Hacker News: Aardwolf

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

New comment by Aardwolf in "Sealed tomb filled with paintings and inscriptions discovered in Egypt"

Aardwolf — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:53:00 +0000

If I were in a tomb for 2000 year I wouldn't even mind if they can learn about the history of my era 2000 years later

New comment by Aardwolf in "Decoy Font"

Aardwolf — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:13:11 +0000

So if I squint my eyes I'm a human, if I don't squint them I'm a robot

New comment by Aardwolf in "Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone"

Aardwolf — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:07:16 +0000

It would be neat if it were a steampunk-style civilization traveling around their atmosphere in helium airships. But probably just helium escaping from rocks...

New comment by Aardwolf in "Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK"

Aardwolf — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:59:58 +0000

> One thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful.

If only they'd actually DO something with this meaningfulness. I love and use Linux as my daily driver, but desktop environments and everything around it have become so complicated yet worse than before.

In the past a simple config file with intuitive setting names inside of them could make you do anything you wanted.

Today they have all these layers of abstraction for themes, icon sets and light and dark mode and what not, but almost NO combination works!

If you set light mode, you'll get some light gray text on lighter gray background somewhere, but if you use dark mode, then you'll get some black text rendered on a black background elsewhere. And even if not involving light or dark mode, same misery with whatever themes like "Adwaita" and others, some things will work in one, other things in another, I've seen a PDF viewer that made everything black text on black background in some desktop themes... A PDF viewer can't even independently choose its own text and background color without the desktop environment messing with it?

No theme I found anywhere has _well visible_ scrollbars, they all seem to love making them as subtle as possible so you can hardly see where your scroll position actually is. No theme I found anywhere has a _clear visual distinction_ (different color, not just a subtle shade difference) for the selected window vs the non selected ones. This would be _extremely_ handy for knowing in what window you're typing now, even windows 3.11 got this (and the scrollbars, and the ability to customize your colors) better

While not latency, it's still a thing they just can't get right, and when things were less overdesigned it actually worked better, so what was all this for?

New comment by Aardwolf in "The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]"

Aardwolf — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:02:13 +0000

The eyes receptors are RGB too and they definitely capture all visible colors by definition (to be pedantic, yes there's also the rods for night vision, and the 'R' is more like yellow)

New comment by Aardwolf in "Alternate clock designs and time systems"

Aardwolf — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:23:25 +0000

Why not 64 minutes and 64 seconds for the hexadecimal in the base 16 clock? The second duration would be closer to the real life one (1.3 seconds) and 64 is closer to 60 too

New comment by Aardwolf in "1983 Northern Telecom Commodore Phone"

Aardwolf — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:08:30 +0000

Even the acoustic coupler seems to have had compatiblity issues, see timestamp 1:10 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqJ159pngY8 ("1986: Email - the Perfect Tech for the Jet Set? | Micro Live | BBC Archive")

New comment by Aardwolf in "Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art"

Aardwolf — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:53:57 +0000

> https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!

New comment by Aardwolf in "UK Brings in Full Social Media Ban for Under-16s"

Aardwolf — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:29:56 +0000

Maybe they can't make real friends if all the others are engulfed in social media

New comment by Aardwolf in "Show HN: 2 Weeks of Hallucinate – The Photo Gallery"

Aardwolf — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:59:51 +0000

I had no idea what I was looking at until I read the hacker news comments, what I was thinking it was was AI-hallucinated images of a combination of the Backrooms and the Metaverse

New comment by Aardwolf in "The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip"

Aardwolf — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:56:23 +0000

Any idea how much adder designs changed on modern CPUs compared to back then? I mean there's only so much you can optimize in those, I think...

New comment by Aardwolf in "Show HN: Putt.day a daily mini golf game"

Aardwolf — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:54:10 +0000

I don't know any since I'm not playing any golf simulator games myself, but most games on Steam work in Linux with Proton so you might find something there. That's not open source of course but you had it in parenthesis which I think means this was optional :)