MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duffyjp | 2025-12-13 04:39:44+00:00
We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.

They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—
by sandspar | 2025-12-13 04:39:50+00:00
It’s definitely a useful word! Modern tech rollouts often do happen without fanfare. And the word alerts readers to a kind of story shape. So I can see why people use it! Its usage reminds me of when competitive video games develop a new meta, a new powerful technique. There follows a short period where everyone spams the technique over and over. Eventually people figure out a counter and the meta quietly disappears. (Couldn’t help myself!)
by juliangamble | 2025-12-13 04:39:54+00:00
I'd like to call out the work from Nada Amin in this area:

Dafny and verification-aware programming, including proof by induction to verify properties of programs (for example, that an optimizer preserves semantics). Dafny Sketcher (https://github.com/namin/dafny-sketcher)

Multi-stage programming, a principled approach to writing programs that write programs, and its incarnation in multi-stage relational programming for faster synthesis of programs with holes—with the theoretical insight that a staged interpreter is a compiler, and a staged relational interpreter for a functional language can turn functions into relations running backwards for synthesis. multi-stage miniKanren (https://github.com/namin/staged-miniKanren)

Monte Carlo Tree Search, specifically the VerMCTS variant, and when this exploration-exploitation sweet spot is a good match for synthesis problems. VerMCTS (https://github.com/namin/llm-verified-with-monte-carlo-tree-...), and Holey (https://github.com/namin/holey).
by stinkbeetle | 2025-12-13 04:42:33+00:00
> Human language is imprecise and allows unclear and logically contradictory things,

Most languages do.

"x = true, x = false"

What does that mean? It's unclear. It looks contradictory.

Human language allows for clarification to be sought and adjustments made.

> besides not being checkable.

It's very checkable. I check claims and assertions people make all the time.

> That's literally why we have formal languages,

"Formal languages" are at some point specified and defined by human language.

Human language can be as precise, clear, and logical as a speaker intends. All the way to specifying "formal" systems.

> programming languages and things like COBOL failed: https://alexalejandre.com/languages/end-of-programming-langs...
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-13 04:45:22+00:00
> There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.

Great. Waiting for your argument on why this is one of them.

> If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.

I'm curious, how did you come to know that everyone who is asking questions not in line with the consensus belief is a bad faith operator? And what makes you able to assess the framework behind their questions?

> Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.

This is exactly the problem. You're equating the small minority of folks who are using their speech to defraud with the remainder of the "dissent group" (for lack of a better term) who is trying to get to the truth. Then, by claiming the existence of the minority's speech is incredibly dangerous, attempt to ban anything not in line with the orthodoxy.

I'm not defending people using their speech to profit politically or financially. I'm saying the benefit of getting rid of that speech is not worth the collateral damage that would inflict.

How did the folks that questioned the early "masks aren't effective" claim stand to profit? Or the claim that the virus definitely 100% had zoonotic origin? Maybe you believe they were heavily invested in mask manufacturing companies and were imminently about to launch a political campaign on a Sinophobic platform?

> Free speech isn't absolute, and private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property.

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm not sure how much you've gone into the details of what you're saying, but: - "free speech is not absolute" is not normative, but descriptive (not really relevant to our discussion) - "private companies are allowed to moderate the speech that happens on their property" Wrong. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R.... Whether this applies to social media is currently being tested in our court system. - SCOTUS saying "not much came of this" doesn't mean nobody was wronged, or that much couldn't have come of it. Also, doesn't this (govt intervention in speech) directly contradict your claim that it was just private companies acting in their own domain?

> This isn't a societal priest class.

You're literally advocating for a priest class, who is blessed to discuss "science", because they are doing it in the way that you interpret as "good faithed" and have the right "framework" behind their discourse. Which is exactly what qualified the religious leaders of old times.

I'm incredibly grateful to not live in a time where only certain people could speak on particular topics. I wish more people were.
by adastra22 | 2025-12-13 04:46:45+00:00
How much is too much? It’s like porn: you know it when you see it.

Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.

Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.
by energy123 | 2025-12-13 04:47:23+00:00
> My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in

The other limitation is lower brightness than miniLED monitors, around 30-60% of the nits in SDR. Whether that matters obviously depends on the ambient light or reflective surfaces near you.

For me, because I'm next to a big window and already squinting at my 400 nits IPS monitor, a < 300 nits OLED is a non-starter, but a 600 nits in SDR, IPS miniLED, is ideal.

