MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: A daily arithmetic puzzle with a hidden Hard Mode
by kapework | 2026-03-09 17:50:38+00:00
I built a small browser puzzle game:

https://make24.app

Each day you get 4 numbers and try to make exactly 24 using +, −, ×, ÷. Each number must be used exactly once, and fractions are allowed.

I like puzzle games that are very easy to start but still genuinely challenging, so I tried to make this one as small and streamlined as possible — no signup, no ads, and not much UI beyond what is needed to play. Much of the AI-assisted coding work was cutting away clutter.

Three moves with no undos in less than 60 seconds constitutes a perfect solve.

After you solve the daily puzzle, a hidden Hard Mode appears. Using the same four numbers, you try to fill as many reachable integer targets as possible before the timer ends.

A few implementation details:

puzzles always have at least one valid solution

Hard Mode computes the reachable target set dynamically

everything runs in the browser

mobile-first, but playable on desktop too

keyboard input works on desktop

Two things I’d especially love feedback on:

Does Hard Mode make sense within the first 10 seconds?

Anything in the UI feel unnecessary or unclear?
by chasd00 | 2026-03-09 17:50:43+00:00
They're not really the same planes, they've been continually upgraded over time. For another example, The B-52 strategic bomber is being used right now and but it was also operational during the Korean war. However, the B-52s flying today are very different than the ones flying back then. Another way to think about it is a computer with an old case but upgraded mb, cpu, and ram.
by kakacik | 2026-03-09 17:50:50+00:00
What does that have to do with anything? They went through training in different times when conflicts were not on their plate. During peace it is a cool job, you know not every air force around the world bombs schools, in fact most don't.

Anybody who ever went through arab countries with eyes opened saw the massive nepotism and corruption at all levels. Army/air force ain't immune to this, in contrary. Do you think ie some general or politician's first son would be treated and pushed up same as common folks?
by troupo | 2026-03-09 17:51:04+00:00
> 5% per minute is not extremely fast.

5% of nameplate capacity.

> You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day"

Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me.

> "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.

Imagine if you didn't omit the full quote/context:

--- start quote ---

Also, AES-2006 is capable of fast power modulations with ramps of up to 5% Pr per second (in the interval of ±10% Pr), or power drops of 20% Pr per minute in the interval of 50-100% of the rated power. However, the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations.

--- end quote ---

Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.

Which is literally an emergency that is not needed in a power grid.
by corry | 2026-03-09 17:51:06+00:00
Nice points! You reminded me that, actually, contrary to my hand-wringing, the IG algorithm is excellent (for me) when it comes to recommending music - and it's often artists with very few monthly listeners on Spotify.

Why is IG so much better than Spotify itself's algo? Or YouTube's? Or... etc? No idea. And also - it's always paid ads from these artists that get me.

So on the one hand, <insert my original point>; but on the other, as much as technology is perhaps driving the brand hollowness, it's also allow for more long-tail discovery precisely because it makes powerful marketing/advertising channels accessible to that girl making beats in her bedroom - so long as she has a bit of $ to deploy. It still may not be profitable for her (because: Spotify) but I also try to support these artists with merch buys, physical buys, etc.
by rs999gti | 2026-03-09 17:51:16+00:00
> Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

But it is abundant in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland. Also, there is nuclear power in France.

However, Russia and Ukraine are at war. Germany is willing to go green and destroy itself. EU hates Poland and other east European countries. And EU and the rest of the world can't disassociate nuclear power with weapons.

So I guess EU can enjoy their limited and expensive green energy.
by babypuncher | 2026-03-09 17:51:19+00:00
What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work.

This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.

I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-03-09 17:51:21+00:00
In the corporate world, we've started using reimplemation as a way to access tooling that security won't authorize.

Sec has a deny by default policy. Eng has a use-more-AI policy. Any code written in-house is accepted by default. You can see where this is going.

We've been using AI to reimplement tooling that security won't approve. The incentives conspired in the worst outcome, yet here we are. If you want a different outcome, you need to create different incentives.
by VLM | 2026-03-09 17:51:26+00:00
DCS World to the rescue?

There's open source intel on google that Iran has SU-27s. Under combat conditions you have an instant to tell them apart. Clearly, its possible to misidentify them at least one time historically as the F-15s did get shot down.

I can assure you from having flown around a lot, if you are wildly outnumbered 3 SU-27 (err, F15) to your 1 F-18 you do not attempt a radar lock you do an IR only attack. The article mentions getting a radar lock first but that is unnecessary for IR guided weapons and in a 3-1 situation will just get you shot down.

Waiting for confirmation from the ground means 1 of the 3 will surely notice and you will be shot down.

