HN user

eieio

3,112 karma

I build unusual games with big constraints (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Checkboxes). You can see all my work at https://eieio.games

I'm based in Brooklyn. You can reach me at eieiogames at gmail dot com

alum Jane Street Capital, Recurse Center (F23, W25)

Posts29
Comments289
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www.ayush.digital 8d ago

The Memory Heist

eieio
98pts15
parametricavocado.itch.io 4mo ago

Bubble Sorted Amen Break

eieio
383pts123
numberresearch.xyz 4mo ago

Number Research Inc

eieio
55pts20
snake.eieio.games 4mo ago

Show HN: MMO snake over ssh – ssh snakes.run

eieio
2pts0
eieio.games 6mo ago

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

eieio
662pts362
en.wikipedia.org 6mo ago

1000 Blank White Cards

eieio
364pts63
news.ycombinator.com 6mo ago

Show HN: ssh tiny.christmas

eieio
14pts4
brooker.co.za 7mo ago

It's Always TCP_NODELAY

eieio
491pts179
eieio.games 7mo ago

Are Two Heads Better Than One?

eieio
2pts0
pixelogic.app 1y ago

Every 5x5 Nonogram

eieio
175pts86
rulethepla.net 1y ago

The Screamer – A yell-on yell-off light

eieio
35pts15
hannahilea.com 1y ago

Clapping Music for two flip-disc displays

eieio
35pts6
hannahilea.com 1y ago

Clapping Music for two flip-disc displays

eieio
3pts1
litherum.blogspot.com 2y ago

Addition Font (2019)

eieio
2pts0
techcrunch.com 2y ago

This camera trades pictures for AI poetry

eieio
1pts0
stfj.net 2y ago

Building games that can be understood at a glance

eieio
1pts1
eieio.games 2y ago

Questions to ask when I don't want to work

eieio
3pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

BreakTime: Running Breakout inside Google Calendar

eieio
213pts15
eieio.games 2y ago

Show HN: Teleyegraph – convert blinks to Morse code

eieio
1pts0
www.givedirectly.org 2y ago

Our experiments to raise more money for people in poverty

eieio
1pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

My Computer Tells Me to Go to Bed

eieio
2pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder

eieio
639pts57
en.wikipedia.org 2y ago

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages (largely pictographic)

eieio
1pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

Making a real-time game in Google Sheets

eieio
5pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

Measuring something changes it – and sometimes that's enough

eieio
1pts0
eieio.games 2y ago

Hexagone: A font that automatically converts hex color codes to RGB

eieio
3pts0
www.twitch.tv 2y ago

Show HN: A game designed for twitch chat inspired by the infinite monkey theorem

eieio
1pts0
eieio.games 3y ago

Opensearch Trickery: Playing Wordle from the Firefox Address Bar

eieio
3pts0
www.adweek.com 10y ago

BuzzFeed Launches New Ad Format

eieio
1pts0

I made a little TUI last month for searching within a channel! It supports before: / after:, fuzzy/exact/regex matching, lets you order by upload date/views/duration, lets you search over just a video's titles or descriptions, etc: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse

The vast majority of my youtube watching is "go to a specific channel and try to find a certain kind of video" so it drives me nuts that youtube channel search is so bad (and afaik you can't search a channel on mobile?). I end up using my tool to find a bunch of videos and get them into my history to watch on my ipad.

n.b. my tool downloads all video metadata for a channel and then searches over it locally, so it's pretty slow the first time you search a channel (results are cached for 24 hours though).

I'm so excited about this! And I expect the speed/bandwidth improvements in the new renderer to be very significant.

I spent a while hacking on my own fork of the Bubbletea renderer over the last few months in order to run a game over SSH[1]. It was a ton of work for a niche, simple game (snake) but it dropped bandwidth usage by a factor of 10. The new renderer has to be more general so it might not quite hit that for all applications, but I bet it's not that far off.

I could also see it being an even more significant gain for apps that use a lot of modern colors and styling, since escape sequences there can be very long / heavy weight.

Some of the comments here are annoyed about the website branding but FWIW I think bubbletea and lipgloss (and wish, if you want SSH stuff) are really excellent tools for building "boring" TUIs too.

[1] https://eieio.games/blog/secure-massively-multiplayer-snake/

Typically in this system you encode obligations - e.g. "eieio should review, or at least be aware of, all changes made to this library." I think that means you're unlikely in practice to have a problem like that, which (unless the team is not functioning well) requires two people who care deeply about the variable name and don't know that someone else is changing it.

