Hacker News Reader

JoeDaDudeon We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

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.

JoeDaDudeon Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

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...

JoeDaDudeon Learning Creative Coding

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

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

JoeDaDudeon Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

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

JoeDaDudeon A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment

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

JoeDaDudeon A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment

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

JoeDaDudeon Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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

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

JoeDaDudeon Television is 100 years old today

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

JoeDaDudeon Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

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.

JoeDaDudeon Level S4 solar radiation event

There is a video update from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. (I could only find this on Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/reel/1190509063198524

JoeDaDudeon AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos

I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.

JoeDaDudeon Paperbacks and TikTok

And yet, penny dreadful editions and pulp magazines that existed before pocket books... did they have the same effect? Or did they only produce pocket book writers?

JoeDaDudeon NOAA deploys new generation of AI-driven global weather models

I know someone pursuing a degree in meteorology at well known university for the subject and I asked that person if they are being taught about these and other AI weather models, about how they work, how to evaluate them for effectiveness, etc.

The answer: AI is not even covered, at least at the undergrad level. This is just a sample of one, so are any other universities educating future meteorologists on this subject?

JoeDaDudeon How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)

For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...

JoeDaDudeon How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)

I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.

JoeDaDudeon Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

Cool! Reminds of the Music From Outer Space synth in which the designer makes the claim that it "can actually get a child away from a television" and includes a video to prove it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6M_KrZByz4

MFOS Weird Sound Generator

https://musicfromouterspace.com/index.php?CATPARTNO=WSG001&P...

JoeDaDudeon Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall

On the subject of walls... Cortez reported seeing a wall blocking off an entire valley on his way to Tenochtitlan. One source reported the wall was 6 miles long, and yet it seems to have disappeared without a trace. And yet, Both the London Wall and Hadrian's Wall, though much older still have surviving ruins to this day.

JoeDaDudeon The Computer Church – Pennsylvania Computer and Technology Museum

Same here, and I've lived very close to their location for... well, decades now and had no idea this existed.

Maybe one reason is that you can't just walk in. "If you wish to see the collection, we can arrange an appointment. "

JoeDaDudeon 40k-Year-Old Symbols in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

To be fair, in the video TED talk by Genevieve von Petzinger, she does not claim these are "writing", instead calling the symbols "graphic communication". So not a language, much less writing, but still conveying a shared meaning between the sender (writer) and the recipient (observer). She does admit speculating these symbols could be clan or family identifiers, but does not attempt to ascribe any meaning beyond that.

JoeDaDudeon Introduction to Computer Music

"Computer Music" is a very broad term (no surprises here) so, like many here, I can point out topics that are not covered. In particular, computer music (aka algorithmic) composition [1], or very recent AI techniques like the Google seq2seq example at [2], or the (unpublished, but probably a form of generative adversarial networks) techniques used by SunoAI and Udio.

[1]. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html

[2]. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11325

JoeDaDudeon Show HN: A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments

Thanks for posting, will have to try it out later. I hope it works with my HP Reverb through Windows MR and/or Steam VR.

Re: pedagogy. Here is an anecdote. The very old Java game linked below is a 4d puzzle where players would have to rotate a tesseract to pass a ball through a hole. Comments made at the time were that players would fumble for a while but would eventually "get it" and after that the play was simple and obvious. I never got to that point. Maybe I'll fire it up and see if I can do better now.

http://harmen.vanderwal.eu/hypercube/

JoeDaDudeon The sumerian game early computer game

Cool! TFA is not clear on how the slides and audio would be triggered from the teletype though. I've never heard of any application from that era doing this.

Also, who else wants to see the (lost) game source code in APL?

JoeDaDudeon Show HN: OffChess – Offline chess puzzles app

I don't want to detract in the slightest from this fantastic app (I will be getting it shortly), I just want to point out another set of Chess puzzles for folk like me that enjoy this stuff. Check out the World Champs app, it has puzzles (mostly) taken from actual end games:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-world-champions/...

JoeDaDudeon YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

I watched all the ads, just at 100x speed. It doesn't work anymore - RIP the Ad Accelerator - but I could use it guilt free knowing the ads were watched and google collected their money

https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator

JoeDaDudeon MiniMax-M1 open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model

As best I can tell from a gloss-over read, it doesn't use anything like the Minimax algorithm. Astute readers are aware that one of the first applications of Minimax was in an AI chess program designed by Claude Shannon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Shannon's_compu...

JoeDaDudeon Show HN: A Implementation of Alpha Zero for Chess in MLX

Cool! I'd love to tinker with this and see about adapting it to other perfect information games. If you have any suggestions (or warnings) before I do this, please let me know!.

JoeDaDudeon Practical SDR: Getting started with software-defined radio

This is a gentle reminder that this text book might be applicable, depending on how you use your SDR:

Communication Systems Engineering with GNU Radio: A Hands-on Approach Jean-Michel Friedt, Herve Boeglen

https://www.wiley.com/en-fr/Communication+Systems+Engineerin...

JoeDaDudeon The scientific “unit” we call the decibel

Maybe you can say "6 dbm/s"

JoeDaDudeon Diffusion models explained simply

Coincidentally, I was just watching this explanation earlier today:

How AI Image Generators Work (Stable Diffusion / Dall-E) - Computerphile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CIpzeNxIhU