Just a note, it's very clear the OP's associated account was an attempt at an AI managed account created for HN 5 days ago, looking at their post history and their single comment. I'm not sure about this post in particular but it is strange that you have a full 8-bit CPU simulator with no history older than 4 days ago, full with comments on each function. It's likely this "CPU simulator" is AI-generated and in fact not from scratch. Of course, it's possible you had a rather polished, from scratch project the OP polished on their own PC before uploading to github. That said, their first post already cast some doubt.
I'm not sure if this is in the spirit of "Show HN" because really anyone can do this.
Sort-of agree, but then I saw this code in the Visualiser[0]
try:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
except Exception:
plt = None
class Visualizer:
def animate_combined(
# Stuff...
):
# Stuff...
try:
import numpy as np
except Exception:
print("numpy is required for animation")
return
if plt is None:
print("matplotlib not available - cannot animate")
return
Is AI really that bad? Or has it been written by a human?
I mean, it's not impossible to get bad AI code, no?
Anyway, as I said in a comment below, Show HN already has vibe-coded projects in it, much less merely AI assisted works, the problem here is the title that says it is "from scratch" which most readers would assume means it is written by hand.
Agree, I was checking the code and the first thing that I notice were the extremely detailed doc comments even for simple methods. i.e. the memory[0] class.
If you want something done by hand, I made kind-of the same thing in JavaScript ages ago. (actually, no I just looked and I made the emulator part in Haxe)
[Edit]
Taking a look at the other posts, I think that the user is using AI, but also sincere in their intention of learning by making things. You will get people at all skill levels posting to Show HN: So I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that they are posting something that doesn't require a lot of skill. Some of these beginner efforts are quite well received.
AI moves the bar somewhat, for what a beginner can do. In an ideal world, they would also clearly indicate their methods to avoid confusion or making people feel like they have been tricked. In their defence, this too, is an attribute of beginners. They have yet to learn the expectations of the community.
It get's even more complicated with AI of course, because the expectations of the community on this are rather in flux right now. To an extent, we're all beginners when it comes to what can be made with AI, how to use it, and how to present it.
To be clear, my main issue, if any, is the misleading headline. People have posted Show HN things they've used AI to help build (partially or completely). However, saying this is from scratch if it isn't is straight up lying. Moreover, the fact that this is on the front page is likely due that claim, so the reality of it is important context for readers, I imagine.
It seems this was posted while I was editing my comment. Essentially I agree, but feel like you have to make allowances for beginners in both coding and in how they conform to community expectations.
I can see how someone using AI would consider something made from scratch differently. Similarly, in the past using a batteries included language wouldn't have counted as from scratch to someone who had to write most of their support code themselves. Go back further and you'll probably see people considering the idea of using a compiler written by someone else as not from scratch.
Unless you want to go full NAND to Tetris, the notion of from-scratch is contextual. Maybe it's shifting under our feet.
Sorry, but the existence of such an inversion still is interesting from a mathematical perspective. It isn't "of much use" practically without the inversion formula/calculation, but that's ok. "There exists" is still a fascinating fact.
Completely agree. Beyond being of interest in its own right, "There exists" is a prerequisite for further work in finding a practical approach to find the path.
While I sympathesise with the other recent posts about political freedom, this post is rather further along the line to just straight politics (namely, it is about acceptable rhetoric) and it isn't really even about policy.
It's fine to be appalled, I am. HN just doesn't seem like the forum for this, there are tons of fora out there online to discuss similar outrages.
The gravy train will crash. Fortunately, given many of those who facilitated it will die within 20 years, and then that will be someone else's problem.
Let's have a quick recap of two of the things we've already tried:
Isolationism sucks. You have a domestic industry but it's not allowed to sell to other countries in retaliation for you doing the same to them, so it's small and consolidated and when the domestic providers are correspondingly terrible the trade barriers inhibit you from using the foreign ones.
"Free Trade" (but not actually) is even worse, because you take down your own trade barriers nominally in exchange for others doing the same, and then some of them don't. They subsidize their industries so that the global industry consolidates into one country and then if that country sucks you're in even worse shape because it's also a single point of failure and subject to foreign political forces.
What we should be doing isn't going back to trade barriers, it's creating sufficient tax incentives to sustain a domestic industry for strategically important products and then letting other countries do the same and consumers choose which company they want to buy it from. Because then you don't have trade barriers but you do have both domestic production and competition.
