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    Tom 7

    tom7.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2019

    Tom Murphy VII, who posts as Tom 7, publishes offbeat research projects such as NES-playing programs, printable DOS executables, and odd hardware and floating-point experiments.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    ProgrammingRetro ComputingScience
    What HN says

    Commenters describe his work as amazing rabbit holes that make them fans, and recommend his papers on fluint8 and GradIEEEnt.

    Stats for nerds
    97HN people shared it
    43linked in comments
    2.5Kstory points
    Aug 2026last shared
    2020people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters
      6 people · 727 points · first shared 2021 · 165 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]
      10 people · 446 points · first shared 2022 · 71 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Tom 7: Badness 0 (Three ways)
      6 people · 367 points · first shared 2024 · 68 comments on HN
    4. 4
      NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS
      7 people · 203 points · first shared 2019 · 33 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Research paper is also an executable x86 program [pdf]
      4 people · 189 points · first shared 2023 · 28 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Rupert's snub cube and other Math Holes
      2 people · 149 points · first shared 2025 · 10 comments on HN
    7. 7
      Survival in chessland [pdf]
      1 person · 128 points · first shared 2019 · 11 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (2022) [pdf]
      9 people · 100 points · first shared 2022 · 25 comments on HN
    9. 9
      GNU Justified Public License
      1 person · 85 points · first shared 2024 · 58 comments on HN
    10. 10
      Learnfun and playfun: a general technique for automating NES games (2013)
      8 people · 46 points · first shared 2019 · 4 comments on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • kmeisthaxApr 2026

      The problem with the toxic max-security[0] arguments is that it is always possible to invent a more gullible fool. There is no security measure that will perfectly protect a user from getting scammed out of everything, save for scamming them first and then treating their property as your own. That's the Apple argument. The only way you can keep people secure without falling into the same rhetorical trap Apple employs is with bright red lines that you swear not to cross, no matter how many people wind up getting scammed, because at the end of the day, people are adults, and their property is theirs.

      Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that scam-fighting is not Google's job. They can assist with law enforcement (assuming they do not violate the rights of their customers while doing so) but they should not be making themselves judge, jury, and executioner in the process.

      If you want a more concrete technical recommendation, locking down device management profiles would be a far more effective and less onerous countermeasure than putting a 24-hour waiting period on unknown app installs. Device management exists almost exclusively for the sake of businesses locking down property they're loaning out to employees, but a large subset of scams abuse this functionality. Part of the problem is that installing a device profile is designed to sound non-distressing, because it's "routine", even though you're literally installing spyware. Ideally, for a certain subset of strong…

    • garaetjjteAug 2026

      >Frankly, writing directly in emojissembly is a miserable, painful slog, lacking reasonable immediate values, arithmetic operations, or sane jump offsets. Therefore it is sensible to construct a loader that can simply build 8088 code in memory and jump to it.

      If you think that self-modifying loader is too easy, I recommend Tom7 take on printable x86:

      >This is like telling the waiter that you don’t eat poultry but eggs are okay, and then they bring you an egg, but that egg hatches into a chicken right after they bring it to you. Come on.

      https://tom7.org/abc/paper.pdf

    • fartcannonFeb 2021

      There was an AI created the absolutely brilliant Tom7 on on his YouTube channel 'SuckerPinch' on April 1, 2013 that paused a game of Tetris instead of losing. In my opinion, Tom doesn't get enough credit for his work. He released his AI a full 8+ months before DeepMind released their Atari playing AI.

      Watch the whole thing, it's delightful. The AI pauses Tetris right before it loses at around 16mins into the video.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY

      I also recommend his other videos. Brilliant guy.

      Edit: Here's the paper http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf

    • diimdeepJun 2026

      the reach is by rough estimates ~2.5–6 million websites globally, 2–5 million of those in Russia and 0.3-1 million in Iran

      Whatever USofA, it's not hard to have their own cosmodrome and certificates.

      Tangential, in 2026 website certificates feel like nothing, disposable automation artifact, toxic max-security[1], vehicle for those who rent seek, fingerprint.

      [1] https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf

    • dejobaanMay 2025

      Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.

    • pandigitalMar 2022

      Seems to be inspired by Tom7's "You can't win this game, it exists only to destroy your mind" [1]. Tom7 is like an indie intellectual/artistic hero of mine. Be sure to check out his other stuff. [2]

      [1] http://entire.spacebar.org/ [2] http://www.tom7.org/

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