Ironically if it were a flight of 4 F-18 they'd probably not have been as skittish at radar locking a mere 3 aircraft and the IFF (assuming its probably configured and working etc) would have informed them they're friendlies. IFF can only tell you if everything on both sides is working perfectly and powered up, if you don't get a friendly response all you know is it didn't work. Not unlike a network ping command. If ping works you know they're up and accepting pings from you, if ping doesn't work, you don't really know anything for sure.

Possibly the primary fault was the Kuwaiti lack of situational awareness. Somehow he's in shoot down range of three other A/C and he's got maybe 3 to 5 seconds to shoot them down or be shot down himself.

Somehow there is no discussion on what both A/C were doing. Usually a landing on an airfield would not look like a bombing run but possibly the F15s were doing something "weird" for which they could be blamed. The total censorship of what they were doing points to them being up to something dumb "lets buzz the airfield during active combat would could possibly go wrong" and they get shot down for looking like an attack run. Or a mix up where there's a published ahead of time safe altitude window around 15K but these guys for who knows why were 1000 feet off the ground doing who knows what. Maybe they had a good tactical reason to do it but its damning that nothing is being reported as an excuse.

Clearly any passive IR detector thats theorized to exist for years either doesn't exist or doesn't work very well. In theory, a smart enough IR camera should be able to notice something very warm indeed is getting rapidly brighter as it approaches you. In practice, these don't exist, or don't work. "Oh yeah they didn't have those when I was in, but they totally have them now" for the last 30 years. Apparently, not yet in 2026.

I find it unfortunate that people who do this for a living can't legally comment, people who do this for a hobby are not asked or actively ignored despite extensive practical experience, and people who mostly have a grift of looking authoritative for legacy media get automatic blind belief despite sometimes spouting total nonsense. This is the typical journalistic response in ALL disaster situations not just military aviation.
by ksri | 2026-03-09 17:51:29+00:00
I am working on a declarative CLI for google docs/sheets/slides etc. The general idea is a "pull" command that converts the proprietary document into a local files like tsv or xml. The agent (claude code) then simply edits these files in place and calls "push". The library then figures out the diff and applies only the diff, taking care to preserve formatting and comments.

The hypothesis is that llms are better off getting the "big picture" by reading local files. They can then spend tokens to edit the document as per the business needs rather than spending tokens to figure out how to edit the document.

Another aspect is the security model. Extrasuite assigns a permission-less service account per employee. The agent gets this service account to make API calls. This means the agent only gets access to documents explicitly shared with it, and any changes it makes show up in version history separate from the user's changes.

Early release can be found over here - https://github.com/think41/extrasuite.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-03-09 17:51:48+00:00
> there is little difference between the stock market, prediction markets and horse betting. I just don't believe speculation is necessary to a healthy economy

The speculation I’m describing is entrepreneurship. That is the core risk taking that makes market systems competitive. To the extent stock markets support that, they’re socially useful. (In America, liquid stock markets support liquid private markets that support entrepreneurship pretty directly.)

> it takes remarkably little for things to go horribly wrong, and we ought to address that somehow

I’d argue the opposite. The economy is doing remarkably well given we’re at war (kinetic and trade) and just getting over Kristi Noem.

That aside, I suspect the problem is leverage.
by DarkmSparks | 2026-03-09 17:51:56+00:00
That is the basis for my theory.
Not being on

And

Being on but jammed look the same from the perspective of the one shooting them down.

Also, I wonder how resilient it is to the gps spoofing that been going on. If they managed to trick it into identifying itself as a few hundred miles from where it actually was, then very hard to know where it actually is.

All of which is well within Irans technical capabilities.
by VorpalWay | 2026-03-09 17:51:58+00:00
Java on smartcard etc is a thing. I haven't met anyone who used that and actually like it. And it is apparently nothing like normal java.

Many microcontrollers are indeed still running C, but things are starting to change. Esperif has official support for Rust for example, and other vendors are experimenting with that too. Many other microcontrollers have good community support.

> if there is Rust support, most likely only no_std fits, thus no async anyway.

This is just plain incorrect. The beauty of async in rust is that it does work on no_std. You don't need an allocator even to use Embassy. Instead becuause async tasks are perfectly sized, you can reserve space statically at compile time, you just need to specify with an attribute how many concurrent instances of a given task should be supported.
by rramadass | 2026-03-09 17:52:02+00:00
From the article (this is what i believe too);

Another fighter pilot’s analysis, seen in video below, questions whether the Kuwaiti pilot might even have gone rogue against an ally. That actually seems possible based on the evidence, but it is hard to believe.

