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France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
469•nar001•4h ago•224 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
156•bookofjoe•2h ago•137 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
447•theblazehen•2d ago•161 comments

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
33•thelok•2h ago•2 comments

Software Factories and the Agentic Moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
33•mellosouls•2h ago•27 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
93•AlexeyBrin•5h ago•17 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
782•klaussilveira•20h ago•241 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
42•samasblack•2h ago•28 comments

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
26•simonw•2h ago•24 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
36•vinhnx•3h ago•4 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
59•onurkanbkrc•5h ago•3 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1034•xnx•1d ago•583 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
180•alainrk•4h ago•255 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
171•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

Vinklu Turns Forgotten Plot in Bucharest into Tiny Coffee Shop

https://design-milk.com/vinklu-turns-forgotten-plot-in-bucharest-into-tiny-coffee-shop/
10•surprisetalk•5d ago•0 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
16•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
107•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
7•0xmattf•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
266•isitcontent•20h ago•33 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•43 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
278•dmpetrov•20h ago•148 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
36•matt_d•4d ago•11 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
546•todsacerdoti•1d ago•264 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
421•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•22h ago•166 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
65•helloplanets•4d ago•69 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
338•eljojo•23h ago•209 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
460•lstoll•1d ago•303 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
373•aktau•1d ago•194 comments
Open in hackernews

Tetrachromatic Vision

https://www.bookofjoe.com/2025/05/my-entry-32.html
47•surprisetalk•7mo ago

Comments

oofbey•7mo ago
At some point the world's gonna figure this out and start making tetrachrome cameras and screens and it's gonna be the next big TV upgrade after 8k.
carlosjobim•7mo ago
Current technology is far more advanced than that, with hyperspectral cameras which can make images to identify different geological materials etc.
mholm•7mo ago
15 years ago, Sharp released “Quattron” TVs with yellow subpixels. It was effectively indistinguishable, even in person.
_tom_•7mo ago
But was it distinguishable by tetrachromat?
rini17•7mo ago
IIRC the yellow subpixels did not add any new colors, only increased the yellow beightness.
_vaporwave_•7mo ago
Is there a simple (visual) way to test for this?
varunneal•7mo ago
Not publicly, but a few people in berkeley are working on it. Here is a paper from last year: https://imjal.github.io/theory-of-tetrachromacy. (Disclaimer: i am on this paper).

They've prototyped displays that can test for it as well.

glkindlmann•7mo ago
This is so cool. For your figures, how did you decide the RGB colors of the 4D colorspace? Or did you convince ACM to print your paper with special inks? :)
eesmith•7mo ago
Definitely not the latter as the paper mentions "The digits are faintly visible in this photograph, because the camera’s color response differs from a human’s."
eesmith•7mo ago
I remember watching a video some years back where the researcher thought he had developed such a test.

As I recall (it's been many years; likely over a decade since I saw it) he tested it with a woman who was believed to have tetrachromatic vision. She could reliably tell the difference.

As a control, he tested it with a man who was trained as a graphic artist.

He too could reliably tell the difference.

That result strongly implied the test did not work as expected.

Do you know anything about this previous work? I tried reading the paper but was immediately out of my depth.

colechristensen•7mo ago
Simple? No. My understanding is that the perceptual difference is much less significant than for colorblindness and while visual tests exist they are less reliable and less obvious than the visual tests for colorblindness.
glkindlmann•7mo ago
afaik not based on standard RGB displays. All widespread technology for digital color reproduction is based on RGB primaries, i.e. a 3D space of color, or rather a 3D submanifold of spectra inside the effectively infinite-dimensional space of spectra. It is feasible to test for color deficient vision (deficiency or absence of one or more cones, reducing color perception to a 2D or 1D space) because it is easy to sample 3D RGB space and behaviorally detect if colors that are different in 3D are conflated because in some viewer they project to the same location in their 2D or 1D "color" sub-submanifold.

