Hacker News: Aardwolf

New comment by Aardwolf in "Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age"

Aardwolf — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:03:33 +0000

Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?

New comment by Aardwolf in "Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards"

Aardwolf — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:21:46 +0000

> Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does?

A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.

New comment by Aardwolf in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

Aardwolf — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:47:56 +0000

This is the most dwarven thing I've read today

New comment by Aardwolf in "The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers"

Aardwolf — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:49:46 +0000

I feel like there could be a fifth finger at the top 90 degrees rotated compared to the others, to e.g. click a pen

New comment by Aardwolf in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

Aardwolf — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:18:14 +0000

> the implementation may assume any thread will eventually do one of the following: terminate, call a library I/O function, access a volatile glvalue, or perform a synchronization or atomic operation

Why is that rule needed? I could make my for loop try to solve the halting problem and it'll never finish either, circumventing that rule

New comment by Aardwolf in "Reversing Factorio's RNG"

Aardwolf — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:17:16 +0000

> We chose taus88 mainly because it is the fastest from boost’s generators.

That's an RNG from 1996. It seems neither recent C++ standards, nor boost, know anything about the modern PRNGs that are much faster yet better at passing test suites

EDIT: Ok the above quote was from 2014, and boost seems to know some now! https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/boost_random/...

New comment by Aardwolf in "A Dick Smith VZ200 without the Dick Smith"

Aardwolf — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:14:35 +0000

I know this brand even though I'm not Australian! Thanks to "Australian guy that screams at ipods" DankPods

New comment by Aardwolf in "Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life"

Aardwolf — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:44:47 +0000

Some of the mouse-overs don't seem to match, hovering over 'viruses' shows a raccoon, and hovering over 'lungfish' shows a bird eating a fish

New comment by Aardwolf in "How I feel about AI"

Aardwolf — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:10:10 +0000

What's wrong with titles starting with "How"? Of the various title rewriting rules on HN, this one seems to cause the most meaning-changing modifications

(Article title: "How I feel about AI". HN title: "I feel about AI")

New comment by Aardwolf in "Glacier Mice"

Aardwolf — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 20:18:22 +0000

I clicked the picture first without reading any of the article and was wondering "where are the mice? they must be well camouflaged!"

New comment by Aardwolf in "LinkedIn CringeBot 3000"

Aardwolf — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:03:45 +0000

What causes this style of linkedin posts anyway? What causes so many people to adopt that writing style?

The one where there's some short paragraph intended to evoke some feeling or thought, then longer ones that elaborate on it in some way. Or something like that, not sure how to describe it.

BTW its puzzle games are what keeps me coming back every day and see those posts :p

New comment by Aardwolf in "The sale of Electronic Arts has been finalized"

Aardwolf — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:02:19 +0000

I guess it'll keep existing with the name EA? "Public investment fund" doesn't sound too fitting for a game company

New comment by Aardwolf in "The Prospects for 128 Bit Processors ( John Mashey SGI 1995)"

Aardwolf — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:04:40 +0000

Personally I'm disappointed 128-bit floating point (quadruple precision) never properly made it into CPU's (sure it appeared in some niche ones here and there, but not in what we actually use today). After all, in the 1980's they had 80-bit ones, it's not even that far off, and they had millions times less transistors then.

While probably niche and applications that need higher precision using their own custom types anyway, they'd allow cool stuff like easy to program fractals with much higher detail than now. But also, less precision loss in many applications.

New comment by Aardwolf in "Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way"

Aardwolf — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:57:58 +0000

> In order to put the emission peak in the visible spectrum, the filament would need to run at ~5700 °C (...) No metal can survive these conditions: Tungsten melts at "only" 3422 °C.

Hmm, can we possibly find something that does survive at 5700 °C to use as a light source? Perhaps molten metal confined in a magnetic field...

New comment by Aardwolf in "Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others"

Aardwolf — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:34:06 +0000

Is there any info for a way to check this on your SNPs from genome sequencing data?

New comment by Aardwolf in "Show HN: Reverse Minesweeper"

Aardwolf — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:41:37 +0000

It has the option to play a tutorial that explains the controls

New comment by Aardwolf in "Extinct Media Museum Tokyo"

Aardwolf — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:12:04 +0000

Techmoan has to visit this place

New comment by Aardwolf in "Stolen Buttons"

Aardwolf — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:12:30 +0000

What is one to do? Unicode has dozens of arrows for each direction, but each of them has its height compared to the text rendered differently depending on font or platform

New comment by Aardwolf in "The World's 2,400 Castles"

Aardwolf — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:46:50 +0000

That's less than I expected for worldwide

Apparently Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc... were not really into castles, while Japan was?

New comment by Aardwolf in "Airport Simulator"

Aardwolf — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:41:09 +0000

4 successful landings before disaster struck, not a bad first day as ATC