Hacker News Reader

cml123on The Computer Museum of America reclamation project

I'm bitter about the outcome too, but doesn't it seem like Paul could have _easily_ made a plan for the museum's continued existence or the donation of the computers into worthy hands? I can't see any scenario where the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft wouldn't have had those plans had he wanted them..so I can only conclude he _didn't_ care materially about the importance of the computers separate from himself.

cml123on The Computer Museum of America reclamation project

Some might surprise you. I brought my Altair over to a friend's house and his clever 5th grade son was enthralled by it. I explained binary numbers and how to convert from binary to octal. Then I taught him some basic 8080 assembly instructions and he was entering his own programs on the front panel shortly later. I wrote out a basic program for adding two 8 bit integers and without my explanation, he figured out converting decimal <-> octal and chose some numbers you might expect from a 5th grader, like adding 6 and 7, and choosing two numbers that summed to 67 in decimal.

cml123on OpenAI's Unreleased Model Astra Solves Ten Major Open Mathematics Problems

Achievement aside, the framing of this and the previous Claude achievement with the Jacobian conjecture don't sit right with me. They make it sound as though there is just some truly automated problem solving process underway at these major labs yielding novel math results on their own without human engagement. The OpenAI post [0] itself on this says "claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system’s contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work." That's true only if there was _no_ human prompting involved to yield this result. In the case of the Claude result on the Jacobian conjecture, the employee who obtained the result _is_ a mathematician.

It seems to me that a mathematician is in a much better position than a lay person to construct prompts and engage with an LLM in a way that results in a new mathematical result. If he could work with Claude to obtain the counterexample but I cannot, that highlights the importance of the prompt engineering from the person, and their knowledge to do so. I'd be surprised that he was the first person to ever prod Claude to work on that particular problem.

Since they don't elaborate on the prompts or method that yielded the result, I'm unable to assume it was a fully AI driven approach. From that lens, I find the framing disingenuous.

0)https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

cml123on Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter

Amusingly, I made the same thing late last year, though just on an ordinary computer, allowing you to draw in the browser. I used pageflip [0] with styling akin to Riddle's actual diary and a tiny local model crafted for roleplay via ollama. I remember writing "my name is Harry Potter, what is yours?" and getting back Snape, Malfoy, and even Harry Potter back across a number of iterations. After completing my experiment I learned I wasn't the first to think of this idea and found a few other similar AI Riddle diaries out there.

Incidentally, I have a Remarkable 2 and as of this weekend an m4 iPad air. Maybe I'll test this one out and see what the landscape for running models on iOS looks like.

0) https://nodlik.github.io/react-pageflip/

cml123on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera

I think attributing it to luck is a bit uncharitable. They described getting in on talent over credential. I also don't hold a degree. I've worked with a handful of Ivy League interns over the years and none of them blew me away. Certainly none were at the level I was at when I interviewed without a degree. I think I'm _fortunate_ to have gotten into the work without a degree, but it wasn't _luck_, it was ability.

cml123on I built a GPU back end for Emacs

it certainly has the tells... I could be charitable and say maybe since it's a bilingual blog it was generated as a type of translation from the original source, but that post itself seems only available in English

cml123on Mixing Visual and Textual Code

I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention the humble TempleOS support for mixing code and sprites. I can't say I've ever used the system myself, but its DolDoc format [0] offered some pretty nifty features for directly interspersing sprites into source code viewable together as one. You can see some screenshots on the hackmag page [1] under the section that reads: "If that’s not enough to impress you, open any game file and behold the unthinkable: the sprites are embedded right in the code!"

0) https://tinkeros.github.io/WbTempleOS/Doc/DolDocOverview.htm... 1) https://hackmag.com/security/templeos

cml123on Using AI to improve a challenging reaction in medicinal chemistry

I also had a strong reaction to the title from their research blog; too anthropomorphic. Model, agent, or system don't have the same personification.

cml123on FPS.cob: A first person shooter in COBOL

This was posted on hackaday[0] last week with a link to a youtube video. In the video, the author of the project goes into depth about some of the challenges they encountered and changes they made in good technical detail.

I think the complaints in this thread are not in the spirit of HN. Let's do better.

0) https://hackaday.com/2026/06/06/a-raycast-fps-in-cobol/

cml123on The Speed of Prototyping in the Age of AI

The approach I've been trying to use at work is making heavy use of AI for the generation of experimental prototypes, but with little intention of keeping all that code verbatim. I can get something to the demo stage much more quickly than before, allowing me to show it to coworkers and users to get feedback on random possibilities. From there, I make a case to properly delegate time for "doing it the right way" as a slotted piece of work. That's resulted in a number of high-impact features being added to our app in the last few months, that in the past would have taken much longer or never came to fruition.

