MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matthakimi | 2025-12-18 23:25:04+00:00
Any Backgammon players on here?

For those unfamiliar: Backgammon is a 5,000-year-old game that sits in an interesting space between pure skill (like chess) and pure chance (like poker). The dice introduce enough variance that a novice can occasionally beat a grandmaster, but over sufficient iterations, skill dominates completely. It's why backgammon has always been played for money – the doubling cube is literally built into the game's rules.

Despite this, there's never been a legitimate peer-to-peer platform for real-money backgammon in the US. You either play on sketchy offshore sites or meet strangers with cash at clubs. With skill-based gaming laws evolving (prediction markets, DFS, etc.), we saw an obvious gap.

What we built: Backgammon Cash is an iOS app for head-to-head real-money matches. Key technical challenges we solved:

- Skill-based matchmaking using Elo-style ratings to keep games competitive (paired with analyzing users' skill level by checking performance) - Verifiable random number generation for dice (with player-accessible stats) - Anti-cheat detection for move timing and pattern analysis - Integration with regulated payment processors (GIDX) and banking partners for deposits/withdrawals - State synchronization for real-time gameplay without exploitable lag

We launched in December 25 and are live in most US states where skill-gaming is permitted. The game is free to download, and we take a small rake on entry fees (similar to DFS platforms).

Technically, this required navigating a complex regulatory landscape – we're working with gaming attorneys and have partnerships with institutional-grade payment infrastructure to ensure everything is compliant and secure.

Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around:

- Feedback on the game itself - everything from gameplay & general UX/UI to deposits & withdrawals

Download (iOS only due to Google Play's stubborness): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/backgammon-cash-win-money/id67...
by jraph | 2025-12-18 23:25:07+00:00
I can't make any sense of your first paragraph. And again, please look up "by definition".

> I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling

Telling what? That you have the burden of proof?

Suit yourself though.

> There is no further point to this discussion.

I'm afraid I agree with you here. Good day / good night.
by tguvot | 2025-12-18 23:25:15+00:00
i am principle architect. last time i wrote code for production was more than 10 years ago. i never touched half of languages that are used in our system

in last week I resolved a few legal/regulatory problems that could have cost company tens of millions of dollars in fines/direct spend/resources and prevented few backend teams from rolling out functionality that could have negative impact on stability/security/performance. I did offer them alternative ways to implement whatever they needed and they accepted it
by rahimnathwani | 2025-12-18 23:25:42+00:00
The largest nodes in his cluster each have 512GB RAM. DeepSeek V3.1 is a 671B parameter model whose weights take up 700GB RAM: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1

I would have expected that going from one node (which can't hold the weights in RAM) to two nodes would have increased inference speed by more than the measured 32% (21.1t/s -> 27.8t/s).

With no constraint on RAM (4 nodes) the inference speed is less than 50% faster than with only 512GB.

Am I missing something?
by CodeMage | 2025-12-18 23:26:17+00:00
Yes, and I agree with that. But my reply was to a comment that seemed to dispute that idea and imply that if you wanted to stop growing at some point, then you should shift to academia.

That said, there is an expectation of unlimited growth and it comes from a different source: ageism. At my age, the implicit expectation is that I will apply for a staff or even principal role. Applying for a "merely" senior role often rings alarm bells.

That trend -- and certain others -- are what's making me consider taking up teaching instead.
by bsder | 2025-12-18 23:26:26+00:00
Perhaps. But you also need to ask why Paxton is doing this as this case will vaporize as soon as that is accomplished. I would be much more optimistic if California were also signed onto this.

Paxton, however, doesn't give one iota of damn about individual freedom. So, this is either a misdirection, shakedown or revenge.

Unfortunately, we don't have Molly Ivins around anymore to tell us what is really going on here in the Texas Laboratory for Bad Government.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-18 23:26:36+00:00
It is well-known as a result of the expert reports in US v Google that generally software users do not change defaults

Whereas providing an option or a setting that the user must locate and change doesn't really mean much. Few users will ever see it let alone decide to change it

For example, why pay 22 billion to be "the default" if users can just change the default setting
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 23:27:03+00:00
If you really distill it, I've been doing API Glue for about a quarter century.

I connect to a 3rd party API with shitty specs and inconsistent output that doesn't follow even their spec, swear a bit and adjust my estimates[0]. Do some business stuff with it and shove it to another API.

