Hacker News: noncovalence

New comment by noncovalence in "Glacier Mice"

noncovalence — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:44:32 +0000

Always love seeing a link to wikipedia.org on the front page. Pretty much guaranteed to make me go "oh, neat" :)

New comment by noncovalence in "The Red Strings Club"

noncovalence — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:06:26 +0000

> My problem with having many different choices that will actually have consequences for the game play is that I’m always worried I didn’t choose the best path through the game. But my main issue with having a lot of options, is that I won’t get to experience the whole story without playing through the game multiple times.

As someone who's often annoyed by games that make you choose between dialogue options that all lead to the exact same result, this criticism alone was enough to convince me to buy the game.

New comment by noncovalence in "Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript"

noncovalence — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:36:12 +0000

It's been a while since I've had to do this so I'd be very happy to hear if the process has become smoother since - does it no longer give you a big warning that you've got a dangerous unpacked extension installed every time you start chrome then?

New comment by noncovalence in "Show HN: I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript"

noncovalence — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:19:01 +0000

In addition to the advantage of explicitly specified capabilities mentioned by others, I'd say a userscript is also much more durable and low-maintenance than a Chrome extension. This is coming from someone who's written an extension for personal use before, and had to jump through a million hoops with Chrome Dev just to give the browser permission to run my own code that I wrote myself, and that's to say nothing of the whole mess with manifest v3 as well. Throughout the entire time I've been able to happily keep using userscripts written by myself or others with 0 maintenance required.

New comment by noncovalence in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

noncovalence — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:24:33 +0000

Very cool, I'll definitely be playing around with this some more! Two questions:

- How difficult would it be to add many-valued functions to this? It would be really nice to be able to get the full set of [pi/2, pi/2] + n[2pi, 2pi] from asin(1) without needing to break out Mathematica.

- And:

> Numbers input by the user are interpreted as the smallest interval that contains the IEEE 754 value closest to the input decimal representation but where neither bounds are equal to it

Am I missing something obvious, or should this be the other way round, i.e. the output bounds are the closest two IEEE 754 numbers that contain the input number?

The way it's written I'd interpret the smallest interval to be IEEE754(input)+[-epsilon, epsilon] for infinitesimally small epsilon.

First Lego League will end in 2027

noncovalence — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:35:47 +0000

Article URL: https://education.lego.com/en-us/first-lego-league/partnership-update/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459518

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by noncovalence in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

noncovalence — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:23:49 +0000

There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.

https://twitter-thread.com/t/1214607304106098689

New comment by noncovalence in "Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?"

noncovalence — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:12:50 +0000

This problem is usually known as regression dilution, discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_dilution

Ask HN: Cheap smartwatch recommendations while waiting for the new Pebble?

noncovalence — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:25:06 +0000

My old smartwatch finally gave out. Usually when buying any new tech the main question I ask myself is "how likely is this to survive for practically forever?", so I've been eyeing the Pebble Time 2, which looks to be shipping early next year.

Was wondering if anyone can recommend an affordable interim smartwatch, that would still provide good value even when I'm only expecting to use it for around half a year?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45608911

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Damned Yellow Composite

noncovalence — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:36:40 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damned_yellow_composite

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43851926

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by noncovalence in "Attacking My Landlord's Boiler"

noncovalence — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 18:31:14 +0000

If I understood the OP correctly, then the broadcasting would only be illegal in the US.

New comment by noncovalence in "Books on the Finer Points of Tkinter"

noncovalence — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 10:32:33 +0000

As others have pointed out, tkinter is just a wrapper around Tk, so the best way to learn more about it is to learn about Tk. The documentation for Tk [1] is fairly comprehensive: for example, the algorithm used by the `pack` command that you asked about is explained here: [2].

It's definitely worth learning at least some very basic Tcl if you want to get as much as possible out of tkinter - sometimes you end up having to use `widget.tk.eval()` to use a Tk feature that tkinter doesn't provide a good wrapper for.

[1] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TkCmd/contents.html [2] https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TkCmd/pack.htm#M27

New comment by noncovalence in "Ask HN: What are your worst pain points when dealing with scientific literature?"

noncovalence — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:32:03 +0000

A better way to organise and find papers I've looked at before. For example, being able to ask an LLM "what was that paper again that tried using X to solve Y but ran into some issue" which I vaguely remember skimming a month ago but only just realised that it might actually be useful to me, and it will find the right one from my reference manager and/or subset of my browser history.

New comment by noncovalence in "PysimpleGUI"

noncovalence — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 12:30:22 +0000

There's a few projects that can package a python environment into a single executable (the main tradeoff is you end up including a copy of python with every single executable if you have lots of tools) - when I wanted it to create an installer (.msi/.dmg), I've found cx_Freeze came the closest to "it just works".

New comment by noncovalence in "The shortest papers ever published (2016)"

noncovalence — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 06:41:18 +0000

Missing my favourite zero-word paper:

"Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?" https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12599

Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question? (2022)

noncovalence — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 06:37:16 +0000

Article URL: https://philpapers.org/rec/HABCAG

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964613

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Sandringham Time

noncovalence — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 06:03:41 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandringham_time

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808206

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by noncovalence in "Ask HN: Those with ADHD. What's a hobby that never gets boring?"

noncovalence — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:36:52 +0000

Of all things, rowing. It's a way to force myself to keep a consistent exercise routine because others depend on me to show up for each session, and given that my club has active members who are decades older than myself, I expect to continue doing it for as long as I can. It's especially great in a coxed boat with an experienced cox, it feels like the microphone wire is plugged directly into your brainstem so you completely outsource your executive functioning for two hours and respond to every call without even consciously parsing it.

And if you're after an adrenaline rush, a close race can teach you a whole new meaning of maximum heart rate.

New comment by noncovalence in "Thoughts about what worked in math circles"

noncovalence — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 01:13:27 +0000

I only gained an appreciation for ruler and compass constructions early in secondary school, at age 7 I'm not sure I could fully understand the beauty of deriving a huge system from axioms.

For making Euclid interesting to children, I remember really enjoying a game called Euclidea: https://www.euclidea.xyz/

Novel approach to Room Temperature Superconductivity problem (2020)

noncovalence — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:14:22 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14321

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36983757

Points: 2

# Comments: 0