HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

RRWagner

340 karma · joined June 8, 2012

Programmer from the early days of the Apple II (wrote the first book on assembly language programming for the Apple II), later developed the #1 K-12 educational application worldwide of the 90s and early 2000s(HyperStudio). More at rogerwagner.com.
submissionscomments
RRWagner··on Nobody wrote the Matrix and AI code-writing will be dead by 2036
I really enjoyed the writing in this.
RRWagner··on People that worked on the same idea for decades
Myself, Roger Wagner,HyperStudio, 1988...1998...2008+
RRWagner··on Top Pentagon Official Contracted Personal Lawyer to Handle Minerals Deal
For a king, and one that presumes themselves king, every act is official. The theory is that Congress can always impeach but we have seen and still see that they have no interest in doing so for any reason, no matter how egregious.
RRWagner··on Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk
And... once I stopped at a roadside farmer's stand and the fruit still had the grocery store chain label and barcode on it, just smaller stuff and perhaps older than at the original store.
RRWagner··on Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems
But I thought that our AI was trained by scanning all human knowledge and behavior with the goal of emulating and amplifying that ability and process and now we are surprised that it is doing what humans do?
RRWagner··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
I've been on jury duty several times and in each time the entire jury pool was dismissed an hour or so into the morning, with "all cases have been settled". As I was leaving, the official said, "see how efficient we are now?". I replied, "The guillotine is efficient, but it's not justice." Look into Aaron Swartz. The % of cases that go to trial is very small, in no small part because plea bargaining is no bargain at all. "Plead guilty and we'll do the minimum (whether you're actually guilty or not), or go to trial and we will seek the maximum sentence, which could be 30 years in prison. What's your answer?"
RRWagner··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Thank you for the heads up! There was an error in the conversion process. All the images are there now.
RRWagner··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
The book is "Making Good in Business" by Roger W. Babson. Babson gifted the book to Edison in 1921. Here is a link to a scan of another copy of the book in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P9-DAU-349/mode/2up

Here is my github repo with scans of the marginalia from Edison: https://github.com/RRWagner/Making-Good-in-Business-Babson-E...

RRWagner··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
The current administration
RRWagner··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
I have a book (not authored by Edison) that Thomas Edison scribbled his comments in the margin and I was quite happy to read them! Changing my own nearly-religious belief to never write in a book,I found that it totally changed my experience with the book and the author. There are thousands of copies of any particular modern book and it's no longer my task to preserve that unique copy for after the apocalypse. I would like to imagine my children one day being able to see their father's thoughts and dialogue with authors.
RRWagner··on AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
And if the company didn't need $XX,XXX*0.90 (or more) that you would have paid them to further develop their product and stay in business? If that other company now paid their own $50 in tokens? Maybe the overall flow of money in the economy went from $XX,XXX (you) + $XX,XXX (them) + $(not much, AI didn't exist yet) equals or is greater to $50 + $50 + ($xbillions in AI)? Dunno.
RRWagner··on For Most of the World, Open-Source AI Is the Only Way Forward
I would propose that copyrights not be eternal
RRWagner··on Moody Mush: An Interactive Mushroom Robot
This is a lovely project, and if you do the 3D print and assemble it, even if you use a different microcontroller inside, it is continual series of delightful discoveries in the details of the 3D and mechanical design and engineering, coding and artistic skill of the maker of this, SayaNIGHT. I could easily imagine this as a pair of "friendship lamps", or any number of other delightful variations.
RRWagner··on Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
A friend said at one of those moments, "And other than that, how was the play Mrs Lincoln?" And the 3rd person replied, "I don't know, I've never seen the play 'Mrs Lincoln'"
RRWagner··on Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
Daily
RRWagner··on I made my phone slow on purpose
I only doomscroll HN to 90 n times/day
RRWagner··on Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year
At the time, I stupidly thought Blockbuster would see what was coming and use their at the time larger size to pivot and do what Netflix had demonstrated would work. Kind of like when the Yellow Pages bought early Google. Oh wait...
RRWagner··on A laser-based process that enables adhesive-free paper packaging
I thought that this was going to be illustrations of the marvelous ways that the Japanese wrap and secure gifts without using any tape. When I was in Japan years ago I would tell them that a purchase was a gift just to see how they wrapped things. I might even still have something that I never unwrapped because the finished thing was a work of art in itself.
RRWagner··on Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
It seems that no one ever mentions that every dollar given up to tariffs is that much less for growing staff, equipment, facility and R&D expansion. It's literally a drag on the entire GDP and ecomomic growth.