The fact that _three_ were shot down using air-to-air missiles is the clincher.
by hellojesus | 2026-03-09 17:52:05+00:00
Yes, and the next battle is ech-pinned params in apps. The browser can at least single that ech isn't supported. For apps, you'll just have to strip the ech and downgrade the connection and live with the server dropping you. But that's fine. My kids don't need tiktok if I, the parent, can't decrypt the info.
by netsharc | 2026-03-09 17:52:13+00:00
An Instagram video I saw (yeah I know, great source) said that the idea is to cut off oil supply to China, which was getting it from Venezuela and Iran. That the 2 events are connected is new to me, and it's surprising considering the Trump regime acts seemingly more like a chicken with its head cut off.

But maybe it's all in service to Putin, who will now get to fill his war chest with the profits of the high-priced oil he can sell to China, and India...
by AnonymousPlanet | 2026-03-09 17:52:22+00:00
That's the current hope. But do you know who also had consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG, Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.
by reactordev | 2026-03-09 17:52:22+00:00
Same flaws. It was all designed to make up for budget cuts and stayed when it made a dent. Once they got used to the money from it, they got complacent with how effective it actually was. This is Law Enforcement in America in a nut shell. They only care when they can’t make their pension plan payments. Rather than go out there and police, they have staffing shortages and rely on the private sector to provide services that allow them to “police” from afar or by an algorithm.
by Teever | 2026-03-09 17:52:58+00:00
> Lastly, the stem cells we're planning to use to make these eggs accrue mutations with age, and we don't currently have a good method to fix these before making them into eggs. These mutations will bring additional risk of various serious diseases, only some of which we currently have the genetic screening to detect.

I've always found this one fascinating. Somehow human cells age and humans get old and die but humans can somehow make an entirely new creature through reproduction where that is reset and most of the defects from the parent are gone as well.

How does that work and what stumbling blocks exist that prevent us from replicating it?
by BenjiWiebe | 2026-03-09 17:53:01+00:00
You can use ohms law - let it draw power through a 10k resistor, and put your multimeter across the resistor. Every .01 volt is 1 uA. This also means that if you're powering it with 3.3v and it browns out at 3.0v, you'll only be able to draw 30uA before browning out.

You can use a different resistor according to the power draw and how sensitive your volt meter is.

You'll probably need to power it up with the resistor shorted, and only remove the short once it's in sleep mode, to measure the current.
by NicuCalcea | 2026-03-09 17:53:11+00:00
Graphene OS really like to shit on competing projects, it seems. Maybe they're right, but it seems a bit obsessive.

/e/OS: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1946269698498105813

iodéOS: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1892555359656534284

CalyxOS: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1953856218931376421
by jeffbee | 2026-03-09 17:53:15+00:00
A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.
by axus | 2026-03-09 17:53:16+00:00
Oracle had it's day in court with Google over the Java APIs. Reimplementing APIs can be done without copyright infringement, but Oracle must have tried to find real infringement during discovery.

In this case, we could theoretically prove that the new chardet is a clean reimplementation. Blanchard can provide all of the prompts necessary to re-implement again, and for the cost of the tokens anyone can reproduce the results.
by 0x3f | 2026-03-09 17:53:26+00:00
They have the right to question, but I don't have to testify to anything, that's what the fifth ammendment is for.

As usual, Europe doesn't care about internal consistency when it comes to rights. They just legislate (or rule) whatever 'works' for the current definition of 'works'.

> If someone shot a person with your gun, you gonna say it wasn't you and expect them not to question you further? Not very no-brainer, is it?

Nobody has said you can't be questioned.
by 1024core | 2026-03-09 17:53:29+00:00
Most of this is just speculation until the Kuwaiti pilot is identified. If it turns out he is a Shia muslim, then it'll open up a new dimension on this event.

History buffs may remember that the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia was the catalyst that turned OBL into America's foe. He had offered his services to the King to defend KSA against Saddam Hussein (after Saddam swallowed Kuwait), but the King politely refused and speed dialled the USA instead. The rest is history.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-09 17:53:33+00:00
Surprised they don't mention Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. Seems a bit myopic to condone the general legality while arguing "you can only use it how I like it".

It also doesn't talk about the far more interesting philosophical queston. Does what Blanchard did cover ALL implementations from Claude? What if anyone did exactly what he did, feed it the test cases and say "re-implement from scratch", ostensibly one would expect the results to be largely similar (technically under the right conditions deterministically similar)

could you then fork the project under your own name and a commercial license? when you use an LLM like this, to basically do what anyone else could ask it to do how do you attach any license to it? Is it first come first serve?

