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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
1•ColinWright•1m ago•0 comments

Jim Fan calls pixels the ultimate motor controller

https://robotsandstartups.substack.com/p/humanoids-platform-urdf-kitchen-nvidias
1•robotlaunch•5m ago•0 comments

Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck with My Dad

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/exploring-a-modern-smpte-2110-broadcast-truck-with-my-dad/
1•HotGarbage•5m ago•0 comments

AI UX Playground: Real-world examples of AI interaction design

https://www.aiuxplayground.com/
1•javiercr•6m ago•0 comments

The Field Guide to Design Futures

https://designfutures.guide/
1•andyjohnson0•6m ago•0 comments

The Other Leverage in Software and AI

https://tomtunguz.com/the-other-leverage-in-software-and-ai/
1•gmays•8m ago•0 comments

AUR malware scanner written in Rust

https://github.com/Sohimaster/traur
3•sohimaster•11m ago•1 comments

Free FFmpeg API [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RAuSVa4MLI
3•harshalone•11m ago•1 comments

Are AI agents ready for the workplace? A new benchmark raises doubts

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/are-ai-agents-ready-for-the-workplace-a-new-benchmark-raises-do...
2•PaulHoule•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Watermark and Stego Scanner

https://ulrischa.github.io/AIWatermarkDetector/
1•ulrischa•16m ago•0 comments

Clarity vs. complexity: the invisible work of subtraction

https://www.alexscamp.com/p/clarity-vs-complexity-the-invisible
1•dovhyi•17m ago•0 comments

Solid-State Freezer Needs No Refrigerants

https://spectrum.ieee.org/subzero-elastocaloric-cooling
1•Brajeshwar•17m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Will LLMs/AI Decrease Human Intelligence and Make Expertise a Commodity?

1•mc-0•19m ago•1 comments

From Zero to Hero: A Brief Introduction to Spring Boot

https://jcob-sikorski.github.io/me/writing/from-zero-to-hello-world-spring-boot
1•jcob_sikorski•19m ago•1 comments

NSA detected phone call between foreign intelligence and person close to Trump

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/07/nsa-foreign-intelligence-trump-whistleblower
7•c420•20m ago•1 comments

How to Fake a Robotics Result

https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/how-to-fake-a-robotics-result
1•ai_critic•20m ago•0 comments

It's time for the world to boycott the US

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/2/5/its-time-for-the-world-to-boycott-the-us
3•HotGarbage•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Semantic Search for terminal commands in the Browser (No Back end)

https://jslambda.github.io/tldr-vsearch/
1•jslambda•20m ago•1 comments

The AI CEO Experiment

https://yukicapital.com/blog/the-ai-ceo-experiment/
2•romainsimon•22m ago•0 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
4•surprisetalk•25m ago•0 comments

MS-DOS game copy protection and cracks

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/game_cracks.php
3•TheCraiggers•27m ago•0 comments

Updates on GNU/Hurd progress [video]

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_...
2•birdculture•27m ago•0 comments

Epstein took a photo of his 2015 dinner with Zuckerberg and Musk

https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&q=davenewworld_2%2Fstatus%2F2020128223850316274
12•doener•28m ago•2 comments

MyFlames: View MySQL execution plans as interactive FlameGraphs and BarCharts

https://github.com/vgrippa/myflames
1•tanelpoder•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LLM of Babel

https://clairefro.github.io/llm-of-babel/
1•marjipan200•29m ago•0 comments

A modern iperf3 alternative with a live TUI, multi-client server, QUIC support

https://github.com/lance0/xfr
3•tanelpoder•30m ago•0 comments

Famfamfam Silk icons – also with CSS spritesheet

https://github.com/legacy-icons/famfamfam-silk
1•thunderbong•31m ago•0 comments

Apple is the only Big Tech company whose capex declined last quarter

https://sherwood.news/tech/apple-is-the-only-big-tech-company-whose-capex-declined-last-quarter/
4•elsewhen•34m ago•0 comments

Reverse-Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600

https://github.com/joshuanwalker/Raiders2600
2•todsacerdoti•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Deterministic NDJSON audit logs – v1.2 update (structural gaps)

https://github.com/yupme-bot/kernel-ndjson-proofs
1•Slaine•39m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Rupert's Property

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/08/28/a-polyhedron-without-ruperts-property/
91•robinhouston•5mo ago

Comments

pavel_lishin•5mo ago
They came up with a great name for it.
bediger4000•5mo ago
I could not find a Rupert's cube for sale, only thingiverse files to print one. Seems like a missed opportunity, given that you can sell Gombocs at hundreds of dollars each.
pavel_lishin•5mo ago
I could have sworn that Matt Parker did a video on this as well, but I couldn't find one.
jerf•5mo ago
https://youtu.be/gPIRLQZnRNk , 7:20 specifically for cubes.

I knew I'd seen it before too so you nerd-sniped me.

pavel_lishin•5mo ago
Thanks!
dwrensha•5mo ago
Last month, before this result came out, the question "Is Every Convex Polyhedron Rupert?" was added as a formal Lean statement to Google's Formal Conjectures repository:

https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/1...

I wonder how feasible it would be to formalize this new proof in Lean.

yorwba•5mo ago
The most annoying bit might be that they use different, though equivalent, definitions of the property, so you would also need to formalize the proof of the equivalence of definitions.
robinhouston•5mo ago
Interesting. My guess is that it's not prohibitively hard, and that someone will probably do it. (There may be a technical difficulty I don't know about, though.)