More subtle is that every dollar saved in buying components from China is more money for all of the forementioned.

RRWagner··on Montana passes Right to Compute act (2025)
You cant drain a swamp by filling it with billionaire alligators.
RRWagner··on Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial
Here is an important difference. A century ago, the predator (seller) and the prey (buyer) were on equal evolutionary terms. Each generation of humans on either side of the transaction came into the world, learned to convince, learned to resist, then passed, and some balance was maintained. In this century, corporations and algorithms don't die, but the targets do. This means that the non-human seller is continuously, even immortally, learning, adapting and perfecting how to manipulate. The target, be it adult, adolescent, or child, is, and will be ever increasingly, at a severe disadvantage.
RRWagner··on If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)
It would be good to remember the Miranda warning: "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." (emphasis mine). It doesn't say, "maybe" or, "only if".
RRWagner··on Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
Every Roman fortification, medieval city & castle? Clarifying, compared to a single villager with a sword or even two.
RRWagner··on Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)
Do many people think that with their single assault rifle or other weap9n, that they would successfully defend against one or more truckloads of vandals looking to steal whatever they have stored up "self-sufficiently"? History seems to indicate that in the absence of law, those with the most people inside a fortified structure and position are the most likely to survive.
RRWagner··on Computers that used to be human
Sometime when you're in a used bookstore, thrift store or yard sale, keep an eye out for very old dictionaries, and if found, look up the word "conputer". You will find the proof of the human occupant of this definition surprisingly recently (as in 1930s)
RRWagner··on Presidential Immunity in the United States
It would seem now that Sotomayer was not speaking totally hypothetically.
RRWagner··on Intricuit: A touchscreen add-on for Mac laptops
Pretty much every school in the US has students using touchscreen Chromebooks. It's funnyish when a young person tries to touch my MacBook screen to do a quick action, and I have to tell them that it's necessary to go to the touchpad, diddle a little to find the cursor, then do a move action to get to get to the target. Dragging is even more puzzling, touch and drag on a screen vs. move, double-tap or ctrl-click, then drag, then tap to release. I'm sure some will help me with faster touchpad methods, but that aside, I've used Mac laptops for 30+ years, and generally feel that those who perceive touchscreens as a gorilla-arm problem just haven't used a touchscreen laptop. They provide a much more efficient interface for some common actions. Touchscreens are so common now that most Windows and Chrome devices have them as the norm. Always strikes me as a bit strange that Apple-priced Mac laptops lack a feature found in low-price competitors.
RRWagner··on State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'
Displaying Nazi symbols is allowed (protected) in the United States, but prohibited in Germany. Does that mean that any German person involved in enforcing pr even tangentially acting on that restriction would be ineligible for a U.S visa?
RRWagner··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
Working with a group of friends on a "microcontroller-for-makers" kind of thing called the MakerPort. (https://makerport.fun) Sort of similar to an Arduino or micro:bit, but uses the MicroBlocks programming editor (https://microblocks.fun) created by John Maloney, who was the original team leader for Scratch at MIT for 11 years. The hardware includes an mp3 player, I2C ports, accelerometer and true capacitive touch sensors.
RRWagner··on Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law
I used to do presentations at educational technology conferences and many (30+)years ago I speculated that "in the future" computers that could create would be licensed. This was based on the observation that every significant past technology under user control was eventually licensed for permission to operate - radio, television, cars, the list is long.
Page 1 of 4Next →