But we'd need a convenient way to sample a 4D space of colors (perhaps with 4 monochromatic sources?), and thereby generate different spectra that normal trichromats see as the same color (called "metamers"), but that tetrachromats could recognize as distinct. And, how the 4D space is sampled would have to be pretty carefully optimized to generate distinct spectra that have the same response with the M (medium or "green") and L (long or "red") cones (which are actually quite similar already!) while also generating different responses for the putative tetrachromat's additional code between M and L. And that isn't possible with any conventional display device.

carlosjobim•7mo ago
On the contrary, RGB displays should be excellent tools to determine if somebody has vision which differ from normal. Ask the person to adjust the color settings so that real world footage on the display looks like how they experience the real world. Then you will see if there's any divergence in color perception, since display images are direct light while real world vision is reflected light.
glkindlmann•7mo ago
Whether via direct or reflected light, spectra in trichromat's eyes are still projected down to a 3D space (the responses of the S, M, L cones). What you describe would still require a standardized and reliable way to probe an extra degree of freedom in spectra that conventional RGB displays can't access. The paper shared by varunneal explains it better than I can.
carlosjobim•7mo ago
If we assume that digital video/film recording will compress the spectrum to images which are composed of three colors, somewhere in the processes between the light hitting the camera and the light being emitted from a display to the viewer, that means any tetrachromatic person will notice a difference between the images and the real world.
glkindlmann•7mo ago
Sure, but noticing a difference between the images and the real world also happens with us trichromats too, e.g. colors online don't match those in the real world if the illuminant isn't correctly controlled. The intrinsic difficulty of color reproduction is not the same as detecting tetrachromacy. The nuance here is in generating stimuli that reliably and specifically detect the difference between projecting from an infinite-D space of spectra down to 3D (via metamers like the "keef" and "litz" described in the paper linked above), versus projecting down to 4D.
carlosjobim•7mo ago
The difference between display and real world will be at most slight to a trichromat, while it would be extraordinarily obvious to a tetrachromat.

It's not very uncommon for people to be colour blind, dichromats. If media on screens would be dichromatic while the world around me is trichromatic, I would certainly notice at once.

glkindlmann•7mo ago
I suggest trying to quantify "extraordinarily", using the actual spectral response curve for the tetrachromat's fourth cone, called "Q" in the paper shared by varunneal. Most people casually equate the short (S), medium (M), and long (L) cones with blue, green, and red, with the idea that these are all as different as can be, but the M and L cones are very similar to each other, compared to S. The L, M, S curves are independent but far from orthogonal in the way you may be thinking as you say "extraordinarily". The Q curve is just another wide bump, with a peak in between that of M and L, so again, very far from being orthogonal. Whatever 4th dimension of color perception is accessed by the Q curve, it is a relatively cramped dimension, so reliably detecting perception along it requires some carefully designed stimuli.
glkindlmann•7mo ago
(in the awesome paper shared by varunneal, the metamers are named "keef" and "litz")
postalrat•7mo ago
Maybe if colors on a monitor or photographs don't match colors in real life? Like how a how black and white displays don't match. This would probably be pretty subtle differences.
crazygringo•7mo ago
> The first known human tetrachromat, an English social worker identified in 1993, sees 10 distinct colors looking at a rainbow, whereas the rest of us see only five.

What does this even mean? It's setting off my BS detector.

I can see as many colors in the rainbow as I want, since colors are culturally determined. Cyan is prominently there in the rainbow, even though most people don't include it in the traditional "Roy G Biv" -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Speaking of which, where did 5 even come from in that quote? I mean, the fact that we can argue over how many colors the rainbow has just shows how unscientific such a statement is.

If there's anything potentially scientific here, you could say that humans see three primary colors associated with the three cones -- red, green, blue -- and therefore three intermediate colors -- yellow, cyan, magenta. A fourth cone between red and green means that it might be possible to see 8 primary and intermediate colors instead of 6. But it also might not do much of anything at all, if it's then mapped to our existing opponent process [1] that is fundamentally based on red vs. green and blue vs. yellow. In other words, it would just be a redundant or ignored sensory input to our conceptual color processing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process

tom_•7mo ago
You're quite right. How could this possibly be worth investigating? There is nothing useful that we could discover here.
crazygringo•7mo ago
What? Nowhere did I say it wasn't worth investigating. How did you come up with that?

I'm complaining about a seemingly non-scientific statement that sounds absurd at first glance.

If you want to do rigorous testing of different combinations of wavelengths to see if anything can be distinguished and how that fits into our current frameworks of color interpretation, then great! But saying someone can see twice as many colors of the rainbow sounds like nonsense unless you have a rigorous scientific framework for that, and the article sure doesn't provide one.

david-gpu•7mo ago
> But it also might not do much of anything at all, if it's then mapped to our existing opponent process [1] that is fundamentally based on red vs. green and blue vs. yellow. In other words, it would just be a redundant or ignored sensory input to our conceptual color processing.

