This looks pretty intense. Their time estimates add up to over 35 days (assuming a full 8 hours of work per day) to complete, although some of the estimates seem a bit weird. Basic Linux installation and usage is given 10 hours which seems like it must be very hand holdy.
Also, there are some rough corners. I went to the course material to see what is covered in that 10 hour course and it starts off with:
*Install a Linux operating system*
We will reuse the content from the PA lecture notes.
Please install the Linux operating system according to PA0.
The Eve of the World's Birth: Development Environment Setup
The Story of the World's Birth - Prologue
PA tells the story of a “Pioneer Creating a Computer.”
The Pioneer intended to create a computer world.
But even the most skilled cook cannot make a meal without ingredients.
To facilitate the creation of this world, even the Pioneer had to put in considerable effort to prepare.
Let's see what tools he gathered.
Submission Requirements (Please read the following carefully. Violations will be at your own risk)
Estimated Average Time: 10 hours
This is Chinese text, so properly they are Hanzi. Yes, they use the same Unicode code points, and both words approximately mean "characters of the Han people" in their respective languages (and can be written with the same characters in those languages); but this is culturally sensitive and some people will give you a lot of grief about it. (The same character may be rendered differently, even within the same font, to respect different calligraphic traditions etc. This happens either with the help of supplementary "variation selector" characters or with font substitution based on some external detection of the language.) There are quite a few characters used in one language but not the other (despite being recognized as in some sense the same "kind of" character), and independent systems and traditions of simplification.
I would much rather learners be directed at a proper resource for doing something than trying to include all the info locally which inevitably will get out of date and become incomplete.
Is a search term really a proper resource? A chosen installation guide, preferably an official one with a stable URL (and available in the language of instruction) would be better IMHO. When the link goes dead, the learner could search based on the link title anyway.
How does this compare to something that might be offered in a strong computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering program in the U.S. or Europe?
It’s not really the same scope but Stanford had (has?) a course where you literally fab a simple computer chip yourself from bare silicon to rudimentary packaging. It takes a team on 4 one quarter working pretty much around the clock
Statements like this always feel a bit rude to me—as a Chinese, I use em dashes (in Chinese texts) on a daily basis and insert them in English texts when I see fit.
A bit of background: Em dashes “—” (or, very often, double em-dashes “——”) are to Chinese texts what hyphens “-” are to English texts. We use them in ranges “魯迅（1881－1936）”, in name concatenations “任－洛二氏溶液（Ringer-Locke solution）”, to express sounds “呜——”火车开动了, or `“Chouuuuuuuuu”, starts the train' in English, and in place of sentence breaks like this——just like em dashes in English texts. They are so commonly used that most Chinese input methods map Shift+- (i.e., underscores “_”) to double em-dashes. So, as a result, while I see many English people have to resort to weird sequences like “Alt + 0151” for an em-dash, a huge population in the world actually has no difficulty in using em-dashes. What a surprise!
As for this article, obviously it was translated from its Chinese version, so, yeah I don't see em-dashes as an AI indicator. And for the weird emoji “” (U+1F54A), I'm fairly certain that it comes from the Chinese idiom “放鸽子” (stand someone up, or, literally, release doves/pigeons), which has evolved into “鸽了” (pigeon'ed), a humorous way to say “delayed, sorry!”.
Totally agree, I don't think em dashes are a particularly useful AI tell unless they're used in a weird way. Left to my own devices (as a native English speaker who likes em dashes and parentheticals), I often end up with at least one em dash every other paragraph, if not more frequently.
On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!
Thank you! It would indeed require extra effort for me to notice issues like this, and it is very nice of you to have pointed it out!
Speaking of personal devices, I also have a dedicated key binding for en dashes “–” (because, well, I already have a whole tap layer for APL symbols, and it costs nothing to add one more). Since we're on HN, I believe many people here can easily do that if they wish to, so I too don't think en/em dashes are very telling, especially on HN.
This comment has become more robotic than the thing it criticises. People use em-dashes and emoji all the time! They are easy to type. On Apple operating systems you can even make em-dashes accidentally by default by simply using two hyphens. Those by themselves aren’t sufficient to detect LLM writing, please stop propagating that wrong idea. And emoji?! Human communication over the internet is littered with them, they’re insanely popular and have their own jargon and innuendos.
