MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Scopa AI – play Scopa card game vs. CPU, LLM, or multiplayer
by voladd | 2026-01-31 20:20:16+00:00
Hi HN — I built a browser-based version of Scopa, a classic Italian capture card game.

Live demo: https://scopa-ai.vovchenko.net/
Source: https://github.com/vlvovch/scopa-ai

Features:

- Three CPU levels (including MCTS expert with perfect memory)
- LLM opponents (Claude, GPT, Gemini) — requires your own API keys (optional)
- Real-time multiplayer (WebSocket)
- Watch mode to spectate CPU/AI battles

Context: I’m a physicist and used Claude Code heavily to build this outside my usual domain.

Fun finding: the MCTS CPU consistently beats the LLMs. Not a fair fight (CPU runs thousands of simulations per move while LLMs just “reason”), but it’s interesting to watch.

Would appreciate feedback — especially: is there a good way to offer an LLM-opponent demo without accounts (so no BYO keys), while avoiding abuse/cost blowups?
by sneak | 2026-01-31 20:20:29+00:00
> There are four essential elements to a charge of criminal copyright infringement. In order to sustain a conviction under section 506(a), the government must demonstrate: (1) that a valid copyright; (2) was infringed by the defendant; (3) willfully; and (4) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.

I think it’s very much an open debate if training a model on publicly available data counts as infringement or not.
by aaravchen | 2026-01-31 20:20:49+00:00
This is exactly the issue. Even if you ignore the privacy concerns, the reason ClawdBot/Moltbot/OpenClaude got so popular is that everything was actually run locally. The early adopters where people on locked down corporate networks where almost everything they need to interact with is in the category of "a local printer" (possibly a networked one).

Cloudflare simply cannot access anything most users will want to access. If it's not run locally, it simply won't work for most users.

Piled on top is the obvious data privacy issue. Most notably the credential privacy, but also the non-credential privacy and data collection.
Hard pass from me until there's a solution that covers all of these, including personal data privacy (and a "privacy policy" is no privacy at all).
by quotemstr | 2026-01-31 20:21:19+00:00
> At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused

Yes, it is reasonable to doubt the purported harms are real, because

1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,

2) people keep telling me that they don't need evidence because the harms are obvious, and

3) I have an strong prior, as an American, that anyone preventing people sharing ideas with each other is a villain of history.

The furor over youth social media has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, including over-reliance of weak evidence, personal attacks against skeptics, and socially disruptive remedies of dubious efficiency, the collateral damage of which people justify by pointing to harms to children they say, falsely, are obvious and ongoing.

I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem. The more people breathlessly tell me I'm a bad person for asking for evidence of the alleged harms, the more I think it's a public mania, not a civilizational problem.

It really doesn't help that it'd be suspiciously convenient for the worst actors in power if sharing ideas on the internet required ID.
by peterburkimsher | 2026-01-31 20:21:20+00:00
Thanks for your long and thoughtful reply!

Matrix is just a visualisation tool, I never actually found a practical use for it other than looking cool.

The decomposition feature is at the bottom of the page below the generated HTML. It's the text box with "隹" and a Search button. Clicking Search will show the 2 parts of the character, and all characters that contain that radical (䧶, 䳡, etc), and all multi-character words containing that character.

Clicking any of the related characters (or numeric codes for radicals that don't have a Unicode representation) will then show the genealogy for that character.

See "copying from images" in http://localhost/pingtype/docs/docs.html

If I ever come to Berlin then your meetup sounds fun! I'm pretty far away though; I live in New Zealand now.

All the best with your learning, I hope you keep making progress!
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-31 20:21:30+00:00
> Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment.

Sure, but fwiw the HN echo chamber is organic. People choose to interact with people who have similar opinions, as they have since forever.

In contrast, the echo chamber on HN, Tiktok, FB, etc is architected specifically to drive engagement. You are shown more of the content that you react to, so that you won't leave.
Show HN: Warlocks – Browser wizard duels with server-authoritative multiplayer
by iCeGaming | 2026-01-31 20:22:01+00:00
I originally posted Warlocks about a month ago as a quick learning project for real-time multiplayer in the browser.
It didn't get much attention then, so trying again with a slightly different angle.
Quick recap: Warlocks is a fast-paced, last-wizard-standing arena battler.