The price is that companies in those industries would essentially be paying lower taxes than they currently do or receiving some subsidies in order to make them competitive with the other countries doing something equivalent. But maybe that's not the worst of the three options.
> What we should be doing isn't going back to trade barriers, it's creating sufficient tax incentives to sustain a domestic industry for strategically important products and then letting other countries do the same and consumers choose which company they want to buy it from.
Trade happens because not a single country has or can produce all the (strategically important) products it wants, without trading with others.
Entities the size of the US or the EU are capable of producing most or all strategically important products internally, and then trade still happens because not all products are strategically important. Or because e.g. people in the Northeast buy oil from Canada because it's closer to them than Texas, even if both countries have that industry.
> Entities the size of the US or the EU are capable of producing most or all strategically important products internally
The US can internally produce: food staples, fossil fuels and nuclear fuel, most (but not all) industrial chemicals and construction material, defense systems and major military equipment, generic drugs and many medical devices.
However, vulnerabilities exist in: semiconductors, rare earth minerals, speciality chemicals and pharmaceutical raw materials.
Even if the EU were a country, it has high self-sufficiency for: temperature agriculture, industrial chemicals, some aerospace and defense components.
However, it is import dependent for: energy, specialty metals and rare earths, pharmaceuticals, high-tech electronics and semiconductors.
Lastly, what about the remaining 167 countries in the world (195 - US - EU)?
90% of the world's population live outside the US and EU.
Trade is really really important for human flourishing.
> The US can internally produce: food staples, fossil fuels and nuclear fuel, most (but not all) industrial chemicals and construction material, defense systems and major military equipment, generic drugs and many medical devices.
The US used to produce nearly all of those things and would benefit from having the industrial capacity to process rare earths even if some of the mining happens in Brazil or India or Australia.
> Lastly, what about the remaining 167 countries in the world (195 - US - EU)? 90% of the world's population live outside the US and EU.
They would then have the option to buy any of them from the US, the EU or China instead of having only one of those monopolize global production.
Most products are strategically important. You might be fooled into saying that toaster ovens aren't strategically important, but then if your country can't make its own toaster ovens, it turns out that it can't make dozens of other strategically important products either. Steel, ships, automobiles, semiconductors and computer infrastructure, food, clothing, aircraft, medical equipment, and on and on and on. It's difficult to name a manufactured product that isn't.
>Trade happens because not a single country has or can produce all the (strategically important) products it wants,
This is an interesting claim. What if instead, a single country could produce all the products it wants and needs, but that doing so would be less lucrative for a certain subset of the population that can take advantage of trade? In such a case, that single country might fail to do so and import a bunch of crap anyway, don't you think?
I don't see what the meaningful difference is between trade barriers (assuming by that you mean tariffs) and tax incentives for specific industries. Moderate, targeted tariff policies, especially ones that gradually decreased over time, can achieve the same effect of bolstering domestic industry while still allowing a healthy amount of foreign competition.
If a domestic industry is only surviving because of tariffs then it will lobby to keep the tariffs high and for the tariffs to be effective in sustaining the domestic industry they'll have to be enough to deter domestic consumers from patronizing foreign competitors when domestic producers are lacking. That means domestic customers get screwed and domestic companies don't have the incentive to improve as long as they can successfully lobby for continued tariffs.
If you only provide subsidies then consumer prices go down rather than up because the mechanism of operation is for the subsidies to make the domestic supplier more attractive rather than for tariffs to make foreign suppliers less attractive. Meanwhile the subsidy is paid by the government and then the legislators will be trying to keep it down rather than raise it because it reduces the money they have to spend on other things rather than increasing tariffs which do the opposite.
Some will win and some will loose without free trade as well. Or do you think without free trade everybody will be great?
For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.
Sure, now in some countries we can associate free trade with consumerism, but it's not everywhere the same.
> For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.
I don't believe in putting the responsibility on individuals. Billions upon billions of whatever currency are being poured into ads, marketing, influencing, lobbying, propaganda (and whatever other manipulation mechanism I'm not thinking of), employing some of the most brilliant mind of this generation, to ensure that individuals are consumerist. Because that's what will make companies the most money, and "making more money" is the only incentive this society has in place.
Show me the incentive and I show you the outcome: the outcome is enormous externalities. We need to fix the incentives, not expect individuals to somehow act against them en masse.
