Hacker News: roter

New comment by roter in "Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982"

roter — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:52:42 +0000

We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.

New comment by roter in "Lake Ontario ("Lake America")"

roter — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:12:45 +0000

> Canadians also don’t seem to understand that this situation is only going to get worse and America can no longer be considered a friend.

As a Canadian, I very much understand that this will/can get worse, and not just for the US. The problems of America do not stop at Trump. He is merely the distracting, mercurial figurehead of a dysfunctional government and populist movement.

It is not a matter of friendship --- the average American isn't that different than the average Canadian. Some of my best friends and favoured colleagues are Americans. We can't turn this into Americans v. Canadians. We're all just getting exposed to the same social media cues that feed on fear and despair driven by profit and bad actors which leads to an erosion of trust and goodwill. America may just be a few short years ahead of the rest of us. We need to recognize who/what is driving us apart and fight that.

New comment by roter in "Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity"

roter — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:21:44 +0000

Most building professionals, urban/city/master planners/engineers are explicitly incorporating resilience into their designs at all levels. This includes both new designs and retrofitting old buildings.

Places of emergency cooling refuge, parks, backup power to ensure energy/water continue, passive features like solar heating, natural ventilation, bioswales, air quality filtering, cool roofs/roads, water features, overhangs/louvers/awnings, insulation, thermal mass, etc, etc.

These are things grass roots can do now to mitigate impacts while governments dither and punt hard decisions into the future.

New comment by roter in "Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22"

roter — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:50:46 +0000

The confirmation email takes a few minutes.

New comment by roter in "Myths about /dev/urandom (2014)"

roter — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:52:09 +0000

I saw a note from an earlier year's discussion saying the css has been changed over the years. Perhaps it was easier then to discern fact or myth, truth or fiction.

New comment by roter in "Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse"

roter — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:31:24 +0000

> ... potential collapse of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC.

The Gulf Stream is not also known as the AMOC. The nature of the Gulf Stream (intense surface current flowing off the eastern coast of North America) is largely driven by wind torque (westerlies in the mid-latitudes, easterlies in the tropics and polar regions) with the intensification due to Coriolis and coastal friction. What we're talking about collapsing is the overturning part largely driven by the differences in salt & temperature between the surface and the abyss. This overturning intensifies the heat transport from tropics to poles and pulls the Gulf Stream farther north:

  All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream
  -- Ulysses, James Joyce

New comment by roter in "European Alternatives"

roter — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:25:15 +0000

Somewhat similar for Canada:

https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives

New comment by roter in "Is GitHub Down?"

roter — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:07:24 +0000

Browsing is slow. Can browse folders but can't open individual files. Pink unicorns with fiery manes.

New comment by roter in "Show HN: A store that generates products from anything you type in search"

roter — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:34:28 +0000

Hitting the "I'd Buy" button gets me "Your bank account is filing a restraining order". Lovely.

New comment by roter in "An average human breathes out roughly 1kg of carbon dioxide a day"

roter — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:12:09 +0000

Isn't the main reason because you're not eating?

New comment by roter in "Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate"

roter — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:06:35 +0000

The whispey ones are largely transparent to incoming shortwave radiation but largely opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. You just need to put on your ~10 micron wavelength goggles.

New comment by roter in "What's stopping America from going all-in on heat pumps?"

roter — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:34:57 +0000

The pros for heat pumps are numerous. There is the issue of resilience to extreme weather. ASHRAE is funding a project, just getting underway, to create a map, first of the USA but anticipated to be expanded to worldwide, of heat pump resilience in the face of an expected change in the frequency of extreme events. Those wanting to learn more:

https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...

New comment by roter in "Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system"

roter — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:19:30 +0000

And I went straight to storing large numerical arrays, i.e. replacement for Zarr, NetCDF, HDF, etc

New comment by roter in "British naval dominance during the age of sail"

roter — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:29:04 +0000

There is also the theory that the British just had more practice at gunnery and sailhandling while blockading the French/Spanish in the various ports.

New comment by roter in "U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter"

roter — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 13:10:30 +0000

http://archive.today/dalBp

New comment by roter in "Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming"

roter — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 14:18:04 +0000

Clouds have two main impacts: reflect incoming, shortwave radiation back to space and absorb (and re-radiation up and down) outgoing, longwave radiation from the surface. The interplay and relative proportion between these two impacts has long been a challenge and depends upon the cloud altitude (low/high), composition (water,ice), and optical depth.

New comment by roter in "Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming"

roter — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 14:14:10 +0000

Units provided were power not energy. The number provided is just the product of the solar constant and the cross-sectional area of Earth [0], roughly.

[0] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=100943

New comment by roter in "Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone?"

roter — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 13:36:46 +0000

I always found this 2/3rds statistic hard to believe but it counts all coastlines as a border zone [0].

As a Canadian, I'm more concerned with the vast percentage of us who live within 100 miles of the US border.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

New comment by roter in "Repealing the CHIPS Act risks US national security"

roter — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:07:40 +0000

https://archive.is/m3TcW/share

New comment by roter in "Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library"

roter — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:28:24 +0000

Very interesting and promising package.

I especially like that there is a PyQt interface which might provide an alternative to another great package: pyqtgraph[0].

[0] https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph