Hacker News: marcusbuffett

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Improving in chess is hard. I built the most human-like chess AI to help me"

marcusbuffett — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:49:11 +0000

Do you find the bots on chess.com play human-like chess? I'm not sure what they're using under the hood but I assume they've also put some effort into this sort of stuff.

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Improving in chess is hard. I built the most human-like chess AI to help me"

marcusbuffett — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 14:52:14 +0000

Yeah the intention is to make them available on my chess site eventually (Chessbook). It's in very early alpha though, so it's breaking constantly as I tweak things and try playing against it with different configurations.

Improving in chess is hard. I built the most human-like chess AI to help me

marcusbuffett — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 14:40:23 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/chess-move-prediction

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790648

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten better"

marcusbuffett — Sun, 18 May 2025 15:38:41 +0000

I used this for spaced repetition for opening training on Chessbook, can vouch that the Rust package is excellent. Easy to use and immediately lowered the training load on our users while keeping retention high. FSRS is awesome.

An honest review of my first year as a full-time indie dev

marcusbuffett — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 21:26:56 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/chessbook-year-review-2024

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43198687

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design"

marcusbuffett — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 01:26:53 +0000

I strongly recommend "A Philosophy of Software Design". It basically boils down to measuring the quality of an abstraction by the ratio of the complexity it contains vs the complexity of the interface. Or at least, that's the rule of thumb I came away with, and it's incredible how far that heuristic takes you. I'm constantly thinking about my software design in these terms now, and it's hugely helpful.

I didn't feel like my code became better or easier to maintain, after reading other programming advice books, including "Clean Code".

A distant second recommendation is Programming Pearls, which had some gems in it.

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki"

marcusbuffett — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 03:55:51 +0000

Yeah as someone working on educational software, anything hand-rolling their own SRS is a pretty big red flag. Beating FSRS is going to be next to impossible, especially FSRS with parameters optimized from your users’ review history.

My deep-cut book recommendations

marcusbuffett — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 17:38:45 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/deep-cut-book-recs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576561

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A self-review of my last year building Chessbook

marcusbuffett — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:39:18 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/chessbook-year-review-2024

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42523588

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Treat your onboarding users like toddlers

marcusbuffett — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:34:46 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/onboarding-babies

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42398626

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Locality of Behavior, over the Single Responsibility Principle

marcusbuffett — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:55:58 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/locality-over-single-responsibility-principle

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42329958

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by marcusbuffett in "A Made-Up Name Is Better Than No Name"

marcusbuffett — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:27:40 +0000

Yeah this is a good shot at using existing verbiage, better than the candidates I came up with at least. Still not entirely self-descriptive, and has some overlap with usage in other parts of the codebase, like in data processing and user onboarding, but maybe that's a fine trade-off to make in order to use a normal word. I'd be equally fine with them being called "steps", but now I'm attached to my Keps :D

New comment by marcusbuffett in "A made-up name is better than no name"

marcusbuffett — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 23:12:26 +0000

Oh god yeah I’ve been in this situation too. Working at Apple it was like “is everyone in this meeting cleared for Tigris?” And you’d be like “I don’t know, what the hell is Tigris”, and then it turns out after you check your clearances it’s just iOS 13, which is obviously no mystery that after 12 there will be a 13. Just call it that!

Nothing was named according to what it did either, I think our deploy tool was Carnival? Just codenames everywhere

New comment by marcusbuffett in "A Made-Up Name Is Better Than No Name"

marcusbuffett — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 23:02:54 +0000

It’s one made-up name in a 30,000 line codebase. I think if anyone else ever works with the project they’ll have a lot harder things to catch up on than this convention

A made-up name is better than no name

marcusbuffett — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:43:01 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/a-made-up-name

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285206

Points: 62

# Comments: 81

Supermaven Joins Cursor

marcusbuffett — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:38:19 +0000

Article URL: https://supermaven.com/blog/cursor-announcement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125550

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by marcusbuffett in "Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you"

marcusbuffett — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 03:01:42 +0000

I gave this a spin, this is the best iteration I've seen of a CLI agent, or just best agent period actually. Extremely impressed with how well it did making some modifications to my fairly complex 10,000 LOC codebase, with minimal instruction. Will gladly pay $99/mo when I run out of credits if it keeps up this level.

Creating an optimized keyboard layout for the next generation of the Datahand

marcusbuffett — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 12:49:10 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/optimizing-datahand-layout

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41994247

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by marcusbuffett in "On Good Software Engineers"

marcusbuffett — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:28:11 +0000

Yeah I'm also sick of seeing articles cite this mythical trade-off, where any increase in programming output must be correlated with being a bad team member, churning out bad code, and generally being a pain to work with.

Anyone that's worked with engineers can tell you that there are simply some people getting more done than others, in the same amount of time. Are there people producing bad code? Yes. But I don't think output is inversely correlated with code quality. In fact the people I've worked with that have the most output, also had some of the highest quality code. I've never experienced this mythological 10x rockstar figure that works alone creating impossible to maintain systems, and I've worked closely with dozens of engineers. He probably exists somewhere, but not with the sort of prevalence that justifies every programming productivity article ripping on his archetype.

The 2030 Rust Update

marcusbuffett — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 22:41:33 +0000

Article URL: https://mbuffett.com/posts/rust-2030/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385220

Points: 6

# Comments: 0