Hacker News: cromulent2

New comment by cromulent2 in "Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure"

cromulent2 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:04:41 +0000

Thank you. Investigative journalism is so important and I would happily believe some of the claims made here, but when I encounter even just a few sentences that sound LLM-written, suddenly I don't trust any of the statements in the source anymore. This site goes way beyond that, with a vibe-coded UI and generated articles. There might be value in what's reported here, but currently it requires a lot of work from the reader.

Show HN: Plausible – asynchronous Balderdash (a.k.a. the Dictionary Game)

cromulent2 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:02:45 +0000

I love The Dictionary Game (the party game where everyone submits a fake definition for an obscure word and you vote for the one you think is real), but I found it not so easy to get a session going. I made this async version to play the game more casually and hopefully against a larger pool of players, too.

There is one word per day. You play against the definitions submitted by yesterday's players and (optionally) submit your own for tomorrow's word. All definitions rank on a global leaderboard.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47648993

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by cromulent2 in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

cromulent2 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:10:48 +0000

That makes me wonder: do you see a difference in when viewers drop off between using a more math-y title versus a more accessible one?

The "broke my brain" title originally put me off from watching. I caved after a few days; I think the video is one of your best!

New comment by cromulent2 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

cromulent2 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:58:29 +0000

Thanks! Frontend is Nextjs. Flask, Postgres and Redis in the backend. Hosted on a cheap VPS.

I spent way too much time trying to automate moderation (grouping related submissions, judging similarity, removing offensive submissions) using sentence-transformers and w2v. Finally gave up and settled on using deepseek to moderate for 0.002€ a day.

One thing I'm currently working on is improving the exploration vs exploitation balance in matchmaking (selecting the fakes to present to a player). I want sessions to contain good fakes, but every fake must be played a few times to judge its quality. As a first step, I'm replacing the ELO system for definitions with one that accounts for uncertainty (like Trueskill)

New comment by cromulent2 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

cromulent2 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:53:34 +0000

A daily, async version of the dictionary game.

Each day, players try to spot the real definition of an obscure word among the fakes submitted by other players the day before. Fake definitions rank on a daily leaderboard.

I love the traditional version of the game, but it's not so easy to get a session going. An asynchronous, global format is my attempt to make it more casual and accessible.

It's live for about a month now: ~100 daily players, 5000 total, some 20 people on 10-day streaks.

https://plausiblegame.com/en