MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-28 05:51:36+00:00
> And just as a smell test: have you ever converted an image to grayscale and flinched away because it seemed twice as bright? Of course not; it just loses its color.

Of course that is the way it is normally done. But it does not have to be done that way; does it?

Guidelines and norms are meant to be bent.

To demonstrate: I may be old, but I've definitely owned monochromatic "paper white" VGA displays that only responded to one channel of RGB and ignored the remaining two; the other two pins weren't even present in the connector. (These were trash for displaying color images without special care in software-world, but they were cheap.)

> The only way you would get more perceived brightness at lower backlight intensity would be if you physically removed the color gels that overlay the LCD matrix. Which is obviously not what they’ve done here.

We can evaluate that.

Suppose we have one ideal backlit pixel displaying FF0000, and that to achieve FF0000 66.6% of the backlight's total output for that pixel are being blocked and only the remaining 33.3% gets transmitted. Two subpixels are occluded; one subpixel allows transmission.

Suppose that with a backlight intensity of 100%, this pixel has a luminous output of 1 unit. (1 of what unit, you ask? For our purposes, it doesn't matter -- it's just 1 unit.)

Now, suppose we double the area of exposed backlight by instructing our pixel to display FFFF00. Our backlight intensity remains 100%, but we have twice as many subpixels allowing that backlight to be transmitted. The backlight stays the same, but our measured luminous output for this pixel is now 2 units.

To continue: FFFFFF. All 3 subpixels allow light transmission. Our luminous output is now 3 units for the same level of backlight.

Thus: With this result of 3 units, we've got 3 times as much light as we had at the beginning -- for the same pixel, with the same backlight, and about the same energy use.

---

To get back to the same 1 unit luminous intensity as we had with FF0000 @ 100% backlight, we we can run the backlight at 33.3% for FFFFFF. This saves power.

Our pixel is producing 1 unit of luminosity with FFFFFF, but with only one third of the backlight required to display FF0000 with 1 unit of output.

> The idea that color pixels drain more energy is just obviously nonsense.

That's not obvious to me at all for a backlit LCD.

FFFFFF is always going to be brighter than colors like FF0000, 00FF00 and 0000FF are for a given backlight intensity, which permits the opportunity to reduce the amount of backlight provided, use less energy, and still provide the same luminosity as a color would.

And it accomplishes this without stripping layers out of an LCD panel, or using magical thinking.

Is that what was proposed? Fucked if I know. I find that articles like this (and approximately anything else that has ever been published with the words "you" and "should" juxtaposed in the title) are meant to make people bicker about dumb shit, and I try to avoid poisoning my brain by reading them.
by hn111 | 2025-12-28 05:53:35+00:00
I’ve tried replacing my modal components with the <dialog> element, but had to reverse everything due to this issue: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9936

In short: you can’t have an interactive popover (e.g. a toast notification) on top of a dialog modal.

I’d love to use the new native elements but we’re sadly not quite there yet.
by mothballed | 2025-12-28 05:55:08+00:00
Incentive != break even point.

$35-40 takes into account the risks and time value of the investment, potential price fluctuations, and the preference for (all else equal) lowest cost extraction.

I would not expect someone to dump in a shit ton of money, hope the well works out, and nothing else go wrong right at an expected cost at $60/barrel with amortized investments/operations included.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-12-28 05:56:31+00:00
This ideas pops up pretty often, and people have their opinions. Personally, I suggest against this, especially if you are older (40+ years).

I’ve tried this, and it is a hindrance to some of the critical apps I use regularly, such as Camera, Maps, Messages, and occasionally the Phone App.[1] Of course, you can set shortcuts in the Control Center, double-tap the back of your phone, and all of that jazz, but it is slower, and the UX is a hindrance when you need it.

Instead, have the minimal App on your HomeScreen to avoid distractions as much as possible and/or remove the usual suspects — Social Media Apps, Games, etc. The idea is to make your Phone boring but just works when you need it. You can continue to use them on your desktop/laptop, which prevents that easy reach when you are not at your desk. Read[2] or write[3] if you are serious about avoiding distractions. If you already use a Smartwatch,[4] you can reduce your phone usage a lot more.

And the eyes work much harder in the Grayscale than in well-contrast colors. I prefer most things minimal; no labels, no text where not needed, learn shortcuts, etc. However, my phone is set to show labels and has higher contrast in the evening/night, while it shows no labels during the day. If I have to glance at it at night while driving or wake up to VIP/critical calls at night, I can see way faster and easier than squinting my eyes or fumbling for the glass. Grayscale is horribly in this situation.

