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Comment by rolenthedeep | Hacker News Reader

"just don't connect it to the internet" is such a typical HN response that completely misses the point. A smart TV with no internet connection is still a smart TV. It still has an entire operating system that needs to load wifi, ethernet, Bluetooth, usb driver stacks. It still has an awful, flashy interface that adds unnecessary steps between changing inputs. It still tries to load god knows what apps every time you turn it on.

A dumb TV is a panel, some inputs, and an OSD menu that hasn't changed since 2005. It has exactly two functions: select an input and display that input. It should turn on in seconds, not minutes. Changing inputs should have at most two steps and take no more than two seconds. It should have exactly as much processing power as is required to pipe an hdmi signal to the panel and nothing more. It should be so fundamentally incapable of injecting ads that the very idea is laughable. Hell, I'd even prefer it not have speakers.

Disconnecting your smart TV from the internet only means it doesn't spy on you and advertise to you. It doesn't solve any of the other problems making these devices awful.

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> A smart TV with no internet connection

And it's soon going to be impossible to dodge it going on the Internet anyway. Manufacturers are hard at work making sure that if any of any neighbor's Internet of Shitty Insecure Things [TM] device participate in the scam, the smart TV shall use your neighbor's device to escape and access the net. I forgot the name of the protocol / "feature", but it's a very real thing.

So unless you live in the middle of nowhere, like in a cabin in the woods, it's not going to work for much longer to "no enter the WiFi password" to "just don't connect it to the internet".

Just buy a projector made to project reports at corporate meetings or the like. These are still totally dumb and has added bonuses you can get a diagonal bigger than what any TV can offer and it's much closer to the movie theater feeling.

> And it's soon going to be impossible to dodge it going on the Internet anyway.

To the tune of the Sesame Street song: Faraday cage, sweeping the signal away

I don't know if transparent Faraday cages are possible, but there's apparently at least one company that will EM shield entire rooms.

> I don't know if transparent Faraday cages are possible

Depending on your budget, you could faraday enclose the whole room / building rather than trying to do an individual device.

As related reading from back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)

> While much of TEMPEST is about leaking electromagnetic emanations, it also encompasses sounds and mechanical vibrations.

Damnit. They're going to embed signals in the harmonics of the sound system, and invert the sound systems of neighboring connected devices to act as microphones. So you'll need a Faraday cage and a fully soundproofed and seismically-proofed room.

Of course then you can't use your phone inside your house/living room.

They still sell landlines.

I'm already sold on the idea, you don't need to keep on selling it to me. :)

lol

That is total unfounded speculation unless you have evidence for it. Do you?

There's been an urban legend going around for years that smart TV's automatically connect to unsecured wifi but nobody's ever been able to demonstrate it a single time. (Probably their kid had connected it intentionally or something.)

So you might be conflating that urban legend with Amazon's network of Ring devices. But that's extremely low bandwidth, and there is zero evidence TV manufacturers are trying to build in automatic connections to it.

Again, if you have actual evidence then please share, otherwise this is just scaremongering and FUD.

https://m.gsmarena.com/huawei_reportedly_working_on_a_5gconn...

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN111885330B/en

Your car already does this. It's trivial for your television to do so as well.

Sidewalk doesn't yet have a TV manufacturer onboarded but an ad profile is well within the size limit for their spectrum. We're talking kb of json.

So it's not unfounded, there are patents. It's not speculation, it seems to be a pretty active area of thought for manufacturers of televisions, and it's used now in your car.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/28/23659191/amazon-sidewalk-...

I mean, bandwidth doesn't really matter if we're talking about whether the device is sending home private information about what content you watch. It doesn't need to stream video back to Samsung to be basically malware.

If Amazon can't do it 5G will, one of the advertised aims is to allow many more types of device to connect without overcrowding the networks.

> When fully operational, 5G networks will have the capacity to connect 500 times more devices than 4G. This is the foundation for the future of Massive IoT—a world with a million or more connected devices per square kilometre.

https://www.rogers.com/business/blog/en/understanding-massiv...

Now for the sentence that will ruin my credibility: they've done a pretty good job of immunising (ha) everyone against any criticism of 5G by associating it with antivaxxers etc.

> By injecting people with a severely weakened dose of fake news (the virus) and refuting it in advance, over time people can develop mental antibodies – psychological immunity – against misinformation.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/foolproof

>There's been an urban legend going around for years that smart TV's automatically connect to unsecured wifi but nobody's ever been able to demonstrate it a single time. (Probably their kid had connected it intentionally or something.)

Your neighbours' smartTV might take on an AP role for yours.

There's no escaping the ads and tracking with these devices.

But again, that's total speculation.

You say "there's no escaping" and yet there is. Just don't connect the wi-fi. And done. You've escaped.

To actually be sure, just invest in a dumb TV or monitor.

SmartTV are not something you want to support with your money anyway.

"Perhaps I can interest you in my services. I specialize in foiling, in copper, the entire television set to block all RF signals from entering or leaving the device. Uh, except for the screen side, of course."

How is it not illegal for your device to highjack a neighbour's internet connection?

Because your neighbor "agreed" to to the possibility in the process of setting up their device as part of that device's TOS.

Should still be illegal. Nobody expects such a thing in a TOS.

Long TOS that nobody expects to ever be read should be illegal in general.

A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements, and your nonfunctional requirements (low processing power) frankly don't matter to most people. My smart-but-disconnected TV turns on just as quickly as my PC monitors can return from sleep (a second or two); changing inputs is just as quick (input button on remote, left/right to select, okay to confirm), and the automatic input selection when a device turns on means I barely even need to endure that tiny hassle; the interface it displays is more than a dumb monitor's OSD, but not by much.

You seem to be of the opinion that it's the principle of the thing, mine is avoiding ads and bloated/slow interface. To me, keeping it disconnected avoids all of the problems of it being smart. Those "smart features" are not features to me (or most people here), but neither are they anti-features.

I also wonder if an older device with lower processing power doesn't draw more power, which is a metric I find it easier to care about.

I have a 75" Sony bravia smart tv and it draws 10-20 watts in standby.

I have a 70" dell monitor used as a a tv in another room it draws 0 watts in standby.

Is the Sony tv disconnected?