Microcap will handle both Analog and Digital simulations.
KiCad now also supports Spice, and reports it should import the free LTSpice libraries. I have yet to find a use case for the kicad sim option... so YMMV.
Most AI tells are like this. I have been taught in marketing training to list things in pairs of three, because that's punchy, sufficiently succinct and very memorable. Now this is strongly associated with AI
After all AI didn't pick up these habits out of nowhere - all the tells are good writing advice and professional typography, but used with a frequency you would only see in highly polished texts like marketing copy
Totally agree with this view. Why use an extra character when we already have a dash - just to add a pixel or two on either side. How an em-dash visually connects two words is not pleasant either, I prefer to have a space between them. For writing English, the ASCII character set is plenty.
The term is 漢字. It's written the same in both Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese pronunciation being "kanji" and the Chinese pronunciation being "hànzì".
It can be written this way in Chinese (in those variants using traditional rather than simplified characters).
Whether that makes it the "same word" is a philosophical question. But writing "hànzì" is proper when referring to the use of the characters to write Chinese. If one is using it to mean a set of characters (rather than the general concept of characters that come from that writing tradition), they're different sets; and there are typically different expectations for typesetting etc. The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).
That difference in pronunciation is why “kanji”, in English, is almost exclusively used to talk about the Japanese script.
The word “hanzi” in English is much less commonly used — people studying or discussing Chinese are more likely to call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters”.
The organizers presented this at COSCUP 25 [1]. It's both extremely ambitious and impressive. They said there are basically no restrictions on who can join -- high schoolers to postdocs, and it's completely based on personal aptitude. The fastest students can finish in a few months, and some go on for years. Students who graduate finish an actual chip that (probably among other things) runs a video game.
The materials are available for non-chinese learners. Although from the overview you can know that the first attempt of this project is to train skillful Chinese students for industry/academic research。
Just to add to this, the Branch Education YouTube channel has great videos detailing the manufacturing process as well, here's one for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w
NAND2TETRIS is fun. For an experienced programmer the difficulty is almost akin to a game. Highly recommend it to programmers who have been in high level land for too long.
Without a proper proxy setup, access to GitHub is often painfully slow from mainline China.
But the choice of Baidu Pan is indeed questionable: You need a Chinese phone number in order to sign up, which is out of reach for many expats living overseas. I don't get why they can’t just mirror it on a university server.
Interesting initiative, too bad there is no english alternative with the same format (the linux parts are not that useful) since knowing mandarin is not that common.
This looks pretty intense. Their time estimates add up to over 35 days (assuming a full 8 hours of work per day) to complete, although some of the estimates seem a bit weird. Basic Linux installation and usage is given 10 hours which seems like it must be very hand holdy.
Also, there are some rough corners. I went to the course material to see what is covered in that 10 hour course and it starts off with:
That PA0 link goes to https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/ics-pa/PA0.html which is entirely in Kanji but doesn't appear to have any extra information about installing Linux.The machine translation of that page is amusing:
> That PA0 link goes to https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/ics-pa/PA0.html which is entirely in Kanji
This is Chinese text, so properly they are Hanzi. Yes, they use the same Unicode code points, and both words approximately mean "characters of the Han people" in their respective languages (and can be written with the same characters in those languages); but this is culturally sensitive and some people will give you a lot of grief about it. (The same character may be rendered differently, even within the same font, to respect different calligraphic traditions etc. This happens either with the help of supplementary "variation selector" characters or with font substitution based on some external detection of the language.) There are quite a few characters used in one language but not the other (despite being recognized as in some sense the same "kind of" character), and independent systems and traditions of simplification.
In the left menu there's a PA0 item. When you click on it, sub-items appear.
Here is one of the sub-items: https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/ics-pa/0.1.html#installing-ubuntu
The directions in question:
This course is not impressing me.I would much rather learners be directed at a proper resource for doing something than trying to include all the info locally which inevitably will get out of date and become incomplete.
