MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Enabling cheap LCD HUDs – 0.015px calibration eliminates waveguide optics
by nighthawkcar | 2025-11-24 22:44:24+00:00
Description:

I've developed a display calibration system that makes premium HUD (Head-Up Display) technology affordable by replacing expensive waveguide optics with calibrated LCD films.

The Breakthrough:

0.015px RMS accuracy using phone cameras

9-second calibration process

Eliminates $50,000+ professional calibration equipment

Makes $5 LCD films perform like $200 waveguide optics

How It Works: Traditional HUDs require complex waveguide optics costing $80-200 per unit. My technology enables cheap LCD films to achieve the same optical quality through subpixel-perfect calibration. The system uses phase-shift algorithms to measure and compensate for display imperfections, windshield curvature, and subpixel misalignment.

Technical Claims:

Better accuracy than professional calibration systems

Automatic RGB/Pentile detection (98% accuracy)

Handles perspective distortion and camera gamma

Production-ready implementation

Applications:

Automotive HUD systems (90% cost reduction)

VR/AR display calibration

Display manufacturing quality control

Mobile device calibration

The technology is patented and available for acquisition or exclusive licensing. Serious inquiries from automotive suppliers, display manufacturers, and VR companies.

Contact: nighthawkcarvision@gmail.com
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-24 22:44:27+00:00
So obviously this is big if true, but do we know it isn’t just that a lot of high profile type people on social media use VPNs? If I was a public figure or attempting to be one or anything like that I would definitely try to hide where I am actually located, regardless of whether I am doing anything nefarious, just because political harassment and violence is a thing.
by vacuity | 2025-11-24 22:45:45+00:00
If the goal is to make a safe abstraction, which is what I'm talking about, proper use of visibility and safe code at the module boundary encapsulates the unsafe code soundly.

You seem to be talking either about improper encapsulation or unsafe that is intended to be exported and used unsafely. Or perhaps some method that is not sound according to the language.
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-24 22:46:05+00:00
Ram is a commodity they have spikes in demand/shortage of supply which drive the price up like this.

I remember when there was a flood somewhere in Thailand in the 2011 and the prices of hardisks went up through the roof.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2011/10/17/thailand...
by vel0city | 2025-11-24 22:46:26+00:00
> We used to have 64MB and that was plenty.

Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases, but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home multimedia work a lot better.
by dpark | 2025-11-24 22:46:30+00:00
I agree with this. Though this would require getting a lot of people to stop imagining that the founding fathers created a perfect document. There’s a very weird belief that the founding documents (and the founding fathers) are essentially infallible and that governing in accordance with these is the best possible option. Of course this leads to “originalist” jurisprudence which seems to consist of finding ways to pretend that whatever the judge believes is exactly what the founding fathers intended.
Show HN: A faster day-count to Y,M,D algorithm – 30-40% speedup
by benjoffe | 2025-11-24 22:47:02+00:00
Converting that integer to a Year, Month and Day is a fundamental calculation made in almost all programming languages and standard libraries. It runs every time a date is displayed, whether it's in a user interface, log, API etc.

While it is rarely a bottleneck, it is a very frequently run algorithm, and thus has attracted a lot of attention over the years.

In 2021, Cassio Neri and Lorenz Schneider developed the Neri-Schneider algorithm, which was a major breakthrough in this niche area.

Lately, I have been studying this function deeply, and found what I believe may be the last remaining substantial improvements achievable on current hardware. The gains come mainly from counting dates backwards, and from reducing the number of multiplications from 7 to 4.

Adoption will depend on whether library maintainers consider the performance benefit to outweigh the readability. If this is rejected on readability grounds, then in those cases my algorithm outlined in Article 1 (linked in the blog post navigation) is likely to be simpler and faster than what almost all existing libraries are currently doing.

I found this a very interesting challenge to work on, and I believe some of the techniques outlined may be applicable to other areas of optimisation.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-24 22:47:22+00:00
BLE could do that too via advertising packets. I don't know if any devices actually do though.

Also the connection process isn't power-prohibitive for BLE, and it doesn't have to take a long time. It's just that most Bluetooth software stacks suck balls. Basically only Apple's is good.

As I recall BLE only supports hosts connecting to 7 peripherals simultaneously which is a bit rubbish, but if you're a gym with some custom ANT+ receiver you can definitely get a custom BLE receiver that can connect to more devices (assuming someone makes such a thing).
by lxgr | 2025-11-24 22:47:25+00:00
> Plus, some mobile networks are taking the step to run IPv6-only to simplify network operations and reduce costs.