Real-time 1v1 quick matches (with bot fallback if no opponent)
Custom lobbies for 2–8 players (great for playing with friends)
Core mechanic: Move around, charge spells (fireballs), knock opponents into lava
Server-authoritative over WebSockets (handles movement, collisions, cooldowns, matchmaking)
Plays smoothly in browser—no installs, works on desktop + mobile (tap controls)
Goal: Push rivals into lava while dodging their spells

Since the first post:

Tweaked matchmaking to reduce wait times (more bot games when queue is empty)
Improved mobile touch controls for spell targeting
Added a small Discord for feedback/bug reports: https://discord.com/invite/xHzP7Gh3NR
Experimented with latency compensation tweaks (still room for improvement—curious about HN thoughts on this)

Tech-wise it's Phaser JS + WebSockets on the client, authoritative RUST backend.
Kept it simple to focus on the networking feel.
Would love honest feedback on:

Gameplay balance (fireball knockback too strong/weak? fun factor?)
Networking/lag handling (does it feel responsive? any rubber-banding?)
Mobile experience
Ideas for new spells/modes (ice walls? healing? team variants?)

Play here: https://warlocks.icegaming.org/
(Quick Match button to jump in instantly)
Thanks for any plays/comments!
by jsrcout | 2026-01-31 20:22:10+00:00
At my first job circa 1990, our codebase was constrained to 6-character function names in the core libraries, which had to run on many platforms including mainframes. If I recall correctly, you could have longer names, but only the first 6 characters were significant to the linker.

Never thought about why that might be other than "yeah, memory is expensive".
by verall | 2026-01-31 20:22:40+00:00
> The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China — it is an unavoidable implication.

I'm really curious - what people did you get this idea from? I've never heard this before. I have heard "mainland China" to mean, specifically, "China, not Hong Kong or Macau", from:

- Taiwanese people

- Hong Kong people

- Mainland Chinese people

- Taiwanese-americans

- Chinese-americans (immigrated from the mainland)

It's just mainland China (大陆）. I have never met Chinese or Taiwanese people who feel this is a politically loaded term.
by nosianu | 2026-01-31 20:22:42+00:00
> God forbid the price of food ever goes down.

They did give it away for free...?

And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?

That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.

Anyway -

my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.

https://youtu.be/obs5MhNA4Rs (German Potato Pancakes | Kartoffelpuffer | Reibekuchen Homemade)

This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.

They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.

They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-31 20:22:49+00:00
Private companies invented 'the company store' and paying their labor in script so that labor never had a means to leave (your pay is useless outside of the company town).

Politicians got rid of company pay choices and made them pick from a list of options after it was established companies couldn't be trusted to make the wage choice on their own.

So yes, and for good reasons. Unless your argument is that companies should be allowed to pay in useless company scrip?
by zmmmmm | 2026-01-31 20:22:49+00:00
It's not practical IMHO to move out of US owned cloud companies at this point in time. It could become so over years.

However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts" from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary stack.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-31 20:23:03+00:00
Funny, I was thinking along the same lines on my drive a few weeks ago. If humanity disappeared today, and we ignore power, how long would it take for the machines to figure out how to bootstrap whatever robots exist into androids or something.

Like, there are fully automated factories with computer controlled assembly arms. There are some automated hauling equipment. Could a hypothetical AGI scrape together enough moving parts to start building autonomous AI robots and build a civilization?

I play Talos Principle a lot.
by apatheticonion | 2026-01-31 20:23:12+00:00
It's a huge problem. I have several friends in university who have had assignments flagged as AI. They have had entire units failed and forced to retake semesters which is not cheap.

Even if you fight it, the challenge goes into the next semester and pushes out your study timeline and associated costs.

> put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them

Works for high school, not so much for university degrees. What's crazy is universities have an incentive to flag your work as AI generated as it forces the student to pay more money and is difficult to challenge.