Maybe my ignorance here but a 70 inch monitor? At what point is it just a dumb tv? Like is monitor a term used to describe its actual engineering and functionality or just how it's used. Also if engineering, is there a substantial price difference?

I've never seen a 70 inch monitor either, but usually text looks a lot better on a monitor and of course many monitors offer much higher refresh rates.

Ads aren't the only reason why a 42" 4K TV is generally much cheaper than a 32" 4K monitor

> Maybe my ignorance here but a 70 inch monitor?

"Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor - D7523QT":

* https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-75-4k-interactive-touch...

"Dell 65 4K Interactive Touch Monitor - C6522QT"

* https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-65-4k-interactive-touch...

Use-case seems to be conference rooms.

In addition to what others have already mentioned, it would generally be completely acceptable for a monitor to not have built-in speakers. For a TV, not so much.

Ugh, opportunity to rant a bit. As of some iPadOS release last year, I can no longer connect my iPad to a monitor while simultaneously using Airplay to send audio to my HomePod. I assume this is a DRM-imposed bug, but it’s frustrating as hell.

I finally bought a cheap speaker with a 3.5mm input because none of my existing Bluetooth speakers have one, so I could plug it into my monitor, but it’s crappy audio and a crappy workaround for a crappy limitation.

Look for a power setting related to quick boots. They are common and increase power draw (at a benefit of quicker on/off cycles).

20 watts standby is only about 14.7 kWh per month. Even at on-peak, summer PG&E rates, we're only talking about $7/month. Granted, I'd much rather pay $0 than $7, and I'd rather not waste energy, but we're probably not talking about anything close to the amount of energy the average household wastes. I'd be looking at refrigerators and other large appliances for energy savings long before I'd be thinking about how much electricity the TV uses on standby.

Are you seriously trying to suggest that paying $7/mo for literally nothing is a reasonable thing to do? Not to mention the waste this causes...

Sure, other appliances may suck down more power, but at least you are getting something valuable for that energy use and expense.

I am not. I am suggesting there are other savings in the average household energy budget that are more significant. Besides, even "waste" electricity heats a home in the winter, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds even.

And it heats it when you want it cool in the summer. So it’s actually net worse?

Unless you have a crazy old bad refrigerator that TV would be up there with the most costly appliance per month for most people. WHILE BEING OFF.

You are off your rocker here

That's 20W and $84/yr to do absolutely nothing. There is absolutely, positively no reason the standby power draw needs to be that high. I'm fine with like, 100-1000mW to allow whatever background circuity is required to wake up, but 20W is absurd. That's enough to reasonably illuminate a bedroom (your average 100W-equivalent LED bulb is 14-20W).

$7/month is a really high amount. Especially for nothing. Or something I actively don’t want.

I have lots of dumb devices in my house I don’t want piling on $7 so the manufacturer can try to earn $0.30/month in data fees. I have multiple TVs, a washer, a dryer, a fridge, a cryo tank, lots of things. I don’t want them to waste $7 each.

cryo tank?

A tank you go in and cry every evening after work.

Probably a cold immersion tub.

$7/mo would be something like 1/5 of my electricity bill and we run 2x old overclocked fx-8350s, (w/ dual monitors) and do all cooking at home.

That’s a lot for something functionally off.

I would argue the TV is the most wasteful thing you mentioned. The refrigerator, even if it is inefficient, still does it’s job by cooling food. That ~15kWh monthly to your TV to exist in an off state does nothing for your quality of life. It’s not like the energy is uses somehow charged the TV for future use, it’s just running internal systems that we have no insight into and most likely does not benefit us.

Exactly this. More than 7$ a month leave my bank account every month on so many random things, subscriptions I forget to cancel, virtual machines I forget to destroy etc etc. I'd rather have my TV shutdown / turn on quickly over sweating about a random $7 savings on an electric bill that I wouldn't even see anyway.

you don't need to be put into a financial crunch by the $7 in order to see it as wasteful, and it doesn't take 20W of energy to get a television to do things quickly.

we're in this sorry state of affairs because of people accepting lower quality without protest, while expecting everything to be cheap. Companies are in a bad spot, and so are consumers.

Demand doesn't really drive supply, not the way we're told it does. The manufacturers want to make devices that give them a further income stream, and they just have a marketing budget for making sure demand doesn't drop too low for what they're making.

So, about US$100 a year?

Doesn't that seem like a pretty crap deal if you're planning on using the TV for 5+ years or so?

Say you keep the TV for 7 years, that's $588. You can get a 75 inch Sony Bravia TV for $1500. You want to pay 1/3 of the price of your TV just to power it while it is turned off?

Kinda related note: I also have smart but disconnected Samsung TV. Everything was great until a new neighbour moved in and started repeatedly trying to connect her watch to my TV. Apparently my TV has a bluetooth that's always on and has no way to turn it off.

If you don't mind voiding your warranty, physically disconnect the BT module. There are "how to" videos on yt. Had to disconnect the WIFI module on mine (also Samsung) to make the remote work again...

When this happened to me, I just renamed my tv to "STOP TRYING TO PAIR WITH THIS FUCKING TV"

Very tangential, but this reminded me of a much more obscene [0] Wi-Fi name controversy.

https://gothamist.com/news/park-slope-childrens-salon-trolle...

Funny! But probably not the wisest way to introduce yourself to the neighbors.

Some feedback from being sort of on the other end here.

I rent a room and the tenant is on the same WiFi network. They politely messaged me one day saying “I think you’re trying to connect to my TV”. Which as it turns out was our toddler mashing the screen on YouTube Kids. I worked out on YouTube kids how to disable the option in the app.

My point being that it’s not always a rational person you’re dealing with, being able to at least disable the option is essential.

Ads are really the least of our worries.

Data about attention (viewing habits) is so immensely valuable, who knows what the next generation will do to obtain it? Years ago, the TV execs told us not to have a private conversation in the TV room. We all know how very easy it would -- if they wanted -- to exfiltrate your data in a variety of ways: Kismet, group Xfinity/Fios wifi passwords, or even ultrasonic beacons between cell phones. Why would they leave cash on the table if they had the option?

Running a Samsung Tv for example thru pihole can solve a lot.

You mean like using a pervasive low bandwidth cellular data service or Sidewalk or other such tech? I’m surprised blackholing your TV even works any more given how cheap low bandwidth data services are to both add into the set and provision at scale, compared to the value of collecting all the smart tab data that’s not connected. Don’t forget a lot of TV users aren’t savvy enough to configure them, on the other end of the spectrum.

