HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Vvector

1,044 karma · joined April 14, 2011

submissionscomments
Vvector··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
Rampage!

https://www.slideserve.com/hedy-gilmore/3dfx-rampage

Vvector··on AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?
I have no idea about the claim of a backdoor. But here is the source:

Matt Mackall: "It's worth noting that the maintainer of record (me) for the Linux RNG quit the project about two years ago precisely because Linus decided to include a patch from Intel to allow their unauditable RdRand to bypass the entropy pool over my strenuous objections. "

https://cryptome.wikileaks.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm?utm...

Vvector··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
AndonLabs wins
Vvector··on Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)
I'm confident that the Land Paths need bridges to cross the numerous rivers along the route. You need a different qualifier.
Vvector··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
An acre of alfalfa is typically irrigated at 5.5 AF per year. The standard center pivot field is 130 acres ~ 700 AF of irrigation, to grow alfalfa to ship overseas. Converting to gallons, 210 million gallons, for one field.

80 fields of alfalfa equals all the data center water usage.

USDA estimates that total irrigation uses 55 million AF of water per year.

Vvector··on Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-...
Vvector··on Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
This is why i use Firefox
Vvector··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
"But over time, if we didn't have leap seconds, the difference would accumulate. The accumulated difference now between UTC and TAI is 37 seconds--which is almost twice the maximum variation in actual solar noon from mean solar noon that you refer to."

No, the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon.

From the link I posted, in NYC, solar noon on 2026-01-01 is at 11:59am. On 2026-01-31, solar noon is at 12:09pm. In one month, it has drifted 10 minutes. That's much greater than the 37 leap seconds we have added in 60 years.

"We humans have collectively decided that we don't want that, and that it's better to do the adjustments a little at a time rather than in bigger lumps."

Yet we just reversed that decision. No more leap seconds after 2035. After trying it, we decided it was terrible.

Vvector··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
"In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian."

Why?

If I travel 1 mile east or west of the prime meridian, my solar noon now comes 2-3 seconds earlier/later. It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. For most of the population, solar noon is, on average, 30 minutes off of 12:00 noon.

Plus, solar noon varies from day to day by 10-20 seconds. Check the charts out. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york

Vvector··on Splash Is a Colour Format
Isn't this just RGB, with 246 of the 256 values removed from each channel?
Vvector··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
"Commercial Use" is only one part of the four prongs of the fair use test. For example, commercial Parody is generally considered Fair Use. Look at Space Balls, which is a direct transformation from Star Wars.

This is all new territory. We don't have court-settled law yet.

Vvector··on Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
He bought a $900 monitor that has a KVM built in
Vvector··on California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy
Paying farmers to make the transition from peaches is a bailout
Vvector··on Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign
Seamless syncing is the primary reason I stick with BW
Vvector··on Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died
almost all d10's are zero-based, 0-9. And the "decade" die is 00-90. So it's just a simple matter of adding the rolls, no complicated math. And 0=100.
Vvector··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
Paper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted.

Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.

Vvector··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026
Can you explain how a 10 minute offset would affect you in any way?

For 99% of the world today, high noon =/= 12:00:00. Nothing breaks because of this. The world continues to run.

Vvector··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026
Yet high noon at my current location comes at 12:03 (1:03 with DST). It's three minutes off. If I lived further west in my timezone, noon would come much later.

How can people manage with noon off by minutes, yet want leap-second accuracy every 6 months?

Vvector··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026
Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain.

Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.

Vvector··on We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk
Delete your account. I did. https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1rh30rw/great_day_t...
Vvector··on Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
Are you suggesting that I cannot refuse to hire a bookkeeper that has multiple convictions for embezzlement?
Vvector··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
s/cloudflare/coinbase/
Vvector··on Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
Is a pirated movie, found on bittorrent, public?

IMO, your definition is overbroad

Vvector··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
Does an increased pixel count make a bad movie better?
Vvector··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
If the local market for American DBAs is $180k, then hiring H1B DBAs at $110k does depress wages.
Vvector··on Serverless Horrors
If it is a "free tier", Amazon should halt the application when it exceeds quota. Moving the account to a paid tier and charging $100k is not the right thing to do.
Vvector··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
When I google ANATEL, it comes up as Brazil
Vvector··on Guid Smash
Here is a statistical analysis of birthdays https://www.zippia.com/advice/most-least-common-birthdays/
Vvector··on GPT-5 Demo Mistake About Bernoulli Effect
"The theory (from GPT-5) is one of the most widely circulated, incorrect explanations."

Naturally. This is how LLMs work. It regurgitates the data fed into it.

Vvector··on Font-size-adjust Is Useful
Just brainstorming here, why can't we have "browser fonts" shipped with the browsers?
Page 1 of 11Next →