And shooting photos in Grayscale, even if the actual photos are in color, is another blunder. I want to see the shades while shooting to compensate for any errors. Again, especially in the dark (however good phone AIs have become), it will always be either too bright and saturated (compensated by the AI) or too dark with a chance in lens at the last moment, trying to focus elsewhere.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/phone/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/books/

3. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/

4. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/watch-tiny-handy-computer/
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-28 05:57:16+00:00
> But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS.

I would certainly agree that using a little JS can get you further than just HTML. But I think that a plain HTML page is far more pleasant to use (and thus, functional) than the JS monstrosities that dominate the Web today. There's a reason people use the NoScript addon: because a whole lot of website designers use JS in ways that make the experience a ton worse for the user.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 05:57:35+00:00
> For instance, they just slashed short term rates 25bps, but long bond rates (10+ years) have actually gone up a few basis points since the cut

Could you point to the date range you’re referencing?

> if you look at the debt, and the USD's current position, there really is no way out for the US government other than inflating the currency and cashing in that reserve status for a reset

Of course there is. Loads of options.

Broadly speaking, the talk around rates and commodities tends to involve serious people totally divorced from the talk-show/Zero Hedge circuit.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-28 05:57:56+00:00
> see that as a side show to the overall banking system

See what? The geopolitics? The petrodollar was entirely a geopolitical affair. If anything, one could argue petrodollar recycling—together with the fall of the USSR-created the modern American banking system. (The timeline is compelling for e.g. LBO debt.)
by karlitooo | 2025-12-28 05:58:21+00:00
When foundry came out the demo looked next level. I'm sure you could do much of the same thing with FOSS but IMO the problem that the NHS has been struggling with for multiple decades really looks like a lack of Technical Leadership due to the complexity of the environment and care needed when dealing with patient data.

Hopefully Palantir has the necessary skillset to navigate the political environment which involves developing a platform that:
1. protects patient privacy
2. supports needs of providers (e.g. hospitals, gps, specialists, DoH)
3. allows providers to use data to support their operations
4. allows NHS to use the data to improve patient outcomes and efficiency

This Foundry demo impressed me at the time but its a bit dated now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms

Actual data analyst from a hospital talking about what the platform achieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps47Azr2Jz0
by rlupi | 2025-12-28 05:59:35+00:00
Rigidity in inputs lock down your system's evolution. The whole system need to evolve in lockstep if you need to change what the systems processes.

In practice, you either end up with an enlarging monolith or introducing state evolution (either explicitly, or by adding incremental input types that the system processes and expanding its API surface).

Beyond a certain inflection point of complexity, flexibility in introducing change becomes necessary.
by zarzavat | 2025-12-28 06:00:00+00:00
A table of numbers is copyrightable if it represents some creative expression by a human being. For example, a BMP representing a sketch is a table of numbers and clearly copyrightable.

Weights are numbers that come from an optimization process. To the extent that weights encode any creativity, they encode the creativity of the training data. But any company using AI models (including Apple) does not want that interpretation because they are using AI models that were trained on other people's copyrighted works. If weights could be copyrighted, we all of us would own them.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-28 06:00:28+00:00
> For the tagged case you would have to change all(!) the call sites

Yeah, that's exactly why I want a tagged union; so when I make a change, the compiler tells me where I need to go to do updates to my system, instead of manually hunting around for all the sites.

---

The only time an untagged union is appropriate is when the tag accounts for an appreciable amount of memory in a system that churns through a shit-ton of data, and has a soft or hard realtime performance constraint. Other than that, there's just no reason to not use a tagged union, except "I'm lazy and don't want to", which, sometimes, is also a valid reason. But it'll probably come back to bite you, if it stays in there too long.
by bfkwlfkjf | 2025-12-28 06:02:28+00:00
I don't know the legals in detail, but I cant imagine that GPL would do something about how you use it in your home? How is that enforceable?

Again don't now the legals but I think in practical terms this affects companies trying to own a project.

> using something in a way you don't like

You're mischaracterizing what I'm saying. For one thing you're talking about "someone" when I'm taking about "someone with power". Copyleft isn't about two people, one gaining power over the other. It's about lots of people with no power protecting themselves again one entity with a lot of power to impose themselves.

> Do you have an example of that happening?

Are you new to HN? Every month there's news of projects trying to arrest power contributors using various shenanigans. Copyleft protects against a class of such attacks.

Eg Oracle and open office, red hat and centos.

Edit this is literally on HN right. Is this your first day here or something? https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1puojsr/the_device_t...
by hemulich | 2025-12-28 06:03:08+00:00
Hey HN!

