<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: oersted</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=oersted</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:02:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=oersted" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It should have taken you to the mansion. Yes I agree that the game is unnecessarily obtuse, but the vibe-coded interpreter itself is rather buggy too. I've had several crashes, resets, and state corruptions.<p>Sometimes it's a bit hard to distinguish between a bug and archaic design :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:53:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757680</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How was this built? It's gorgeous, I've been wanting to have a cool-retro-term in the browser for a long while.<p>If this was built bespoke for this game, fair play, but I would love to have this library if it's a library.<p>EDIT: I found the repo <a href="https://github.com/jscalo/haunt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jscalo/haunt</a><p>> js/terminal.js implements the I/O layer: a typewriter-speed character queue drained via requestAnimationFrame, an inline editable prompt with command history, and two promise-based input methods (readToken for OPS5 accept, readLine for acceptline).<p>> css/crt.css creates the retro look: a bezel frame with power LED, a perspective-transformed screen, repeating scanlines, a slow horizontal band, flicker animation, and triple-layer phosphor text glow. Three themes are available — green P1 (default), amber P3, and white — switchable from the settings menu.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:11:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748716</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The grey bar on the left that the extension adds also collapses the comments. They are aligned vertically and they have a bigger clickable area than [-].</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:15:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700678</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well yes, that’s in a solid state. Lots of crystals have hexagonal structures since it’s the optimal packing distribution.<p>If “structured water” just means that there are tiny ice crystals in water, sure that’s very plausible, but I doubt it would have much of an effect.<p>PS: Trying to grow crystals of different challenging structures does sound like an awesome hobby.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:34:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700036</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700036</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700036</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it could offer the simplest and most encompassing explanation for biological harm from EMF<p>Frankly this is a bit of a red flag for me in terms of scientific rigour. It sounds like you want the conclusion to be true, or you already believe it to be true, that EMFs are harmful, and you are searching for ways to justify it. Careful with confirmation bias.<p>> would also make the benefits of sauna, red light therapy, grounding/earthing, and other practices more legible<p>This is also a bit suspect. These treatments don't seem to have much in common and it's unclear how they may affect the phenomenon you are discussing. Coincidentally they also tend to be some of the go-to treatments for a myriad unscientific wellness practices.<p>And I'm not sure how you plan to observe the molecular structure of water with a basic microscope. I suppose that trying to induce Rouleaux formations by exposing red blood cells to WiFi is worth a try of course, but it would be very strange if such a basic thing hadn't been observed already by the scientific community.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:18:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699922</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699922</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699922</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah okay... Surprised to see this as the top comment.<p>> Hexagonal water, also known as gel water, structured water, cluster water,[1] H3O2 or H3O2 is a term used in a marketing scam[2][3] that claims the ability to create a certain configuration of water that is better for the body.[4]<p>> The concept of hexagonal water clashes with several established scientific ideas. Although water clusters have been observed experimentally, they have a very short lifetime: the hydrogen bonds are continually breaking and reforming at timescales shorter than 200 femtoseconds.[7] This contradicts the hexagonal water model's claim that the particular structure of water consumed is the same structure used by the body.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_water" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_water</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:06:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699845</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699845</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699845</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "They're made out of meat (1991)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you liked this check out 365tomorrows.com, they one such scifi story for each day of the year on rotation, quite similar in style, wit and length.<p>It’s a great daily snack, the constraints of Flash Fiction yield quite lean and punchy stuff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:24:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697061</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697061</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697061</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "JSON Canvas Spec (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Check out charkoal.dev it has nested canvases and a few other extra features.<p>It is a great VSCode extension as-is, but the maintainers have abandoned it and they keep refusing to make it open-source. Someone is bound to make an open-source copy soon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:52:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623934</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47623934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software.<p>We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore.<p>From day one I had the expectation that my knowledge would become obsolete and that I needed to keep learning. That new tools will constantly replace me, my knowhow for doing things manually, and that I will need embrace and learn how to take advantage of new levels of automations.<p>Frankly my experience of AI hasn’t been much different from when React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust came in for instance, some random examples. You just keep learning and embracing the new technologies. Yes they automate some of what you were good at doing and that part of you is no longer needed, that’s the whole point.<p>I think we will be totally fine as software engineers, not because we are not being replaced, but because replacing ourselves and adapting to it is the core of what we do!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:35:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603164</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603164</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603164</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Curious that both average inputs and outputs match to exactly 5.74 kg. I had intuitively assumed there would be a significant difference, but I suppose that even if a lot of energy is extracted, the mass difference will be negligible, mc2 and all.<p>I'm also surprised that the vast majority of the output carbon is in the form of CO2 rather than feces.<p>It's all rather obvious in retrospect, it was just nice to see crystallized like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:18:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592899</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592899</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592899</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, the article itself says "unbacked" right upfront:<p>> an attacker was able to mint tens of millions of Resolv’s unbacked stablecoins (USR) and extract roughly $23 million in value</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:02:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500107</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Mamba-3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’d argue the opposite, the terminology is fairly mainstream by now and “inference” has a much more specific sense than “making predictions”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:20:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47465108</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47465108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47465108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not true, in a democracy you tend to have methods of appeal that actually work, and their threat keeps the wheels of bureaucracy greased.