But I've done that now in ... six maybe seven different languages and a few different frameworks on top of that. And because both sides of the API tend to be a bit shit, there's a lot of experience in defensive coding and verification - as well as writing really polite but pointed Corporate Emails that boil down to "it's your shit that's broken, not ours, you fix it".

At this point I really don't care what language I have to use, as long as it isn't Java (which I've heard has come far in the last decade, but old traumas and all that =).

[0] best one yet is the Swedish "standard" for electricity consumption reports, pretty much every field is optional because they couldn't decide and wanted to please every company in on the project. Now write a parser for that please.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-18 23:27:05+00:00
Good for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).

Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.

I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-18 23:27:05+00:00
Apple has always sucked at properly embracing properly robust tech for high-end gear for markets outside of individual prosumer or creatives. When Xserves existed, they used commodity IDE drives without HA or replaceable PSUs that couldn't compete with contemporary enterprise servers (HP-Compaq/Dell/IBM/Fujitsu). Xserve RAID interconnection half-heartedly used fiber channel but couldn't touch a NetApp or EMC SAN/filer. I'm disappointed Apple has a persistent blindspot preventing them from succeeding in data center-quality gear category when they could've had virtualized servers, networking, and storage, things that would eventually find their way into my home lab after 5-7 years.
by andy99 | 2025-12-18 23:27:15+00:00
I’d like to know how they chat-tuned it. Getting the base model is one thing, did they also make a bunch of conversations for SFT and if so how was it done?

We develop chatbots while minimizing interference with the normative judgments acquired during pretraining (“uncontaminated bootstrapping”).

So they are chat tuning, I wonder what “minimizing interference with normative judgements” really amounts to and how objective it is.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-18 23:28:06+00:00
>Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years.

I want an application to serve me webpages and manage said webpages. It wasn't a "non-starter" for me 2 years ago when I switched off Chrome who chose to be too user hostile to ignore. It won't be a non-starter here.

>I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works." We can't have this if Firefox stays in the pre-ai era.

If "it just works" is all my non-tech family needs, I'm not really gonna intervene and evangelize for Mozilla. I don't work for them (if you do, that's fair). Most browsers "just work" so mission accomplished. These are parents who were fine paying Hulu $15/month to still see ads, so we simply have different views. I'm sure they felt the same way about my pots falling apart and insisting "well, they still work".

Meanwhile, my professional and personal career revolves around the internet, and I don't want to be fighting my screwdriver because it wants to pretend to be a drill. At some point I will throw the drill out and buy a screwdriver that screws.
by lbhdc | 2025-12-18 23:28:18+00:00
I think that is because they are being judge by their outcomes.

In the space I was in (ads) users were highly mistrustful of the data. They felt everything was kind of fuzzy (eg how well are you measuring unique users and their actions).

They would end up using multiple vendors (and we would have to spend a lot of time comparing and contrasting results). They really really want "apples to apples" comparisons.

At the end of the day they were trying to answer, does what I am spending my money on give me the results the business needs? To your point there is a lot of nuanced data, but their bosses definitely only cared about the top line, did it move the needle.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-18 23:28:46+00:00
No, I am saying there is no such objectively correct set of books. Hiding behind "expertise" doesn't make educational decisions less political. Children can be indoctrinated more, or less, "expertly".

But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].

I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/narrative-expansion...
by renewiltord | 2025-12-18 23:28:57+00:00
ASML will instantly stall at that point. The EUV light sources are built in the US under US export control regulation. No EUV light source means no ASML EUV machine. I get that some European chest-beating sounds good because there's not very much tech in Europe, but this is an intentional transnational supply chain. It's no accident that the US chose ASML to develop this tech rather than Canon or Nikon. Close ally deep within the US military shield from nearby air bases.

The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.

I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.
by selectodude | 2025-12-18 23:28:58+00:00
I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs.

If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-18 23:29:03+00:00
Nay, that would be "Plattenbau", meaning built(ge(bau)t) out of prefabbed concrete slabs(platte) and steel bars. Which btw. isn't that limited to former eastern Germany.

West Germany did that too, in so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_city like:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fwohnsiedlung

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabantenstadt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannenbusch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osdorfer_Born

The thing is, these were often badly insulated against sounds from the neighbors, also the neighbors often weren't particularly desirable, because badly educated and in general stupid people tend to agglomerate there. Because it is 'social' housing, mostly. Little around to do depends on what you'd want to do? Since they are often on the outskirts, you're faster in the nature, and maybe even better air in general, because the stink/smog of downtown isn't so intense there. If you'd like to take a bath in the unwashed masses, doing speciality shopping, dining, there is public transportation 24/7 with service at least every 20 minutes during the night, and 5 to 10 during the day. Taking you downtown in 20 minutes tops.