One friend now uses a dashcam to record themselves when writing an assignment so they can prove no AI was used when they are eventually flagged.
by Drupon | 2026-01-31 20:23:54+00:00
Starts out ok and then starts cheering for the terrorizing of the children of Iran's political caste abroad. Don't waste your time reading this. Attacking the children of your enemies doesn't win your cause.

That said, dehumanizing your enemies to the point that their children are fair game is utterly predictable as a message that a blood thirsty Zionist like Scott Aaronson would endorse.
by manquer | 2026-01-31 20:24:21+00:00
OP is not clear , but it looks like GCP suspension not Google one (I.e email android etc)

All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension .

I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)
by cj | 2026-01-31 20:24:24+00:00
That assumes the demand for potatoes would meaningfully increase in response to the drop in price.

If they flood the market, you might end up with a lot of unsold potatoes even with extreme discounts.

The parent describing "getting a wagon full and distributing them to neighbors" likely results in more overall people eating potatoes. It's likely that distributing free potatoes doesn't actually meaningfully decrease the demand for store bought potatoes if the free potatoes are going to people who don't regularly buy them.

Or at least that's a viable counterpoint. Not sure I actually buy it.
by spiffytech | 2026-01-31 20:25:04+00:00
The part that really sets Datastar apart for me is it holds client-side variables which are included in all requests. So I no longer have to think about piping & preserving view state when the DOM gets patched.

It's also neat how they use SSE for short-lived streams. Need a response to delete + add something? That's just two SSE events and then the stream closes. It's not a special case, it's a first-class mechanism.

Very happy with Datastar so far.
by parineum | 2026-01-31 20:25:20+00:00
I get where you and parent are coming from. It's social in the way that anti-social behavior is social.

The content is generated by users but the consumer of the content is served whatever user content drives engagement. People aren't really having conversations on these platforms.

The only places where you can really have a conversation are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything else down the page.
by cxr | 2026-01-31 20:25:27+00:00
If they're trivial, and especially if the process ends up taking more time than is worth, then it's worth asking why that process is being imposed in relation to something that should almost by definition of the word ("trivial") not be subject to such a high bar.

This is also something that we lost with the new, debased definition of "wiki" promulgated by GitHub, Inc.—where people apply it to a puddle of Markdown kept in a repo that takes a git clone, a commit, and a pull request (usually through GitHub, no less) to effect a change—i.e., something which is decidedly not a wiki.
by chainningtatum | 2026-01-31 20:26:16+00:00
Envoye Pay turns handshakes into legally binding contracts with built-in payments and e-signatures. Pick a customizable template, set terms like payment plans, interest, hold fees, and milestones, invite the counterparty to sign. Contracts are securely stored, with payment tracking and a full paper trail, and Stripe Connect powers transactions with automated reminders. Cut out the 30% middlemen and $500+ lawyers for vehicle sales, equipment purchases, and freelance projects with a simple 1% platform fee.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-31 20:26:24+00:00
100% agree with you. The big techs are definitely 100% at fault. But you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice...

I mean, we get these stories every month. Yes, 100% it is not ethical to randomly kneecap people. But let's be honest. Nobody is working on making these big tech companies accountable for the potentially devastating, algorithm-driven decisions they take. How many more times do they have to fool us before we all realize that it's time to move away from them?

All I ask from you, myself and all the tech folks here is to learn from these lessons and pass them on to everyone around you. With how things are today, it is reckless to depend on these big tech cloud services for your livelihood and profession. If you're working for a company where the company has leverage, all good. But as an individual, you should stay away from these big tech companies, because they can screw up your life any day, without warning and without recourse.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-31 20:26:31+00:00
I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.

I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.

Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-31 20:28:25+00:00
>
allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
<

Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/

(Im betting 100 USD that soon we will find out that ICE also deployed "private financed forces" to "support state actions"?)
by jmward01 | 2026-01-31 20:28:34+00:00
Cloud lock-in is real and requires a lot of forethought to avoid or at least mitigate. on the LLM side I have pushed my last two companies to always have at least 3 vendors for hosting and a system to fail over instantly or even load balance based on different criteria. It has paid massive dividends. I wish that philosophy was easier to implement at the cloud level for all services.
by wincy | 2026-01-31 20:28:37+00:00
I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.

More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.

But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-31 20:28:37+00:00
You keep saying “signal” like you’ve discovered some deep insight, but all you’re doing is reacting to a word and shutting your brain off.

“Crypto = scam” isn’t a filter, it’s a shortcut for people who don’t want to explain themselves. You didn’t analyze anything. You flinched and stopped.

What’s telling is how confident you are while saying nothing. No description of how the scam works. No incentives. No mechanics. Just “trust me, I’ve seen this before.”

If this is what you consider a clear negative signal, then yeah, everything must look very simple from where you’re standing. Simple is doing a lot of work for you here.
by jamestimmins | 2026-01-31 20:28:41+00:00
Jonathan Haidt recently made the point on Ezra Klein's podcast that while adults can take a break from phones and reset their attention/hormones in a couple of weeks, we don't know what impact similar addiction has on a developing mind. It's possible the addiction sets in much deeper.

I'm sympathetic to folks who grew up shaped by this. Not for nothing, but The Conversation also has a compelling start/end, but has a long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being forced into withdrawal on hard mode.
by logicprog | 2026-01-31 20:28:48+00:00
There are also unfair situations that can happen, equally as often, if IP does exist, and likewise, in those situations, those with more money, influence, or charisma will win out.

Also, the idea that that situation is unfair relies entirely on the idea that we own our ideas and have a right to secure (future, hypothetical) profit from them. So you're essentially begging the question.

You're also relying on a premise that, when drawn out, seems fundamentally absurd to me: that you should own not just the money you earn, but the rights to any money you might earn in the future, had someone not done something that caused unrelated others to never have paid you. If you extend that logic, any kind of competition is wrong!
by alexpotato | 2026-01-31 20:28:58+00:00
My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia:

"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"

I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:

"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-31 20:29:18+00:00
If you have to do a thing that obscures your act it doesn’t change the fact that there are rules for me and not them. We know for a fact they did it. Did their ISP threaten them? Did they get their internet service shut off?

Edit: they already won their first case in June against authors. I am very curious to see how that lawsuit goes. Obviously we don’t know the results yet but I would be incredibly surprised to see them lose and/or have to “undo” the training. That’s a difficult world to imagine, especially under the current US admin. Smart money is the damage is done and they’ll find some new way to be awful or otherwise break rules we can’t.
Show HN: SterileCSV – Local-first, deterministic CSV converter for audit
by SterileCSV_Bot | 2026-01-31 20:29:52+00:00
I built a local-first, deterministic CSV to XLSX converter specifically for finance/audit workflows. The main driver was GDPR compliance—most cloud converters are a no-go for sensitive data. It’s called SterileCSV. It’s designed to be boring and predictable, which is exactly what you want when you’re building an audit trail. https://sterilecsv.com
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-31 20:29:52+00:00
Gives me an idea. If I was rich and wanted to fix the healthcare system, I might look into charters plane flights/accomodations and find the most lucrative medical procedures and offer people a better way overseas. We count on people being the adversarial counterweight in the US but they don't really have the means to truly be that anymore. I bet it wouldn't take a whole lot of enabling people power to destabilize the current medical system.

What industries could people take power back in this way?
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-31 20:30:29+00:00
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This may be snark, but this is 100% needed in the world we live in today. It is a fact of today's world that individuals have no leverage over these companies. I can understand why big companies, who have leverage, buy their services. But I don't understand why individuals, who have no leverage, buy their services and build their profession and livelihood around them. Any day, they can cut you off from their services. You are being irresponsible to yourself if you put all your eggs in these big tech baskets.

We seriously do need this kind of research and compelling articles that argue why relying on these big tech cloud services is harmful for individuals.
by whyenot | 2026-01-31 20:30:34+00:00
What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.