> My smart-but-disconnected TV turns on just as quickly as my PC monitors

Probably because your smart TV is never actually turned off, but sits in a standby state that wastes electricity.

It's only disconnected until your neighbor's AP decides to advertise an open guest network for it to automatically connect to.

Networks with no password and no captive sign in portal are extremely rare nowadays. They are on by default and anyone with the IT ability to go in and change it will already know the dangers of letting anyone use the Internet you are paying for.

But also are there any actual confirmed cases of TVs doing this? The comment section here always fear mongers about it (kudos for not mentioning Amazon sidewalk), but it isn't anything worth worrying about currently.

> Networks with no password and no captive sign in portal are extremely rare nowadays.

In my suburban-American experience, they are in fact they are more common these days as more consumers purchase and own ISP-provided equipment.

> But also are there any actual confirmed cases of TVs doing this?

Given the nature of proprietary closed source software, I am willing to accept a less than charitable assumption of what they do.

Which ISPs are giving out APs with no key needed and no captive portal? Every one that I’m aware of requires some manner of secret to login to the shared AP.

There's nothing actually stopping an ISP from making a deal with a TV manufacturer to provide connectivity though, is there?

There’s also nothing stopping any of them from including an Iridium modem in their sets. Or using aircrack to try and break into a nearby network. Or any other tinfoil hat thing we can come up with.

There are literally thousands of paranoid security researchers who would love to post about something like this (hi), and none of them have. That’s hardly conclusive, but if it’s not good enough for you then maybe you should reconsider whether society is the place for you.

I'm sure they're not doing it now, I'm not sure they won't do it eventually. I don't think it can be done without people noticing but I'm also not sure they'll think that far ahead.

I don’t understand the point you’re making. Someone might eventually start doing something they’re not currently doing?

Why would you think LG/Samsung/Sony/etc don't have corp creds for every ISP AP on the planet?

That’s moving the goalpost pretty far, don’t you think?

No. Why do you think it is? If the business model is "connect to the mothership and feed us data at all costs", why wouldn't they just arrange with the ISPs to allow their devices to connect?

We were talking about open Wi-Fi networks.

This paranoid alternate reality where tv companies are paying every ISP for backdoor access is very, very far away from flipping the “opportunistically join open networks” bit. It’s also not borne out by either research or logic.

> at all costs

Nothing works like that. They don’t care about you, beyond the pennies they can make. If it costs (and it would) they won’t do it.

Not really, The default wifi router supplied by the biggest ISP here has got a guest network turned on by default.

Which ISP? Comcast in America does that crap, but it's worthless to snoopers since you need a Comcast account to do anything on it, so will actively need to log in.

Can you connect to it and get internet without hitting a captive portal that requires your ISP creds? That’s usually how it happens in the US.

Best solution for that is to open up the TV and disconnect the antenna.

I think that's why people are just asking to buy non-smart TVs.

Any guides or recommendations on accomplishing this on LG equipment?

Open the thing up and figure it out!

Great advice for breaking a $1000 piece of kit.

A convenient rule of thumb for this advice is that anyone who should follow it doesn’t need it. Everyone else should be redirected to a teardown video.

There are some videos around on the internet that show how to find the Wi-Fi module on an LG tv, for example the below. If you break your tv by trying this it’s on you.

https://youtu.be/gRrBZ2Eu5-I

the best offered solution should probably be a bit better than "throw away your warranty and labor to do X."

Your neighbor's SmartTV might volunteer to the task of relaying tracking and ads to your SmartTV, with no manual setup involved.

There's no evidence that smart TVs actually do that, aside from a few scant anecdotes from reddit.

I have tried pretty hard (I came up with 100 common Wi-Fi names by googling around) and have never been able to get it to happen. With enterprise grade Wi-Fi gear it’s pretty trivial to create a ton of AP names and route them all to a test VLAN.

If it sounds like the idea comes with a tinfoil hat, best to investigate with a skeptical eye.

They don't do it yet. I don't think it's crazy to imagine that changing, especially with stuff like Amazon's Sidewalk.

Or they embed a 4G/5G radio.

> "A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements, and your nonfunctional requirements"

Ehhh I beg to differ. I got a Sony TV a year or so ago with Google TV built in. It's been a nightmare - the GUI is basically unusably slow (literally 5 entire seconds from button press to response) and the whole experience sucks.

So I did what most reasonable people did - plug in some HDMI device that doesn't suck (in my case, an Apple TV) - except that didn't fix the problem entirely.

You see, this TV really really really wants to boot into Google TV. So sure, you have your dongle plugged into this HDMI port full time but it just won't reliably boot into it. Even after setting the HDMI port as the default, half the time it insists on booting into Google TV anyway. And sure, I can grab the TV remote and switch inputs - but again, it's multiple button presses on a software suite that takes ~5 seconds to respond to a single button press. It's a good 20-30 seconds just to switch inputs.

It's maddening. So maddening that I am in fact in the market for a dumb TV just so I can be rid of this cursed UX.

I'm not particularly puritanical about this. I'm willing to live with "just disconnect it", but that solution doesn't actually work for me!

My LG C9 OLED from 2019 works great with my AppleTV. It starts up quickly, and I only ever see its interface if I accidentally bump the TVs remote (all normal interaction including power on and volume go through the AppleTV remote). Of course I never connected it to WiFi.

I have one of these and was happy with it until it decided to use the notification system to nag me.

1. Lots of ads of local TV stations on the system update notifications.

2. Often it nag me about other random things too, like asking me to change the brightness settings or telling me that using the TV for too long is unhealthy.

3. Often it decides to stop work properly unless I accept license agreements. Sometimes I accept and immediately deny them again, and then the TV works fine for about a week.

4. It started to show ads for porn stuff. When I complained to my country authorities they said it was just "documentary recommendations, not ads". And thus why I can't disable them by refusing to accept the EULA for the ad service.

It’s doing all this tuff without an internet connection? Did you update the firmware since you bought it? I’ve never seen anything like you describe on mine.

I made the mistake of letting it update. :(

Are you using HDMI-CEC? You shouldn't be touching your TV remote at all. You shouldn't need to set a default HDMI input. All you have to do is press any button on the AppleTV remote and it will turn on the TV with the correct input device selected. I have a 2 year old Sony TV with GoogleTV and it works fine. I can go directly to a PS5 and Switch by just turning on the respective controller.

Sure, that stuff "should" work and there are set ups that one "should" do, but one can say the same thing about how these things work as well: The manufacturer "shouldn't" be requiring things to work this way and "shouldn't" be forcing this software on everyone.

This isn’t what I’m experiencing at all. I have a Sony Bravia TV. The TV works flawlessly with HDMI CEC and the Apple TV port set to default. It never opens Android TV, I haven’t seen that interface in months. I also never even set up Google TV or logged in with a Google account, which is optional.

HDMI-CEC is a very underrated feature not more widely known.

Indeed. I was surprised when new Apple TV 4K remote was able to turn on/off my 2009 Panasonic plasma TV. And the Apple TV remote could be IR programmed to adjust the volume of my NAD amplifier, too.

This is perfect for me as I still find the picture quality of plasma sufficient and don’t want a “smart” TV.

I’ve never had HDMI-CEC not do something that absolutely infuriated me.

Yep, I'm using HDMI-CEC. I would love to just touch the Apple TV remote and have everything "just work", but for whatever reason a good 1/3rd of the time it just boots into Google TV anyway despite not touching the TV remote at all.

This sort of annoyance would be far more tolerable if the onboard software wasn't such a gigantic pain.

But it could be worse - I owned another (slightly older) Sony "smart" TV that wouldn't even display the Input switcher until ~60s after boot. It would literally give you a "TV is still starting, try again later" prompt for a good minute after the screen turns on. So I guess this is something of an improvement.

What year/model of Sony TV is it?

I've had a couple of Bravias over the past 7 years, with the newer of the two having been purchased in 2018 and I've not seen the smart TV homescreen once since configuring the last used input as the default. Neither were ever connected to the internet though.

Also, as I understand recent Sony TVs include something called "basic TV mode" that turns off all smart functionality and make them function much more similarly to dumb TVs, perhaps yours has this feature?

Hadn't heard of "basic TV mode" but it seems to be a feature of any Google TV device made in the last year or two. They say it will disable all smart tv features and leave only the HDMI inputs and antenna input.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-best-feature-of-...

https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en

I bought a Sony 2 years ago (2019 model apparently and not a Bravia). It’s been great as a dumb telly. I have Chromecast 4K plugged in, use its remote for everything (sometimes control it from Google speakers and phone apps too). The official remote is sitting out of the way gathering dust.

Thanks for this, I will stay away from any Google TV sets for my next purchase.

> changing inputs is just as quick

Problem is, it's not. And turning it on is slow. Changing channels is also slow. I'm not picky or principled at all when it comes to TVs, I just want it to work without pissing me off by taking forever to do stuff, and they're failing the test. My old TVs were always fine.

Also, my last smart TV bricked itself, which I'll write off as me being unlucky but it probably wouldn't have happened with a dumb one. When I was shopping for a replacement and asked the BestBuy employee if they have any dumb TVs, he said he gets that question a lot, and no. So I don't think I'm a weirdo for wanting one.

IPtv will be slower than analog as you need to request the channel when switching.

I meant regular cable TV over coax. (Included in my apartment rent, and occasionally I want to watch sports.)

A lot of smart TVs turn all the way off by default but have a quick power on setting buried in there that uses a bit more power when not on.

Not mine, unfortunately.

You have to be careful. My Samsung smart tv throws up a splash screen whenever any HDMI input is plugged in or wakes up, which can only be dismissed by using the remote. Sometimes it even shows a few frames of the HDMI input before switching to the splash screen. Infuriating!

This kills me about the Apple TV.

It didn't used to display an ad for Apple's channels but now it does and it requires the remote to dismiss... Previously you could just blindly airplay something but now you have to airplay + dismiss the ad with the remote.

I’ve been using Apple TV since the first generation and haven’t gotten an ad in my experience - did something change or a new version of the hardware I’ve not noticed yet show up? Are you using the Apple TV app itself?

I frequently use AirPlay with Apple TV and have never experienced this

This has never happened to me in 8+ years over dozens of Apple TV's in both home and office settings.

That sounds horrible and I would immediately quit the ecosystem... I have never experienced this in nearly a decade of use, but I also pay for TV+; is it possible you got the bad luck of getting a terrible A/B test or something?

>A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements

One of them will. This thread is full of conflicting anecdotes: one user's smart TV turns on quickly and works like a dumb TV when it's not connected to the Internet; another user's TV takes a full sixty seconds to get going. The fact that one smart TV will do the thing does not at all imply that another one will.

And if you have to search for what kind of smart TV will act like a dumb TV when you want it to, you are already looking for a dumb TV! You still have to look at reviews and seek out the other people who didn't want any of this corporate surveillance catastrophe to find out what happened to them. It is the same search process with a slightly broader scope at the cost of a more complicated definition of that scope.

Meanwhile, I got a 40" Sceptre dumb TV from Walmart last year and it's been a very satisfying decision. It was cheaper than most if not all of the smart TVs, too. And I don't have to treat it like a contamination risk or worry about it finding an open WiFi network. Maybe I'm just one of those old curmudgeons who doesn't care about image quality. Couldn't tell you.

> A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements

I agree. The question should be "What TV doesn't force smart features upon me" instead. I've had an LG Smart TV for four years. Never connected it to the internet, only use it with Apple TV and PS4. I notice none of the issues that GP mentioned.

Just because a problem doesn't affect you personally doesn't mean that it isn't a problem.

I bought a TV recently and "didn't connect it to the WiFi", but guess what it does? If can't connect to the internet for a certain period of time, it desperately wants to display a "Internet Connection Error" message that puts the entire display into a state where CEC doesn't work, so the whole damn thing is useless.

Which brand / model? Please name and shame.

Vizio M65Q6

> Vizio Well there's your problem (paraphrased from someone who used to work for them)

Yeah, it’s sad all the answers to this problem are some form of victim shaming.

I am frankly surprised they do not all do this, and predict they all will. There will be no "don't connect it to the internet" nor even "use a pie hole" solutions possible, because the manufacturers will intentionally block them

Use monitor and smart TV dongle?

You have an 80” monitor solution?

Projector

I think this is probably a valid solution in many cases.

However, it is not a computer monitor, which is the explicit item at question here.

80” is a marketing solution in search of a problem. Read a book.

Books are a marketing solution in search of a problem. Watch a movie.

…convincing, isn’t it?

My TV is a 43" HP Monitor. Some things just don't work right. The Roku cannot turn off the display like it could my old television. Since the monitor has no speakers, I have to use a soundbar but the Roku remote cannot adjust the volume so I have to use two remotes. None of this is a big deal to me but it is not seamless.

I have a Roku Ultra LT, and the remote has an IR blaster. I have it control TV power and sound bar volume via IR just because it's more reliable than CEC. It is seamless for me. Perhaps you could upgrade to the higher end remote?

You may be right. I am on the Roku accessories page and it doesn't look like my remote is even sold any more. Mine is the voice remote with headphones but it does not have the two shortcut buttons.

I got the Roku Ultra LT back in November and I vaguely recall only spending $40 for it new. It looks like just the remote it came with is $40 now! Might be worth picking one up on eBay or something?

Children are complaining, but this is exactly right. Yes, I can work around the device connecting me to the internet. What I’d really prefer though is to exchange whatever cost went into the shit add ons, the Bluetooth, the speakers, the wifi, the usb, and put that into a better display. Done. I’m sure there’s a good business reason why this simple, obvious project is not what’s in the market.

The good business reason is that Bluetooth etc cost essentially nothing compared to the $$$ they make selling your privacy.

I doubt it's actual nothing, rather I think the added cost in absolute value is used to improve operating margins in ratio. This would also drive internal incentives, and it's rendering the cost to the manufacturer irrelevant so long that the capitals at hand and market demand can absorb it.

e.g. $150 TV + $75 chips - $100 rebates = $125 -> negative cost and +10% margin to add chips!

And the problem is that we as customers are still charged the full $225, not the essentially nothing.

I do Bluetooth hardware for my job. At the scale that TV manufacturers operate at, I would be extremely surprised if Bluetooth cost more than a dollar for them to implement.

I operate on the scale of hundreds to thousands of units, and Bluetooth adds less than $5 to each unit. At millions, I assume it's more or less free.

Suppose economics of scale make it cheaper to produce the smart devices than the specwise-equivalent dumb devices, just like how it's cheaper to produce microcontroller-based electronics today than the "simpler" analog electronics which came before. Then what is the argument for the dumb devices?

I would spend the premium to buy a stupid dumbass tv.

That is really not how that works.

A smart TV is a dumb TV with an extra processor. No matter how you shake it, the smart features are extra hardware added on to the dumb TV.

And besides, smart TVs are already much cheaper, because the manufacturer is spying on you and selling that data in perpetuity. They're injecting ads into your TV menus and keeping that profit.

Your smart TV is priced so low because it's subsidized by the manufacturer selling your privacy.

What you're talking about was a paradigm shift in the fundamentals of electronics. Silicon wafers in the trillions are cheaper to make than vacuum tubes in the thousands. It was a radical shift in the way the industry worked. It literally revolutionized the entirety of global society.

Meanwhile, Samsung took the guts out of the cheapest android tablet they could find and stuffed it in a TV. It's really not at all comparable.

In fact "dumb" TVs also need control circuitry for tuning, input selection, on-screen display, picture settings, etc., so isn't it possible that it works out to be cheaper to roll that control circuitry right into a more sophisticated microcontroller, which is probably produced in bigger scale due to its wider applications? And then, why produce a proprietary "dumb" firmware for the TV when you can just throw Linux on it?

Bluetooth and Wifi are on the same radio.

But it costs money not to advertise to you. You have to be willing to pay more for your TV, and people love buying $500, 65-inch TVs.

I was actually pleasantly surprised to see the "just don't connect it to the internet" comments, as most of these smart TV threads are usually full of comments complaining about them on principle, even though most of the world doesn't care (connected to the internet or not), and in this case, I think it does solve most of the issues.

It's more common for HN to argue against something on principle, even when there's a relatively simple solution/workaround.

Not saying there's something inherently wrong with arguing against something on principle, but just saying that it seems more common on HN, and saying that the inverse is "such a typical HN response" is not my experience at all.

> It should turn on in seconds, not minutes.

I'm assuming this is hyperbole, but if not, I think there are other issues if it's taking minutes for even the smartest, most connected and loaded TV to turn on. Every smart TV I've owned has barely taken seconds to turn on, and I usually don't go out of my way to keep it disconnected from WiFi (unless, for example, I'm trying to avoid an update).

I have a smart TV (in fact, the very one recommended in the article), connected to a Sony sound bar, and an Apple TV. I wake the whole assemblage from sleep by prodding the Apple TV remote — and then it takes fully 60 seconds before I can use it, because it seemingly

1. Wakes the TV up in SDR, syncs with the Apple TV;

2. Starts playing audio;

3. Which wakes the soundbar up;

4. Which forces a re-sync as the TV switches to eARC mode;

5. And then the TV notices that the Apple TV is offering to negotiate Dolby Vision, so it does so, and re-syncs again;

6. Which kicks it out of eARC mode, so it needs to re-sync another time to get back into it…

And that’s all just if I left it on the Apple TV’s input when putting it to sleep. If I sleep the TV by sleeping a game console when it’s the only thing awake, and then wake it up later with the Apple TV remote, then there at least two more resyncs involved, and also seemingly ten seconds of complete blackness where it’s doing literally nothing.

Also, this one’s not the TV’s fault, but YouTube for tVOS gets so confused by these repeated mode-switch re-syncs, that if it’s what would be playing on resume from sleep, then instead the audio will play from the YouTube video, with the first frame of the video frozen on the display and the event loop stalled for another ~60s (I.e. my prompting to go into the task manager to kill the app is ignored, and then 60s later it suddenly happens, but at that point the video resumes so I don’t need to do it any more.) Doesn’t happen with any other app waking from sleep.

Oh, and sometimes the TV will just wake to its home menu despite being woken up by the Apple TV remote, and while the system apps will be responsive (once I grab the TV’s remote), it will refuse to open the input switcher, or the device preferences (in order to gracefully reboot it.) when it does this, I have to get up and unplug the damned thing to get it working again.

None of those things have anything to do with the TV being "smart" though, it's all up to the crappiness of modern HDMI.

Removing app support from the TV would not fix it. Actually, it sounds like using the smart features of your TV to watch video instead of an Apple TV would actually reduce the bugginess?

I have a 10 year old non-smart TV. It predates HDR, but just basic ARC and CEC still regularly trips it up. To the point my 5 year old knows how to re-select the sound bar output to fix when the audio breaks.

Ah, but most of the slowdown from this messiness is due to all these mode changes being handled at the application layer in sandboxed userland daemons on a non-real-time OS. Before smart TVs with application processors “fast enough” to (barely, slowly) do these things, the “control-plane logic” for a TV’s DSPs was handled effectively instantly by purpose-designed ASICs.

I suspect if you fully unplugged many smart TVs on the market, and then plugged them back in and turned them on, they'd take a minute or two (or more) to fully turn back on.

When you turn off a smart TV, it doesn't actually turn off. It's similar to a laptop when you close the lid and it goes into standby. Consumers wouldn't tolerate a several-minute power-up sequence every time they want to watch TV -- and rightly so -- so instead, they sit there, wasting power and money in a standby state.

Most of the world does care, they want their TV connected to the internet. They want to install apps and stream content. They don’t want to have to run a plex server and set up a raspberry pi hanging out the back of their TV.

I should turn on in seconds (and be ready to use) from having the power switched off at the wall. Dumb TVs can do this.

> "just don't connect it to the internet" is such a typical HN response that completely misses the point. A smart TV with no internet connection is still a smart TV. It still has an entire operating system that needs to load wifi, ethernet, Bluetooth, usb driver stacks. It still has an awful, flashy interface that adds unnecessary steps between changing inputs. It still tries to load god knows what apps every time you turn it on.

And that’s forgetting that some of those, when not actively connected to any specific wifi network, will just connect, on their own, to any nearby open wifi network.

See http://web.archive.org/web/20210828035115/https://forum.deve...

> Because end user questions disrupt developer discussion this thread will be removed soon.

Lol. I’ve worked for Samsung’s TV (and ad business, I’m ashamed to say) and this doesn’t surprise me one bit. The culture was actively user hostile and gave zero fucks about security or quality. All that mattered was how much data we could suck out of the users home. That included automated content recognition so we’d know what you were watching at all time including porn even if it was streamed via your laptop, or reporting all the IDs of all hdmi devices connected to the tv, or scanning your internal network to find out what devices are there to then sell this info to advertisers and have you switch from Nintendo to Xbox for example.

Fwiw this was the first and last time I’ve ever worked in adtech, I’ve sworn to never ever enable this industry ever again.

The automated content recognition thing is surprising, at least to me. That’s so invasive I’d assume it was illegal, but I guess I’m too optimistic about privacy laws.

It’s been documented

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...

They also unilaterally decided to add a new "ad" feature to existing TVs

https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...

It’s to sell analytics that are “better than Nielsen”, real-time, across devices, and for ad (re)targeting. There were also plans to detect commercial breaks on broadcast tv and dynamically replace them with whatever ads samsung wanted to show you instead but I think this was scrapped after all.

You forget that there's ethernet inside the HDMI (1.4 and up) cable, it's called HEC (HDMI Ethernet Channel)?

It can just take network from whatever is attached and connected.

While Ethernet over HDMI is certainly a thing, is there any chance of a TV actually doing that without a consumer jumping through several hoops? As someone who would actually like that as a feature, I am 100% sure my 4 month old TV isn't sneaking internet access through its HDMI connection.

No, the typical HN responses are the "just pay three times as much for a digital signage display because we're all rich Bay Area types here right" and the "Just use a really cheap crappy panel since we're all old curmudgeons who can't tell the difference in image quality anyway, right" ones.

"Just don't connect it" is the pragmatic option that normal people do.

Thank you for your comment of sanity. I have a ‘smart tv’, never connected it to wifi. Turns on within seconds. No bloat.

I think we are all forgetting something here... Android smart TVs are just an android phone that is not pocket-able.... If all of us galaxy brains here stop arguing and made a crew to make ROMS for our TVs that remove all the spyware... the world would be a much much MUCH better place!

As someone who shares your concerns, as well as the privacy concerns, I got a projector a few years back and never looked back.

I'm not one to care too much about picture quality and all that so my $300 projector is the perfect device for me: - Turns on pretty quick just has to warm up - Fully dumb, no internet connection or crappy web UI - Giant screen for me to see from anywhere comfortably seated in the room - I just hook up my computer with HDMI for steaming, nice speaker hooked up with 3.5 mm audio

I have a TCL and the factory firmware was out of date and apparently was affecting the picture quality in negative aways. My options were: 1) connect to wifi, update, then disconnect and trust that it's been done or 2) load the update onto a usb stick. I went with #2 but they could just remove that option in the future if they feel it's interfering with their ability to mine data off customers.

PS. the update fixed the picture immediately beyond what I was able to achieve by messing with the exposed configs

I guess you could change the wifi password after if you're worried the TV is secretly keeping the connection after you disconnect it.

meh, i think your response is more 'typical HN'. Nether are more correct than the other, but if you're annoyed or distrustful of all the internet connected factors of a TV, just don't connect it to the internet. I think that's a fine non-perfect, pragmatic solution.

What it doesn’t solve is the friction and bloatware of the tvos. My Sony tv’s Android interface has unbearable input lag using its menus, so I inevitably leave it set to my appletv hdmi input.

Could the TV do everything the appletv could? Yep just worse and I can’t get rid of it

That applies regardless of whether or not the tv is “smart” - my current “smart” Roku TV runs great, and I had an old “dumb” Samsung that took forever to do anything.

Well-written software is what helps here, not smartness or lack thereof.

No, dumbness helps. You want to solve the input delay, you can use an external HDMI switch or get a dumb TV.

But your response confirmed the parent's part about missing the point which is that Smart TVs' OS is an absolute bloatware dumpster fire.

This isn't some silly /r/privacy - tier paranoia about not wanting being tracked by your home devices, though it's a reasonable concern to an extent.

It's just about the people who don't care about those shitty overpriced streaming services and just want to watch the news without having to wait 15 damn seconds for the thing to turn on or worse, having to be more than patient to switch channels after turning it on because God knows what is running on the background and the channel hasn't changed in over two minutes in spite of having spammed the remote already.

"Don't connect it to the internet" might work, assuming it doesn't aggressively scan for open connections every chance it gets, but if this becomes common it'll only be a matter of time until you're forced to sign up for an account at initial setup, and the TV starts refusing to function at all without an internet connection (or it's been more than x days without one), and searches for nearby bluetooth devices of the same brand which are connected to send your data through that internet connected device instead.

The only way to solve this problem for good is to regulate the industry, but failing that, the least we should do is make it clear we're not interesting in buying their shitty spying products by refusing to hand over our money in the first place.

Buying the TVs, connected or not, signals that you support them and what they are doing, and more importantly it makes doing the things they are doing profitable for them. It reinforces the behavior you're trying to stop. That's not just "imperfect" it's counter-productive.

> The only way to solve this problem for good is to regulate the industry

At a place like Hacker News I expect there will be people who have the technical know-how to make a non-smart TV, or even a modular, pick-and-choose, TV, and crowdfund it. At the very least.

Lots of industries that aren't tech-adjacent, or are very expensive, need regulation in order to stop particular practices from becoming universal trends, but TVs shouldn't be one of them.

there's one person in the comments here already who is trying to build dumb TVs, and if they do it, that'll be where I'm buying my next TV, but I fear that even if they are successful eventually they too will turn to spying and ad pushing, because companies will always make more money by doing so and if their own greed doesn't push them to do it, their shareholders will.

Sometimes, it will always be more profitable for a company to refuse to provide what consumers want. There is no price they can charge us that will ever beat charging that same price and also selling every scrap of our data they can on top of it.

If the skills and materials to construct a quality TV were common or easily obtainable, I'd agree that the smart TV problem would be something we could solve ourselves in our own garages, but I'm not convinced that's the case which means nearly every one of us will be dependent on someone else to build and sell us displays, and as long as that's true we'll be at the mercy of their benevolence and their continuing willingness to reject huge piles of easy money.

Personally I'm more concerned about power consumption. My current TV, when it is off, it is off. It sips a tiny amount of power so it can listen for IR signals from the remote, but that's it.

Smart TVs never really turn off. If they did, they would take too long to "boot up" and consumers would be frustrated and angry. They're more like a laptop in a not-too-deep sleep state when they're turned off. Another commenter mentioned their smart TV consumes 10-20W when turned "off". That's just gross. It should consume milliwatts, at most.

And yes, I know that there are things in my house that consume far more power. But I actually get something for that power. A smart TV that I will of course never connect to the internet gives me nothing for that waste while in standby mode.

It's hard to understand because a smartphone can wake instantly with a fraction of the idle power draw. Smart TV = dumb TV + smartphone chipset in many cases so, where is it all going?

Here's a link to a previous discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32888844

The comment isn't about trust, it's just that the smart TVs are slower even when non-networked.

Did you read the comment you replied to? Because it was a direct response to comments exactly like this one.

The problem is when HD video standards evolve (DV, HDR10), or bugs are found, etc., as well as handling things like VRR or lip-sync.

Unless you externalize smarts to e.g. HDFury VRRoom (strongly recommend), these panels need some smarts, regardless.

$549USD - more expensive than some people's TVs.

Sort of the point. This tech is necessary somewhere for a lot of uses of TV panels. Make a panel dumb enough, cheap enough, it loses capabilities of displaying Netflix's highest quality or supporting Xbox Series X and PS5 or less a gaming PC.

The can't follow, why would the panels need smarts if the arguably correct way is to externalize the smartness to enable future evolution?

It's not the response you're looking for, but I recently got an LG C2 and plugged in a Roku from day 1. It turns on relatively quickly, and Web OS stays out of the way. I do have it connected to wifi, though, so I do get the occasional prompt to update the TV's OS.

I was previously using a Sony LCD TV from 2015 or so. I originally bought it as a monitor, but it became the living room TV when we bought a house. While I originally liked the built-in Android TV, it aged poorly. The TV's hardware decoders have silicon bugs that never got patched around. Netflix stopped working after they deployed their new compression a couple years ago. The only way I was able to get it working again was by having a friend at Netflix file an internal ticket. All they did was add the model number to a block list so that it would fall back to the older compression.

The LG is a joy. It's been a very satisfying purchase. Honestly, the Roku might as well be the TV's built in OS. My 4 year old can reliably turn it on and launch Disney+ in 3 button presses. Also, I bought it refurbished with warranty on eBay for $1k; the only flaw was a couple stripped out threads for the table stand. I hung it on the wall, so well worth the $400-600 discount.

I've plugged in my Steam Deck as well. It's a little bit clunkier due to lack of CEC, but I am using a random Thinkpad USB3 dock I salvaged from a junk bin at work several years ago. I suspect a more modern dock would be flawless.

What TV takes minutes to turn on?

My smart tv is set to turn on and switch to the Apple TV when the Apple TV wakes from sleep. The tv turns on in about a second, waits for a few seconds, and then waits five seconds to switch to the Apple TV.

Same except mine goes black a few times trying to negotiate with the HDMI source. Whole process from turning on my TV to watching something on it takes 1-2 minutes.

Maybe minutes was hyperbole, but my Sony Smart TV (to be fair, it's the circa-2015-ish one relegated to the bedroom today) is unresponsive to silly human concerns like "changing inputs" or "adjusting volume" for a good 30-40 seconds when it turns on. ("Please wait.")

To mitigate this, you can pick a certain 4-6 hours of each day (24h isn't allowed) during which it'll make sure to stay "booted" but with the panel off. Or if you don't enable this, you'll enjoy lower power consumption but have to deal with this foolishness every time you turn it on.

My vizio 75” oled TV takes a minute to turn on. Disconnected from internet. Sometimes annoyingly asks to connect to wifi

None of them, because the Linux computer on TV boots up and goes to sleep immediately upon being plugged in, and is connected to an internal video mixer chip rather than managing the panel directly.

My "smart" LG TV takes almost an entire minute from when I turn it on to when I can change the brightness settings (because the auto brightness is entirely inaccurate). The whole menu interface is slow, clunky and the remote (which I'd since replaced with a generic universal one) has idiotic buttons for features I don't want and will never use, plus has a microphone. It's a complete train wreck. I also asked LG if I can turn off Wifi/Bluetooth hardware entirely and they said it's categorically not possible, obviously because the data from spying on you is worth more than they make on hardware.

