Hacker News: jhbadger

New comment by jhbadger in "Schlitz Is Gone, but First It's Getting One Last Hurrah"

jhbadger — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:37:25 +0000

Wilkins Coffee (which gave employment to a young Jim Henson before Sesame Street or The Muppet Show) was quite successful with its implication that people who don't drink Wilkins get shot and suffer other misfortunes. Maybe having puppets do it was just more charming.

https://youtu.be/HVewx3-9x24

New comment by jhbadger in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

jhbadger — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:14:28 +0000

Unless they are very popular books, they will be weeded (thrown out or or sold) in a matter of a few years though. People imagine that libraries are infinite storehouses of material, but except for places like the Library of Congress they really aren't. There is limited storage space, and in order to get new books they need to discard the old ones that were rarely checked out. Even the example of old books on parchment aren't immune to this trend -- the books we have from Ancient Greece or Rome are just the really popular ones that were copied over and over again, and the vast majority of works from those times are lost.

New comment by jhbadger in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

jhbadger — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:41:53 +0000

Yes, but getting an unlisted number was considered weird and against the norm even if possible. Even in the early 2000s when I dropped my landline, my parents were aghast - "if you do that, you won't be in the phone book! How will anyone get in contact with you?"

New comment by jhbadger in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

jhbadger — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:03:16 +0000

I'm not a fan of sports betting, but surely you can see how betting on a game is not the same thing as betting on a war? People generally don't die because of a sports game (although it happens rarely).

New comment by jhbadger in "I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation"

jhbadger — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:52:30 +0000

I've actually done something similar with a cheap $50 Amazon Fire tablet -- I installed F-Droid and Termux plus Unexpected Keyboard (software keyboard that has ctrl, alt, tab, and other important techy keys) -- It is actually pretty fun to use for light coding.

New comment by jhbadger in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

jhbadger — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:38:00 +0000

Maybe. There are certainly people in all fields who are book smart and did well in classes but are useless at actually practicing their field (not to mention people who cheated in school and got away with it and aren't even that), and it is worth filtering them out. But I think it is weird that CS expects good workers to have these passion projects. Do we expect civil engineers to build bridges in their back yard on the weekends? Can't someone just be good at their job and have other interests outside it?

New comment by jhbadger in "A Tiny E Reader"

jhbadger — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:21:33 +0000

While I know people understandably dislike Onyx Boox for their disregard for the GPL, their Android-based e-ink readers are exactly this. Their built in reader has offline dictionary support of its own, but as they are Android devices (albeit an older version and with a bit of hassle to get the Play Store on it besides their limited store), it can run standard Android apps -- I use it for both ebooks and for reading magazines from my library with Libby.

New comment by jhbadger in "Bullshit Machines"

jhbadger — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:20:32 +0000

The idea that LLMs are useless "bullshit machines" is very 2022. We live in the world today of 2026 where Donald Knuth and Terrance Tao, neither of whom have any patience for hype, use LLMs to help them craft mathematical proofs, I get not liking AI, and getting more satisfaction by doing things oneself. I get frustration on how the AI boom has caused the RAM and graphics cards we want to buy to become unavailable/unaffordable. I get concerns over how such technology is being used by the police and military. But in 2026 the attitude that they are useless "bullshit machines" is as absurd as the articles in the early 2000s that still claimed the Web was just a fad that could be safely ignored.

New comment by jhbadger in "Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer"

jhbadger — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:32:07 +0000

Even in LA it's quite possible to live without a car if you live in the right neigbhorhoods like K-Town or any other centrally located one where both the Metro and buses are plentiful. LA's a huge place with varying amounts of density.

New comment by jhbadger in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

jhbadger — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:17:43 +0000

While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia and other sites -- I wonder why IBM created it when they already had AIX.

New comment by jhbadger in "The Boston library where you still can borrow a giant puppet"

jhbadger — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:02:28 +0000

There is actually a phrase "free library" commonly seen in older libraries often called a "Carnegie Free Library" because they were created as a philanthropic project by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. They are called "free libraries" because many libraries in the 19th century were businesses run rather like video stores (if you can remember those) where you had to pay to check out a book, while Carnegie's were free of charge.

New comment by jhbadger in "I hate soldering"

jhbadger — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:53:33 +0000

Whatever happened to wire wrapping? That used to be a viable alternative.

New comment by jhbadger in "dBase: 1979-2026"

jhbadger — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:46:48 +0000

My first gig at 18 was managing my university library's database (in dBase III; it was the 1980s) and writing the user interfaces for searching. This was a pre-SQL database for you youngins in case you have no idea what I'm talking about.

New comment by jhbadger in "The locals don't know"

jhbadger — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:52:54 +0000

The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.

New comment by jhbadger in "The locals don't know"

jhbadger — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:30:58 +0000

I live in the DC area and it is kind of sad that a lot of people here haven't been to the various Smithsonian museums (which are free) here, or haven't been since they were children.

New comment by jhbadger in "Eight More '8-Bit Era' Microprocessors"

jhbadger — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:21:06 +0000

The RCA-1802 was used in the COSMAC Elf computer which was described as a hobbyist project to build in a series of articles in Popular Electronics 50 years ago. The Elf may be obscure but one thing developed on it (or its successor, the COSMAC VIP), CHIP-8, lives on -- it was (by some definitions) the first "fantasy console" like Pico-8 and TIC-80 today -- a virtual machine designed for writing action games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_Elf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

New comment by jhbadger in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"

jhbadger — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:59:09 +0000

I think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie akin to Richard Stallman. That doesn't really square with being Cheney's supporter.

New comment by jhbadger in "I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up"

jhbadger — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:27:24 +0000

Or just plain FoxPro. I was writing dBase programs to put myself through undergrad in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I really liked the early DOS versions of FoxPro with their extensive mouse-driven TUI -- even more elaborate than the ones Borland had for their "Turbo" languages.

New comment by jhbadger in "I want to live like Costco people"

jhbadger — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:54:54 +0000

I also find it funny that many of the people who look down on Costco rave about Trader Joe's and find it cool -- even though, like Kirkland, Trader Joe's products are mostly de-badged brands as well.

New comment by jhbadger in "I want to live like Costco people"

jhbadger — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:49:32 +0000

Coke is amazingly popular around the entire world, though. You can go to China, India, South Africa, and find Coke for sale and selling well even though they have their own traditional beverages. Obviously sugar water isn't very good for you -- it's liquid candy, but the idea that people only drink it if they've been "indoctrinated" isn't very likely.