I'm using this specifically in the context of concepts/features that are hard to explain/sell without some working visual or prototype, but which aren't immediately evident needs or features requested by our users. Some of them go nowhere, but I think the net result is an increased ability for me to get my experiments from the "lab" to production.

cml123on Googlebook

Don't you think that's backwards from how utility usually works? Most effective solutions come from attempting to solve a known problem, not by searching for problems to apply an available solution. Even thinking outside the box is usually in service of a particular problem - just applying creative or unorthodox solutions to that problem.

cml123on Flash-MoE: Running a 397B Parameter Model on a Laptop

fwiw, the opposite view was recently taken for node js. GH hides most of the conversation by default due to size, but the gist is that a new VFS feature is being proposed for node that was largely written using an LLM. I think I've more often seen the view these days that if you used, steered, and likely modified code generated by an AI, you generated the code and hold the copyright.

https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/61478

https://blog.platformatic.dev/why-nodejs-needs-a-virtual-fil...

cml123on Zed new terms required to be 18 years old

don't think they understood the reference

cml123on “Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server

this is interesting because of how much it differs from my own hopes. I don't really have any personal need or want for the Linux desktop marketshare to increase. I like computers because I can program them to do something and it will do it. Ideally you have complete control over it. I've customized my desktop here and there in order to get some result, but while you care most about the _result_, for me the act of _making_ that result happen is as important if not more. I'm not looking to offload it to something else.

I don't really see the troubleshooting/customization as annoying. It's not much different than learning to program. At first you don't have any intuition for patterns or ways to solve problems, but given time, you start to identify them and know how to work on it unaided. For many distros or operating systems more broadly, it's the same thing. When in doubt, I head to the Arch wiki or more rarely the forums, then I'm good to go.

I'm not really after some integrated LLM or Copilot 365 for Linux experience when it comes to using my computer.

cml123on A Programmer's Loss of Identity

my employer has told me that it's an expectation for me and that if I don't use it i'll be replaced

cml123on ADHD and Methylphenidate Use in Prepubertal Children and Adult BMI and Height

I don't think the evidence is on your side for the outcomes. Kids cannot be assured to make the best choices in their own interest for every scenario. I was on meds for ADHD from ages 4 to 14 before I asked to stop. In elementary school I was among the most talented students in my class, but I was very close to failing to graduate high school. I later failed out of community college. Through great effort I managed to get employed as a software developer, though my original passion and hope was biology. I now take Vyvanse to keep sustained focus in my work.

I'm confident if I had stayed on my meds that I would have been far more academically successful in high school and beyond. I pushed to get off Adderall as a kid because I started to feel like a zombie on it, but maybe my parents could have instead helped me to find a treatment that was better suited for me or adjust my dosage.

cml123on Board Games in Ancient Fiction: Egypt, Iran, Greece

I've played Senet regularly for over 15 years. I was working over the holidays on a GNOME Senet game which I hope to put out there soon. I think it strikes a fun balance between chance and strategy. It probably won't appease chess die-hards on the complexity front, but for casual gameplay it's nice.

cml123on Giving university exams in the age of chatbots

I think many people who grew up before cell phones remember phone numbers from the past. I just thought about it and can list the phone numbers of 3 houses that were on my childhood street in the early 2000s + another 5 that were friends in the area. I remember at least a handful of cell phone numbers from the mid to late 2000s as friends started to get those; some of them are still current. On the other hand, I don't know the number of anyone I've met in the last 15 years besides my wife, and haven't tried to.

cml123on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design

Classical Chinese had a much larger phonemic inventory than modern Mandarin, and notably no tones. Below are a collection of Classical Chinese reconstructions in IPA that are all pronounced yì in Mandarin today. (like "ee" for English speakers). The creation of tones and other sound changes were fairly predictable, so as you say, the hints often still help today.

- ŋjajs 議; 'discuss' - ŋjət 仡; 'powerful' - ʔjup 邑; 'city' - ʔjək 億; '100 million' - ʔjəks 意; 'thought' - ʔjek 益; 'increase' - ʔjik 抑; 'press down' - jak 弈; 'Go' - ljit 逸; 'flee' - ljək 翼; 'wing' - ljek 易; 'change' - ljeks 易; 'easy' - slek 蜴; 'lizard'

cml123on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design

Incidentally, the largest group of Chinese characters are phono-semantic e.g. encode both meaning and pronunciation. Over half of all Chinese characters are in that bucket. That actually allows speakers to have some ability to guess both pronunciation and meaning of characters they have never seen. There are rules to guide this.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%...

cml123on Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://irregex.dev

My personal blog that until recently was mostly reviews on lox bagels. I yanked out the bagel reviews for now to focus on programming topics, but need to write up some worthwhile posts.

cml123on What Is Generative UI?

I sometimes have this argument with my Product Owner, despite believing we both want what we individually believe is best for our users. I've tried to suggest that the ideal interface for a power user is not the ideal interface for a novice, and that none of our users should be novices for long as an expectation.