A click away: https://imjal.github.io/theory-of-tetrachromacy/

tom_•7mo ago
Everybody has their own BS detector, and mine happened to go off in this case. But you're quite right.
metalliqaz•7mo ago
> If there's anything potentially scientific here, you could say that humans see three primary colors associated with the three cones -- red, green, blue -- and therefore three intermediate colors -- yellow, cyan, magenta.

By this measure, a rainbow would be 3 primary colors and 2 intermediate colors: red-green=yellow, green-blue=cyan. That's five. Magenta could be described as "not green" and thus does not appear in a rainbow.

moralestapia•7mo ago
>I can see as many colors in the rainbow as I want, since colors are culturally determined.

Yeah man, tell that to a deuteranopic person.

"You're lacking cuhlshure", mega-lmao, the things one reads here.

spondylosaurus•7mo ago
When I learned about tetrachromacy as a kid I remember being devastated for like a week afterwards that I wasn't one too. It felt like discovering that superpowers are real but that you'll never have any :P
chrisco255•7mo ago
No worries, just strap on some infrared night vision goggles. You may not be superman, but you can always be iron man.
sublinear•7mo ago
I can't find any consistent estimates on prevalence or whether this is strictly X chromosome related (why it's assumed that only females can have this).
somat•7mo ago
I assume it is the same reason that women have stripey skin.

at ~ 100 cells, if the embryo has 2 X chromosomes the cell shuts one of them off, which one is random, those cells continue to multiply bringing their specific X chromosome with them.

So women have genetically distinct blotches all over their body based on which cell disabled which X chromosome.

I will have to leave this one for the scientists but I assume tetracromats got some of their cone cells from X and the rest from X`

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw (veritasium: Why Women Are Stripey)

The implication being, I don't think tetracromats have some sort of super vision, they just have what would be considered color blind if all their color cells were defective. But because only some of them are they get an interesting subtle addition to their color sense.

IAmBroom•7mo ago
That's exactly it.

There exists two genes that code for the red-cone-detector. They sense /slightly/ different shades of red (more precisely, their gaussian-like filters are centered differently).

And these are carried on the X chromosome. Either one or the other is in a male fertilized cell, but both are possible in a female fertilized cell.

The measurable end result is that some few women have both kinds of cones (therefore four color detectors, where two majorly overlap in the red region). These tetrachromats can detect finer distinctions between colors on the red end of the spectrum; their color detection in green/blue is identical to ordinary color vision.

lizknope•7mo ago
I remember this article from a few years ago about a tetrachromat artist.

https://concettaantico.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-ju...

https://munsell.com/color-blog/tetrachromat-artist-concetta-...

Many flowers have patterns only visible in ultraviolet. Many pollinators can see ultraviolet and these patterns on the flower direct them to the pollination areas.

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

http://www.naturfotograf.com/UV_ANGE_SYL.html

The lens in our eye filters out a lot of UV.

After Monet had cataract surgery his color perception changed so his later paintings have a different color balance.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullartic...

supermatt•7mo ago
Impossible to read on an iPhone. Undismissable ad obscuring top part of screen. https://imgur.com/a/W1yweDQ
geonic•7mo ago
See that tiny arrow on the left bottom? You can collapse the container by clicking that.

Really shitty UX.

supermatt•7mo ago
Thanks - I didn’t even notice that. But now you point it out I’ve tried to use it 4 times and each time I go through to the ad :/ really scummy website. Flagged.
TomMasz•7mo ago
Kind of the opposite of colorblindness, where people (mostly male) see fewer colors in the rainbow and are often unaware of it.
IAmBroom•7mo ago
A lot of false assumptions are going on.

Tetrachromats are not seeing four well-separated colors. They are seeing the exact same blue-area and green-area colorrs, with two different cones responding slightly differently to red-area light.

So, instead of a color looking RGB(200,100,100) to them, it might look (200.26,100,100).

The very slight difference is why it's so hard to detect in people, and frankly, doesn't affect much (which is why there's apparently very little evolutionary "pressure" on the color genes).