This limitation should be temporary however because there are some high nit OLED TVs coming on the market in 2025 so bright OLED 27-43" monitors will likely follow.
by alterom | 2025-12-13 04:47:58+00:00
>There are alternative search engines to Google,

..and of those, I really wouldn't be giving the one under the direct control of Russia's FSB as my top recommendation.

A little-known American search engine known as Bing[1] lists Sci-Hub just fine though.

[1] https://www.bing.com/search?q=sci-hub
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-13 04:48:10+00:00
EDITED to emphasize that the idea Kontsevich "took from string theorists" is not as big a deal as title of TFA implies, thanks sno129

On page6 is the crucial^W main idea that Kontsevich took from string theory, the Hodge Diamond

It's memorable, at least :)

En.wiki has a quick explanation

Mirror symmetry translates the dimension number of the (p, q)-th differential form h^(p,q) for the original manifold into h^(n-p,q) of that for the counter pair manifold.

(n=4 for the paper, "cubic 4-fold")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homological_mirror_symmetry#Ho...

Don't miss the caption from the end of the previous page, what the sum means :)
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-13 04:49:14+00:00
(Shrug) It's a really nice introduction to manifolds, to the extent that's what it is. Really it's just an introduction to rational parameterization, which I'd never heard of but which at first glance seems extremely nifty.

It all gets pretty incomprehensible after that, but that's not the author's fault.
by apatheticonion | 2025-12-13 04:50:01+00:00
Keep in mind the energy vs electricity "gochya".

Australia, for instance, powers 40% of its electricity with renewables.

However, electricity makes up ~20% of _total_ energy consumption which means renewables made up 9% of _total_ energy production.

As the electrification of transport, industry, manufacturing, etc proceeds, the demand for electricity will increase (in the case of Australia, we need to 5x our electricity production).

Ironically, legislators are disincentivized from stimulating electrification as getting to 100% renewable electricity production is easier when electricity is only 20% of our energy usage.
by rl3 | 2025-12-13 04:50:09+00:00
I disagree. Traditional underwater human habitats are overengineered and expensive.

By using plywood in conjunction with other off-the-shelf parts and materials, we can change this equation to deliver more value while dramatically reducing costs.

If, due to unforeseen circumstances the habitat occupant can no longer sustain life, they're automatically entombed inside a makeshift plywood coffin—no costly recovery operations required. Logitech wireless game controller sold separately.
by NaOH | 2025-12-13 04:53:23+00:00
Previously:

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35874183 - May 2023 (20 comments)

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542260 - Aug 2022 (149 comments)
by charcircuit | 2025-12-13 04:54:14+00:00
>then the private key of this digital signature is a "god object"

You could instead require the app to be part of the OS. The next gotcha would from you I imagine is that the build farm for the next OS update is a god object and at that point I think this is a meaningless tangent. I'll concede and say you have to trust your OS creator. But you always have to trust your OS creator for any OS.

>then you basically have passwordless sudo

If sudo couldn't be used from other programs / she'll scripts and doesn't give access to a god account, but instead did simple things like let you use ping, then that seems fine to me. But why require people to manually wrap programs when it could be handled automatically.

>Either way, there is some source of authority in here

Sure, but it's a system that's much better than sudo.
by phire | 2025-12-13 04:55:09+00:00
It seems to be more that they are simultaneously launching and killing the product.

Sounds like they entered into a contact to develop and sell the CM0 to several large manufacturers who happen to all be in China, hence the launch. But then discovered the supply of ram chips that it uses is extremely low (they apparently stopped manufacturing them years ago) and they want to direct as many of them as possible towards the Pi Zero 2.

So we will probably see a follow up to both later, and the CM0-B (or whatever they call it) will be more widely available.
by Animats | 2025-12-13 04:56:31+00:00
The trouble with formal specification, from someone who used to do it, is that only for some problems is the specification simpler than the code.

Some problems are straightforward to specify. A file system is a good example. The details of blocks and allocation and optimization of I/O are hidden from the API. The formal spec for a file system can be written in terms of huge arrays of bytes. The file system is an implementation to store arrays on external devices. We can say concisely what "correct operation" means for a file system.

This gets harder as the external interface exposes more functionality. Now you have to somehow write down what all that does. If the interface is too big, a formal spec will not help.

Now, sometimes you just want a negative specification - X must never happen. That's somewhat easier. You start with subscript checking and arithmetic overflow, and go up from there.

That said, most of the approaches people are doing seem too hard for the wrong reasons. The proofs are separate from the code. The notations are often different. There's not enough automation. And, worst of all, the people who do this stuff are way into formalism.