David Renshaw recently gave a formal proof in Lean that the triakis tetrahedron does have Rupert's property: https://youtu.be/jDTPBdxmxKw

dwrensha•5mo ago
> David Renshaw recently gave a formal proof in Lean that the triakis tetrahedron does have Rupert's property

That's me!

This result appears to be significantly harder to formalize.

Steininger and Yurkevich's proof certificate is a 2.5GB tree that partitions the state space into 18 million cells and takes 30 hours to validate in SageMath.

Formalizing the various helper lemmas in the paper does seem achievable to me, but I suspect that applying them to all of the millions of cells as part of a single Lean theorem could present some significant engineering difficulties. I think it'd be a fun challenge!

If that turns out to be infeasible, an alternate approach might be: we could write a Lean proof that the 2.5GB tree faithfully encodes the original problem, while still delegating the validation of that tree to an external SageMath process. Such a formalization would at least increase our confidence that there are no math errors in the setup. A similar approach was taken recently by Bernardo Subercaseaux et al in their recent paper where they formally verified a SAT-solver encoding for the "empty hexagon number": https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17370

mananaysiempre•5mo ago
That sounds like the current proof is too brute-force—too badly understood by humans—for humans to be able to explain it to Lean?
namibj•5mo ago
Lean does feasibly let you shard out verification work; i.e., you can take a huge proof tree, chop it into an assortment of independently-proven branches (trivial if it's a true tree), let those branches be verified in parallel by a simple cluster, inject the feedback information from the cluster tasks ("this theorem here (the open goals/interactive state at the point this branch was cut out of the full tree) is true; no need for you to actually be aware that it's proven with specifically this proof here (the branch of the tree)") into the main kernel's verification cache (or just declare those intermediate theorems as true), and write a "apply this_theorem_we_cut_out_here" in place of the cut-out branch when writing up the main tree.

Good thing that, as long as you verify the entire result and make sure your verifier orchestration doesn't have bugs of a "cheating" nature, you can let AI run pretty wild on transforming/translating/chopping a Lean proof tree, because the verifier is already presumed to be an oracle with no false positives.

E.g. here it could potentially help translating SageMath representations to Lean4 representations, with the only downside that a failed verification in Lean could be due to merely erroneous AI-assisted translation.

Overall, I'd think given the nature of proving that a polyhedron doesn't have Rupert's property, there should be fairly straight-forward (if not actually trivial) ways of sharding the proof. The paper seems to talk of a 5-dimensional search space; in more general I'd think it's 8 dimensions to account for the translation through the proposed hole (this is still assuming you want to not rotate the polyhedra as you're passing one through the other):

"attack direction (angle of the penetrated)" from any direction (3D; unit quaternion), while the penetrator is facing any direction (3D; unit quaternion), shifted sideways any amount normal to the direction of translation (2D; simple 2D point), valid at any translation/penetration depth (1D; simple distance/real), while cancelling one dimension worth of freedom because only mutual twist along the direction translation matters (not absolute twist).

There's some mirror/flip symmetries that each take a factor of 2 out, but that's insignificant as long as we keep the dimensions of our geometry fixed at 3.

Now having thought about it a bit more to write this, I think it'd be mostly (automatable brute-force type) mechanical once you translate the coarse proof structure and theorem definitions, because you're "just" sweeping 5 (or 8) degrees of freedom while partitioning the search space whenever your property definition hits a branch. A benefit of that being a possibly trivially parallel/flat certificate that's basically composed of 2 parts: (1) a list of intervals in the 5/8 dimensional search space that together cover the entire search space, and (2) for each listed interval, a branch-free verifiable statement (certificate) that the property definition applies in a definitionally uniform manner across said interval.

karmakaze•5mo ago
Intuitively not surprising as the property doesn't hold for a sphere which can be approximated. But there's a world of difference between intuition and proof, especially on the edge.

I would hope there are others with more faces that don't have the property and this could have the fewest faces.

Strilanc•5mo ago
Oh damn, in this year's sigbovik, Tom7 was trying to find out if shapes were Rupert or not: https://sigbovik.org/2025/proceedings.pdf#page=346
robinhouston•5mo ago
I believe that the name ‘Noperthedron’ for this new polyhedron that has been proven not to be Rupert was given in homage to tom7’s coinage ‘Nopert’ in that SIGBOVIK paper.
clgeoio•5mo ago
I just read this yesterday, how serendipodus
decimalenough•5mo ago
I was expecting a long listing of real estate owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fortunately somebody else already wrote that one too:

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-murdoch-family...

nroets•5mo ago
I was thinking of a different billionaire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Rupert

throw0101c•5mo ago
As a Canadian something else came to mind:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert%27s_Land

robinhouston•5mo ago
But this is the same Rupert that we're talking about here!
B1FF_PSUVM•5mo ago
"You can cut a hole in a cube that’s big enough to slide an identical cube through that hole! Think about that for a minute—it’s kind of weird."

Audience pretending not to think of https://www.google.com/search?q=it+goes+into+the+square+hole... ...

oersted•5mo ago
Here's the Rupert in question. What a dude! Eminently impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert_of_the_Rhine

mci•5mo ago
He is also known from prince Rupert's drops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_drop

armoredkitten•5mo ago
When I saw the title "Rupert's Property", I immediately thought of Rupert's Land which used to exist in Canada[0] (a large area around Hudson Bay, essentially). And as it turns out, it's the same guy! So apparently Canada also can be said to have Rupert's Property ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert%27s_Land