Hacker News: maxnoe

New comment by maxnoe in "Future euro banknote design proposals"

maxnoe — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:43:09 +0000

Because he composed the anthem?

New comment by maxnoe in "New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory"

maxnoe — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:22:44 +0000

Who blatantly ripped that off from Karl Marx...

New comment by maxnoe in "'Complex numbers are not needed for quantum mechanics'"

maxnoe — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:00:21 +0000

> The square root of -1 doesn't correspond to any quantity you could count or measure directly (you can't have negative one apple, for instance)

That must be the worst explanation of complex numbers I ever read. It's not even remotely connected.

New comment by maxnoe in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

maxnoe — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:17:33 +0000

Unix time does not count elapsed seconds in real time since 1970-01-01T00:00:00, this is a common misconception.

Unix time assumes a fixed number of seconds per day. 86400. If a leap second is inserted, either end of June or end of December, the day is 86401 seconds long.

There are different implementations for how your Unix time will behave 24 hours before to 24 hours after the leap second. A timestamp might just repeat during the leap second or the system changes the length of a second in a time range around the leap second introduction to make up the difference. This is called smearing.

A simple example is the elapsed time between these two timestamps:

    2016-12-31 23:59:50
    2017-01-01 00:00:10

Unix time differs by 20 seconds (assuming the system/library doesn't use smearing). But actually elapsed time is 21 seconds, since

    2016-12-31 23:59:60

was the last added leap second. This timestamp cannot be represented by Unix time (again assuming no smearing, with smearing you could).

New comment by maxnoe in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

maxnoe — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 06:31:40 +0000

No, the current rules are being relaxed because with the current ones, a negative leap second _might_ happen in the near future.

It did not happen yet. No negative leap second that should have been inserted was skipped.

See this chart here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1#/media/File:Leapsecond.ut...

You can see the the positive leap seconds as jumps upward once the graph reaches around -0.5 s.

We were never close to reaching +0.5 seconds with a positive trend and we are still relatively far away from that.

New comment by maxnoe in "Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests"

maxnoe — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:15:14 +0000

GitHub Incident again/

Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests

maxnoe — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:15:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/xy1tt3hs572m

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48293080

Points: 335

# Comments: 208

New comment by maxnoe in "Can You Find the Comet?"

maxnoe — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:34:22 +0000

Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, we detect optical light emitted by high energy particle Cascades in the atmosphere to observe cosmic gamma radiation.

The particles need the atmosphere to interact, Cherenkov light is only emitted in an optical medium and because it's optical light we measure we are affected by satellites. Not as strongly as optical telescopes though, because the air showers last for only tens of nanoseconds.

New comment by maxnoe in "Zed 1.0"

maxnoe — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:39:39 +0000

One would be support for ligatures

New comment by maxnoe in "Can You Find the Comet?"

maxnoe — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:35:13 +0000

Our telescopes actually need the (or at least an) atmosphere to function.

There are some classes of observatories, which you cannot build in space but which are still affected by satellites to some degree.

New comment by maxnoe in "Flickr: The first and last great photo platform"

maxnoe — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:45:55 +0000

> This is where I usually insert that 3,000 year old Gandalf meme.

Elrond?

New comment by maxnoe in "Tip: Web requests should not be measured in Hz [Hertz]"

maxnoe — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:41:01 +0000

Copying my comment from the other recent thread:

The authority on the definition of SI units is very clear:

> The hertz shall only be used for periodic phenomena and the becquerel shall only be used for stochastic processes in activity referred to a radionuclide

Usually, no radionuclides are involved in web requests.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/d/guest/si-brochure-9-en-pdf

New comment by maxnoe in "Vera C. Rubin Observatory has Discovered 11,000 New Asteroids"

maxnoe — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:57:29 +0000

Keep in mind that our current instruments are not really sensitive to most exoplanets that would be interesting for a sci-fi setting.

Current instruments are mostly good at finding large planets around small stars, we are basically blind to earth-like planets around sun-like stars.

See e.g. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2019/queloz/lectur...

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

maxnoe — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:13:28 +0000

Please don't.

The authority on the definition of SI units is very clear:

> The hertz shall only be used for periodic phenomena and the becquerel shall only be used for stochastic processes in activity referred to a radionuclide

Neither is usually the case for requests.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/d/guest/si-brochure-9-en-pdf

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

maxnoe — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:57:17 +0000

Yes, the year has pi * 1e7 seconds

1e5 / 3.14e7 ≈ 3e-3, milli, not micro

New comment by maxnoe in "Am I German or Autistic?"

maxnoe — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:24:59 +0000

Or as Stephen Fry put it: "Nature, Nurture and Nietzsche", very fitting here.

New comment by maxnoe in "OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval"

maxnoe — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:31:35 +0000

There is a section in the GitHub Readme of Eurooffice with a justification of the fork:

https://github.com/Euro-Office#euro-office-liberates-the-onl...

New comment by maxnoe in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

maxnoe — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:40:06 +0000

"Most companies still do not publish Linux builds for creative software"

There, fixed it for you.

It's not like Linux is the blocker here.

New comment by maxnoe in "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student"

maxnoe — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:41:36 +0000

Absolutely not. You could argue this for entry level lectures, but not at the PhD level. PhD is learning how to do original research, how could you separate teaching that from doing that?

New comment by maxnoe in "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"

maxnoe — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:55:07 +0000

Ever tried latexmk for the automation?