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daltont

151 karma · joined June 3, 2021

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daltont··on Why 'What's Opera, Doc?' looks like that
There was a NHL player named Jordan Leopold who played my favorite team.

My brain would go there every time he was mentioned in a broadcast.

daltont··on The Beauty of Roundabouts
I'm old enough to be "triggered" by the word "Roundabout" to have this "Yes" song to start playing in my head:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOrrNM4md8c

daltont··on Movie Scene Map – 13,312 films, series, games, anime and manga
I was just thinking about this concept a few days ago.
daltont··on Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives
"The 6809 saw some success, especially in arcade machines, but it did not steamroll the world the way the 6502 and Z80 did."

Could have mentioned the use of the 6809 in the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and the Dragon in the UK. Using the TRS-80 tag on something not using a Z-80 never made sense.

daltont··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)
Location: St. Louis, MO USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, REST, Scala, Typescript, SQL, Python

Resume/CV: https://daltontf.github.io/Resume.pdf

Email: In resume

Site: https://daltontf.github.io

Taught myself Java in 1997 and was able have it do the heavy lifting over the years. Have "kicked the tires" on a lot technologies over the years for side-projects evidenced by the menagerie of repositories on my GitHub.

daltont··on Ask HN: Similar to Brex what are some crazy company pivots no one talks about
Old one.

Coleco known for the ColecoVision home video game system and the Coleco Adam home computer started out as the "Connecticut Leather Company" in 1932. The business supplied leather and "shoe findings" (the supplies and paraphernalia of a shoe repair shop) to shoe repairers.

daltont··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
An exercise in simulating sports fandom on a map. To do things like simulate expansion and relocation of franchises.

The idea of turning this into a simulation game is a possibility hence "warz" in the name.

It is a bunch of Jupyter notebooks being served by Voila. The "Blank.ipynb" one is more interactive but the ergonomics need work.

It is running free tier hosting so it could swamped if enough people use it simultaneously:

https://sportwarzsim-production.up.railway.app/

https://github.com/daltontf/SportWarzSim

There are instructions to run locally via Docker in the README.md

daltont··on ‘Based on a True Story’ (2016-2019)
A idea like this has been on the back of my mind but more like forming a taxonomy of embellishments and dramatic license. Figure out which ones are somewhat necessary and which ones are "bad". Particularly bad would be those that villainize a real person which role in the actual event was more benign. Coach Dan Devine in "Rudy" and boxer Max Baer Sr. in "Cinderella Man" come to mind.
daltont··on Failed Soviet Venus lander Kosmos 482 crashes to Earth after 53 years in orbit
Paging Steve Austin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvc-FodxV4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE

daltont··on Why I'm Resigning from the National Science Foundation
Otherwise it is just a Strawman argument
daltont··on Ask HN: What are the most complicated machines humans have built?
Saturn V rocket
daltont··on The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
I've internally thought of a similar metaphor. Previous generations didn't have to conscientious of food intake. Food options were more limited, there wasn't as much processed/calorie-dense food, work was more manual in nature and people likely walked greater distances. My dad who grew up during the Depression in the U.S. weighed 140 pounds in his '20s, but hit 280 in his '40s. That generation was kind of blindsided by the affect of this.

Likewise, my generation is dealing with an explosion of easy to consume streams of information and entertainment and we are kind of blindsided by that I have to conscientious of spending too much time consuming online information with Reddit being my biggest vice.

daltont··on Show HN: Flyde – an open-source visual programming language
I was just thinking about something where I could design web based workflows that could use online services to perform transformations on items dragged into a dropped and perhaps the output would be downloadable.

Maybe this exists elsewhere, but is is free?. It is still a thought and I haven't dig deep to see what exists, but Flyde seems kind of close.

daltont··on Tal is the programming language for the Uxn virtual machine (2021)
I did a tiny bit in the late '90s at Mastercard. Wrote my share of TACL macros before that.

When I first saw the "99 Bottles of Beer" site, I was working for a company the was using the POSIX-layer OSS and C. I was able to "drop down" into Guardian and re-learn enough to contribute: https://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-tandem-tal-437.html

daltont··on Tal is the programming language for the Uxn virtual machine (2021)
I guess the original TAL is not making a comeback:

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

daltont··on Intuitive Machines successfully lands on the Moon
Was it run by Andy Griffith?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

daltont··on Ask HN: What can today's youth learn from young people of the 80s?
"- The world isn't getting worse"

Bad stuff has always happened, but when something bad happens now, more people are made aware of it.

For example, when I was in high school in the the early '80s there was a shooting at a high school in my Midwestern US city. A kid brought a gun to school and shot two kids who said something about his brother. The shooter then turned the gun on himself. One of the other kids died too.

This was big news locally, I don't remember national TV coverage of it. There was no internet so if someone was 500 miles away, they never knew about it. It didn't spur a national debate about gun control, kid's mental health or school safety.

daltont··on German developer guilty of 'hacking' for exposing hardcoded credentials in app
Sounds similar to a case where I am from:

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/25/turns-out-it-was-actuall...

The "hacking" was decrypting social security numbers from BASE64.

daltont··on The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
The ironic thing with increase in GDP is that life becomes almost too easy. In the past the difficulty of life didn't require a person to have use as much willpower.

Easier life with things like plentiful food and entertainment options requires willpower to not over-indulge. A factory worker or subsistence farmer didn't have force themselves to exercise or worry about spending to much time watching TV. They had to work to not starve.

daltont··on NASA’s tech demo streams first video from deep space via laser
It would be just be cool just to have a HD footage of satellite orbiting Mars or Venus.
daltont··on NASA’s tech demo streams first video from deep space via laser
"cats have been dominating the airwaves from the beginning of broadcast video."

Maybe the Kzinti will think we are long lost relatives after receiving them.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kzin)

daltont··on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
https://github.com/daltontf/clipzoomfx

I wrote it to be able to extract exceptional plays from footage of my daughter's volleyball teams and be able to zoom in on each clip. Pretty much a minimal viable product.

daltont··on Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Williams Electronics used the 6809 in Defender, Robotron, Joust and Sinistar. It was more expensive. Tandy chose it for the TRS-80 Color Computer and sacrificed dedicated sound generation hardware for it to keep costs down.
daltont··on Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024?
The book "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", is handy is you are Bugs Bunny and your are cornered by pack a dogs in New York. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XFFqbr27Vc&t=148s )
daltont··on The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets (2020)
The imagery of the football players at the buffet brings back memories of my team going to the breakfast buffets at Shoney's the morning of Saturday games at noon. We didn't need lunch and the food was down before game time.
daltont··on The hunt for life in Alpha Centauri
The idea of silicon based life reminds of this old B-movie:

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

daltont··on Ask HN: Which language will you try for this year's Advent of Code and why?
Inko would be interesting (https://inko-lang.org/)
daltont··on Dungeon KeeperFX 1.0
Every time I see a project ending with "FX", my first thought is that it must be implemented using JavaFX.
daltont··on Apollo astronaut Frank Borman has died
I read this book, https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Men-Odyssey-Astronauts-Journey... and Apollo 8's accomplishments were way under-rated.
daltont··on Ask HN: What minor UI/UX issues annoy you on frequent basis?
Confirmation dialogs "Are you sure you want to cancel xxxx" with "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons. The "Cancel" button cancels the cancel and always gives me pause.
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