Is a search term really a proper resource? A chosen installation guide, preferably an official one with a stable URL (and available in the language of instruction) would be better IMHO. When the link goes dead, the learner could search based on the link title anyway.
Yes, makes sense to me, especially since it isn’t really even the purpose of the course.
I think it's a difficult thing to scale. But they're open about the results they've been able to achieve, and the challenge of scaling.
https://ysyx.oscc.cc/en/project/intro-past.html
It's preparing them for the real world! It's certainly how I learnt, by breaking things at 2am and having to fix them before class at 9am.
You could select the language in the left Top corner menu, And then all the materials will switch to English, e.g. https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/en/ics-pa/0.1.html https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/en/ics-pa/PA1.html
In fact your can find the English version in the website: https://ysyx.oscc.cc/docs/en/ics-pa/PA0.html
35 days (of 8 hours) is equivalent to 10 ECTS (European Credit thingies).
So equivalent to 2x 90minutes lectures + homework
How does this compare to something that might be offered in a strong computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering program in the U.S. or Europe?
It’s not really the same scope but Stanford had (has?) a course where you literally fab a simple computer chip yourself from bare silicon to rudimentary packaging. It takes a team on 4 one quarter working pretty much around the clock
Edit: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filt...
I’m guessing a good chunk of the page is AI generated - em dashes and random emojis.
Statements like this always feel a bit rude to me—as a Chinese, I use em dashes (in Chinese texts) on a daily basis and insert them in English texts when I see fit.
A bit of background: Em dashes “—” (or, very often, double em-dashes “——”) are to Chinese texts what hyphens “-” are to English texts. We use them in ranges “魯迅（1881－1936）”, in name concatenations “任－洛二氏溶液（Ringer-Locke solution）”, to express sounds “呜——”火车开动了, or `“Chouuuuuuuuu”, starts the train' in English, and in place of sentence breaks like this——just like em dashes in English texts. They are so commonly used that most Chinese input methods map Shift+- (i.e., underscores “_”) to double em-dashes. So, as a result, while I see many English people have to resort to weird sequences like “Alt + 0151” for an em-dash, a huge population in the world actually has no difficulty in using em-dashes. What a surprise!
As for this article, obviously it was translated from its Chinese version, so, yeah I don't see em-dashes as an AI indicator. And for the weird emoji “” (U+1F54A), I'm fairly certain that it comes from the Chinese idiom “放鸽子” (stand someone up, or, literally, release doves/pigeons), which has evolved into “鸽了” (pigeon'ed), a humorous way to say “delayed, sorry!”.
[0] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/标点符号用法
Totally agree, I don't think em dashes are a particularly useful AI tell unless they're used in a weird way. Left to my own devices (as a native English speaker who likes em dashes and parentheticals), I often end up with at least one em dash every other paragraph, if not more frequently.
On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!
> referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth
I don’t think that applies when referring to yourself, as the parent did.
Thank you! It would indeed require extra effort for me to notice issues like this, and it is very nice of you to have pointed it out!
Speaking of personal devices, I also have a dedicated key binding for en dashes “–” (because, well, I already have a whole tap layer for APL symbols, and it costs nothing to add one more). Since we're on HN, I believe many people here can easily do that if they wish to, so I too don't think en/em dashes are very telling, especially on HN.
(...and of course we have an xkcd for it: https://xkcd.com/3126/ )
Automatic translation, for sure, as evidenced by this sentence in the two's complement section:
In fact, complement is a concept in counting systems, and the Chinese term for it is "complement".
This comment has become more robotic than the thing it criticises. People use em-dashes and emoji all the time! They are easy to type. On Apple operating systems you can even make em-dashes accidentally by default by simply using two hyphens. Those by themselves aren’t sufficient to detect LLM writing, please stop propagating that wrong idea. And emoji?! Human communication over the internet is littered with them, they’re insanely popular and have their own jargon and innuendos.
Some folks actually were taught to use em-dashes as part of their normal writing, especially if you've taken a technical writing course.