If you do this right, you can get over 90% of proofs with a SAT solver, and the theorems you have to write for the hard cases are often reusable.
by d--b | 2025-12-13 04:57:57+00:00
The examples are great and these bidirectional calculators are something that people would love to have in traditional spreadsheets.

So much so that Credit Suisse, which basically was running everything on heavily modded Excel, created a full language whose outputs were Excel spreadsheets capable of doing that. That thing called “paradise” was a total monstrosity but showed how much people wanted this.

That said, you really need a way to set which cells are fixed and which cells are allowed to move if you want to move past basic examples.

Most times you know what you want to do. like => if the user modifies that cell, find a solution for those specific ones.

If you can enter that info, then you have a lot more constrains for your solver and will avoid a lot of edge cases where everything goes to 0, and you can check that the calculation entered is indeed reversible or not, or if it could have multiple solutions, and so on.
by wnevets | 2025-12-13 04:58:03+00:00
> On a tangent note: don’t use ultrasonic humidifiers. Unless distilled water is used, they create a shit-ton of pm2.5 particles.

Not according to my uHoo air quality monitor. I have had one running a few feet from the monitor for over a week and there hasn't been any notable increase in PM2.5 particles.
by asdff | 2025-12-13 04:59:19+00:00
No thank you. I will take predictable handling and a steering wheel that responds to my inputs. Loss of traction situations are exactly where I don’t want any systems helping. I need to countersteer and feel the car. Speaking as someone who was raised in winter driving and encouraged to find the limits of handling in snow and ice covered parking lots.

Of course if you are one of those drivers who removes their hands from the wheel in a stressful situation (there are many), these systems will help somewhat.
by mbreese | 2025-12-13 05:00:06+00:00
I wonder how robust the solder joints are for castellated boards. I’d still imagine that to be a weak point vibration-wise. Definitely easier to automate, but would it be that much more robust?

Thinking about those CM sockets and I think the answer is yes - a castellated solder joint (is that the right term?) would be stronger. But other sockets might be more robust than the CM0.
by wpm | 2025-12-13 05:01:32+00:00
If I want to reprogram my own FIDO2 token, I should be allowed to.

If I get your FIDO2 token and reprogram it without somehow also wiping the data on it, your problem is that I got your FIDO2 token, not that I could reprogram it without erasing it (which theoretically could perhaps be true right now)
by pabs3 | 2025-12-13 05:02:14+00:00
As Conservancy would say, a device with no way to modify isn't GPLv2 compliant either.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
by chihuahua | 2025-12-13 05:02:19+00:00
While reading the article, I was pretty suspicious about Emerson and Westinghouse, because they sound just like Polaroid - once a solid American manufacturer, but run into the ground and then the name is licensed to bottom-of-the-barrel cheap electronics marketers. It seems strange that the article went out of its way to mention they are headquartered in Pittsburg and founded in the 1940s, like it's some respected brand with a long tradition.
by moribvndvs | 2025-12-13 05:03:06+00:00
> Now, being somewhat "vintage" in 2025, COM is noticeably not well documented on the web.

To be fair, they were not in 2005 or any time before or since either. I think I had an outdated book by Don Box and a giant win32 reference book and muddled my way through. The inconsistent behavior and random crashes are also pretty much what I remember.
by kyralis | 2025-12-13 05:06:13+00:00
The restriction to a polytree might be useful -- but only with quite a few more caveats. In the general case, this is absurd; having dependencies that are common to modules that are themselves dependencies of some single thing is not inherently wrong.

Now, if that common dependency is vending state in a way that can be out of sync along varying dependency pathways, that can be a recipe for problems. But "dependency" covers a very wide range of actual module relationships. If we move away from microservices and consider this within a single system, the entire premise falls apart when you consider that everything ends up depending a common kernel. That's not an architectural failure; that's just a common dependency. (Process A relies on a print service, which depends on a kernel, along with a network system, which also depends on the kernel. Whoops, no more polytree.)

This is the sort of "simplifying" heuristic that is oversimplified.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-13 05:07:13+00:00
Yes because it’s completely safe to bike everywhere and how would I bring the groceries back?

I live in a tourist area where there are a lot of drivers causing the prices to be low. I noticed it in Las Vegas too.

The only reason I know is I use Uber to run errands close by when my wife has the car on the weekends.
by karim79 | 2025-12-13 05:07:38+00:00
Aren't energy drinks packed with sugar? That surely "helped" a bit[0]. My unqualified opinion is that the cause of his stroke wasn't solely caffeine (and perhaps Taurine) and other crap which constitutes.energy drinks.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25547872/
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-12-13 05:10:03+00:00
I just bought a LG 50" UA7000 [1] that goes straight to HDMI on turning on. I am using it as a additional screen for my laptop. I am hoping using one screen two feet away and one screen 6 feet away will preserve my eyesight a bit longer.