At least where I still own a condo which I rarely visit anymore.
by igorpcosta | 2025-12-18 23:29:44+00:00
Hi HN, founder here of Autohand AI

A few weeks ago I shared some thoughts on intent weaving in AI coding agents. Today I would like to invite the community to our private beta of Evolve.

Evolve is an AI software engineer designed for long horizon workloads. It uses reinforcement learning style feedback loops to learn from past mistakes, improve future decisions, and reduce repeated human intervention when working on real codebases.

We are early and actively looking for feedback from people who deal with complex systems, legacy code, or long running engineering tasks.

Private beta: https://autohand.ai/products/evolve/

Happy to answer questions and hear what does not make sense.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-18 23:29:55+00:00
It'll never be literally indispensible, because open models exist - either served by third-party providers, or even ran locally in a homelab setup. A nice thing that's arguably unique about the latter is that you can trade scale for latency - you get to run much larger models on the same hardware if they can chug on the answer overnight (with offload to fast SSD for bulk storage of parameters and activations) instead of just answering on the spot. Large providers don't want to do this, because keeping your query's activations around is just too expensive when scaled to many users.
by decafninja | 2025-12-18 23:30:15+00:00
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.

I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.

Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.

But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
by runarberg | 2025-12-18 23:30:43+00:00
It varies by use case. I can think about e.g. an SRS flash card where you next review is in 2 years. I honestly don‘t care if 2 years here means 21 months or 28 months, and I especially don‘t care if the next review is on 21st of February 2028 at 13:52. All I want to know is that the next review is so far in the future it may not actually happen.
A simple leaderboard changed player behavior in my puzzle game
by keini | 2025-12-18 23:31:45+00:00
I released a small logic puzzle game a few weeks ago. It reached around 1000 installs with roughly 400 active players.

What surprised me wasn’t the growth, but player behavior.

I added a daily leaderboard mostly as a nice extra. No rewards, no social sharing, no incentives.

Players started replaying puzzles obsessively just to improve rank. Some would finish a level and immediately restart to shave off seconds.

It ended up driving more repeat sessions than progression itself.

Lesson learned: In logic games, light competition can outperform progression, even without rewards.
Show HN: Composable, Deterministic Builds from a Single Source of Truth
by nucleic-se | 2025-12-18 23:31:47+00:00
Tried to put my homelab infra in Git. Things escalated into a deterministic build engine for structured data. It merges JSON classes and instances using multi-parent inheritance and composable aspects, validates against schemas, and renders template-driven outputs. Generate configs, docs, and code from one canonical model. No vendor lock-in, composable stacks, fail-fast validation. Same inputs always produce the same outputs.

I can now officially call myself a proud maintainer of an open-source project.

Warning this is still alpha software, breaking changes are expected, but if you want to try it: npm install -g @nucleic-se/struktur@alpha
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-18 23:31:56+00:00
Something I've started doing in my workflow is using Pandoc to convert between Markdown and DOCX when authoring long documents. This lets me put the Markdown into Git and apply the Gemini CLI to it. When referencing other documents, I'll also convert them to MD and drop them into a folder so I can tell the AI to read them and cross-reference things.

At the start of the project the Markdown is authoritative, and the DOCX is just for previewing the styling. (Pandoc can insert the text into a layout template with place holders.)

Towards the end of a project I'll start treating the DOCX as authoritative but continue generating Markdown from it, so I can run the AI over it as a final proof-read or whatever.

This is similar to what people used to do with DocBook, but with a more friendly text format and a more AI-friendly "modern" workflow with Git, etc...
by wvbdmp | 2025-12-18 23:32:17+00:00
I like to return errors as text/plain and I have a global event handler for failed requests that throws up a dialog element. That takes care of most things.

Where appropriate, I use an extension that introduces hx-target-error and hx-swap-error, so I can put the message into an element. You can even use the CSS :empty selector to animate the error message as it appears and disappears.

