Hacker News: jhbadger

New comment by jhbadger in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:37:44 +0000

Eh, it worked fine in my multiroom apartment - again, this is how all first generation robot vacuums worked. Mine eventually died and I got a new one with lidar, and the main adventage is that with mapping I can specify areas to avoid like a chair whose base tends to trap robot vacuums.

New comment by jhbadger in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:05:31 +0000

It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.

New comment by jhbadger in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:15:40 +0000

The classic Roombas from a decade or so ago worked without any sort of mapping or camera at all -- they basically did a version of the "run and tumble" algorithm used by many bacteria -- go in one direction until you can't any more then go off in a random new one. It may not be efficient but it does work for covering territory.

New comment by jhbadger in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

jhbadger — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:43:56 +0000

That's a different issue. Things like Electron are popular not because native development is buggy, but because most developers these days are web developers. They know Javascript. They've never written anything in C/C++ or even the slightly friendlier Swift, Rust, or Go. Electron lets people who only know the Web make desktop apps.

New comment by jhbadger in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

jhbadger — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:57:16 +0000

You can argue that a true meritocracy still wouldn't be ideal (as Young did), but that argument seems irrelevant -- the problem in the real world is that we pretend that we have a meritocracy, but often the person who gets the promotion or whatever isn't actually the best at their job, but is a cousin or fraternity brother of the person in charge -- the old "it isn't what you know, but who you know".

New comment by jhbadger in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

jhbadger — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:49:59 +0000

Or the "Whiz Kids" that Robert McNamara brought into the DoD in the 1960s who were supposed to win the war in Vietnam through game theory and other applications of science and technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...

New comment by jhbadger in "Siclair Microvision (1977)"

jhbadger — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:35:11 +0000

He did have his showman side certainly -- but I'd argue that Alan Sugar of Amstrad was more the UK Steve Jobs because Clive Sinclair really did have deep technological knowledge himself (even though he obviously also had a staff of talented engineers like Richard Altwasser who rarely got their due in the public eye)

New comment by jhbadger in "Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important"

jhbadger — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 11:07:48 +0000

There isn't a technical reason why titles have to be that short, memory isn't in that short supply despite the RAM shortages. A function, therefore an algorithm, is deciding to truncate the title for some reason.

New comment by jhbadger in "Potato Fruit"

jhbadger — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:00:46 +0000

It makes sense that they'd make a tomato-like fruit because potato plants, like tomato plants, are part of the Solanaceae (nightshade family). Also, not that surprising for the same reason that they are poisonous

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

New comment by jhbadger in "Byte Magazine Archive 1975 to 1995"

jhbadger — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:32:30 +0000

I remember Anacreon! I used to play that, and another Turbo Pascal game called BEGIN that was a sort of port of the Star Fleet Battles board game on my first PC clone that I got in the early 1990s aftet leaving the 8-bit world.

New comment by jhbadger in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

jhbadger — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:57:05 +0000

I really liked the widget set (custom made for the program) that xv used. In the 1990s it looked far more "professional" than most GUI apps on Linux/Unix in general.

New comment by jhbadger in "What came after the 486?"

jhbadger — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:19:04 +0000

I remember when IBM was upset that various companies were calling their 80286 computers " AT" like the IBM AT ("advanced technology"). But you can't trademark a preposition!

New comment by jhbadger in "I quit editing photos"

jhbadger — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:49:43 +0000

I'm just waiting for daguerreotypes to come back into fashion.

New comment by jhbadger in "Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists"

jhbadger — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:37:36 +0000

I think Rafael Irizarry put it best over a decade ago -- while historically there was a feud between self-declared "frequentists" and "Bayesians", people doing statistics in the modern era aren't interested in playing sides, but use a combination of techniques originating in both camps: https://simplystatistics.org/posts/2014-10-13-as-an-applied-...

New comment by jhbadger in "Books of the Century by Le Monde"

jhbadger — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:20:46 +0000

If you found Ulysses confusing, what would you think of Finnegan's Wake? Ulysses is practically a children's book in comparison. As for the lack of 1984, Orwell was an important author sure, but not particularly a good one. People read 1984 and Animal Farm for the messages, not for the exquisite prose that someone like Joyce can manage.

New comment by jhbadger in "Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” [video]"

jhbadger — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:05:54 +0000

I also didn't think it was quite as good as it was hyped to be, but as someone who has long been into the web-based SCP stuff, I did appreciate how the book is introducing SCP to a wider audience.

New comment by jhbadger in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

jhbadger — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:20:33 +0000

Maybe I am just old, but I have absolutely no idea what this passage is about -- why would people be fiddling with Bluetooth on a date and why would it cause them to forget their network?

>"Bluetooth does not work," Kravitz said in a recent interview, and it's not just headphones, but Bluetooth connections in general. "It's ruining important moments. Imagine the amount of times that you're with someone on a date, you're trying to set a vibe, and then you have to forget the network. On a date!"

New comment by jhbadger in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

jhbadger — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:01:59 +0000

You might not like this type of interface, but it is hardly "nonsensical". In the 1990s this sort of text-based GUI was common in DOS programs, such as Borland's "Turbo" languages and the original pre-Windows FoxPro.

New comment by jhbadger in "Pike: To Exit or Not to Exit"

jhbadger — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:49:31 +0000

Or the (mostly forgotten) scripting language Pike (derived from the internal language of a MUD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)

New comment by jhbadger in "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"

jhbadger — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:51:35 +0000

The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but were often typeset mockups of screens from the programs.