Not sure what you are arguing for, if it is that something should be done about consumerism/externalities, I definitely agree. People are not "act against free trade en masse" either, it is a policy choice with various impacts, which I doubt will be "great" for most, just different.
> "making more money" is the only incentive this society has in place
Which society? I lived in 3 different societies (more than a couple of years), and while it is true that money is one of the incentive I think there were fundamental differences that were not obvious about what makes people tick. And by looking at the political situation around the globe - my impression that people care about many more things than their bank account.
That does not mean I propose specific solutions, I am just very skeptical that without free trade things will be better on average for more people than without, if anything is just a red herring so that nobody deals with the more complex issues.
You should realise this is quite the conflation. Might as well say we are going back to the age before penicillin because that was also "back then." I personally don't advocate for a return to the past for its own sake.
perhaps the US is doing that for other reasons (RFK Jr.) but the good news is that in the post US hegemonic order, that country can go ahead and collapse into flames and the rest of the world won't be taken down with it.
That's rich, coming from a country which outright bands foreign corporations from even operating within their borders, and those who they allow have to operate through a state-controlled corporate minder.
And then you actually go to China and are shocked to realize that Western companies and brands are everywhere. Starbucks and KFC on every other corner. Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW cars clogging the roads. Rich people wearing Italian luxury brands, middle-class people wearing Nike and Adidas athleisure wear.
China’s foreign investment framework is formally open (especially after WTO accession), but:
- Certain industries are restricted or prohibited for foreign investors.
- The “Negative List for Foreign Investment” explicitly bans or limits foreign participation in many areas (e.g., media, education, data services, telecoms, mining).
-
Some sectors require a Chinese joint venture (you can’t have 100% ownership).
So even though the law allows foreign entry, policy barriers and regulatory discretion make it hard in practice.
To use your example of Volkswagen, their ownership in China is structured around several joint ventures, where it shares ownership with Chinese companies like SAIC Motor, FAW Group, and JAC Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC_Volkswagen
> The “Negative List for Foreign Investment” explicitly bans or limits foreign participation in many areas (e.g., media, education, data services, telecoms, mining)
That's a very good for them, by looking at the list. Look at how big a problem the EU now has with its reliance on US tech and military. Sovereignty is very important in strategic industries and in those that allow foreign powers to influence your population.
> of use your example of Volkswagen, their ownership in China is structured around several joint ventures
Volkswagen is a cherry picked example, look at Tesla, which isn't a joint venture. BMW still uses a JV but now holds 75% of BMW Brilliance etc.
And it's no longer required for car companies to use joint ventures, that rule was lifted in one of the recent years and more industries were actually opened in the same time.
> Volkswagen is a cherry picked example, look at Tesla, which isn't a joint venture. BMW still uses a JV but now holds 75% of BMW Brilliance etc.
No cherry picking. Purely random. FWIW, according to my quick research there are only 3 vehicle manufacturers that operate and manufacture in China while retaining 100% ownership as a foreign company. They are Tesla (Gigafactory in Shanghai), Lexus (EV plant in Shanghai), and Scania (truck manuf. in Rugao). If this list is comprehensive, then it is very very short, and my original point stands which is that technically the market might be open (barring the exceptions I mentioned), but in practice it is pretty closed because it is so hard to enter due to all the barriers that are put up.
I think it is fair to say, and I think you would agree, that on a spectrum of free trade, China doesn't rank very high.
The JV rule is gone. China removed the foreign ownership cap in autos on a staged schedule with NEVs in 2018, commercial vehicles in 2020 and passenger cars from the start of 2022. The old "max two JVs" rule was lifted at the same time. In other words, if a foreign OEM wants 100% today, the law allows it.
BMW example I mentioned is an example of exercising that choice, it lifted its stake in BMW Brilliance from 50% to 75% once the rules changed. And Tesla ias wholly owned in Shanghai (enabled by the 2018 NEV opening). That's precisely the point I made, it wasn't an "exception" as you framed it, to a still binding rule, it was an early use of the liberalization.
So since 2022 ownership is a strategic choice for these companies. Many legacy JVs remain not because they don't have a choice but because of scale, supply chain integration, dealer networks, local partners assets etc, so on other words it works for them like this better, but any OEM with the capital can take majority or go 100% (as BMW did and as Tesla/Scania/Lexus show).
Saying "technically the market might be open ... but in practice it is pretty closed" doesn't hold up to the post 2022 facts.
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