The tool (iron) isn't open source, but there are a bunch of public talks and blogs about how it works, many of which are linked from the github repo[1].

It used to be "open source" in that some of the code was available, but afaik it wasn't ever possible to actually run it externally because of how tightly it integrated with other internal systems.

[1] https://github.com/janestreet/iron

at my last job code review was done directly in your editor (with tooling to show you diffs as well).

What this meant was that instead of leaving nitpicky comments, people would just change things that were nitpicky but clear improvements. They'd only leave comments (which blocked release) for stuff that was interesting enough to discuss.

This was typically a big shock for new hires who were used to the "comment for every nitpick" system; I think it can feel insulting when someone changes your feature. But I quickly came to love it and can't imagine doing code review any other way now. It's so much faster!

I'm not sure how to tie this to AI code review tbh. Right now I don't think I'd trust a model's taste for when to change things and when to leave a comment. But maybe that'll change. I agree that if you automated away my taste for code it'd put me in a weird spot!

Eh, I was a little annoyed at the comment last night but read through the thread again today and you were clearly engaging in good faith.

I totally get being exhausted at LLMs. And I don't mind the nudge to be a little less lazy and install wireshark for next time.

hope I get you to play the game when it's out!

Hey! I'm the author.

My thinking was:

  * Yes, I clearly know what tcpdump is / how to capture network traffic
  * It has been several years since I have looked at a pcap
  * I don't have wireshark installed on this computer
  * I've done the thing where you decrypt TLS with wireshark exactly once, years ago, and I found it frustrating for reasons I can't remember[1]. Wasn't sure if I could do this with ssh
  * When I started investigating this, I didn't remotely think that ssh was the root cause. I thought it was a quirk of my game
  * I *did* make a client that printed out all the data it was receiving, but it was useless because it was operating at the wrong layer (e.g. it connected over SSH and logged the bytes SSH handed it)
  * I'm experimenting with Claude Code a lot because it has a lot of hype and I would like to form an opinion
  * Looking up flags is annoying
  * Being able to tell an agent "look at this pcap and tell me what you see" is *cool*
So idk. I'm sure that you would have solved this much more quickly than I did! I'm not sure that (for me) opening up the packet in Wireshark would have solved this faster. Maybe reading the SSH spec would have, but debugging also just didn't take that long.

And the big leap here was realizing that this was my SSH client and not a quirk of my game. The time at which I would have read the SSH spec was after I captured traffic from a regular SSH session and observed the same pattern; before that I was thinking about the problem wrong.

I don't think that this is unfortunate. In fact, I think I got what I wanted here (a better sense of Claude Code's strengths and weaknesses). You're right that an alternative approach would have taught me different things, and that's a worthy goal too.

[1] I suspect this is because I was doing it for an old job and I had to figure out how to run some application with keys I controlled? It would have been easier here. I don't remember.

Or you could use anycasting to terminate SSH sessions on the moral equivalent of one of a number of geography based reverse proxies and then forward the packet over an internal network to the app server over a link tuned for low latency.

I've been thinking about some stuff like this! Not being able to put my game behind Cloudflare[1] is a bummer. Substantial architectural overhead though.

The idea of letting Claude loose on my crypto[graphy] implementation is about the most frightening thing I've heard of in a while [though libnss is so craptastic, I can't see how it would hurt in that case.]

I hear you, but FWIW the patch I was reverting was trivial (and it's also in the go crypto library, which is pretty easy to read). It's a couple-of-line change[2], and Claude did almost exactly what I would have done (I was tired and would have forgotten to shrink the handshake payload).

[1] This isn't strictly true, Cloudflare spectrum exists, but its pricing is an insane $1/GB last I checked.

[2] https://cs.opensource.google/go/x/crypto/+/833695f0a57b30373...

Oh wow - I've never heard of TCP_CORK before. Without disabling pings I'd still pay the cost of receiving way more packets, but maybe that'd be tolerable if I didn't have to send so many pongs. This is super handy; excited to play around with it.

I am aware of TCP_NODELAY (funny enough I recently posted about TCP_NODELAY to HN[1] when I was thinking about it for the same game that I wrote about here). But I think the latency hit from disabling it just doesn't work for me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359120

This is an interesting question!