<p>This is because, in principle, everything comes down to the fundamental threat that the people can remove the current government, and the government does have full control over the unelected civil servants. If they keep ignoring appeals, they'll eventually get dethroned.<p>There's a nice symmetry between this and the fact that the law is ultimately guaranteed by the governments monopoly on violence. They can dethrone you too if you don't comply.<p>When a democracy works, there can be a very effective balance between the people's leverage towards the government and the governments leverage towards the people.<p>In an authoritarian regime the same forces are present but they are not balanced in the same way. The people can still rise up and dethrone the ruler through violence, but that is so much harder, and it is mostly offset by the governments greater power of violence. So they can get away with so much more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:10:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400927</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The neurons serve as a biological filter: the training system translates screen pixels and ray-cast distances into electrical zaps, the living cells fire spikes, and those counts feed straight into a PyTorch decoder that maps them to Doom actions. The PPO agent, CNN encoder and entire reward loop run on ordinary silicon elsewhere. Cole’s ablation modes make the split testable, set decoder output to random or zero and the game still plays. The CL1 hardware interface works exactly as advertised. What remains unproven is whether 200,000 human neurons can ever carry the policy instead of just riding along.<p>Yeah… That’s quite the smoking gun.<p>So it’s quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn a half-decent policy for playing the game.<p>If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game inputs directly.<p>Besides, they are not streaming the  video into the neurons at all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it’s barely more than pong isn’t it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is essentially that…<p>While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO or neurons.<p>EDIT: It seems like the readme does address these concerns, and the described setup differs significantly from the description in the critical blogpost. Still not entirely convincing to me, a lot of weights being trained in silicon around the neurons, but it sounds better. I don’t have time right now to look deeper into it. They outline some interesting details though.<p>> Quote from: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/main/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/mai...</a><p>Isn't the decoder/PPO doing all the learning?<p>No, this is precisely why there are ablations. The footage you see in the video was taken using a 0-bias full linear readout decoder, meaning that the action selected is a linear function of the output spikes from the CL1; the CL1 is doing the learning. There is a noticeable difference when using the ablation (both random and 0 spikes result in zero learning) versus actual CL1 spikes.<p>Isn't the encoder/PPO doing all the learning?<p>This question largely assumes that the cells are static, which is incorrect; it is not a memory-less feed X in get Y machine. Both the policy and the cells are dynamical systems; biological neurons have an internal state (membrane potential, synaptic weights, adaptation currents). The same stimulation delivered at different points in training will produce different spike patterns, because the neurons have been conditioned by prior feedback. During testing, we froze encoder weights and still observed improvements in the reward.<p>How is DOOM converted to electrical signals?<p>We train an encoder in our PPO policy that dictates the stimulation pattern (frequency, amplitude, pulses, and even which channels to stimulate). Because the CL1 spikes are non-differentiable, the encoder is trained through PPO policy gradients using the log-likelihood trick (REINFORCE-style), i.e., by including the encoder’s sampled stimulation log-probs in the PPO objective rather than backpropagating through spikes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:36:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302342</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302342</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302342</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "GPT-5.4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I believe you are looking at GPT 5.4 Pro. It's confusing in the context of subscription plan names, Gemini naming and such. But they've had the Pro version of the GPT 5 models (and I believe o3 and o1 too) for a while.<p>It's the one you have access to with the top ~$200 subscription and it's available through the API for a MUCH higher price ($2.5/$15 vs $30/$180 for 5.4 per 1M tokens), but the performance improvement is marginal.<p>Not sure what it is exactly, I assume it's probably the non-quantized version of the model or something like that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:43:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265520</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265520</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265520</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Microslop Manifesto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not at all, one of the key features of that design system was that the boxes had no borders, and they were differentiated by their flat background fill color instead. There's borders galore here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:06:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47219782</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47219782</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47219782</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Microslop Manifesto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The site itself it's quite the slopfest too!<p>There's no manifesto ("manifest"??), the counter is completely fake, and the tracker doesn't show any of the user submitted reports.<p>There's nothing here other than: "Microsoft is integrating AI into their products and I don't like it, build a website about it please". It barely even has anything to do with Microsoft, it's more of a shallow "AI is bad" take.<p>Is this meant to be satire? It's rather in bad taste if you ask me, I have no idea how it got so many upvotes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:05:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218119</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218119</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218119</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It'd be interested in seeing how exactly the lawyers figured out how to define AGI. It must be a fairly mundane set of KPIs that they just arbitrarily call AGI, the term will probably devalue significantly in the coming years.<p>The actual quote is this though:<p>> hitting an AGI milestone or pursuing an IPO<p>So it seems softer than actually achieving AGI or finalising an IPO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:35:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182507</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182507</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182507</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I did upvote, it's witty, but it's a bit of a misrepresentation of how the economy works.<p>In practice, people don't tend to pay people to eat shit without gain. You are paying people to help you. Money gaslights everyone into helping each other, the most selfish people become the most selfless.<p>Of course, real capitalism is much more complex and much uglier than this fantasy. When certain people end up with long-term control of large piles of money, the whole thing gets distorted. They get to make lots of money on interest without doing anything, and making other people eat more shit for scraps. That's the "capital" part of capitalism.<p>But the toy world-model that this joke is making fun of, is actually the one core positive aspect of capitalism and brings all the prosperity we have: tricking people into helping each other.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:27:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182408</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182408</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47182408</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by oersted in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution.<p>The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:38:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119657</link><dc:creator>oersted</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119657</guid></item></channel></rss>