I think this has also already happened. You don't really notice it as a user, because the phone itself can act as a 4-to-6 translator (similar to how DS-Lite in DOCSIS transports CG-NATted v4 traffic in v6) for both native apps doing incompatible things with literal v4 addresses and tethering clients.
by mrinterweb | 2025-11-24 22:47:38+00:00
The whole time while reading over this, I was thinking how a small orchestrator local model might help with somewhat known workflows. Programmatic orchestration is ideal, but can be impractical for all cases. In the interest of reducing context pollution, improving speed, and providing a better experience; I would think the ideal hierarchy for orchestration would be programmatic > tiny local LLM > frontier LLM. The tiny model doesn't need to be local as computers have varying resources.

I would think there would be some things a tiny model would be capable of competently managing and faster. The tiny model's context could be regularly cleared, and only relevant outputs could be sent to the larger model's context.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-24 22:47:48+00:00
> unnecessary tests or fraud or overpaying for things?

Glad you ask. That was the job of the Attorneys general to figure out. A core part of their task was finding and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.

They were fired almost day one of the Trump admin. DOGE's notion that the actual gov spending was in the employees was laughable. If we actually wanted to eliminate waste then we should have put more employees in the AG and IRS, not done mass firings from those agencies.

The other part to mention is that Medicare Part C, putting public dollars into private insurers, has lead to a huge amount of the fraud. Those useless tests have often been done by these private insurance agencies because they can easily bill the government for them.

Eliminating that public/private partnership is exactly what will save money. Our inefficiencies are largely due to our reliance on the private sector to backfill what the government isn't doing.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-24 22:48:37+00:00
We just need simple language syntax like python and for models to be trained on it (which they already mostly are):

class MyClass(SomeOtherClass):

def my_func(a:str, b:int) -> int: #Put the description (if needed) in the body for the llm.

That is way more compact than the json schema out there. Then you can have 'available objects' listed like: o1 (MyClass), o2 (SomeOtherClass) as the starting context. Combine this with programatic tool calling and there you go. Much much more compact. Binds well to actual code and very flexible. This is the obvious direction things are going. I just wish Anthropic and OpenAI would realize it and define it/train models to it sooner rather than later.

edit: I should also add that inline response should be part of this too: The model should be able to do ```<code here>``` and keep executing with only blocking calls requiring it to stop generating until the block frees up. so, for instance, the model could ```r = start_task(some task)``` generate other things ```print(r.value())``` (probably with various awaits and the like here but you all get the point).
by neilv | 2025-11-24 22:48:42+00:00
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that Micay knows a million times more about this technical and application space, and the political and business dynamics around it, than most HNers.

And I also believe that he's actually been personally targeted for harassment, from multiple directions, over the years.

So he's learned and earned some... vigilance.

And overall, I suspect that GrapheneOS is much better for the vigilant mindset.

I donated money partly with this in mind.

I don't know whether the project has a PR expert working with them already, but if not, that would be a nice pairing with the very smart and vigilant people on the team.
by encomiast | 2025-11-24 22:49:19+00:00
This is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials.

I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking.

Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
by vkou | 2025-11-24 22:49:36+00:00
> but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.

If the concept is too foreign for them, I'm sure we could figure out how to replicate the grade school environment. Give them their 15 hours/week of lecture, and then lock them in a classroom for the 30 hours they should spend on homework.
by apparent | 2025-11-24 22:50:11+00:00
True but he does say "it is waterproofed" [1] and this is the common way of referring to this level of water resistance (IPX8, 1 meter for 30 mins). I wouldn't take it in a hot shower, but IPX8 should be good for more than being "water resistant" to incidental splashes.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTlRBI2QCzM
by formerly_proven | 2025-11-24 22:50:14+00:00
> Even the cheapest SSDs, say those with QLC NAND, can safely store data for about a year of being completely unpowered. More expensive TLC NAND can retain data for up to 3 years, while MLC and SLC NAND are good for 5 years and 10 years of unpowered storage, respectively.

This is somewhat confused writing. Consumer SSDs usually do not have a data retention spec, even in this very detailed Micron datasheet you won't find it: https://advdownload.advantech.com/productfile/PIS/96FD25-S2T... Meanwhile the data retention spec for enterprise SSDs is at the end of their rated life, which is usually a DPWD/TBW intensity you won't reach in actual use anyway - that's where numbers like "3 months @ 50 °C" or whatever come from.

In practice, SSDs don't tend to loose data over realistic time frames. Don't hope for a "guaranteed by design" spec on that though, some pieces of silicon are more equal than others.
by tpmoney | 2025-11-24 22:50:48+00:00
Perhaps, but the Norway tax mentioned in the article kicks in at $174k net worth. That's a paid off house and a nearly drained 401k for even the poorest of Americans. Yes there is an exemption for part of the house, but even if it were 100% exempt, I think you're going to have a rough time getting support for taxing 1% of a retirement account worth less than the code section it's named for.
by vkou | 2025-11-24 22:51:04+00:00
> What's sad is it's 500 years later and education has barely changed

From my extensive experience of four years of undergrad, the problem in your plan is "3. Therefore students can read at home " - half the class won't do the reading, and the half that did won't get what it means until they go to lecture[1].

