Hacker News: vasac

New comment by vasac in "FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX"

vasac — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:10:54 +0000

> Iran's situation is obviously very different.

Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.

We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).

And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.

New comment by vasac in "FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX"

vasac — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:52:36 +0000

> Germany would have to quickly get nukes

No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?

New comment by vasac in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

vasac — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:30:11 +0000

I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.

New comment by vasac in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

vasac — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:14:44 +0000

The OP probably thought of defense in the narrow sense as "the action of defending against or resisting an attack", and not in the broader sense defined as "we’re going to travel halfway around the world to kill a million people because that’s who we are". A common mistake.

New comment by vasac in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

vasac — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:56:39 +0000

I’m implying they aren’t getting ready because they think Russians are going to march on Berlin.

New comment by vasac in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

vasac — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:30:29 +0000

So while many of the reasons are questionable (understatement of the year), let’s focus on the last one. After America lost the war in Vietnam, what happened to those neighboring nations? Did they suffer from Vietnamese communists? The only Vietnamese intervention was in Cambodia, and hardly anyone thinks that wasn’t the right thing to do.

New comment by vasac in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

vasac — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:22:22 +0000

Yes, the previous time they were getting ready it was because those pesky Poles being an inch away from invading the Third Reich.

New comment by vasac in "Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)"

vasac — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:02:39 +0000

The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).

New comment by vasac in "21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains"

vasac — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:29:04 +0000

Both scripts have been taught in the early years of elementary school in Serbia for the past 80 years.

New comment by vasac in "21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains"

vasac — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:24:40 +0000

So Croats and Muslims fought each other bloodily because all Serbs wanted to live in one state? Funnily enough, they were already living in one state - Yugoslavia - so they certainly had no reason to start the war.

New comment by vasac in "21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains"

vasac — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:16:58 +0000

Russia pretty much took over all the USSR's external debts too.

New comment by vasac in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

vasac — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:52:44 +0000

> Do you think some evil military planners sat in the Pentagon...

Why shouldn’t he believe it?

You people believe the same kind of crap when you're told that X (insert the current boogeyman de jour) hates Murica and wants to kill you all.

New comment by vasac in "Iran launched unsuccessful attack on UK's Diego Garcia"

vasac — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 19:17:30 +0000

Americans can be convinced of anything without too much effort so that isn’t really a factor here.

New comment by vasac in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

vasac — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:51:27 +0000

One of my better cinema experiences was watching Austin Powers 3 at the theater in some random late-morning screening where there were only three friends and me in the hall, plus two elderly ladies in their 70s. They were laughing so hard that the movie became even funnier for us, because you somehow wouldn’t expect them to find it that hilarious.

Also, growing up in a small town in Yugoslavia in the 80s definitely didn’t guarantee a top-tier cinema experience, to put it mildly. But the feeling I had watching the James Bond opening credits from a damaged film reel, with frayed subtitles projected from a decades-old projector, is something I can never quite recreate when watching on a 4K screen from a perfect source. So there's that.

New comment by vasac in "FrameBook"

vasac — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:44:28 +0000

The worst part is that the discrete GPU was used to drive external displays, so now I’m stuck with a 17” integrated display, which is large for a laptop but still small for a computer that I’ll never again lug with me (it’s heavy by today’s standards).

New comment by vasac in "Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years"

vasac — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:09:38 +0000

> ... in the Balkans this was exclusively done in areas to harm civilians ...

It wasn’t.

While there were probably some areas that were mined with the intention of harming civilians, most of the mines were laid in places where you would expect the enemy to advance. In the section of the front where I was located, all minefields were laid with the intention of slowing down or preventing enemy infiltration (which does not exclude areas near human settlements).

There was simply no point in mining places that were under your control and where you expected your people to live after the war, unless it was necessary.

New comment by vasac in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

vasac — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:52:53 +0000

> Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?

Russia thought so too.

New comment by vasac in "Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged"

vasac — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:20:19 +0000

> The point is you don't have to attack Kaliningrad. A siege trivially collapses the place.

This is hilarious as naval blockade by itself is an act of war.

New comment by vasac in "Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”"

vasac — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:59:38 +0000

You’re in for a big surprise once you discover what happened after Nuremberg.

New comment by vasac in "What Happened to Abit Motherboards"

vasac — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:20:53 +0000

The legend was that Celeron 300A CPUs packaged in Malaysia were more overclockable than those packaged in Costa Rica. I specifically hunted down a Malaysian one, and it happily ran at 450 MHz for years.