I built this because I was frustrated with bloated image editors for simple tasks.

Key features:
- Client-side only (images never leave your browser)
- No account required
- Drag & drop support
- Multiple fonts and text styling
- Instant download

Tech stack: Vanilla JS, HTML5 Canvas, no frameworks.

Would love your feedback and suggestions!
by handoflixue | 2025-12-28 06:05:05+00:00
I think at some point in the future, you'll be able to reconfigure programs just by talking to your LLM-OS: Want the System Clock to show seconds? Just ask your OS to make the change. Need a calculator app that can do derivatives? Just ask your OS to add that feature.

"Configuration" implies a preset, limited number of choices; dynamic languages allow you to rewrite the entire application in real time.
by cubefox | 2025-12-28 06:05:46+00:00
I believe there is a misunderstanding. The compiler can check untagged unions just as much as it can check tagged unions. I don't think there is any problem with "ambiguous narrowing", or "reliability". There is also no risk of "nullable everywhere": If the type of x is Foo|Null, the compiler forces you to write a null check before you can access x.bar(). If the type of x is Foo, x is not nullable. So you don't have to remember null checks (or checks for other types): the compiler will remember them. There is no difference to tagged unions in this regard.
Show HN: I visualized C pointers because I was failing my class (built with AI)
by af_mi | 2025-12-28 06:07:23+00:00
Hi HN, I am a 17-year-old Kosen student in Japan. I struggled to understand pointers, so instead of reading textbooks, I prompted AI to build this visualization tool for me. I wrote almost 0 lines of code manually. It is still very rough and early (MVP), but it works enough to teach me memory concepts. Feedback welcome!
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-28 06:08:10+00:00
>Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.

I agree but I don't think it is possible to maintain an advantage in process or scale permanently in general. If you expect other countries to never figure it out, you're wrong. But there can be a situation where higher local costs in some areas are offset somehow by transport costs or strategic subsidies for domestic production.

>Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.

China has many protectionist policies, some of which they have leveraged to steal technology from foreign competitors. The Chinese people are not very happy with their vehicle options, but they do not have the option to buy foreign either for the most part. To give you an idea how unhinged it can be in China, I've heard of campaigns to force everyone to discard perfectly good appliances and scooters to stimulate their economy and eat up excess product. It's a bad move but that's how they roll.

Foreign cars cannot be imported en masse to China, and even the cheapest Western-made cars are more expensive than the average Chinese buyer wants to pay. The cheapest new car on the US market is about $25k I think, and the average is closer to $40k.

>I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars.

I think you'd be better off buying cars from neighboring countries. Anyway, I think every country that can support car manufacturing should do so for strategic reasons. What I was referring to is US-specific rules about what kinds of cars can be imported. Imported cars are usually the more luxurious models due to the rules. The rules as I understand them involve listing out features that each model has. Bare bones and low-quality cars are rejected even if they could be useful to someone, because this strikes a balance between letting people buy what they want and supporting local industry.

>The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality.

They are cheap but low-quality and no doubt infused with Chinese spy/sabotage tech. I'm sure that they can eventually improve on quality, but ultimately countries in the West that produce cars now need to guard their own industries against insurmountable foreign competition. Nobody can beat the Chinese on price, generally. Their government will eat a loss to put competition out of business, because they want to take over the world. So the best we can do is act accordingly.
by sreekanth850 | 2025-12-28 06:08:20+00:00
In physics, time is local and relative, independent events don’t need a global ordering. Distributed databases shouldn’t require one either. The idea of a single global time comes from 1980s single-node database semantics, where serializability implied one universal execution order. When that model was lifted into distributed systems, researchers introduced global clocks and timestamp coordination to preserve those guarantees, not because distributed systems fundamentally need it. It’s time we rethink this., Only operations that touch the same piece of data require ordering. Everything else should follow causality like the physical universe, independent events don’t need to agree on sequence, only dependent ones do. Global clocks exist because some databases forced serializable cross-object transactions onto distributed systems, not because nature requires it.
Edit: I welcome for a discussion with people who disagree and downvote.
by nearbuy | 2025-12-28 06:08:31+00:00
I'm probably not the best person to ask, having looked at the site for all of 5 minutes.

The experiment is having a bunch of AI agents using different models (Opus, Gemini, etc) try to do various real world tasks together. They might be tasked with organizing an event, opening a merchandise store, or help raise money for a charity (I'm not clear on the details). Sometimes their tasks require email (for example, signing up for some web service).