I dislike that people think you're an AI if you're using proper typography. :(
Just writing multiple paragraphs with compound-complex sentences makes people think you're an AI. :(
Given "AI" is over 50% of all content now, even if you flip a coin chances are pretty good some article contains slop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrTrOCQZoQE
The Ubuntu repositories curate both the legacy and more modern logisim fork:
sudo apt-get install logisim
sudo snap install logisim-evolution
Microcap 12 is also still available from the archive.org web cache, was made free, and runs in Wine64 just fine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230214034946/http://www.spectr...
Microcap will handle both Analog and Digital simulations.
KiCad now also supports Spice, and reports it should import the free LTSpice libraries. I have yet to find a use case for the kicad sim option... so YMMV.
https://www.kicad.org/discover/spice/
Best of luck, =3
Most AI tells are like this. I have been taught in marketing training to list things in pairs of three, because that's punchy, sufficiently succinct and very memorable. Now this is strongly associated with AI
After all AI didn't pick up these habits out of nowhere - all the tells are good writing advice and professional typography, but used with a frequency you would only see in highly polished texts like marketing copy
It might be "proper" but I never liked it.
Many proper uses of the em-dash put two words visually together—despite being parts of two distinct units separated by the em-dash.
I much prefer using a normal dash with a space on each side - like this.
Totally agree with this view. Why use an extra character when we already have a dash - just to add a pixel or two on either side. How an em-dash visually connects two words is not pleasant either, I prefer to have a space between them. For writing English, the ASCII character set is plenty.
That link is in Chinese, not kanji. The word “kanji” specifically refers to Chinese characters being used to write the Japanese language.
The term is 漢字. It's written the same in both Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese pronunciation being "kanji" and the Chinese pronunciation being "hànzì".
It can be written this way in Chinese (in those variants using traditional rather than simplified characters).
Whether that makes it the "same word" is a philosophical question. But writing "hànzì" is proper when referring to the use of the characters to write Chinese. If one is using it to mean a set of characters (rather than the general concept of characters that come from that writing tradition), they're different sets; and there are typically different expectations for typesetting etc. The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).
Japanese kanji is not the same as Chinese characters.
Yes, and the vast majority of Chinese would now write it as 汉字 instead of 漢字
That difference in pronunciation is why “kanji”, in English, is almost exclusively used to talk about the Japanese script.
The word “hanzi” in English is much less commonly used — people studying or discussing Chinese are more likely to call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters”.
The organizers presented this at COSCUP 25 [1]. It's both extremely ambitious and impressive. They said there are basically no restrictions on who can join -- high schoolers to postdocs, and it's completely based on personal aptitude. The fastest students can finish in a few months, and some go on for years. Students who graduate finish an actual chip that (probably among other things) runs a video game.
[1] https://coscup.org/2025/sessions/SNHFTW
Background: https://ysyx.oscc.cc/en/project/intro.html
Thanks, I was looking all over the linked page for some kind of overview.
I still don't get it. It seems to address chinese students and graduates. Are non-chinese learners allowed to register?
The materials are available for non-chinese learners. Although from the overview you can know that the first attempt of this project is to train skillful Chinese students for industry/academic research。
If anyone sees this and wants a much more accessible intro to how CPUs work, I would strongly recommend "NAND2TETRIS"
Just to add to this, the Branch Education YouTube channel has great videos detailing the manufacturing process as well, here's one for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w
NAND2TETRIS is fun. For an experienced programmer the difficulty is almost akin to a game. Highly recommend it to programmers who have been in high level land for too long.
It's another project?
https://www.nand2tetris.org/
From the "Installing Logisim" section:
Risky click! Logisim-evolution is available on Github directly, FWIW.Without a proper proxy setup, access to GitHub is often painfully slow from mainline China.
But the choice of Baidu Pan is indeed questionable: You need a Chinese phone number in order to sign up, which is out of reach for many expats living overseas. I don't get why they can’t just mirror it on a university server.
Interesting initiative, too bad there is no english alternative with the same format (the linux parts are not that useful) since knowing mandarin is not that common.
> knowing mandarin is not that common
It doesn't seem significantly less common than English.
"outside of China and other native-mandarin/cantonese countries"
Seems to be an open course (mood) by nanjing u