Hacker News: roter

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

New comment by roter in "Discworld Rules"

roter — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 16:11:38 +0000

One of his (Sir Terry) sources for inspiration was Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [0]. Indeed he wrote a foreword for one of them.

[0] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

New comment by roter in "Time Dilation Formula / Calculator"

roter — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:33:02 +0000

How do you stop so you don't go whizzing past Alpha Centauri at near light speed? :)

New comment by roter in "Orbit by Mozilla"

roter — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 13:55:46 +0000

When running Orbit on the comments in this page:

> The Orbit add-on by Mozilla is a new AI-powered tool that summarizes and answers queries about web content, including articles and videos. It uses a Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) hosted on Mozilla's GCP instance. The add-on is free to use and works on various websites, including Gmail, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube, and more. However, some users have raised concerns about the size of the model and its privacy implications, as well as the fact that it requires an internet connection to function. Additionally, some users have suggested that Mozilla should focus on improving the browser itself rather than developing new add-ons.

New comment by roter in "Google removed Organic Maps from the Play Store"

roter — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 12:25:03 +0000

s/malice/avarice.