[1] If the lecturer is any good at all. If he spends most of his time ranting about his ex-wife...
by cogman10 | 2025-11-24 22:51:44+00:00
Sure it can, by the atorneys general. A core part of their job is identifying, stopping, and prosecuting fraud and waste spending in the government.

Doge was never legal, but there were agencies that had the statutory power to do what doge wanted. However, they also could investigate things like emoluments violations which is precisely why they were some of the first to be fired.
by Someone | 2025-11-24 22:51:57+00:00
> I do wonder why there’s no way to operate qlc as if it were mlc, other than the manufacturer not wanting to allow it.

You can run an error-correcting code on top of the regular blocks of memory, storing, for example (really an example; I don’t know how large the ‘blocks’ that you can erase are in flash memory), 4096 bits in every 8192 bits of memory, and recovering those 4096 bits from each block of 8192 bits that you read in the disk driver. I think that would be better than a simple “map low levels to 0, high levels to 1” scheme.
by sothatsit | 2025-11-24 22:52:11+00:00
The benefit you get from juggling different tools is at best marginal. In terms of actually getting work done, both Sonnet and GPT-5.1-Codex are both pretty effective. It looks like Opus will be another meaningful, but incremental, change, which I am excited about but probably won’t dramatically change how much these tools impact our work.
by beanjuiceII | 2025-11-24 22:54:36+00:00
that IS the lesson! there are a million questions i can ask myself about those incidents. What dictates they can't ever screw up? sure it was a big screw up, but understanding the tolerances for screw ups is important to understanding how fast and loose you can play it. AWS has at least a big outage a year, whats the breaking point? risk and reward etc.

I've worked places where every little thing is yak shaved, and places where no one is even sure if the servers are up during working hours. Both jobs paid well.. both jobs had enough happy customers
by sudoit | 2025-11-24 22:54:42+00:00
My experience at Meta is that those weeks are spent not fixing bugs but working on refactors which increase your LOC and diff count. Many of the tasks engs work on are ones they themselves created months previously as "todos".

I question my life a lot when I'm reviewing code which appears to have been written incorrectly at first so that the author can land a follow up diff with the "fix"
by lkbm | 2025-11-24 22:55:37+00:00
A big reason we did a "fix week" at my old job was to deal with all the simple, low priority issues. Sure, there were high severity bugs, but they would get prioritized during normal work, whereas fix week was to prevent death of a thousand cuts. Kinda trivial things that just accumulate and make the site look and feel janky.

Some things turn out to be surprisingly complex, but you can very often know that the simple thing is simple.
by perfmode | 2025-11-24 22:56:10+00:00
Curious about the authors authz implementation.

Preloading authorization data into memory does not, by itself, provide the specific security guarantee (consistency) that defines Zanzibar.

The Zanzibar model is famous not just because it is fast, but because it solves the "New Enemy" problem (or causal consistency). Simple in-memory caching (preloading) often fails this test unless it is paired with complex invalidation logic that mimics Zanzibar's Zookies.
by traceroute66 | 2025-11-24 22:56:13+00:00
I assume this blog is a re-hash of the JDEC retention standards[1].

The more interesting thing to note from those standards is that the required retention period differs between "Client" and "Enterprise" category.

Enterprise category only has power-off retention requirement of 3 months.

Client category has power-off retention requirement of 1 year.

Of course there are two sides to every story...

Enterprise category standard has a power-on active use of 24 hours/day, but Client category only intended for 8 hours/day.

As with many things in tech.... its up to the user to pick which side they compromise on.

[1]https://files.futurememorystorage.com/proceedings/2011/20110...
by Nifty3929 | 2025-11-24 22:56:22+00:00
"... the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods."

I hope that's not what you think libertarianism is about. I'm sure there are libertarians who DO feel that way, but it's not a core tenet to personally isolate and live off the land.

Libertarianism sees not left vs right, but instead the people against the government. Libertarians focus on personal liberty and solving problems together, voluntarily, as individuals cooperating. A libertarian would say, for example, that if I think a bridge should be built, then I should either build it myself or convince other people to help me out voluntarily - but not use government to force people to help (via taxes, etc).

Libertarians are against force/coercion, and see government as the ultimate expression of force.

There are some loony libertarians, as there are of any political party, but most of us have pretty ordinary and mainstream beliefs and priorities.
by mdhb | 2025-11-24 22:56:27+00:00
Not only is it not dead it’s under HEAVY active development and has been for quite some time now.

