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nicolas-siplis

251 karma · joined June 16, 2017

nicolas.siplis [at] gmail.com
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nicolas-siplis··on [dead]
Hey HN! I've been working on this for the past few months and I think it's at the point where I'm ready for some user feedback. It's a WASM engine attempting to accurately model all of MTG's rules and cards. AFAIK, this is the first MTG engine which tries to accomplish this by live compiling the entire card collection at runtime, instead of coding each individual card.

You can create your own unique cards to playtest against ("Compile Card" button is what you're looking for), as long as they follow the engine's supported grammar (which I'm working on so that it fully supports Magic's ~30k legally playable cards, currently at 26k partially/20k fully supported).

It also supports 4-way P2P multiplayer lobbies via PeerJS, though I haven't had enough time to test everything network related so there may be some hidden bugs there!

My dev process was heavily influenced by the recent surge in agentic coding, but I think I've settled on an architecture which successfully manages to avoid slop creeping in:

Each card from its original, normalized oracle text into a CardDefinition struct which contains every single behavior for that particular card. By the time this card definition is compiled, we no longer have access to the original oracle text.

Each effect in the card's compiled definition can be decompiled into human readable text, after which a series of normalization steps based on the AST structure of the card's compilation and a post-pass to cleanup awkward wording is applied. The resulting compiled oracle text is compared against the original card's using vector embeddings, which gives us a semantic similarity score.

The entire purpose of this development workflow is making it obvious to the AI which cards are working correctly and which ones still need better support, without having to rely on behavioral tests for every single card. It took me some time until I finally managed to get the architecture to the point where the AI doesn't cheat its way into improving the card coverage, but the whole experience has been a fantastic way of getting used to this new way of coding and I'm excited to see how the future of our profession looks like in a few years.

I'm looking for any kind of feedback, both UI/UX and engine related, so please share your thoughts!

nicolas-siplis··on Show HN: A (de)compiler and parser/engine for custom Magic: The Gathering cards
Million thanks for this! I stumbled upon XMage at some point but I didn't think of reusing their test suite. I'll see what Codex can cook up, I already have a WASM API which looks fairly similar to what XMage is doing for their tests so hopefully it won't be too hard to port them over!
nicolas-siplis··on United Wizards of the Coast
I'm actually working on this right now! https://chiplis.com/ironsmith

It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/

nicolas-siplis··on Gambeth – Decentralized parimutuel prediction market platform
Hi HN! The last couple years I fell into an "interesting" relationship with "investing" and so I decided to focus my ludopathy into something remotely useful. Unfortunately, instead of that I bring to you... Gambeth!

Anyone can create their own market with an arbitrary number of options. The submission links to Argentina's presidential elections market, feel free to try it in the Goerli testnet and let me know in the comments if you need some testnet USDC to play with it.

The "Explore markets" option is super barebones but should at least give you the list of all created markets.

I plan on doing a release on the Polygon network, but I'd love to have some feedback for the beta version.

The whole code is open source but honestly pretty illegible at the moment. I need to dedicate a day to splitting/reorganizing the code, and probably start to consider an actual framework instead of vanilla JS. If all that hasn't scared you away: https://github.com/chiplis/gambeth

I'm looking for people willing to contribute to a UI revamp but PR's are welcome on anything and everything, all of the time.

nicolas-siplis··on Nitter is working again
Hey there, just wanted to thank you because you also fixed my Twitter Spaces downloader app[0]! After the API changes the default bearer token I was using (same as yours) stopped working, but after changing the same way you all's back to normal :D

0: https://github.com/Chiplis/moonbird

nicolas-siplis··on How to verify your domain on Nostr and Bluesky (for micro.blog users)
Been trying to find one through Twitter but haven't had any luck, would super appreciate an invite!
nicolas-siplis··on OpenAI Outage
One might entertain a contrary perspective on the issue of ChatGPT. Rather than being a monolithic linguistic equalizer, it could be seen as a tool, a canvas with a wide spectrum of applications. Sure, some may choose to use it as a crutch, diluting their creativity, yet others might harness it as a springboard, leveraging it to explore new ideas and articulate them in ways they might not have otherwise.

