Hacker News Reader

wilbur_whateleyon If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

Then why do I feel like me and not this larger structure?

wilbur_whateleyon Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

I think humans and other life forms have this ability on a long enough timeline through evolution.

wilbur_whateleyon Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab

To me, AI is about the ability to solve novel problems. People who think supervised learning can do that usually believe that new knowledge comes from (1) combining old ideas, and (2) trial and error. I don't think that's true. If you think about the state space of all possible ideas, it's clear that humans can explore a very small subset of that space and supervised learning just imitates humans (with great speed and memory). RL also doesn't work, but it at least attempts to learn independently of human knowledge.

wilbur_whateleyon International chess federation sanctions Kramnik

How did he punish them?

wilbur_whateleyon I cut my AI API costs 99% by switching from Claude to DeepSeek

My own experience. I'm working on something complex that's not in the datasets these models were trained on. There I see V4 flash breaking down and hallucinating much more often than GPT/Claude. For normal, common tasks, I also don't see much of a difference.

wilbur_whateleyon I cut my AI API costs 99% by switching from Claude to DeepSeek

V4 flash is much worse than any Claude model. If you're doing something simple, it can be a good way to save money though.

wilbur_whateleyon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

Working on Nichess (chess with health points) - https://www.nichess.org/

wilbur_whateleyon Turning chess into a roguelike via design first principles

If you like this, you might find Nichess interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947041

Adding health points to chess gives you a lot more options for balancing and abilities.

wilbur_whateleyon Show HN: Nichess – Chess with Health Points

Games from that time had so much soul. I wish I were better at the art side of things.

wilbur_whateleyon Show HN: Nichess – Chess with Health Points

You're right, I'll add that. You remember them after playing for some time, but it is useful for a new player.

wilbur_whateleyon Show HN: Nichess – Chess with Health Points

Yes! Special abilities (Queen-Maenad and Pirate-Pirate) deal 20 damage to neighboring pieces. The only difference between 10 HP pieces and 30 HP pieces is that 30 HP pieces can survive that.

wilbur_whateleyon Show HN: Nichess – Chess with Health Points

AI playing Nichess 1 against itself - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN0TnHkszmgQSnFrvF_ANIzX8...

wilbur_whateleyon I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support

Claude with Sonnet medium effort just used 100% of my session limit, some extra dollars, thought for 53 minutes, and said:

API Error: Claude's response exceeded the 32000 output token maximum. To configure this behavior, set the CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS environment variable.

wilbur_whateleyon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

Working on https://www.nichess.org/

Nichess is a game like chess, where pieces have special abilities and health points. This allows for much finer balancing and many more variants compared to the original chess. It will take some time, but it will become great eventually.