They seem particularly focused on the Linux compatibility layer (starnix) as far as I can tell.

I’d say they are most likely going to end up becoming the thing that Android sits on top of. There is already public indications of some variant of it called “microfuchsia” coming to Android. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that this is all part of the same launch that they are working towards here.
by 827a | 2025-11-24 22:57:45+00:00
I rotate models frequently enough that I doubt my personal access patterns are so model specific that they would unfairly advantage one model over another; so ultimately I think all you're saying is that Claude might be easier to use without model-specific skilling than other models. Which might be true.

I certainly don't have as much time on Gemini 3 as I do on Claude 4.5, but I'd say my time with the Gemini family as a whole is comparable. Maybe further use of Gemini 3 will cause me to change my mind.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-11-24 22:57:57+00:00
but this stuff is basically solved. We have enough history with languages and distribution of packages, repositories, linux, public trust, signing, maintainers, etc.

One key shift is there is no packager anymore. Its just - trust the publisher.

Any language as big as Node should hire a handful of old unix wizards to teach them the way the truth and the life.
by fwip | 2025-11-24 22:58:01+00:00
At the risk of stretching the metaphor - fat is useful, too. In animals, a layer of fat will help you withstand 'lean times' of less nutrition or higher work. Run the body too hard without fat, and you burn muscle for short-term gain, or worse, die.

Similarly, in organizations, 'fat' helps out when the workload increases or productivity decreases. Run an organization too lean, and when you need to respond to a new situation, you burn out your muscle (workers) and/or go broke. This is similar to the concept of "slack."
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-24 22:58:32+00:00
AI can also generate questions of course.

So it is feasible (in principle) to give every student a different exam!

You’d use AI to generate lots of unique exams for your material, then ensure they’re all exactly the same difficulty (or extremely extremely close) by asking an LLM to reject any that are relatively too hard or too easy. Once you have generated enough individual exams, assign them to your students in your no-AI setting.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-24 22:58:43+00:00
Exactly how did you attached three monitors to your laptop without a docking station? I bet you the docking station had displaylink based hardware/software like most of the Dell docking stations had

You didn’t give any citations on your specific model of laptop or docking station. You just admitted that you used an old school docking station - those came with GPUs.

And your citation said it wasn’t available in all configurations.
by Yokolos | 2025-11-24 22:59:13+00:00
Any given TBW/DWPD values are irrelevant for unpowered data retention. Afaik, nobody gives these values in their datasheet and I'm wondering where their numbers are from, because I've never seen anything official. At this point I'd need to be convinced that the manufacturers even know themselves internally, because it's never been mentioned by them and it seems to be outside the intended use cases for SSDs
by throwaway31131 | 2025-11-24 22:59:24+00:00
I’m not sure even $1T has been spent. Pledged != spent.

Some estimates have it at ~$375B by the end of 2025. It makes sense, there are only so many datacenters and engineers out there and a trillion is a lot of money. It’s not like we’re in health care. :)

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...
by belval | 2025-11-24 22:59:30+00:00
> Even the temporarily embarrassed founders that populate this message board do it openly.

Not a wannabe founder, I don't even use LLMs aside from Cursor. It's a bit disheartening that instead of trying to engage at all with a thought provoking idea you went straight for the ad hominem.

There is plenty to disagree with, plenty of counter-arguments to what I wrote. You could have argued that human connection is special or exceptional even, anything really. Instead I get "temporarily embarrassed founders".

Whether you accept it or not, the phenomenon of using LLMs as a friend is getting common because they are good enough for human to get attached to. Dismissing it as psychosis is reductive.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-24 23:00:09+00:00
The point is that the education system has come a long way in utilizing STEM to make education more efficient (helping students advance faster and further with less resources) and it will continue to go a long way further.

People thought the threat of physical violence was a good way to teach. We have learned better. What else is there for us to learn? What have we already learned but just don't have the resources to apply?

I've met many educators who have told me stories of ambitions learning goals for students that didn't work because there weren't the time or resources to facilitate them properly.

Often instructors are stuck trading off between inauthentic assessments that have scalable evaluation methods or authentic exercises that aren't feasible to evaluate at scale and so evaluation is sparse, incomplete or students only receive credit for completion.
by bhelkey | 2025-11-24 23:01:13+00:00
Smart watches with long battery life exist. Garmin watches generally have ~2 week battery life:

* Venu 3 for $350 has 2 week battery life [1]

* Forerunner 55 for $150 has 2 week battery life [2]

I don't see why you are defining success as 30 days of battery life when the baseline is charging your watch every day.

[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/873008/pn/010-02784-00/

[2] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/741137/