Usually the default behavior, keeping the form as-is, is what you want, so users don’t lose their input and can just retry.
by justinator | 2025-12-18 23:32:20+00:00
I have a degree in fine art painting and drawing and that's not correct for oil painting. We would first put on a layer of earth tones, and work from the shadows to the mid tones. Once you got the form correct, you would work on things like adding color, details, and highlights.

In no way would you start with saturated colors. One, they're very expensive, so why would you apply them, just for most to be painted over? Secondly, the more saturated (strong) a color is, the harder it is to paint over. Try painting over a wall painted bright red with literally anything. Paint it over in blue and your blue turns brown. Paint it in yellow and you'll just get red again. That's why we (still) employ a very opaque, white paint to the canvas. Oil paint also becomes more transparent over time, so getting the form right with the earth tone underpainting is crucial for the painting to last hundreds of years.

Perhaps you're thinking of fresco painting? Then, the pigments are added to the medium (plaster) initially, and only very subtle highlights are added afterwards (if at all). This is a very, very difficult technique, and illusions like highlight and shadow are hard to pull off. But the painting over was frowned upon, because it doesn't last nearly as long as the embedded pigment in the plaster (and certainly not after cleaning/restoration). But adding highlight/shadow to a sculpture seems like not the play, as the 3D-ness of a sculpture would imply it brings its own to the table.

Makes more sense just to paint the sculptures the color you wanted them painted, like the (in comparison very contemporary) bust of Nefertiti in the article, which looks excellent. No need for highlight/shadow. I could only see that needed in the face, which would look and act much like makeup.
by psyopsy | 2025-12-18 23:32:29+00:00
Half his employees are women—including leadership, programming, and creative roles. If that doesn’t count as “thinking women have a role,” what would? 51%? 90%?

You’re relying on blatant social media mischaracterizations over real actions.

He actually employs women at parity. You feel like this is unwelcoming.

One of those statements is data. The other is fanfic.
by wek | 2025-12-18 23:32:38+00:00
We have been getting the best results with Claude Code when we iterate with it to build full context and then use and update that context as we work.

So, we built Nimbalyst to be the local WYSIWYG editor and session manager where you iterate with Claude Code on markdown docs, diagrams, mockups, data-models, sessions, and code. Nimbalyst lets you:

- Work in one integrated tool leveraging all your context.

- Use all the power of Claude Code in a UI

- Work with Claude Code to write and edit WYSIWYG markdown, see AI changes as red/green, approve them

- Iterate on html mockups with Claude Code, annotating the mockups, and then use them as context for people and Claude Code coding

- Build your data models based on your docs/code, iterate on them with Claude Code, export them in standard formats.

- Integrate mermaid diagrams, text, tables, mockups, data models, and images in standard markdown for human/AI context

- Tie sessions to documents to sessions, find and resume sessions, treat sessions as context, run parallel sessions

- Code with Claude Code with all of this context, use / commands, see git status.

Nimbalyst is in Beta, local, and free. We would love your feedback.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-18 23:33:00+00:00
No one asked that question except for you.

The other commenter and I were talking about cars.

Car ownership rates increased slightly, number of households nearly doubled, and average population density went up in every state except DC. There are more cars. Cars do not stay in one place, especially in the case of suburbanization.

Also, I'm not sure why/how the DC piece is intellectually honest. The Washington Metropolitan Statistical area has more than doubled in population since 1970[1]. Do you think all of the people who moved to PG County stay out of DC? That must be why the beltway is so easy to maneuver!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-18 23:33:10+00:00
It's the old saying: "$10 for the part, $990 for knowing where to put it"

You get a feel for what works and what doesn't, provided you know the relevant facts. Doing a 10RPS system is completely different than 300RPS. And if the payload is 1kB the problems aren't the same as with the one with a 10MB payload.

And if (when) you're using a cloud environment, which one is cheaper, large data or RPS? It's not always intuitive. We just had our AWS reps do a Tim "The Toolman" Taylor "HUUH?!" when we explained that the way our software works is 95% cheaper to run using S3 as the storage rather than DynamoDB :D
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-18 23:33:20+00:00
It would be nice to have a new Council, an ecumenical one, coming to agreement to unite Catholic, Orthodox, and as many mainline protestant churches as possible. It may require the Catholic church to make some sort of concession, which is probably the biggest obstacle.

There is no question that not everyone could or would want to unite. But some progress would be nice. To take a historical example the Council of Chalcedon did result in a schism (Oriental Orthodox I think), yet even so, more Christians came out of that Council united than were united prior to it.