But no, the python output is correct (although I do round the values). It's counterintuitive but these are two different questions:

    1. What are the odds that both players lie? (4%)
    2. Given that both players say tails, what are the odds that the coin is heads (~6%)
Trivially, the answer for question (1) is 0.2 * 0.2 = 4%

The answer for question (2) is 0.02 / 0.34 = 6%

One way of expressing this is Bayes Rule: we want P(both say tails | coin is heads):

    * we can compute this as (P(coin is heads | both say tails) * P(coin is heads)) / P(both say tails)
    * P(coin is heads | both say tails) = 0.04 (both must lie)
    * P(coin is heads) = 0.5
    * P(both say tails) = 0.04 * 0.5 + 0.64 * 0.5 = 0.34
This gives us (0.04 * 0.5) / 0.34 = 0.02 / 0.34 ~= 6%

I think that might not be convincing to you, so we can also just look at the results for a hypothetical simulation with 2000 flips:

    * of those 2000 flips, 1000 are tails
    * 640 times both players tell the truth
    * 40 times both players lie
    * 680 times (640 + 40) both players *agree*
    * 320 times the players disagree
We're talking about "the number of times they lie divided by the number of times that they agree"

40 / 680 ~= 6%

We go from 4% to 6% because the denominator changes. For the "how often do they both lie" case, our denominator is "all of our coin flips." For the "given that they both said tails, what are the odds that the coin is heads" case, our denominator is "all of the cases where they agreed" - a substantially smaller denominator!

The three players example is just me rounding 89.6% to 90% to make the output shorter (all examples are rounded to two digits, otherwise I found that the output was too large to fit on many screens without horizontal scrolling).

Ah! Right after submitting 1000 Blank White Cards to HN I thought of Finchley Central[1] which (I think) is the game that Mornington Crescent comes from. I learned about Finchley Central a few years ago while reading about the history of The Game[2] (sorry).

I've had ideas off and on for the last 2 years about how to translate Finchley Central into something you could play over the internet with strangers but I've never quite figured out how to make it work; I think a key aspect of these games is having shared context with your friends and trying to make them laugh.

Anyway, fun that your mind went to the same place!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finchley_Central_(game) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

(I'm the author)

I think there's an annoying thing where by saying "hey, here's this neat problem, what's the answer" I've made you much more likely to actually get the answer!

What I really wanted to do was transfer the experience of writing a simulation for a related problem, observing this result, assuming I had a bug in my code, and then being delighted when I did the math. But unfortunately I don't know how to transfer that experience over the internet :(

(to be clear, I'm totally happy you wrote out the probabilities and got it right! Just expressing something I was thinking about back when I wrote this blog)

I'd be worried that the chatroom would be filled with words that are not (ahem) in keeping with the christmas spirit!

I did spend some time thinking about how to let people leave "gifts" over folks could open, but wasn't sure how to make that work in a compelling way. Maybe next year...

I've been playing with multiplayer games that run over SSH; right now I'm trying to push the framerate on the games as high as I can, which is what got me thinking about my networking stack.

I mostly use go these days for the backend for my multiplayer games, and in this case there's also some good tooling for terminal rendering and SSH stuff in go, so it's a nice choice.

(my games are often pretty weird, I understand that "high framerate multiplayer game over SSH" is a not a uhhh good idea, that's the point!)

I found this article while debugging some networking delays for a game that I'm working on.

It turns out that in my case it wasn't TCP_NODELAY - my backend is written in go, and go sets TCP_NODELAY by default!

But I still found the article - and in particular Nagle's acknowledgement of the issues! - to be interesting.

There's a discussion from two years ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310896 - but I figured it'd been long enough that others might be interested in giving this a read too.

Yeah the big race here is that you've made a move (which might not be valid) and you're waiting on a response for that move - and you can receive other moves while you're waiting.

I don't think requesting a new snapshot really helps there. If you do that you're dramatically extending the amount of time that the user sees an invalid state, since you're adding a whole new server roundtrip to the reconciliation process.

FWIW (I'm the author) my creative output was ~0 while I was working a 'normal' job. I worked really hard and didn't have much energy for tech stuff outside of work (especially since I wanted to live a life that included non-tech things!)

I think it's totally fine to not make stuff outside of work, and it's so impressive to me that some of my friends manage to make creative stuff in their free time while working a day job.