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thepoeton I ask this chess puzzle to every new LLM

It might be a reasonable ask for an LLM to 'remember' the endgame tablebase of solved games - which is less than a GB for all game with five or less pieces on the board. This puzzle specifically relies on this knowledge and the knowledge of how the chess pieces move.

thepoeton Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

Did you miss the "I have had my own horror stories in the past 10 years" part?

thepoeton Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

I too started learning chess at the beginning of this pandemic when I turned 29. While I knew how the pieces moved as a kid, I was unaware of rules such as promotion, pawns moving two squares in the beginning, en passant etc. When I started I was 900 blitz on chess.com. I moved to ~1750 on Chess.com blitz and ~2000 on lichess blitz. I assume I would be higher in rapid if I played it as much, probably due to less competition in it online. I learned a single opening with white (and probably the most hated - London system), and one with black (Sicilian hyperaccelerated dragon). I guess most of my improvement came from observing tactics in games and in puzzles. Watching a lot of agadmator kind of videos also helped in figuring out what is a better move out of multiple candidate moves (I guess this is what is positional chess is about.) I have reduced playing it these days since it is quite addictive and takes up a lot of my free time. Also, it is quite demotivating to hear that no matter how much effort I put in as an adult, a 5 yo kid will be much better than me with the same amount of effort.

thepoeton How Stockfish chess engine works

Thanks, Brad. Updated ELO to Elo and added that both rating may not be directly comparable.

thepoeton Ask HN: Is “No Code” the future of web/app dev?

Pure no code in the current form may never catch on. I wrote something on No code this Sunday https://technotes.substack.com/p/no-code-the-revolution-that...

thepoeton View leaked secrets in Git live

It included high entropy strings including keys from 30+ API and service providers, one of which was AWS. We did not target AWS specifically. None of the other services complained. In fact, a customer service widget company even took our help and thanked us. AWS tricked us in taking our findings and then changed their tone.

thepoeton View leaked secrets in Git live

We created a static version of this (almost similar to shodan but for keys) using publicly accessible Github dump hosted on Google Cloud in 2017. We then hosted the processed data, website and our search infra on AWS. AWS security team reached out to us for a potential “collaboration” and asked us to send all AWS keys that we discovered and we sent them the whole list. As a tiny startup, we were elated. Few days later they call us and threaten with a cease and desist notice if we do not take down the website. Remember we are not targeting AWS keys, neither are we in violation of any licensing agreements with respect to the data. We refused to shut it down. They then ask us to stop hosting it on AWS or “anywhere” else since we were using AWS credits to host the product or they will shut our account. When their this strategy did not work out, they contacted someone at Stripe who had given us the AWS credits, who then asked us to take it down or face consequences. We eventually had to shut it down since we did not have a lot of money to fight these people.

It was a stressful week for us where we learnt that corporates can lie and bully you to get whatever they want and then can shut you down. Unless you have the means to fight back. Does not matter where you live.

thepoeton The Riemann Hypothesis, explained

A basic video on Prime gaps and related problems discussion intro video by Terry Tao https://youtu.be/pp06oGD4m00

thepoeton MacBook Pro? No

I know it is unfair to compare a laptop with a desktop but this is what I did based on my specific usage pattern. I upgraded from a 13 inch 2014 Macbook Pro with 8G RAM to a 27 inch iMac. I am still keeping the Macbook pro for travel, though I fear the out of warranty costs now that AppleCare is over. I wanted a faster, powerful machine but did not want to move out of macos with all those programs and settings from last 4 years. Also, all the other laptops had some issue or the other be it the low battery life in ultrabooks to the bad display, weak processors, or build quality issues. The 2017 touchbar MacBook Pro is the best built laptop one can buy but it looked too expensive to me for what it offered. I explored building a hackintosh but it seemed maintaining it was too much pain.

I now use a Samsung T5 external SSD over USB-C as my macos boot drive in the iMac, which I can unplug and boot with my Macbook when I travel. While being 40% cheaper than the 15 inch macbook in my country, the iMac gives me a faster processor that does not thermal throttle after 5 minutes of 100% usage, 24 GB of cheaper RAM (and yes easily upgradable to 64GB), a gorgeous 5k display, lots of ports, a somewhat better graphics card for the rare gaming and lots of space to save data files. With some difficulty, you could also replace the drives and processor.

thepoeton Ask HN: Does Apple slow down old Macbooks as well?

Yes, when I got the Macbook battery needs servicing thing couple of years ago, the processor was permanently in a low power state of 800Mhz. You can verify it using the Intel Power Gadget thing or terminal.

thepoeton India's Indira canteen: The best meal you can buy for 13 cents

The point about majority of Sikhs living in north is irrelevant. The gurudwara provide free food. There are multiple gurudwaras in almost all Indian states [1]. Most of them have langar though some only do on weekends. You can always find one using Google Maps at a location near you, though it might be inconvenient if you have limited means of travel. Several poor people shift base and reside outside or even inside gurudwaras for free accommodation and food.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gurdwaras Some of the gurudwaras

thepoeton Developer preview of TensorFlow Lite

Is the Lite convertor also doing some sort of quantization or is it purely for file format conversion?

thepoeton Launch HN: Cashfree (YC S17) – Automated Payouts and Bank Transfers for India

Nope, not RESTful but still looks usable and they would surely iterate and improve. Violates third, fourth and last of Roy Fieldings constraints [1], last one being really helpful while using APIs [2]

[1] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS

Cashfree looks promising and something really needed in India especially the bank transfer API. Good luck to the team.

thepoeton Learn Ethereum smart contract programming

I am assuming you have gone through the Ethereum whitepaper. It does lists some potential use cases which can be extrapolated. http://fermatslibrary.com/s/ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...

thepoeton Author of cURL denied entry to the USA

On a related note, the visa issuing system of the US sucks. I was denied a tourist visa and then issued one on reapplication in a matter of 5 days. The process is highly irregular since absolutely nothing changed between the two 30 seconds interviews except the interviewer. The only inconvenience was I had to reschedule my YC interview and throw away an additional $300 in visa form and travel cost.

thepoeton How Braintree destroyed a successful taxi startup from Serbia

Stripe can ask you to shutdown a legitimate product if they get bullied from some other larger organisation. It happened with us and we lost the respect we had for Stripe.

thepoeton Show HN: DubDial – Automated calls with any YouTube audio clip to friends

Increased the CVC max length to 4. Please try now.

thepoeton Show HN: DubDial – Automated calls with any YouTube audio clip to friends

Sure, will add it. We also set the caller-id to the user's number so you always know who called you. Will that help prevent such calls?

thepoeton In 1939, US citizens voted against immigration of 10k refugee kids from Germany

If you could read the article, you will find that it says so.

thepoeton ClearTax (YC S14) helps India file tax returns in ‘less than five minutes’

The point I made with individual tax pay is there is no pain, so I would not pay. In case of freelancers, ClearTax does not reduce your effort, instead of your local CA, you just have to deal with someone sitting in another city.

thepoeton ClearTax (YC S14) helps India file tax returns in ‘less than five minutes’

As an individual taxpayer, I would not pay to use ClearTax. I have filed returns both on the Indian Government website and ClearTax. I do not see an added advantage with ClearTax, they show the same bunch of fields and as a last step, submit the data to the government website (I am not sure if the Government website crashes, how this will help ClearTax). I assume the only advantage is they can read your Name, addresses and gross salary data from the two page PDF you upload, not a big deal IMO. As someone who has freelanced a bit, I would still not purchase their INR 5000+ plans. I have had CAs do it for 2500 or less. I assume the site is popular among first-timers or people who have not really tried the Income Tax website recently.

thepoeton Ask HN: Someone raised money by claiming my project as their own

Offtopic but if possible, you should tell the name of the investor. I don't think any decent investor would forget to do such basic checks as part of due diligence.

thepoeton Ask HN: Considering leaving my job at a startup? What should I consider?

I was in a similar position few months ago, getting bored doing the same thing again and again. I could have changed jobs for a better pay and profile but it would not have been a significant improvement in work quality. Also the job was intense so I would end up thinking about the startup all the time with no time left for personal projects. I have decided to take a break of couple of years to learn new stuff I have already made a list of, experiment with some personal projects I always wanted to create and figure out what I would like to do later. Just ensure that you have a fair bit of runway so that if any of your projects get serious you can pursue it to end.

thepoeton IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

https://developer.linkedin.com/blog/stacking-api-support-lin...

LinkedIn API support moved to Stack Overflow too. Same timing might not be coincidence.

thepoeton Ask HN: What's the biggest problem of this world that we need to solve?

Food, cheap but nutritious engineered food which can be produced/grown in diverse geographic areas in large quantities/density.

thepoeton Are There Native Advertisments in Hacker News?

YC startups have this privilege/boost for job posts

thepoeton India’s Downward Spiral

Actually Indian constitution does give Freedom of Speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#In... but agree there are some restrictions which I assume are valid and are there for other countries too. There are problems enforcing or protecting these rights when you are up against corrupt politicians and organizations.

thepoeton Is jQuery Too Big For Mobile?

Did you add an extra zero in gzipped size for a previous version ? Current AngularJS is 36KB minified/gzipped, 100KB minified

Here is the file http://code.angularjs.org/1.2.14/angular.min.js And here you can get the gzipped size http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home

thepoeton Poll: Hacker News Person of the Year in Tech

Is it possible to remove Narendra Modi's name from this list before someone creates a Facebook meme out of this page.

thepoeton Nut consumption reduces risk of death

Although this study was done on US population, nuts are costly here in India so a large section of population cannot afford to eat it on a regular basis. Could it be remotely possible that poverty lead to diseases, improper or no treatments, more accidents etc. lower life expectancy rather than "not eating enough nuts".

Mr. Gates would surely start a Nuts for India campaign to increase life expectancy.