Hacker News: HansHamster

New comment by HansHamster in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

HansHamster — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:58:55 +0000

Yeah, I'm still concerned about crystalline entities suddenly showing up. Have they ever fixed it? I don't see anything in the issue tracker, probably because no one was left last time to report it...

New comment by HansHamster in "The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation"

HansHamster — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:57:23 +0000

Maybe their CRTs had horrible burn-in and they had to erase everything 9 times before it was gone...

New comment by HansHamster in "Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2"

HansHamster — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:20:00 +0000

I would expect all RNG algorithms to be deterministic and stable with their seed, but the cryptographically secure ones to have some additional properties like making it unfeasible to reverse the seed from the output, having a very long period or strong guarantees on the distribution of the output. It's just that using a 'secure' algorithm is often overkill for a game when you don't really need those extra guarantees.

New comment by HansHamster in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

HansHamster — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:00:41 +0000

It feels a bit unfair to say that it is faster by being able to tell the total length from the first byte and capping it at 64 bit, while some of the other formats can store arbitrarily large integers. I guess you could use another variable length encoding for the prefix at the cost of some performance and using even more space...

New comment by HansHamster in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

HansHamster — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:34:31 +0000

Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)

That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.

New comment by HansHamster in "The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube"

HansHamster — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:13:33 +0000

And Hamamatsu (and some others) still produce and sell photomultiplier tubes. The microchannel plate PMTs are pretty nifty things [1]. You can get single-digit picosecond time resolution out of them. [1]: https://www.hamamatsu.com/us/en/product/optical-sensors/pmt/...

New comment by HansHamster in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

HansHamster — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:35:09 +0000

bacon!

New comment by HansHamster in "SI Units for Request Rate (2024)"

HansHamster — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:03:58 +0000

Clearly, we should place a radioactive source, a Geiger counter, and a computer in a sealed box. Every time the counter registers a decay, the computer performs a HTTP GET. Thus, we end up with Schrödinger's webserver...

New comment by HansHamster in "Study: 'Security Fatigue' May Weaken Digital Defenses"

HansHamster — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:45:47 +0000

At least you can tick the "stay signed in" checkbox and... get kicked out a few hours later with a smug "you successfully signed out" message.

New comment by HansHamster in "AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going"

HansHamster — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:53:39 +0000

Obligatory Futurama reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vIBijzg4w

New comment by HansHamster in "The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs"

HansHamster — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:17:06 +0000

> which is faithfully translated by the (hopefully bug-free) compiler.

"Hey Claude, translate this piece of PHP code into Power10 assembly!"

New comment by HansHamster in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

HansHamster — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:49:34 +0000

> You have to be the one who reaches out.

But that's the whole issue. Who am I supposed to reach out to? The 2 people at work I occasionally talk to because they happen to sit in the same office as me?

New comment by HansHamster in "Linux is good now"

HansHamster — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:13:10 +0000

Funny how it went from "just get an Nvidia card for Linux" and "oh my god, what did I do to deserve fglrx?" to "just get an AMD card" and "it's Nvidia, what did you expect?"

New comment by HansHamster in "Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)"

HansHamster — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:14:35 +0000

> Recently, GPT informed me that the strong force is really a tiny after-effect of the "QCD force"

Maybe you should not take everything GPT tells you at face value? I have no idea what this QCD force is supposed to be. The strong force is _the_ force of QCD. The Standard Model still considers the electromagnetic, weak and strong force. The description of the weak and EM force can be unified into the electroweak force and there are theories that try to also unify it with the strong force and even gravity, but there are issues on the theory side and no clear evidence on the experimental side as to which direction is the correct one.

The Standard Model and General Relativity are still our most successful theories. It is clear that they don't tell the whole picture, but (annoyingly?) it is not clear at all where this is going.

Just for dark matter there are probably a dozen proposed hypothetical particles, but so far we have found none. But maybe it's something completely different...

New comment by HansHamster in "Intel could return to Apple computers in 2027"

HansHamster — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:53:57 +0000

that was the joke

New comment by HansHamster in "Intel could return to Apple computers in 2027"

HansHamster — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 21:51:38 +0000

Should be fine as long as the chips have ECC

New comment by HansHamster in "Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on"

HansHamster — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 06:56:50 +0000

Isn't Incus/LXD separate from and running on top of LXC? People sometimes seem to use the names interchangeably which can be annoying because I run just plain LXC but when looking stuff up and come across "this is how you do XYZ on LXC" they are actually talking about LXD and it doesn't really apply. I can't recall what is was last time, but this has happened a couple of times already...

New comment by HansHamster in "Tektronix equipment has been used in many movies and shows"

HansHamster — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:02:40 +0000

Meanwhile, the DPO4054 I use at work has issues with half of the buttons, the data returned by some commands doesn't match the manual, and the probes from some newer scopes don't fit even though they all just use BNC? Maybe the software on it is just outdated? Nope, the only version you can get from the Tektronix page is older than what is on the scope. And there are newer versions, but they are only for the DPO4054B and not the older DPO4054...

New comment by HansHamster in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

HansHamster — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:01:36 +0000

This also confused me. The current ones have very distinct colors and also all the previous series used different colors as far as I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Swiss_franc

New comment by HansHamster in "When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it"

HansHamster — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 01:44:46 +0000

This brings back memories of my old HP laptop with an Athlon 64 and a Radeon X200M. The crappy FGLRX driver only supported overlays (afair) and so when running something like Compiz it would transform the window with the green background but the video itself would stay in place and it would just stick parts of the video on top where it happened to overlap. I still remember being excited when the open source drivers finally gained support for r300 and could do proper textured video...