Hacker News: vt240

New comment by vt240 in "Yester World Asking for Help from Google De-Monitization and AI [video]"

vt240 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:47:40 +0000

One of the best YouTube video producers. It's just kind of gross to hear the system is so messed up.

New comment by vt240 in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

vt240 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:13:40 +0000

Does the activation still work for these are do you have to use a hack to get them running? I still have a TON of older Office 2003 licenses, I'd love to go back. I've hated modern Office with the ribbon for half my life now.

New comment by vt240 in "The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)"

vt240 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:01:07 +0000

This was such a huge transition for FEM on x86-64. We went from UltraSPARC III 1.2GHz 24 CPU system with 128GB of RAM to a smaller Opteron two chassis cluster linked with Infiniband, 500GB 32core/8NUMA nodes per server, and the speedup was almost 10x.

New comment by vt240 in "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail"

vt240 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:25:02 +0000

I randomly came across a YouTube video [1] on the history of After Effects that I found really interesting. Seems as if there is quite a bit of evidence that the Nedry animation was done with an early preview.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LQyhSI56gU

Itanium: Intel's Great Successor [video]

vt240 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:42:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K-IfiDmp_w

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835951

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vt240 in "Debunking the Myths of the HBO Chernobyl series (2023)"

vt240 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:59:21 +0000

Dyatlov's interview from the 90s, which is still available on youtube [1], seems to fit better with the account given in the hit book "Midnight in Chernobyl" (which was the basis for the series,) than the story written for TV. To me the series just seemed like a rehash of the same movie tropes we've seen time and time again in dramatizations of the accident, compared to a true adaptation of book, which included a lot of updated analysis beyond the IAEA original report.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8__v9EswN4

New comment by vt240 in "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla"

vt240 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:25:23 +0000

I added `browser.ml.chat.enabled` = `false` and `browser.ml.chat.menu` = `false` which seems to remove that right-click behavior.

New comment by vt240 in "The value of bringing a telephoto lens"

vt240 — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:49:58 +0000

The Canon 100mm Macro is my favorite walk around lens. I really enjoy the exercise of framing shots with the prime lens. I felt like for me having a medium zoom, 24-105mm like most beginning photographers, I'd become over reliant on changing the focal length without properly evaluating the perspective and framing of the shot.

New comment by vt240 in "AMD claims Arm ISA doesn't offer efficiency advantage over x86"

vt240 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:04:42 +0000

Yeah, I got to say in our sound company inventory I still use a dozen 6-10 year old iPads with all the mixers. They run the apps at 30fps and still hold a charge all day.

New comment by vt240 in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

vt240 — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:00:27 +0000

I see dB scale units used without contextual issues in near uniformity. Unfortunately, I have to agree with the OP, that microphone capsule manufactures seem to be an edge case. I'm not sure where dBV/Pa became the standard. I can understand why given 94dBSPL@1000Hz calibration standards, and the measurement equipment of the time, but I've run into my own fair share of datasheets with lines such as 'Sensitivity -45dB' with no units or other call outs for the standard in use. Thankfully, it seems like most modern datasheets use mV/Pa which seems like a much better unit in my book.

New comment by vt240 in "Internet Artifacts"

vt240 — Thu, 15 May 2025 19:49:19 +0000

Yeah, I agree that is pretty glaring omission. To myself at least, Altavista was a huge part of that small slice of time, where it seemed instantly, the whole world finally got online with dial-up PPP, opposed to earlier when we might have been accessing the internet through gateways at a BBS, or dialup shell access from the local library or ISP.

I'm sure things seemed quite different if you were on a college campus at the time.

New comment by vt240 in "There are two types of dishwasher people"

vt240 — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 21:25:45 +0000

This is a mistake you only make once. Lesson learned when I put a boning knife through my arm in the dish rack one day. Cost me a trip in the ambulance. Absolute insanity– correct! I don't even know how it got in there with the rest of the utensils. But I triple check the sink area every time now.

New comment by vt240 in "A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices"

vt240 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 20:28:23 +0000

I still had my DEC LK201 hooked up on my main home linux desktop until a few years ago. Haha. I don't know why, but I liked the key layout.

New comment by vt240 in "SharkSQL – The Database Project [pdf]"

vt240 — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 01:51:28 +0000

There was a recent update on this [1] at the OpenVMS bootcamp posted to YouTube a couple weeks ago. I thought it was pretty interesting, I'd never heard of the project before, and there are not many new RDBMS trying to break into the enterprise market.

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zWy6B7q68U

SharkSQL – The Database Project [pdf]

vt240 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:08:48 +0000

Article URL: https://h2860042.stratoserver.net/openvmsforum/SharkSQL%20Eindhoven_2023.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295314

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by vt240 in "The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars"

vt240 — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 23:49:22 +0000

There's no wheel on a one button mouse :P Sorry I am really joking here. We have a number of Avid mixing consoles from the 2010s that have extensive mouse UI wheel controls, yet they shipped with trackball controllers. They're actually much easier to use with a standard three-button scroll-wheel mouse. Haha.

New comment by vt240 in "Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers"

vt240 — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:36:44 +0000

I tend to agree with you. I regularly walk, sometimes up to 40 miles per month, in the suburban hellscape that is South Hill in Puyallup, WA. This is the land of major 4 lane arterials w/ turn-lanes and hundreds of unprotected two-way and four-way intersections. There’s almost no pedestrians, I’ll rarely meet other people on my way to work, and sometimes go the whole two miles without making eye contact with a single driver.

This article didn’t touch on it, but there’s another even scarier monster lurking out there. They’ve started to replace some of our larger intersections with these “Smart” traffic lights. Most drivers have a pretty well developed feel for the pattern traffic signals follow. These are pretty much random, adjusting the traffic flow based on some metrics. They use yield left turns with single direction flow and other tricks to try and control traffic. Since the light cycle doesn’t really follow any standard pattern, they’re also pretty much random when they’ll insert the protected pedestrian crossing into the cycle. It’s a death trap. There can be people waiting at a yield left turn which will be going to red, it will click on the pedestrian walk, and the opposing traffic will still be in full green, with drivers never coming to a stop. Add to that, if volume is heavy, you can stand there for 5 minutes or more waiting for a protected pedestrian crossing.

New comment by vt240 in "Windows NT for Power Macintosh"

vt240 — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 20:46:27 +0000

The best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards compatibility.

New comment by vt240 in "Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch"

vt240 — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:19:01 +0000

I loved the Intel Cilk Plus project. I was sad to see it was abandoned. It always felt like a very natural syntax at least to me.

New comment by vt240 in "Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?"

vt240 — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:22:30 +0000

I was so excited last year to get to work on a passion project, which has been at the back of my mind for 15 years. To design from the ground up, a guitar speaker or musical instrument speaker [1]. Something more than just a typical loudspeaker, which is optimized for things like cost or maximum sensitivity, or linearity. I wanted a design that subjectively sounded “good”. It turned out to be one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on. I ended up with two different designs in the end, a standard single voice coil version, and series dual voice coil version. To me, and quite a few people I’ve let try them in different cabinets and with different guitar amps, they sound beautiful.

[1] https://1drv.ms/f/s!AppXGHhkkRjCk6lHhMAbkiMTE7lzlw?e=IdsZdw