Hacker News: jhbadger

New comment by jhbadger in "Forth"

jhbadger — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:22:34 +0000

Don Lancaster did. He used to write programs in Postscript to make figures - he preferred that to using drawing programs.

New comment by jhbadger in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

jhbadger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:28:20 +0000

While there are things like heart rate monitors that can't be replicated on a phone, I've never understood why people bring up step tracking or timers as traits of a smartwatch. My phone tracks my steps and can be used to set a timer just as easily (probably easier as it is has a much larger screen).

New comment by jhbadger in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

jhbadger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:34:48 +0000

>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.

In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.

New comment by jhbadger in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

jhbadger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:20:08 +0000

8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.

New comment by jhbadger in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

jhbadger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:16:01 +0000

It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.

New comment by jhbadger in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

jhbadger — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:13:06 +0000

If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).

New comment by jhbadger in "Three governments agree on something the AI industry doesn't want to hear"

jhbadger — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:54:58 +0000

I think there needs actual statistical evidence (rather than sensationalist hysteria) that very many people think their chatbot lover is real. Before chatbots, there were (and still are as far as I know) phone sex lines where people paid to talk dirty to an actual person. There isn't any reason to believe that most users of sexy chatbots see them as any different from those.

New comment by jhbadger in "Three governments agree on something the AI industry doesn't want to hear"

jhbadger — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:49:01 +0000

The plural of anecdote is not data - and it was exactly these sort of anecdotes that led to the anti-D&D hysteria as well. Often something else was going on - for instance "Mazes & Monsters itself was very loosely based on an incident where a child prodigy who was known to be an avid D&D player commited suicide. The media was quick to blame D&D, but further investigation revealed he was suffering depression because he realized he was gay and didn't know how to tell his conservative religious parents.

New comment by jhbadger in "Three governments agree on something the AI industry doesn't want to hear"

jhbadger — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:13:38 +0000

Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters", a 1982 TV movie that supposedly exposed the sanity-destroying nature of RPGs. Now it looks just silly. Maybe, just as we now get that people can enjoy pretending to be an elf wizard without going insane, others enjoy pretending that a chatbot is their boyfriend and girlfriend and still be well adjusted members of society.

New comment by jhbadger in "The kids with phones are alright"

jhbadger — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:11:16 +0000

That's interesting - Github as social media? That's an idea of would never have thought of in a million years. Personally, I'd be glad if a child of mine hung out there - not at all like something like Instagram or Facebook.

New comment by jhbadger in "The kids with phones are alright"

jhbadger — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:43:22 +0000

Exactly. Drew Talbot's brilliant "Bistro Huddy" (which anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant whether as a server or in the kitchen can relate to) is done as Youtube shorts because that makes sense for comedy sketches. What exactly is wrong with a short vertical video? Just that it reminds people of Tiktok?

New comment by jhbadger in "The kids with phones are alright"

jhbadger — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:33:22 +0000

For starters, what's "social media"? It's kind of a undefinable phrase. Obviously Facebook and Instagram are agreed to be "social media".But is Youtube social media? How about HN? Or any website with a comment section?

New comment by jhbadger in "I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to Draw (With 9front)"

jhbadger — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:29:23 +0000

Do realize that the author is Czech. While being religious is the default and atheists face (mild) discrimination in places like the US, at least until the 1990s and the fall of Communism, things were reversed in (then) Czechoslovakia, with state supported atheism and religious people viewed as suspected dissidents.

New comment by jhbadger in "How to Start a Ruby Meetup"

jhbadger — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:04:34 +0000

Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as popular as BioPython (or I suppose Bioperl if anyone is still using that), but a similar niche.

New comment by jhbadger in "Canada's only watchmaking school still ticking after 80 years"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:31:54 +0000

A real, completely mechanical watch? No battery or crystal? I'm sure my Seiko isn't be best there is and maybe it could be improved with servicing, but I think electronics have given people unreasonable expectations of accuracy

New comment by jhbadger in "Canada's only watchmaking school still ticking after 80 years"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:22:51 +0000

Yeah, but I'm sure your microwave isn't mechanical. What makes a mechanical watch cool, even a cheap one, is that there are no electronics at all - just gears and springs and things. I think that's worth a trivial bit of inaccuracy even if a boring $10 digital watch can easily beat a $200 mechanical one in accuracy.

New comment by jhbadger in "Canada's only watchmaking school still ticking after 80 years"

jhbadger — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:43:33 +0000

Is it a Seiko 5 (self winding)? Yeah, those aren't that accurate, but I wouldn't call them "junk" - they do lose or gain a minute or two a day in my experience - I generally correct mine every couple of days against my phone or computer though.

New comment by jhbadger in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

jhbadger — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:14:16 +0000

In the 1980s, you often had programmers create the art and music for games, but for the last three decades at least there have been dedicated artists and composers who often have no coding skill at all.

New comment by jhbadger in "Moby Dick Workout (2022)"

jhbadger — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:35:22 +0000

I love how Moby Dick suddenly puts the story on hold and diverges into a chapter dealing with the classification of whales. 19th century novels do that a lot with Victor Hugo diverging into the architecture of Paris or whatever in his novels.

New comment by jhbadger in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

jhbadger — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:51:24 +0000

Costco also delivers -- I also live in a city in an apartment and order bulky things I don't want to carry from Costco online.