Hacker News: xioxox

New comment by xioxox in "I Put a Datacenter GPU in My Gaming PC for £200"

xioxox — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:41:37 +0000

Isn't this the same thing with 32 GB already on a PCIe socket?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/166850431555

New comment by xioxox in "Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers"

xioxox — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:54:55 +0000

Personally, I think social media and academic publishing timescales, rewards and social conventions don't match very well. Social networking feels transient and impersonal. I would like to take some time to form my opinion about a paper, not jump in with a post. Maybe some comment box would be ok to write a couple of nice things about a paper, but it doesn't feel the place to write harsh criticism or have complex discussion where things could be misunderstood. Rather than write in the public record, if I think the paper has a deep flaw I would prefer to contact the authors first. This can be followed up by discussions in your own papers. Others may have different opinions, of course.

New comment by xioxox in "HEALPix"

xioxox — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:06:18 +0000

See also HiPS maps, which map the sky onto ever finer HEALPix grids to allow zooming: https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/hips/

New comment by xioxox in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

xioxox — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:16:39 +0000

A surprising number of scientists seem to use it, likely because of the now terrible atmosphere for scientists on Twitter/X and the emptiness of bluesky.

New comment by xioxox in "Treasures found on HS2 route"

xioxox — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:51:58 +0000

What's the good of a perfect railway line if it never gets built? What happened to the capacity argument? There is likely a good optimum between the cheapest and most expensive possible for capacity and speed. We could all fly around in supersonic aircraft, but there's a reason we don't.

New comment by xioxox in "Treasures found on HS2 route"

xioxox — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:41:55 +0000

Isn't the problem that the requirements for line were "gold plated"? If they'd put in another standard rail line instead, it would have increased capacity, taken up much less space, would have been much cheaper, would have caused less disruption and would have had a clearer business case.

New comment by xioxox in "Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet"

xioxox — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 13:38:18 +0000

I get proper IPV4 and IPV6 addresses with Easybell on VDSL. I've been with them a long time and they've been pretty good.

New comment by xioxox in "Einstein Probe detects an X-ray flare from nearby star"

xioxox — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:07:35 +0000

Pedantically, it's Einstein Probe (EP), not Einstein. Confusingly, in Chinese it has another name, Tianguan, commemorating the observation of the supernova which created the Crab Nebula.

New comment by xioxox in "Einstein Probe detects an X-ray flare from nearby star"

xioxox — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 12:01:00 +0000

China + ESA + Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) + Centro Nacional de Estudios Espaciales (CNES) contributions

New comment by xioxox in "Rainbow Six Siege hacked as players get billions of credits and random bans"

xioxox — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 11:56:48 +0000

Stunt Island was pretty good. However, there are more unusual games out there with reasonable budgets, like Death Stranding, The Talos Principle, The Outer Wilds, Portal and X4:Foundations. Even games involving shooting like Control or Alan Wake 2 are driven by unusual story telling.

New comment by xioxox in "Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode"

xioxox — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:43:25 +0000

Of course it might be genuine, but there's also a history of r/LegalAdviceUK getting a number of creative writing exercises. See this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1loyctr/rage...

New comment by xioxox in "Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode"

xioxox — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:18:04 +0000

Although adverts on the fridge are absolutely terrible, is this genuine? Here's a reddit post some time before that suggesting the scenario: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/1ow6cpu/appa...

New comment by xioxox in "The most male and female reasons to end up hospital"

xioxox — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:28:04 +0000

Babies?

New comment by xioxox in "What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription"

xioxox — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:19:36 +0000

With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.

New comment by xioxox in "Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand (2023)"

xioxox — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:33:45 +0000

Although Intel processors are efficient, modern AMD processors have much higher idle power usage, due to their chiplet design. They typically use at least 20W more power.

New comment by xioxox in "Ancient X11 scaling technology"

xioxox — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:46:35 +0000

It's certainly very useful. I do half my work using X11 over ssh and it works reasonably well over a LAN (at least using emacs, plotting, etc).

New comment by xioxox in "Are the Colors in Astronomical Images 'Real'?"

xioxox — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:49:06 +0000

You are plainly wrong. I know several astronomers who look at colour images to check that the software is working properly.

New comment by xioxox in "The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice"

xioxox — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:41:21 +0000

Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.

New comment by xioxox in "Are the Colors in Astronomical Images 'Real'?"

xioxox — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:29:20 +0000

That's not right. I'm an astronomer, and I often look at colour images and colleagues do, too. For example, the galaxies in a cluster of galaxies follow a relation of colours - brightness (the "red sequence"), which can be used to detect the cluster. The eye is also quite good at helping confirm a cluster by spotting the galaxies following this sequence. I also use colour images to help identify spectral changes that change across an image, in my case in the X-ray waveband.

New comment by xioxox in "Show HN: A5"

xioxox — Tue, 13 May 2025 15:36:02 +0000

What's the advantage of this over HEALPix projection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix