Doom running on a pregnancy test | Hacker News Reader

Doom running on a pregnancy test

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443 pointsboyter119 comments

I find the user's earlier threads to be more interesting. Foone deconstructed a digital pregnancy test and found that it's actually just a <$1 pregnancy test strip in the shell, with light sensors that check whether it shows one or two stripes, and then display the result on a screen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371703

How else are you going to do a chemical assay in a portable device? Breathalyzers are even jankier.

How do breathalyzers work?

Somewhat poorly.

I agree with this. It confirms that most "digital" devices like this (for example, scales) are just introducing greater inaccuracy whilst conveying a false sense of certainty.

Counting down to the moment some unicorn SV startup does this, but with WiFi and cloud access =)

And a .io domain name ending with "Base". babybase.io?

4thbase.io seems available....

Surely that's for teledildonics?

Seems IoST has that niche covered already!

https://iostindex.com/

> are just introducing greater inaccuracy

What makes you say that? This is exactly the sort of scenario where punting interpretation off to a simple algorithm is probably more accurate than leaving it up to untrained humans.

It might prevent false positive, but it can lead to false negative.

See for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/comments/4pxghm/confli...

That could happen with any two tests. That second test is really faint. At first I thought "Ok, so they're both negative, so what?"

Not to mention, false negatives are far more common than false positives. If you have a false positive, then there's typically some odd health concern with the person.

I read a comment in a reddit thread and they said the "pro-tip" was to take a picture of the pregnancy test and up the contrast to be able to better interpret results. So a less wasteful idea would be a companion app to help with that process vs. more electronics in a landfill. (Although obvious privacy implications exist).

As the digital scales go I was in the market for industrial scale almost exactly an year ago. At the first glance the stated accuracy is simply function of ADC resolution and maximal measurable weight. On the second glance it is mostly about market segmentation and certifications, because for all manufacturers I've considered getting order of magnitude better stated accuracy seems to be a matter of software license and different cal certificate (and the SW license seems to only affect the error term reported by the scale, not accuracy of the actual measurement).

As I think Naomi Wu said, the paper tests are extremely accurate in the lab, the majority of errors come from failure to read the output correctly (misinterpretation or otherwise).

So adding a digital readout that produces unambiguous results justifies the price.

Only if the code interpreting the color change is reliable.

It's easier to have a group of professionals program it correctly once than it is to have someone who only uses these tests at most every 11 months (assuming success) try to read it themselves.

The issue isn't that it's hard to read. The issue is that humans are psychologically conditioned to believe whatever the machine says and not their own eyes.

My wife works in a lab, has a masters in biology and I'm decently scientifically literate and we had a hard time being confident that we were reading the paper strip correctly by ourselves.

Is it a faint line? How strong does it need to be?

Is that a line or is it a smudge?

Did we wait long enough?

Well these online instructions are for a previous model, are they still valid?

It's not easy. But having a calibrated machine tell you "pregnant" or "not pregnant" give a lot more confidence about scheduling a follow-up test with the doctor

Especially under stress, I imagine.

Yep, my wife's OB told us long ago that the cheap dollar store tests are often the most accurate. Very similar to what they use at the office.

And that's what the digital one uses under the hood, it just interprets the results for you.

Insanely wasteful

More interesting was that before the current chemical strip-based test, apparently the best way to test for pregnancy was to inject the urine into the leg of an African clawed frog, then see if it laid eggs in the next 24 hours.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301844281540239360

One wonders how this method was discovered...

It’s a good read about what scientists do when they have an idea of what they need but not a direct way to measure it, and it was a lot better than the mouse/rabbit tests which involved killing the animal:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/how-a-fr...

Should probably be noted this isn’t actually running on a pregnancy test, it’s a pregnancy test plastic shell with a replacement CPU and display.

IIRC only the display is replaced, the cpu remains the same.

This tweet suggests otherwise: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302453246536028160?s=20

In the original thread Foone said the IC was the "mask rom version", and thus not re-programmable. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301713156822032385?s=20

The CPU was changed.

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302453805057896448

"The existing CPU can't be reprogrammed and the existing LCD can only show 4 things, so I had to replace both to make any changes. And the current version doesn't even fit into the shell! (although I'm certain it will when complete)"

Ahhh, I stand corrected :)

Sometimes Foone's threads go on so long that twitter UI just gives up on linking them, or so it seems.

There's a Twitter App for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-NO/firefox/addon/nitter-redire... that makes it possible to view several 160 char messages at the same time. Computers are so fast these days it is amazing.

Minor nit - Twitter messages are up to 280 characters now.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/tweetingm...

The fact that you need to install a browser extension or use some other tool to view tweets in this manner is a big indicator that something is either wrong with Twitter for these kinds of posts or these kinds of posts are better served elsewhere.

It’s akin to writing a novel on post-its.

Time to buy eightbaud.com and make the twitter competitor everyone has been subconsciously asking for.

Our corporate slogan: "Changing the world; one ASCII character at a time"

Someone -- it may have been OP actually -- has said that his ADHD makes it impossible for him to focus long enough to write and publish a blog post for things like this, but Twitter is low-commitment, low-attention enough that he can get it done.

I really hate Twitter for this kind of content as well, but I'd rather have it there then not have it at all.

Yes, its a Doom running on a 4MHz 64Byte ram 8 bit microcontroller .....

Doom does not run on 64 bytes of RAM.

Original system regs were 8 MB RAM. You can run it on 4 MB and can shave off some more but you need 16-bit bus ~MB's of RAM to run it.

I believe that's if you're running it under Windows, I feel sure I was playing Doom on DOS with 4mb ram.

Edit: yep, https://oldpcgaming.net/doom-1-review/

Yes. I remember that too. I edited it to 4 mb just before you responded.

The point is you can't run doom on hundreds of bytes or even several kilobytes or in 8 bit microcontroller.

Indeed, I didn't need to nitpick

Was searching for exactly that and couldn't find an answer. That's what I would've guessed that such an expensive display won't be on a pregnancy test. Sad.

Hats off to this great achievement, even though it's not really all original hardware.

Regardless of the CPU being replaced, am I the only one who thinks this to much electronics to put into, what I assume, is a single use pregnancy test?

This has so be sorted as "small electronics" when you dispose of it. Even before you can start dealing with the the e-waste part, someone has to manually open the thing and separate plastics and electronics.

Especially when you know that all the electronics actually do is interpret the result of a standard paper based test.

I was surprised to discover that the tests as used without expert supervision had a 25% misread rate, vs 1% with the display.

I think that’s a dire indictment of the education system, but we need to make stuff for the people we have, and a quarter of them can’t read the test.

It eliminates a wide variety of sources of error, including user ignorance but also possible issues with colorblindness, poor lighting conditions, or a positive result that's not as easy to discern with the naked eye.

> a positive result that's not as easy to discern with the naked eye.

Those are false negatives in the machine.

Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/

A subreddit where users post positive or probably positive pregnancy tests.

Pregnancy tests generally measure hCG concentration in urine, early in the pregnancy concentrations are low and the test line will be very faint if visible at all. It's only later on in the pregnancy when the line will become more visible.

Pregnancy also involves a lot of emotion, hope & fear, in combination it's not that surprising that a portion of people misread pregnancy tests.

Wow I did not expect that! Many of them are really hard to read actually!

A quick example of two positive tests side by side https://i.redd.it/llw9fmn6dxk51.jpg

Even worse, sometimes the reaction is so strong that there is a "dye stealer" effect, where the test line steals the ink from the control line. See for example here: https://i.redd.it/skdynwwi6ll51.jpg (Notice how the line is on the "wrong" side)

No wonder the misread rate is so high indeed...

Strictly speaking if the control line disappears that's an invalid test.

https://www.early-pregnancy-tests.com/inpregtesstr

Those aren't misreads, those are ambiguous tests. The computer would get false negatives on those.

>1% with the display

Which is, high as it is, another surprise! I wonder how that happens.

The bottom 2% of the population is illiterate or severely mentally handicapped and do no better than chance at reading pregnant vs. not pregnant.

> 1% with the display

Source on that? I've only seen 1% reported for lab testing of paper strip.

There was a good comment about this on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ini2aw/do...

Essentially - it's easy to mis-read the paper tests and there's a small portion of users who may decided to use an electronic device as a double-check for the standard paper test especially if they've been mis-led in the past.

I thought so too, but the paper version apparently has a ridiculously high (user) error rate. When the failure mode is an extra human it might be a net win.

While may will buy a pregnancy to check for unwanted pregnancies, there's also many who use them to check for wanted pregnancies, so perhaps only to not wanting to be pregnant should use the electronic tests?

I feel like there's a better option, it has to be possible to improve the paper version, without adding a battery, LCD and a CPU.

Maybe you could do it in a smartphone app.

Oh this is a good idea. Calibrate for the phone / camera version and test used and just let your phone read the test and run a little timer.

TestBuddy

Would be a good add in for ovulation tracking apps.

Also, if you are a pregnancy test manufacturer, maybe you release this app so you can see what other tests people use; educate them on the error rates of competitors; and offer 1 click purchase of your products.

Why do that when you can sell the results to advertising networks so the expectant mother can be dogged by ads for maternal wear?

And so that expectant mothers who end up losing their child can be further traumatized by them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...

Obviously. And also in about 12 months Ashley Madison ads.

I was going to comment “oh for f* sake not another app”, but that actually pretty clever. Just add a QR code to the test and the text: having trouble reading our test, download our app”.

Congratulations it's a Cacodemon

It's amazing how the brain can fill in the details. I had no problem identifying the levels and the enemies. I wonder what the images look like to someone who has never played Doom?

It sounds a bit like having a cochlear implant fitted late in life. I've heard that you can listen to music you know well and your brain will fill in all the details, but anything new just sounds terribly low def and isn't really enjoyable.

I've heard about phonemic restoration, but this is even more interesting. Thanks for sharing

Just last Friday. It was pretty quick.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371703

> and to get it; you have to pee on it

Is this a joke? Is there no other way to start the CPU?

It seems that the "power switch" is the moisture conducting between two leads https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301709777383292928

So is the only way for two-player to... you know

That comment was about other ideas for hacked electronics stuffed in a pregnancy test, e.g. a keyboard ("but it would be only one character" in the previous tweet, and the "and to get it, you have to pee on it". Later, he names the idea "peeboard".)

During the latter half of the 1990s and onwards, there was a saying in tech circles along the lines of "It isn't a computer unless it can run DOOM."

Perhaps that was the original motivation behind this tweet, even if it isn't running natively.

Both CPU and display has been replaced. Nothing about the headline is true. 100% clickbait.

That’s it, I’ve finally seen all of the internet.

Anyone know what board he is using in the pic?

Mandatory comic reference: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2158

I saw Doom running on a pregnancy test 7 years ago... But I've subsequently learnt to love him.

Give it another 6 years. 13 years is when the monster comes out.

IT GETS WORSE?!?!?!?!?

I'm always so stunned by this. Young kids are so hard, but they say teens are the hardest! 11 years old is so nice. You can still cuddle, they like to be read to and mostly listen the 3rd time you say it.

Wait another year or two, when the judgemental rebel comes out.

I've only got young kids, so I have only experienced tired and frustrated. But even our bad days only last a day, tops. What I haven't experienced, but do observe in colleagues with teenagers, is utter despondency and emotional collapse due to a cloud of rancor that's been hanging over the family for weeks on end.

Teenages tend to revolt against their parents no?

Yep. People like to think we are more sophisticated, but we have built-in animal behaviors. Teens revolting and making their own way is a big one. Hard for parents but important for the kids. I still find it weird how hard wired some things are.

I’ve heard (can’t remember the source now) that the rebellious teen phase is a cultural phenomenon. I find it believable. In general, ascribing human behaviors to biology is shaky science.

Ah, here we go:

> Although Westerners may expect from adolescents a certain level of delinquency, antisocial behavior and sometimes violence, cross-cultural research demonstrates adolescent behavior and experience is actually quite variable across the world. Adolescent misbehavior does not appear to be a cultural universal.

https://hraf.yale.edu/are-teens-always-troublemakers-cross-c...

I agree that ascribing human behaviours to (particularly animal) biology is shaky. But the changes going on in teenage years (ie puberty) lead me to think teenage rebellion isn’t just cultural.

The hormonal changes are hard wired, but certain behaviors aren’t.

As an interesting corollary, did you know that the symptoms experienced by schizophrenics is extremely culturally dependent? Here in America the voices heard by someone with schizophrenia often urge violence, but in other countries (India is the one I’ve heard) they say nice, positive things. Same condition, culturally dependent outcomes.

Interesting.

What happens to someone with Schizophrenia who moves from the US to India ?

I have no idea.

There are cultures that deal with it better

Teenage rebellion is often “rational but dumb”, in the sense of being an understandable but unskillfully directed protest against actual injustices.

If you take off the “teenager” lens and imagine that you’re witnessing the behavior of an adult who is being denied every variety of personal choice, while being pushed and browbeaten into spending their time in activities that don’t earn them money or status, the behaviors seem almost reasonable.

Just to take one example, if you were forced to wake up at 5:30 AM to get on a bus to sit in chairs for 7 hours listening to mediocre lectures, got in serious trouble if you took more than 5 minutes to move between rooms, had to ask permission to use the rest room, and that’s just what happens before you get home and have a new sequence of orders and chores issued to you ... then you would rebel.

> if you were forced to wake up at 5:30 AM to get on a bus

I know this is an American thing, in the UK high school for me started at 0845, which meant leaving home about 0820, so getting up about 0800. Still way to early, but at least it's not in the middle of the night.

I don't understand how a school day would even work with a 6:30 start. When's lunch?

I haven’t been to school in decades but basically, the bus arrives when it arrives, maybe 30-45 minutes before school starts, and you want to be at the stop early for obvious reasons. It gets a little less stupid once you’re old enough to drive yourself, if you have a car or can carpool. But no way would a 20 minute commute be assumed.

UK average commute for high school is 25 minutes, and 3.4 miles [0], but a 30-40 minute doesn't sound awful on a bus, means leaving home 0800 so getting up 0740.

So your high schools start at 6.30 AM?

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

20 minutes from alarm clock to getting on the bus is unrealistic by an extremely wide margin. High school students typically shower, eat breakfast and get dressed at the very least.

I never had breakfast as a high school kid (still don't). 5 minutes for a shower, 5 more to get dressed and pick up bag, that leaves 10 minutes to get to bus stop.

I've posted this before, but first bell was at 7:18, bus was at 6:30. I had it luckier in that I lived ~1 mile from school, but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk. There were students that lived ~15 miles from school whose buses arrived ~5:45 to be able to make the 7:18 bell.

Why wouldn't you have just leave home at 7AM and walk to school if you're that close?

(A 7:18 bell seems crazy though - what's wrong with a 9AM start?)

From my post:

> but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk.

It was 1 mile on a four lane heavy traffic road with no sidewalks.

I haven't seen a single American kid who could get ready for school (eat breakfast, get dressed, etc) in 20 minutes. I believe you that it's different in the UK, but in the US you need to budget at least an hour for this.

Then, when I was a child I'd spend about 45 minutes to an hour on the bus, which would normally arrive at the school about 30 minutes before start time as a buffer in case things were slow. This was decades ago, but my understanding is it hasn't changed that much.

School actually started at around 8:00, but we still had to wake up before 6:00 in order to get there on time.

Our lunch was split up into 3 to accommodate the amount of students our school had. If you unluckily got put into Phase 1, lunch was at 10:48.

Unfounded theory I came up with just now:

Teenagers go through puberty because biologically they are now ready to have children, and evolution has favored those with very strong such urges.

In cultures where having babies at 14 is completely out of the question, teens rebel!

The article goes on to add:

> What predicts more trouble-making? Adolescent behavior (and misbehavior) is related to key social relationships and socialization styles. More specifically, cross-cultural research finds adolescents are more likely to misbehave in societies that have more severe punishment, more restrictiveness, and more distant mother-child relationships (summarized in Ember, Pitek, and Ringen 2017).

