Hacker News: a1k0n

Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris

a1k0n — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:52:51 +0000

Article URL: https://kywch.github.io/blog/2025/12/curriculum-learning-2048-tetris/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445195

Points: 150

# Comments: 33

New comment by a1k0n in "Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates"

a1k0n — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:34:43 +0000

CORDIC is more accurate, but takes as many iterations as you have bits of precision in your angle. Another demo called Warp in this contest used pipelined CORDIC to do atan2 on every pixel to create a tunnel, which is super impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9mu3getxhU&t=780s

New comment by a1k0n in "Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates"

a1k0n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:10:19 +0000

Yeah, it is exact in this specific circumstance. But yes, it's exactly the same trick; I also enjoyed that video in my Youtube recommender feed last week!

New comment by a1k0n in "Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates"

a1k0n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:40:22 +0000

And this thread shows all of them on real hardware: https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595

New comment by a1k0n in "Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates"

a1k0n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:38:34 +0000

Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?

https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms

Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

a1k0n — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:45:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337438

Points: 429

# Comments: 73

New comment by a1k0n in "From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon"

a1k0n — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 02:10:36 +0000

lmao! that was so cringe I unlisted it from the main index. who is "we"?

part 3 is to find the secp256k1 private key for satoshi's bitcoins

From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

a1k0n — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:36:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/01/10/tiny-tapeout-donut.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675208

Points: 162

# Comments: 25

New comment by a1k0n in "Attention Is Off By One"

a1k0n — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 23:02:18 +0000

Yes, it has to in fact. If you have zero context to attend to in a transformer, and you try to predict the first token, you effectively are multiplying a zero-vector by the attention head, making all tokens equally likely in the final softmax (unless the lm_head has a bias, but at least in GPT it does not).

So the <|beginning of text|> token, with no context before it, learns to predict the first-token-in-a-document distribution. That's not quite the same as predicting nothing at all.

New comment by a1k0n in "Finding Nice MD5s Using Rust"

a1k0n — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 01:26:51 +0000

For finding interesting Ethereum addresses on the GPU (uses SHA3 instead of MD5) there's a tool called profanity.

Amusingly the tool was archived by the author years ago, and just last year a stupid bug in the random initialization code was found (32 bytes of state initialized with ~31 bits of entropy), leading to ~millions of $ in stolen ETH by exploiters.

New comment by a1k0n in "Atari 2600 hardware design: Making something out of almost nothing"

a1k0n — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 17:30:24 +0000

> If anyone has an idea why the TIA’s designers used LFSRs for this stuff, I’d love to hear about it.

I'm guessing because a counter would have ripple carry (i.e. five extra gate delays when rolling over from 111111 to 000000) or need extra gates for carry lookahead and an LFSR is constant-delay.

New comment by a1k0n in "An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching"

a1k0n — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 01:47:22 +0000

https://github.com/a1k0n/asciitracing sort of combines those things also

Localization with ceiling lights for fast indoor autonomous racing (2021)

a1k0n — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 16:07:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.a1k0n.net/2021/01/22/indoor-localization.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25904775

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by a1k0n in "Donut.c Without a Math Library"

a1k0n — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 14:59:57 +0000

I have to admit I stole the idea from this 256-byte demo (after it wiped the floor with the one I made at a demo party): http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5327

New comment by a1k0n in "Donut.c Without a Math Library"

a1k0n — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 14:33:49 +0000

I tweeted a screenshot of the Jupyter Notebook session I used to create the code at the bottom: https://twitter.com/a1k0n/status/1301261285800030208

New comment by a1k0n in "Donut.c Without a Math Library"

a1k0n — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 14:20:28 +0000

Oh, yeah. I had to do that for the RISC-V port, too. I'll update the post, thanks.

New comment by a1k0n in "Donut.c Without a Math Library"

a1k0n — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 07:20:55 +0000

Yeah, that one wasn't too hard but it's nice to have it to check your work. I didn't go into it in the post, but the real power of SymPy is its cse() function, which I used to do all the common subexpression elimination for the integer math version at the bottom.

New comment by a1k0n in "The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors"

a1k0n — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 22:23:49 +0000

Huh, it has 15 registers? AX, BX, CX, DX, SI, DI, BP, SP; CS, DS, ES, SS, IP, flags. What am I missing?

New comment by a1k0n in "Undocumented Catalina file access change"

a1k0n — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 04:07:41 +0000

i mv'd config to config~, then made a copy of it as config. the old file, now renamed to config~, is still read-only.

New comment by a1k0n in "Undocumented Catalina file access change"

a1k0n — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 04:07:15 +0000

yes yes, it is owned by me. i edited my username in the "screenshot".