So that OSD menu, you don't want it to be localizable or accessible with voiceover? No need for customizable picture modes, high quality 1080p to 4K upscaling, wireless surround sound setup, non-line-of sight BLE remote? Since you like to live off the grid, wouldn't it be helpful if ATSC tuner could get over the air program guide and let you record stuff you like to a USB stick? If not, well it's your life, but that's a pretty small market, not likely to have much choice or good price/feature ratio.

Uh… no, none of that, actually. What the hell? In fact, I actually don’t personally know anybody, of any technical level or age group, who uses any of the features you mentioned. So, maybe the market is not as small as you think.

> good price/feature ratio

When the features aren’t useful to you they don’t increase the price/feature ratio. When the features are anti-features, you could even consider the ratio to be getting worse…

"but what about!"

Your question is answered in the comment you replied to

I agree with what you are saying ideologically, but practically:

- Streaming services often work better with native TV apps than external devices, especially in regards to frame consistency and HDR support.

- The upscaling/interpolation ASICs in TVs are really good. Until very recently, especially on streaming services, PC and Android upscaling was not good.

Hence I dont really want a "dumb" TV/Monitor anymore unless I will never watch any kind of video content on it... mostly because of streaming DRM, which is also awful, but still.

In which case this question is not for you I suppose.

this kind of comment is exactly what GP was speaking against…

you’re allowed your preferences, but recognize that they aren’t universal and try not to steamroll over someone else’s divergent preferences.

I have Panasonic FHD LED TV from pre-smart era which I don't intend to change anytime soon for the same reasons you've mentioned and I also maintain a thread[1] on dumb TVs on my problem validation forum hoping that someone would point me to a good dumb TV which is available in my country.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/64-make-tv-dumb-again-privacy-c...

On that matter I have nothing but praise to give about my Panasonic OLED display.

It is a smart tv in the sense that it has YouTube Netflix etc apps, but it’s working perfectly fine without internet access (it has local network only), works with home assistant, shows no ads ever (even if online), starts up in 5–10 seconds from button press to displaying the picture, has a dedicated remote button for switching inputs, and looks fantastic (OLED with tons of calibration options)

My Sony is about as pleasant. I’ve got it on my iOT network just so HA can see it, and it’s fine with having no internet access.

I prefer to purchase my own smarts for tv too.

There are fewer and fewer non smart tvs that have a baseline of quality.

It’s reasonably easy to not turn on the smart features at all, and leave it possible for software updates for the photo, or other operational tweaks.

As for difficult input changes I haven’t about those in a very long time since a harmony hub or something similar can handle that and anything else needed pretty trivially. Smart TVs also come with apps that make input changes one click.

My smart TV (not connected to the internet) is just a monitor - it switches on, detects the HDTV signal, and shows it.

I'm not aware of any awful flashy interface (I think there is an advert for the manufacturer before it syncs to the HDMI connection - 4 big red letters). That's it.

Personally I can live with that. In fact I was considering getting an 8K version of the same to replace the 3 4k monitors I have.

My dumb tv (sceptre) syncs to hdmi in a few milliseconds and there’s certainly no time to show anything other than the signal.

As does mine when it's going from sleep to live. It takes a little longer from cold-start, and you get the manufacturer name, which happens at least once per year.

As I said, it's not something I care about.

Which brand, and is it a cheap one? Cause I know some expensive ones aren't sluggish, but I'm not paying for that.

My older-generation-smart TV remote now has booby trap buttons that when pressed lead to apps trying to start for 15-30 seconds before timing out, because the TV is not network connected. They are some of the most prominent buttons on the remote, and e.g. right next to the on/off button. I'd be happier without them.

So the screen turning on taking a while on newer TVs is often attributed to smart TVs but apparently the …compression? used for sending TV signals of HDMI has a minimum information requirement meaning that it just takes a while to get a first image (according to what I heard from someone on this site at least)

You definitely deserve to be called out for dunking on HN stereotypes and then writing the most HN comment ever, I.e. lamenting about things that an even smaller number of people even care about, and conflating it for popular opinion.

Small number of people? You’re right, the average user doesn’t care about all of these details. They just care about the big picture they create, and how that’s terrible.

> Disconnecting your smart TV from the internet only means it doesn't spy on you and advertise to you.

I'm not even sure that's the case for the ones with WiFi. Software 'kill switches' have become a ridiculous oxymoron.

I don't know, man.

I've got a brand new 48 inch LG oled smart TV. Never connected it to internet.

I hook-up a shield TV on it.

Boot time is 5 seconds and goes directly to the shield TV.

I have no idea what the actual tv os looks like.

Never had a single issue, it just act as a dumb monitor would.

It also doesn't prevent some TVs from finding access points it can connect to, in which it then will entirely on its own. There's quite a few that'll do that.

It solves the problem presented in this article

Which is why people responded that way

“such a typical HN response” to miss that in order to advance your own separate observation or complaint

You can build your own with a monitor and SFTP, etc.

What does SFTP mean in This context?

Only thing I can think of is SSH FTP, but not sure how that ties in?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15605423

It’s a classic HN reply

Here’s the proto-reply:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Ha! I should have known. I've, in jest also, used the archetype here myself.

> It should turn on in seconds, not minutes.

Dear god, has this become a thing??

It solves the problem presented in this article

Which is why people responded that way

How does what you described differ from a monitor? Is it just size?

This, so much this... Smart TVs are slow sluggish trash.

so, a monitor

TVs have decent built-in speakers, a remote, probably more inputs, antenna/cable tuners, and a focus on large sizes, while not being so optimized for low-latency input.

Sure, but the guy I replied to said

> It should have exactly as much processing power as is required to pipe an hdmi signal to the panel and nothing more. [...] I'd even prefer it not have speakers.

So I think a monitor is what he wants.

I mean it needs a tuner to actually qualify as a TV. The bit about latencies and form factor, as well as the pricing for such, is also critical. As is the remote.

If he truly doesn’t care about any of those things, then I doubt he’d be here complaining about it. So imo at least some combination of the above is implicit.

Ah, lost track of the reply level

Reply on news.ycombinator.com