I didn't, nor did many of my friends. I think that's just a stereotype.

Same here and same for my old kids.

It depends. My wife did not rebel at all. From the way her parents, siblings, etc. describe her, she was a model person from childhood to adulthood. But, our children have taken more after me - wild, rebellious, etc. This has been really hard on my wife since it has been so antithetical to how she was growing up.

It mostly depends on the parents, not on children. Teens are finally independent and strong enough to be able to revolt - if they do or not is in many cases just a reflection if their parents treat them as equals or not.

Before you answer "but they are not equal...", please think.

Came to post. Teenagers aren't the totally irrational monsters television/media makes them out to me, necessarily. As one could guess, they're very much a reflection of their parents' investment in their emotional health and growth.

Purely anecdotally, none of the children I've been around that had thoughtful/respectful/logical parents have gone through the mindless rebellion phase - they've all been very level headed reasonable people in their teens. On the flipside, all of the children of mindless authoritarian parents have gone kinda wild pretty much as soon as they developed the agency to do so. It's kind of sad that (at least in the US) we've painted teenagers as some kind of psychotic monster that needs tamed.

Yeah. My early years (up to age 12) were ok. After that though was very... not good.

One memory really stands out though, from about a week (rough guess) before I turned 13. It was my mother saying she was dreading my 13th birthday, as that's when things go bad.

It completely surprised me, as I hadn't thought anything special about it.

However from (literally) my 13th birthday onwards, life became hell. On the day.

My mother turned into an absolute control freak, full on, with no-let up. For years. If I didn't do something she wanted, in exactly the way she wanted (generally with no explanation), it was name calling, taking away of <whatever she knew I felt was important>, and doing whatever she could to belittle and degrade me try try and "teach me a lesson". There are no words to describe the mental abuse from that day onwards. It never stopped, and there was no way of getting it to stop.

I eventually dropped out of school (age ~15), lived on the streets for a while, then went to live with my grandmother.

All because some idiot bitch thought teenagers were the problem. :( :( :(

Please, don't take this approach with your kids.

This is so scary! I mean both being a teenager in your shoes and thinking about whether I will manage to be a good enough parent and not ruin a miracle.

Just treat the kinds with the same level of respect you would grant an adult, and you will be fine.

Yeah. If she'd spent even a fraction of the time to try and understand me as a person, rather than on figuring out ways to "make me comply" (via abuse and punishment) things could have been so much different.

But, she never did. And she never got better. Probably worse if anything. There were signs years later (after her mother - my grandmother - died) that she might have reflected on things and matured.

But no. Given an opportunity, she reverted back to form and went with the abuse approach.

That time, by (literally) forging my signature on paperwork to ASIC signing me out of being the director of my own company. Which she took over.

I wish I was joking. I'm really not.

One really sick thing about it is from her point of view she justified everything as doing it "for my benefit".

Like, you cannot make this crap up. :( :( :(

Anyway, if someone's in my situation then I truly feel sorry for them. I don't know of any way to fix it other than "get out and don't look back".

Yeah they literally stop listening to you and usually do the opposite. I was no different. I heard my mom complaining about her friends kid getting his ear pierced and she looked at me and said ‘never while you are living under my roof!’. My dad immediately realized the error but it was too late. I had never given it a thought before and maybe even thought it was stupid. After dinner I literally drove to the mall and got my ear pierced and went straight home and paraded around our house.

I honestly don't think I had a choice, my brain insisted on doing it.

It's a movie of somebody playing Doom, not actually Doom running on it.

The tweet clearly states that it is not a movie, but the actual game.

> Yesterday I had a lot of retweets and reddit posts and such for playing Doom on a pregnancy test.

> But as I explained then, it wasn't really PLAYING on a pregnancy test, it was just a video being played back, not an interactive game.

> Well, now it is. It's Pregnancy Test Doom!

But it's still not actually running on the pregnancy test, or even the MCU he replaced the electronics with. It's still playing on a PC and transferring the picture: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302834931421175809

So it's for all intents and purposes still playing back a video, it's just a live recording instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com