Hacker News: vt240

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

New comment by vt240 in "Usenet over NNCP"

vt240 — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 02:05:28 +0000

I follow comp.os.vms and sci.electronics.design is always hot. I think there's probably a lot of little corners of usenet which are still pretty active. I was sad to see comp.dsp die off, but it's been equally more active by the same people on stackexchange.

New comment by vt240 in "OpenVMS 9.2 for x86 is finally available for hobbyists"

vt240 — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:40:33 +0000

I had the exact opposite reaction. I grew up on UNIX. BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, then later Linux; though always as a user. The first time I ran into VMS, I fell in love. It was just such a different experience. Granted that OpenVMS has been trapped in a bubble, and that using even the latest versions, feels like you've been teleported back to 1990. I'll be really interested to see, now that the platform is much more accessible, if they can build a community of users again.

New comment by vt240 in "The day Windows died"

vt240 — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 23:12:57 +0000

Yeah, I really feel for people here. I've been maintaining GPOs since Windows 2003 in our small business, and I never run into any of the issues most of these posts are dealing with. I download the policy files, flip the settings around so they work for our employees, and forget what most users have to deal with... If there's not someone in the loop, dealing with the problems.

New comment by vt240 in "How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]"

vt240 — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:03:28 +0000

"For some years afterwards, there was a student agency that would “roff” documents for students for a modest fee. Roff was thus the first program I ever wrote that was used by other people in any significant way."

That's the best part of the story!