Hacker News: knuckleheads

Heerich.js – 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG

knuckleheads — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:41:00 +0000

Article URL: https://meodai.github.io/heerich/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47751823

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Stockfish removes classical evaluation functions in favor of NNUE only (2023)

knuckleheads — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:58:37 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/commit/af110e02ec96cdb46cf84c68252a1da15a902395

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701475

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:11:10 +0000

You really can’t see Trump abusing someone’s trust?

Parseword – new game from the creator of Wordle

knuckleheads — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:00:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.parseword.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325050

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Show HN: Globs – a daily puzzle about finding the hidden connections

knuckleheads — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:58:52 +0000

Article URL: https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/2026-02-27?size=big

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180007

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

knuckleheads — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:25:55 +0000

I don't think that is the issue. This article and your comment advocates that in lieu of more money, we throw more thought at it, in the name of balance. Weak! Put some thought into preventing the gaming of the system, yes, but keep the money flowing to getting the work done, not overthinking how to do the work.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

knuckleheads — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:02:01 +0000

Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

knuckleheads — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:14:01 +0000

>Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes. But stop balancing can have a meaningful impact on these issues for a fraction of the price.

To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can use computers to optimize what we have, but the idea of using money and political will to change anything at all in a meaningful way is anathema, beyond the pale. Giving up before even getting started. Sure, optimize away, but don't expect me to be inspired by pushing papers around.

New comment by knuckleheads in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:52:05 +0000

Makes sense. I started learning how to play Chess when I was ~30 and my tutors were just chess engines, game reviews on chess.com and whatever books I found interesting enough to get through. I have fun, and that's all I'll ever have, no titles or anything. The centipawn stuff makes sense now, but it took a while.

New comment by knuckleheads in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:48:57 +0000

Yep, exactly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out better ways for interpreting the evaluations of engines for https://www.schachzeit.com/en/openings/barnes-opening-with-d... and I ended up liking WDL much better than centipawns. A blunder defined in terms of decreasing your chance of winning by such and such percentage is, to me, a much better definition than a blunder losing such and such material. What does that mean? It makes sense to me now, but it took a long while.

Relatedly, there is an interesting thing that lc0 has been doing as well, where it takes the contempt concept even further, and can beat you with queens odd. https://lczero.org/blog/2024/12/the-leela-piece-odds-challen... It assumes it is better than you and that it shouldn't just give up because you might be up a knight, rook or even queen.

New comment by knuckleheads in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:37:57 +0000

Was it intuitive when you were first learning to play? Or have you gotten used to understanding positions via centipawns?

New comment by knuckleheads in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:35:41 +0000

Yeah, it's still unclear to me why Stockfish produces WDL numbers beyond sometimes people ask for them.

New comment by knuckleheads in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:48:15 +0000

I'm not a chess engine guy, but I've talked to some, and, from what I recall, there is a very interesting difference between an engine like Leela Chess Zero (lc0) and Stockfish. Stockfish internally calculates in centipawns while lc0 calculates in WDL's. Stockfish has a model they use that converts their centipawn calculation to WDL's, but it's not _really_ WDL of the position, it's just their estimate of it according to a probabilistic model. Same in reverse applies to lc0. Why I find this interesting is that it shows how they come from different generations, with Stockfish representing the old deterministic style with deep search, and lc0 being directly inspired by Alpha Zero and the new generation of engines based on neural nets. Stockfish has by now adopted the best of both worlds (deep search with a small neural net) and is the better for it, but I still think the developers of both engines banter over who is really producing the True WDL numbers for a given position.

For my part, I find that WDL is more amendable to interpretation. Being up 5 pawns worth of material sort of makes sense, but being told you have a 95% chance of winning makes more sense to me at first blush.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Show HN: CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable"

knuckleheads — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:33:40 +0000

The very first program I ever wrote that I was proud of was a CIA world factbook scraper and report generation script in High School. A hard ass of a teacher had people grab a random assortment of facts about random countries on there and put it all into word, under the guise that it taught you something about the countries. It was entirely formulaic and I remember the lightning realization I could use the Java I was learning in AP class. I made a bet with my roommate that I could write the program to do it faster than it took him to actually do it. I went over by a half hour, but I posted it to facebook and there was much rejoicing in the class.

Globs – a bigger, more forgiving version of Connections

knuckleheads — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:59:07 +0000

Article URL: https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013519

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code"

knuckleheads — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:49:23 +0000

Oh wow!! Thanks for letting me know, perfect

New comment by knuckleheads in "Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code"

knuckleheads — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:39:45 +0000

Red Alert II for me would be great.

A plea to the various lab engineering teams: please create a json format or whatever that lets me configure this with voices locally. I am a happy user as of late of the Codex app by Open AI. It would be great if I could just give it some JSON somehow and it just works. I suppose skills can do this and I will try that later on. But I think this stuff matters, and it would be nice to have it built in and encouraged.

Peon-ping – Claude Code notifications that uses Warcraft III Peon voice lines

knuckleheads — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:20:41 +0000

Article URL: https://peon-ping.vercel.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46967773

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

knuckleheads — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:16:10 +0000

It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.

New comment by knuckleheads in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

knuckleheads — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:59:12 +0000

Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.