor 2, the Movie: realistic portrayal of modern aerial combat"

chaoticmass — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 18:09:43 +0000

I just watched Planetes last weekend. I'd started it many times but never finished it. Once the main story arc with the main character gets rolling, it gets really good.

I wish more anime shows would be a one season and done affair, instead of the trend for shows to just go on and on indefinitely.

New comment by chaoticmass in "Is Math Real?"

chaoticmass — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:45:34 +0000

Plants may not have a concept of numbers or math, but they seem to follow mathematical patterns regardless.

https://thatsmaths.com/2014/06/05/sunflowers-and-fibonacci-m...