Consequently, the notion that ChatGPT could 'bring down' the more skilled among us may warrant further scrutiny. Isn't it possible that the 'upper echelons' might find novel ways to employ this tool, enhancing rather than undermining their capabilities?

Similarly, while summarization can be a blunt instrument, stripping away nuance, it can also be a scalpel, cutting through verbosity to deliver clear, concise communication. What if ChatGPT could serve as a tutor, teaching us the art of brevity?

The generated words may risk becoming 'blasé', as you eloquently put it, but again, isn't it contingent on how it's used? Can we not find ways to ensure our individual voice still shines through?

So, while I understand and respect your concerns, I posit that our apprehensions should not eclipse the potential that tools like ChatGPT offer us. It might not just be a 'parrot' – but a catalyst for the evolution of human communication.

Though I'm hoping you didn't suspect it, I should warn you this comment was written by you know what (who?).

nicolas-siplis··on TypeScripting the technical interview
I remember reading the original version and thinking "Ah, this would be so much more grokkable if only I knew Haskell"... Delusions of grandeur are a marvelous thing!
nicolas-siplis··on Microsoft Teams is getting big performance improvements next month
I _think_ it still works as expected if you enter fullscreen mode from the browser itself, unless I'm misremembering.
nicolas-siplis··on Gameboy Doctor: debug and fix your gameboy emulator
Hey there! I've been working on a Game Boy emulator since last year and found the GameRoy project, which translates the PPU's logic from SameBoy, the (AFAIK) most accurate GB emulator around. I basically copied the PPU logic into my emulator and replaced the "state" property (an integer) with enums for some extra clarity.

https://github.com/nicolas-siplis/feboy

https://github.com/rodrigodd/gameroy

https://github.com/LIJI32/SameBoy/

nicolas-siplis··on How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]
The explanation I read used Finding Wally as an example:

I can put a piece of paper with Wally's silhouette cut off in front of the book. Align Wally to fit into the silhouette and you're done! The paper just needs to be considerably bigger than the actual book, so other people can tell I know where Wally is without actually knowing his location.

nicolas-siplis··on Formalizing a Proof of God by Leibniz
I have 0 experience with theorem provers (and almost 0 with proofs in general) but am at least somewhat aware of their existence. This might be the first time I feel like I can actually follow the code. Might start learning Oak because of this post, so thanks!
nicolas-siplis··on Formalizing a Proof of God by Leibniz
I think the distinction lies in God being that which cannot be moved, having infinite power is not enough to be God.
nicolas-siplis··on Squabble.me – Multiplayer Wordle Royale
Femme fatale is the first thing that comes to mind.
nicolas-siplis··on Ask HN: What the hell happened to Reddit on Firefox?
Update: One of the Reddit devs just posted a comment with some more information: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/s4095g/resolved_block...
nicolas-siplis··on Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics
Huh, I wonder if there's any relationship to the Hairy Ball theorem. They appear to describe similar situations, but on different dimensions.
nicolas-siplis··on Show HN: Blockchain-based webapp allowing users to create arbitrary bets: WSBDD
Hi HN! These last couple weeks I've been working on what I believe is a really cool idea and think I'm finally ready to show you guys. WSBDD is a fully blockchain based web application, a single static page built using vanilla JS (you need MetaMask installed to interact with it). It allows you to place and schedule arbitrary bets over the contents of any website. It uses Provable's smart oracle[1] to query and extract results from the Internet, which then gets posted to the blockchain and used to determine the bet's winners and award their share of the loser's pool. If you feel like trying your luck, I've created a starting bet on the S&P's 500 price (decimals excluded) on October 9. You can place your bet up until next week's Friday (October 2nd) when the market closes. The website also includes links to the source code[2] and the verified smart contract's code[3].

I'd love to hear some feedback from you! I'm currently trying to think of the best way to handle the discoverability of bets. Right now I have a super simple section showing the last 10 created bets, but it's something I think could be considerably improved.

Also, I am not a big fan of the state of frontend development at the moment, so I decided that it would be a fun exercise to forgo any frameworks and see how far I can push things with plain old JS. I'm relatively happy with the results, but as you can probably tell I'm not a designer or anything of the sort, so any quick tips on that end are super appreciated. I'm now gonna start working on cleaning up the frontend, hoping this gets some discussion going!

