Hacker News: erwincoumans

New comment by erwincoumans in "With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now"

erwincoumans — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:32:28 +0000

I remember playing Stratego as a kid at a friends house, and eventually found out some of his pieces were subtly marked (chip in the pieces). Unhiding information was very unfair :)

New comment by erwincoumans in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

erwincoumans — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:18:48 +0000

"making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion."

Curious how this ages.

Recursive self improvement, self-play and multi-agent RL could make useful new theories, eventually.

New comment by erwincoumans in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

erwincoumans — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:45:47 +0000

Bits of information depend on the readers prior knowledge, those bits are not absolute numbers. That makes communication not just information exchange but also syncing of priors. So some amount of redundant information maybe needed/wanted.

New comment by erwincoumans in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

erwincoumans — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:34:26 +0000

Lossy expansion or bloat?

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

erwincoumans — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:10:28 +0000

Very cool projects, and amazing a 14 byte nn can do it. Would be fun to analyze its approach, converting it to a Code-as-Policy.

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

erwincoumans — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:08:40 +0000

Very cool. Are you familiar with the game Voxile? Its author also created custome languages, and the game uses Lobster.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement"

erwincoumans — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:17:39 +0000

Thanks for the really nice in-depth post! Hoping for a future one about:

"Much recent work on auto-research, self-improving agents, and evolutionary program search can be organized around this question. Other work on model self-play, synthetic data, test-time training and a broader theme of continual learning also matches the RSI vision (e.g. Yuan et al. 2024, Chen et al. 2024), Zhao et al. 2025, Choi et al. 2026)) but they will not be the focus of this post."

New comment by erwincoumans in "Fasttracker II clone in C using SDL 2"

erwincoumans — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:26:05 +0000

Brings back memories of Soundmonitor (Commodore 64, 1986) with vertical scrolling, hex note tracking, and 3-channel column layouts.

New comment by erwincoumans in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

erwincoumans — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:31:20 +0000

Another happy customer, bought two Jamcorder units. Not just the hardware is simple, the software as well: it just works, quietly in the background. I just had to enable daily auto-reset otherwise it eventually had issues. Whenever someone starts playing piano, it records. The iOS app is so nice, playing back on the phone or on the piano, and keeping track of total hours played and organizing favorites. Congrats, if only more projects kept things simple and useable!

New comment by erwincoumans in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

erwincoumans — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:40:39 +0000

Makes me feel old, as original Bullet creator.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine"

erwincoumans — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:25:40 +0000

Great to finally see Box3D released! Glad to see some healthy physics simulation options, next to Jolt, PhysX and https://github.com/newton-physics/newton (using MuJoCo Warp, which I've been pushing at NVIDIA).

Bullet Physics author.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Aging and Eye Problems"

erwincoumans — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:48:38 +0000

I got bifocal monthly contact lenses (-7, +2 and correction for astigmatism). It has been such a relief to read screen/phone without needing to wear reading glasses while still seeing far away). The daily soft lenses didn't correct as well as the firmer monthly ones.

New comment by erwincoumans in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

erwincoumans — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:24:41 +0000

Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).

New comment by erwincoumans in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

erwincoumans — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:02:40 +0000

Gemini is pretty good.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Unitree GD01: China's $537k rideable transformer robot is now in production"

erwincoumans — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:16:32 +0000

and active suspension, now attach wheels.

New comment by erwincoumans in "Unitree GD01: China's $537k rideable transformer robot is now in production"

erwincoumans — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:09:14 +0000

Just a matter of time until they add wheels to its feet, and the legs will act as active suspension. See also https://youtube.com/watch?v=srPz8TRpZ_8 and https://youtube.com/watch?v=iI8UUu9g8iI (at around 1:36 a human rides that Unitree quadruped)

New comment by erwincoumans in "I hate soldering"

erwincoumans — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:22:37 +0000

>> I am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!

Hakko FM2023-05 Mini Hot Tweezers Kit or Hakko FX8804-02 Hot Tweezer for Hakko FX-888 for example.

>> I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down

I replace tips while hot: the sleeve is not hot.

New comment by erwincoumans in "I hate soldering"

erwincoumans — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:47:20 +0000

Agreed on stereo microscope, also suggest flux and a good iron with exchangeable tips and hot tweezers (I enjoy the Hakko).

New comment by erwincoumans in "CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog”"

erwincoumans — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:24:17 +0000

Very nice project. If you like this, the Pupper quadruped robot project by Stanford University is also interesting, with RL training pipeline as well and well-documented open source instructions for 3d printing etc. https://pupper-v3-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gui...

New comment by erwincoumans in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

erwincoumans — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:05:55 +0000

Green Beret and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 tunes are still amazing, Martin is a wizard.