If an agent is acting mostly on its own it feels like if you found a copy of Harry Potter in the fictional library of Babel, you didn't write it, just found it amongst the infinite library, but if you found it first could you block everyone else that stumbles on a near-identical copy elsewhere in the library? or does each found copy represent a "Re-implementation" that could be individually copyrighted?
by CapitalistCartr | 2026-03-09 17:53:48+00:00
We have red light cameras here in Tampa. I don't know all the details of what it takes to make a right on red and not get a ticket, so I do exaggerated stops to be sure. I know what the law claims but that doesn't matter. The real law is the actual (proprietary) code rumning in the machine. Not what the law says. Not what the contract says. Not what the requirements say. Not what the programmer thinks the code does.
by zahlman | 2026-03-09 17:53:53+00:00
Per your own source:

1. There are coordination issues that have caused them to overestimate the need for such plants, which have been running at low capacity. There have also been perverse incentives to build plants that weren't needed, in order to placate the relevant stakeholders.

2. Battery storage (including pumped hydro) is being pursued aggressively, specifically (among other things) to address the reliability concerns that motivated the recent new coal plant construction. Government policy, furthermore, is clearly focused on "new energy", i.e. not fossil fuels.

3. Coal power generation in China has been level or declining for a little while now. Generation from new renewable plants is outstripping the overall increase in demand for power. There is a graph titled "New coal power has no predictive value for future coal power generation".

4. Historical, global evidence shows a persistent trend of capacity reduction lagging behind generation reduction. As should be expected. It takes effort (= money) to decommission a power plant, and an inactive (or less-active) one is a safety net. "In most cases, what ultimately stopped new coal power projects in those countries was not a formal ban, but the market reality.... In China, the same market signals are emerging: clean energy is now meeting all incremental demand and coal power generation has, as a result, started to decline."

5. As a share of total power generation, coal power in China has dropped substantially (from nearly 3/4 to scarcely half) over the last decade or so. In absolute terms, it is likely near or even past the peak.

6. The article concludes: "While China’s coal power construction boom looks, at first glance, like a resurgence,it currently appears more likely to be the final surge before a long downturn. The expansion has added friction and complexity to China’s energy transition, but it has not reversed it."

You asked:

> So are China, generally shifting away from coal?

Your own source clearly argues that they are, in fact, shifting away from coal. Presenting an article that refutes you as if it supported you, while employing this style of repeated "pointed" questions, is disingenuous and obnoxious.
by db48x | 2026-03-09 17:54:21+00:00
Sure, that would be sufficient probable cause for police to ask questions. But it’s not sufficient evidence on which to write a ticket because we specifically wrote into our Constitution that the police must know and be able to prove who the guilty party is _before_ they write the ticket (or make an arrest, in the case of more serious crimes). Poland doesn’t protect its citizens to the same degree, so what is acceptable there is not acceptable here.
by muhehe | 2026-03-09 17:54:29+00:00
I really wish them success, but I just can't see it anymore. I had the first version and it seems it didn't move much forward from that time. And there were also many screwups, as poisonborz reminded a bit earlier.

Their UI looked novel, but wasn't that great in practice. It wasn't stable (hopefully that changed) and the lack of real apps was killing it before and now even more, as more banks/govs require some "trusted" apps
by bluefirebrand | 2026-03-09 17:54:29+00:00
No more lending your car to a friend in need, no more letting your children learn to drive on your car or borrow it ever. Families must now own and insure a car for every individual driver because we can't be bothered to find robust solutions for traffic enforcement

Shift the problem onto individuals, make it a burden for the public. Typical HN attitude
by sethammons | 2026-03-09 17:54:48+00:00
no single raindrop feels it is to be blamed for the flood.

I've always enjoyed that line. I also find it interesting how people interpret it. I take it to mean that each raindrop should still try to not cause a flood, and at some point, the flood will be prevented. Others take it to say there are simply too many other raindrops and they won't try, so there is no point in any drop trying. I don't care for that version.
by tacticalturtle | 2026-03-09 17:55:03+00:00
The relevant part is that the judge declared traffic ticket proceedings “quasi criminal”:

> In the order, the court found that red-light camera cases, although labeled as civil infractions, function as “quasi-criminal” proceedings because they can result in monetary penalties, a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record.

Which seems to just relabel any fine from the government as a criminal matter?

IMO when you register the vehicle for the right to drive on public roads, you are entering into an agreement that you will be responsible for following the rules of the road, and for lending the car to people who also do so.

Similarly, if I register a firearm legally, and then lend it out to anyone who asks, regardless of whether they follow the law, I don’t think it would be crazy to hold me financially responsible if a shooting happens with my gun.