[1] https://provable.xyz

[2] https://github.com/nicolas-siplis/wsbdd

[3] https://etherscan.io/address/0xbB2Dfc930A209Aa32E49f0b49264b...

nicolas-siplis··on Show HN: Wsbdd – Wei Stakes by Decentralized Degenerates
Hi HN! These last couple weeks I've been working on what I believe is a really cool idea and think I'm finally ready to show you guys. WSBDD is a fully blockchain based web application, a single static page built using vanilla JS (you need MetaMask installed to interact with it). It allows you to place and schedule arbitrary bets over the contents of any website. It uses Provable's smart oracle[1] to query and extract results from the Internet, which then gets posted to the blockchain and used to determine the bet's winners and award their share of the loser's pool. If you feel like trying your luck, I've created a starting bet on the S&P's 500 price (decimals excluded) on October 9. You can place your bet up until next week's Friday (October 2nd) when the market closes. The website also includes links to the source code[2] and the verified smart contract's code[3].

I'd love to hear some feedback from you! I'm currently trying to think of the best way to handle the discoverability of bets. Right now I have a super simple section showing the last 10 created bets, but it's something I think could be considerably improved.

Also, I am not a big fan of the state of frontend development at the moment, so I decided that it would be a fun exercise to forgo any frameworks and see how far I can push things with plain old JS. I'm relatively happy with the results, but as you can probably tell I'm not a designer or anything of the sort, so any quick tips on that end are super appreciated. I'm now gonna start working on cleaning up the frontend, hoping this gets some discussion going!

[1] https://provable.xyz

[2] https://github.com/nicolas-siplis/wsbdd

[3] https://etherscan.io/address/0xbB2Dfc930A209Aa32E49f0b49264b...

nicolas-siplis··on The GameStop Short Squeeze
Some firms try to, at least. https://www.shortsight.com/short-interest-of-float-2-0/
nicolas-siplis··on macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 adds full custom kernel support
I'm curious as to Apple's angle here. They have always had a closed ecosystem, so I'm wondering what made them change their approach so drastically.
nicolas-siplis··on [dead]
Source code available at https://github.com/nicolas-siplis/cyberpwned

I'm relatively happy with the current speed of the pathfinding algorithm, but HN is probably the best place to find some different optimization routes I could go with.

nicolas-siplis··on [dead]
Source code available at https://github.com/nicolas-siplis/cyberpwned

I'm relatively happy with the current speed of the pathfinding algorithm, but HN is probably the best place to find some different optimization routes I could go with.

nicolas-siplis··on Cyberpwned: Beating Cyberpunk 2077's hacking minigame with Python
Just posted it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25535434

nicolas-siplis··on Cyberpwned: Beating Cyberpunk 2077's hacking minigame with Python
Ask and you shall receive! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25535434
nicolas-siplis··on Cyberpwned: Beating Cyberpunk 2077's hacking minigame with Python
Hey everyone! Author here, just thought I'd let you know I'm currently working on a mobile app to automate this entire process through OCR. With a little bit of luck I'll have a prototype ready this week.

Thank you for sharing this asicsp. I actually made a submission to HN as soon as my post went up, but I think it was pretty late at night for most readers so maybe people missed it.

nicolas-siplis··on Show HN: BigQuery dataset: 22M FCC comments on net neutrality
Indeed, that small change brings it up to the top of the ranking!

1 | [7568642] | am in favor of strong net neutrality under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Sincerely,

2 | [1523457] | The FCC's Open Internet Rules (net neutrality rules) are extremely important to me. I urge you to

3 | [1359677] | In 2015, Chairman Tom Wheeler's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed restrictive Title

4 | [1283663] | Before leaving office, the Obama Administration rammed through a massive scheme that gave the fede

5 | [958487] | The current FCC regulatory scheme known as "Title II" represents an unprecedented increase in gove

6 | [818815] | The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering

7 | [657153] | As a concerned taxpayer and consumer, I am writing to urge the FCC to set the internet free and re

8 | [531981] | The Obama-era FCC regulations known as "Title II" enable the federal government to exert an extrao

9 | [450914] | The Open Internet rules (net neutrality) are extremely important to me. I don't want the ISP to ha

10 | [379644] | Obama's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) forced regulations on the internet that put the go