Hacker News: drw

New comment by drw in "Codex for open source"

drw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:51:37 +0000

I'm sure they are getting training data! But it is hands-off otherwise.

New comment by drw in "Codex for open source"

drw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:56:54 +0000

Mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli) is a happy recipient of sponsorship from this program. OpenAI asked for nothing in return; not even a link.

Spooky-connect4: a Rust/Python library with variable board sizes

drw — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:24:10 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/snowdrop4/spooky-connect4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730384

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Spooky-chess: a Rust/Python library with variable board sizes

drw — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:23:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/snowdrop4/spooky-chess

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730380

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Spooky-chess: a Rust/Python library with variable board sizes

drw — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:50:15 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/snowdrop4/spooky-chess

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516658

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Memoir of chess influencer and cult survivor Danny Rensch

drw — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:17:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-many-lives-of-danny-rensch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45261230

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

How Many Elite Chess Players Cheat?

drw — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:13:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/sports/online-chess-cheating-report-ef4e6e59

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996329

Points: 16

# Comments: 6

Are There Too Many Upsets in Titled Tuesday on Chess.com?

drw — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:07:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.chess.com/blog/FairPlay/chess-com-fair-play-report-are-there-too-many-upsets-in-titled-tuesday

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40161022

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Chess.com Robots.txt

drw — Mon, 23 May 2022 20:21:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.chess.com/robots.txt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31484351

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by drw in "Zsh-autoquoter makes shell quoting slightly less annoying"

drw — Tue, 10 May 2022 19:59:14 +0000

More flexible would be a double-quote-region widget which can be applied arbitrarily to any region of a command line:

    emulate -L zsh

    if [[ "$REGION_ACTIVE" -eq 0 ]]; then
        return
    fi

    if [[ "$MARK" -le "$CURSOR" ]]; then
        left_region_bound="$MARK"
        right_region_bound="$CURSOR"
    else
        left_region_bound="$CURSOR"
        right_region_bound="$MARK"
    fi
    length_region="$((right_region_bound - left_region_bound))"

    before_region="${BUFFER:0:$left_region_bound}"
    region="${BUFFER:$left_region_bound:$length_region}"
    after_region="${BUFFER:$right_region_bound}"

    quoted_region="${(qqq)region}"
    cursor_offset="$(($#quoted_region - $#region))"

    BUFFER="$before_region$quoted_region$after_region"
    CURSOR="$((CURSOR + cursor_offset))"
    REGION_ACTIVE=0

bind with eg

    zle -N double-quote-region
    bindkey '\e"'  double-quote-region

“Stop the War.” 44 Russian Chess Players Publish Open Letter to Putin

drw — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 18:49:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.chess.com/news/view/stop-the-war-44-top-russian-players-publish-open-letter-to-putin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30558746

Points: 16

# Comments: 0

New comment by drw in "A bit on scaling chess.com's database"

drw — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 01:09:15 +0000

The team had to selectively throttle access to that one game and change things around to get through the overload.

I'm trying to pun "paged" with "Phish" and it doesn't work.

But ops was definitely on deck, on the holiday.

New comment by drw in "A Beginner's Garden of Chess Openings (2002)"

drw — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 01:19:38 +0000

Among chess.com players who have played 10+ blitz games and 10+ puzzles, the average difference between their blitz rating and puzzle rating is 45 (blitz rating higher). The standard deviation of the difference is 374.

Among players who have played 100+ games/100+ puzzles, the difference is -205: puzzle rating substantially higher, standard deviation 320.

I'm not sure that it's ideal for ratings to be identical across the domains, but they should correlate to some degree.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 21:30:10 +0000

Yes, the rating differs by theme quite a bit.

  +-------------------+------------+
  | theme/tag         | mdn_rating |
  |-------------------+------------|
  | Opposition        | 1725       |
  | Passed Pawns      | 1494       |
  | Rooks on Seventh  | 1408       |
  | Pawn Endgame      | 1353       |
  | ...               | ...        |
  | Smothered Mate    | 549        |
  | Stalemate         | 533        |
  | Mate in 2         | 436        |
  | Mate in 1         | 399        |
  +-------------------+------------+

I also like the idea of showing the user's +/- for each theme. Though the data for some themes is better than data for others.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 20:56:48 +0000

Definitely on the roadmap.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 20:54:15 +0000

We sometimes do that. I'm resetting that puzzle down to 1480.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:59:39 +0000

Last month we added 2800, the vast majority automatically derived, though we also prize expert review.

We are thinking of doubling that rate next month.

I'm not sure much can be done about the predominance of certain puzzle types in the very early Rush puzzles. Would you prefer more hung pieces?

But in the later levels, mixing it up by themes/tags is an interesting idea, about which I will make some measurements.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:48:45 +0000

There certainly can be short difficult puzzles, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I think the current 4000-rated puzzles look like outliers and may be removed.

  +----------------+---------+-------------------+
  | ratings_band   | count   | avg_move_count    |
  |----------------+---------+-------------------|
  | ...            |         |                   |
  | 3000-3099      | 917     | 3.9400            |
  | 3100-3199      | 434     | 4.1244            |
  | 3200-3299      | 282     | 4.2766            |
  | 3300-3399      | 144     | 4.7500            |
  | 3400-3499      | 206     | 4.9515            |
  | 3500-3599      | 131     | 4.9237            |
  | 3600-3699      | 104     | 5.0481            |
  | 3700-3799      | 86      | 5.3256            |
  | 3800-3899      | 114     | 6.4035            |
  | 3900-3999      | 43      | 5.9302            |
  | 4000+          | 5       | 1.6000            |
  +----------------+---------+-------------------+

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:43:09 +0000

I am not sure that the 5 specific puzzles maxed out at the 4000 also represent the very best, most fun, and most insightful. Sometimes the reason a puzzle comes up as an extreme outlier is somewhat obtuse, and we are more inclined to remove the puzzle after we see how users interact with it.

For example https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/568140 is mostly rated 4000 because ...Qe1+ is so compelling that it pulls in even excellent players, while there's an easy material pickup on the board.

But there are exceptional puzzles throughout the 3000s, like 3500-rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/769056 , which absolutely anyone can follow, but few can solve on the first try.

New comment by drw in "Chess tactics explained"

drw — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 17:36:39 +0000

The iOS team doesn't see any recent crashes that associate to viewing videos.

If you want to follow up, feel free to email me your chess.com username and the approximate date when you had trouble; the team could look up crashes which happened to that username.

Both my personal and chess.com email addresses are in my profile.