That aside, counterintuitively, removing their email access is less effective than simply telling them not to send unsolicited emails, since they could just sign up for a free email service.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-28 06:10:29+00:00
> The control loop for host PTP benefits from regularity.

How much regularity? If you sent PTP packets with 5 milliseconds of randomness in the scheduling, does that cause real problems? It's still going to have an accurate timestamp.

> instruct the host operating system to disable high-exit-latency sleep features

Why, though? You didn't explain this. As long as the packet got timestamped when it arrived, the CPU can ask the NIC how many nanoseconds ago that was, and correct for how long it was asleep. Right?
by cubefox | 2025-12-28 06:12:29+00:00
> > For the tagged case you would have to change all(!) the call sites

> Yeah, that's exactly why I want a tagged union; so when I make a change, the compiler tells me where I need to go to do updates to my system, instead of manually hunting around for all the sites.

You don't have to do anything manually. There is nothing to do. Changing the return type of a function from String|Null to String is completely safe, the compiler knows that, so you don't have to do any "manual hunting" at call sites.
by h317 | 2025-12-28 06:12:47+00:00
It is way easier to fix a specific problem than to find one and sell solution for it.

For example, Hi I’m John and my accounting software can increase your profits by 10% by reducing time spent doing billing.

Vs

Hi I’m John, we do custom software and we can do an app for you in accounting for example, but also a crypto wallet or a booking website.

If you are in the second route, there is no mass outreach strategy because you are not offering anything specific your customer is anyone and your solution is anything. The outreach works for the first category, because spam or not, if someone is offering to fix a problem I have I’m ready to listen. Hence the relationship advice, if you provide services, people around you need to know that you “do apps and stuff”, and if you do products you can throw 1,000 emails fixing one thing with some level of certainty that someone within the ICP will give you a chance.
by jaredklewis | 2025-12-28 06:15:49+00:00
> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.

I don't understand your criticism.

It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.

This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."

> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.

There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?

Do you have an actual, concrete criticism of the methodology of the epigentic research in TFA, or are your just bloviating?
by lifthrasiir | 2025-12-28 06:16:02+00:00
Maybe we should all adopt Chinese weekday names: Sunday (星期日) remains same, Firstday (星期一) for Monday, Seconday (星期二) for Tuesday, Thirday (星期三) for Wednesday, Fourthday (星期四) for Thursday, Fifthday (星期五) for Friday and Sixthday (星期六) for Saturday. One-letter abbreviations would be simply S, 1 through 6.
by christina97 | 2025-12-28 06:17:04+00:00
It’s not that hard. You would not expect 5 sec drift on phones that can sync time on the web at least once a day or once a week. A basic quartz crystal can keep time to within seconds per month of drift. High quality phones can do the same or better. Also the phone should keep track of system time as epoch time, and convert to local.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-28 06:17:27+00:00
As a lover of Rust, ooo boy does this sound like a bad idea. The Rust compiler is not guaranteed to always output safe code against malicious inputs given that there’s numerous known soundness bugs that allow exploiting this. Unless I’m missing something this is a security nightmare of an idea.

Also there’s reasons why eBPF programs aren’t allowed to run arbitrarily long and this just ignores that problem too.
by caseysoftware | 2025-12-28 06:17:56+00:00
According to the FBI:

> The after-action responses – 50 pages in all – were located by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s team and recently turned over to the House Judiciary Committee and its special subcommittee investigating security failures and weaponization of law enforcement during the Jan. 6 riot.

> The document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/fbi-bombshell-274-age...
by DetectDefect | 2025-12-28 06:19:17+00:00
> I had previously set up my gpg key on a Yubikey and even used that gpg key to handle ssh authentication. Then at some point it just stopped working, maybe the hardware on my key broke

Did you try to SSH in verbose mode to ascertain any errors? Why did you assume the hardware "broke" without anyone objective qualifications of an actual failure condition?

> I figured storing an SSH key in 1Password and using the integrated SSH socket server with my ssh client and git was pretty nice and secure enough

How is trusting a closed-source, for-profit, subscription-based application with your SSH credential "secure enough"?

Choosing convenience over security is certainly not unreasonable, but claiming both are achieved without any compromise borders on ludicrous.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-28 06:19:30+00:00
The earlier article has a brief mention of CCDH's Labour links, and none of the other information in my post. It does cite the US govt. accusations, but makes very sure that's all it cites - painting a picture of he-said she-said, as if those accusations were not easily verifiable.

It also parrots UK govt. talking points on how much they value free speech and how denying visas is equivalent to censorship and witch-hunts, but neglects to mention the UK has banned, among others, Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner, from entry, based upon their speech.