A minor problem is that it displays "Turning on AI voice features" every time I turn it on, but those features are not actually turned on. It probably tries to, but since I never connected the TV to the internet, this fails. Still have to figure out how to get rid of the message.

[1] https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lg-50-ua7000-4k-uhd-hdr...
by simonw | 2025-12-13 05:11:32+00:00
You mean having a financial stake?

Not really. I have a set of disclosures on my blog here: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

I'm beginning to pick up a few more consulting opportunities based on my writing and my revenue from GitHub sponsors is healthy, but I'm not particularly financially invested in the success of AI as a product category.
by fragmede | 2025-12-13 05:12:25+00:00
> do your really believe loan sharks and other lenders are aviors of the poor?

How and what I believe society should be organized and who is good and bad has nothing to do with how society is.

Debt is negative, but it's that you can't just smush the two numbers together and have a valid comparison. A pauper with $0 to their name, living on the streets, and a person living in a $1 million house with $1 million in debt are living two very different lives.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-13 05:13:38+00:00
This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when they close your account. Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-13 05:14:09+00:00
> Your view on parrots is wrong !

There's a good chance of that.

> Africans grey parrots, do understand the words they use, they don't merely reproduce them. Once mature they have the intelligence (and temperament) of a 4 to 6 years old child.

I did not realize I could discuss with an African grey parrot the shared experience of how difficult it was to learn how to tie my shoelaces and what the feeling was like to go to a place every day (school) which was not my home.

I stand corrected.
by DocTomoe | 2025-12-13 05:14:25+00:00
I'm all for KISS.

But in a rare instance, xkcd is missing the point here. People do not live in their rooms 24/7, but they do want to be able to, e.g., turn stuff on or off remotely, or based on environmental conditions (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...) or to get status alerts ("tank empty, refill").

Now, I do that via Home Assistant and keep anything "smart" on a highly-restricted vnet ... but not everyone is a geek. While the standard implementation (some cloud service) comes with a bouquet of problems, it basically acts as a simplified Home Assistant, and ultimately as a necessary crutch. Preferably we'd be in IPv6-land, where ISPs would not NAT everything to death and we could talk to our devices remotely without an intermediary ... but well ... it cannot be helped.

"You're not going to need it" and "In my time, we just flipped a dumb switch" is paternalistic hogwash, not clever social commentary. Back in my days, we also didn't need satnav (just read a paper map), or cell phones (write them a note, leave it on the fridge, nothing is so important to demand imminence), or dishwashers (just do your dishes by hand)
by iteria | 2025-12-13 05:14:36+00:00
Women are definitely told the same thing. That's the whole fight about roe v wade in the US. The difference is that if a man wants the kid and the woman doesn’t, the woman is the one who is putting her health and life on the line, not the man. That's why it's her choice. Or at least it used to be in the US. In many places it's not and women die as a result. Childbirth is somehow still the top 10 killer of women. It's only birth control that dropped it from #1. Men don't die. They're not even the most financially impacted. They also get to walk away like women never get to do. A woman who is forced to carry a child rarely gets to walk out the door and forget about her family. That's why women grt to choose. Until men carry the same burden in child care and child creation, it's the kind of of unfairness that's inherent to the situation.

I understand why men feel this way, but realistically when a woman is stuck with a child she didn't want, which happens more often than people admit because of so many factors and systems set against the idea of abortion, she never gets to walk away.
by rzzzwilson | 2025-12-13 05:16:08+00:00
Totally agree with the dislike of the castering-wheel suitcases. For a start, they are fragile and it doesn't take much of a drop to ruin one or more wheels thereby turning it into a boat anchor. The ones with two fixed more-protected non-castering wheels are better, but you still need a smooth surface. The glitterati might frequent only high class cities, but even there sometimes cobblestone surfaces are desirable and maintained. In the parts of the world I live in there might not even be a footpath/sidewalk, much less one with a smooth surface, so a backpack is better. I can live indefinitely out of a 25 liter pack.
by hexaga | 2025-12-13 05:17:03+00:00
If wishes were fishes, as they say.

To demonstrate with another example: "Gee, dying sucks. It's 2025, have you considered just living forever?"

To this, one might attempt to justify: "Isn't it sufficient that dying sucks a lot? Is it so hard to understand that having seen people die, I really don't want to do that? It really really sucks!", to which could be replied: "It doesn't matter that it sucks, because that doesn't make it any easier to avoid."