Hacker News: brianberns

Show HN: Crushing Hearts with Deep CFR

brianberns — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:53:58 +0000

I built a machine learning project to play the card game Hearts at a superhuman level.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351474

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by brianberns in "The most famous transcendental numbers"

brianberns — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:55:38 +0000

I read this with pleasure, right up until the bit about the ants. Then I saw the note from myself at the end, which I had totally forgot writing seven years ago. I probably first encountered the article via HN back then as well. Thanks for publishing my thoughts!

New comment by brianberns in "Solving the NY Times "Pips" game with F#"

brianberns — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:42:11 +0000

Thanks! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who went down this rabbit hole. :)

I considered parallelizing my solution as well, but the problem is that it only gives a linear speedup, while the problem space increases exponentially. I decided to focus on pruning the search tree instead, and that seemed to work pretty well (after much thinking).

Solving the NY Times "Pips" game with F#

brianberns — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:51:20 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/brianberns/Pips

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682501

Points: 63

# Comments: 15

New comment by brianberns in "Particle Lenia Deluxe Edition"

brianberns — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 01:44:14 +0000

Particle Lenia is awesome. I did an online version that you can interact with here: https://brianberns.github.io/ParticleLenia/

New comment by brianberns in "Proofs Without Words"

brianberns — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 03:37:41 +0000

I made a game out of creating proofs without words: https://brianberns.github.io/Tactix/

New comment by brianberns in "OCaml's Wings for Machine Learning"

brianberns — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:16:02 +0000

Yes, I use F# with TorchSharp to do machine learning. My most recent project is a Hearts AI that is quite good. Here are some links:

* https://github.com/brianberns/Hearts

* https://github.com/brianberns/MinGptSharp

* https://github.com/brianberns/ModestGpt

* https://github.com/brianberns/DeepKuhnPoker

New comment by brianberns in "Haskelling My Python"

brianberns — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:55:49 +0000

These are indeed very similar. Thanks for the link!

The math is a bit over my head, but this formulation seems more difficult than the one I'm familiar with. For example, x^2 is represented as 0::0::2 instead of 0::0::1 (because 2! = 2) and x^3 is represented as 0::0::0::6 instead of 0::0::0::1 (because 3! = 6). Is there a benefit to that?

New comment by brianberns in "Haskelling My Python"

brianberns — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:50:26 +0000

This idea comes from a functional pearl called "Power Series, Power Serious" [0], which is well worth reading.

I implemented the same thing myself in F#. [1]

[0]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

[1]: https://github.com/brianberns/PowerSeries

New comment by brianberns in "Purely Functional Sliding Window Aggregation Algorithm"

brianberns — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:29:12 +0000

I translated this to F# for my own edification. It's more verbose, but perhaps easier to understand for non-Haskellers.

https://github.com/brianberns/AnnotatedStack

Show HN: Tactix: A Game of Tactics and Emojis

brianberns — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:55:29 +0000

Article URL: https://brianberns.github.io/Tactix/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40113472

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by brianberns in "Using ASCII waveforms to test real-time audio code"

brianberns — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 19:33:57 +0000

FWIW, you might like this: https://github.com/brianberns/FYampaSynth

New comment by brianberns in "A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic"

brianberns — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 23:52:23 +0000

Did you read the linked paper? They consider this possibility and reject it.

New comment by brianberns in "CIA director says he is escalating efforts to solve 'Havana Syndrome'"

brianberns — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 23:40:15 +0000

Using media statements to sway public opinion is… a totally normal thing for organizations to do.

New comment by brianberns in "Elixir protocols vs. Clojure multimethods"

brianberns — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 18:18:41 +0000

To me, F# is the pragmatic functional language with the most appeal, but being on .NET maybe it’s not even niche.

New comment by brianberns in "Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project"

brianberns — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 17:23:32 +0000

Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the company’s software is already open source (https://github.com/replit), so cloning it is perfectly reasonable.

If there’s any dispute here, I think it would be over the copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the article doesn’t mention anything about that, so I suspect it isn’t actually cloned at all.

New comment by brianberns in "An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding"

brianberns — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 20:00:45 +0000

A big one I'd add: Ability to gather requirements from a non-technical user, product owner, or subject-matter expert.

New comment by brianberns in "Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams"

brianberns — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 19:16:26 +0000

18 out of 1000 = “teeming with scams”?

It’s a real problem, but the headline is sensationalized.

New comment by brianberns in "Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces"

brianberns — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:27:49 +0000

Parsing his sentence for tiny nuances like that isn't very helpful IMHO, but I'll indulge you.

His exact words are "these differences may explain". He doesn't say "these differences may PARTLY explain". If I say that A may explain B, the reasonable implication is that A may fully explain B. So, yes, he does suggest that non-bias causes are the only causes.

Just to be clear: I don't think this makes any real difference. The reaction to his email would've been the same either way. But the fact remains that your interpretation of the quote isn't supported by the actual words he used.

New comment by brianberns in "Google removes its head of diversity after 2007 blog post surfaces"

brianberns — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 16:41:03 +0000

That’s why I used the word “suggested”, which is exactly what he did, in a section prominently titled “Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech”.