I work on an internal app for an insurance company that allows viewing and editing insurance product configuration data. Stuff like what coverages we offer, what limits and deductibles apply to those, etc. We have built out a very very detailed data model to spell out the insurance contract fully. It has over 20 distinct top-level components comprising an "insurance product". The data generated is then used to populate quoting apps with applicable selections, tie claims to coverage selections, and more.

Ultimately these individual components have a JSON representation, and the "power user" editor within our app is just a guided JSON editor providing intellisense and validation. For less technical users, we have a "visual editor" that is almost fully generated from our schema. I thought perhaps this article referred to something like that. Since our initial release, a handful of new top-level components have been added to the schema to further define the insurance product details. For the most part, these have not required any additionally coding to have a good experience in our "visual editor". The components for our visual editor are more aligned to data types: displaying numbers, enums, arrays, arrays of arrays, etc, which any new schema objects are likely to be built from. That also applies to nested objects i.e. limits are built from primitives, coverages are built from limits. Given user feedback we can make minor changes to the display, but it's been very convenient for us to have it dynamically rendered based of the schema itself.

The schema is also versioned and our approach ensures that the data can be viewed and edited regardless of schema version. When a user checks out a coverage to edit it, the associated schema version is retrieved, the subschema for coverages is retrieved, and a schema parser maps properties of the schema to the appropriate React editor components.

p.s. These patterns might be commonplace and I'm just ignorant to it. I'm a backend dev who joined a new team that was advertised as a backend gig, but quickly learned that the primary focus would be a React Typescript app, neither of which I had any professional experience with.

cml123on Dr Matthew Garrett v Dr Roy Schestowitz and Anor

it's interesting how differently people perceive it. Motherfucker is something I'd have called a parent in a card game if they bested me, or an exclamation said aloud from dropping a wallet while walking. Very little significance to it.

cml123on The fate of "small" open source

granted it's not up to courtroom standards, this post linked by another commenter in the chain does paint the picture pretty well of an internal struggle between Search and Ads inside Google as a company, where there was a decision to promote user-negative changes to Search as a way to increase the total number of searches performed, thereby increasing the number of ads that can be shown. This happened during 2019.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

cml123on The fate of "small" open source

I don't think searching for answers to simple questions was a problem until Google nerfed their own search engine.

cml123on Bach Cello Suites (2024)

Since you mention the viola da gamba, I'll mention that in the US, the Viola da Gamba Society of America[0] is keeping the tradition alive. I'm a rusty cellist and learned of the vdgsa a few years ago. They have an annual conclave for players of all levels to learn, play, and have a good time. There was a conclave about 2.5 hrs from my home, and it was advertised as free for beginners, with the option to rent an instrument for the duration of the event across ~ a week. I also play the bass guitar and double bass, which like the gamba family are tuned in fourths vs fifths for the violin family, so I figured I'd show up and try my hand at the instrument.

They are a friendly and welcoming community maintaining a rental network in the US for the different types of violas da gamba. They have a strong interest as an organization in funding the continued scholarship, performance, and community for these forgotten instruments. It was very cool. I've since gotten my hands on a rental bass viol, though I haven't had as much time for it as I'd like.

[0] https://www.vdgsa.org/

cml123on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

A large insurer with an inexplicable bird mascot

cml123on Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

My employer is currently mandating a 2 day per-week RTO for all employees within 50 miles of a major office, but in my case, even if they wanted to, they'd be unable to force a return to a 5 day arrangement.

My commute time has more than doubled since they closed and sold my office for a hefty sum of money. As a result of multiple offices converging to one, there are insufficient seats for the number of employees actually assigned to my office; hence, "hotdesking".

I'd wager that maybe a third of the total employees assigned to the office could be present at any one point in time, so unless they purchase some additional properties, we're at a stalemate with the twice a week RTO. Most days over 90% of the desks, sometimes over 99% are taken in the building, requiring reservation weeks in advance through a seat reservation app.

I have no direct teammates in the office and no two members of my 10 person team work in the same office (or state).

cml123on Org-social is a decentralized social network that runs on Org Mode

Just last week I was fiddling around with a tangentially related idea. I made some modifications locally to my setup so that when browsing a .org file in eww, org-html-export-as-html would render it in the buffer as HTML directly. eww doesn't really support much styling via shr, so I was working on adding some basic css parsing to expand the range of expression for an org-based blog approach.

Many people export their org file based blogs to HTML and then publish them, but my thought would be to skip that and instead provide a path for eww to directly render org files, cutting out my html export stopgap.

cml123on Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs

Lately I've been seeing a lot of derision from the Emacs community of the consideration for integrating these kinds of tools with Emacs, but I truly think that's much more hurtful than helpful. Although the current development and usage of AI in software development may not closely resemble the techniques used at the time, it seems to me that Emacs' history is inextricably linked to the MIT AI Lab. It feels weird then that people today would shun the inclusion of AI integration into a tool that was produced from such a working group.