Chess is booming and our servers are struggling
chess.com
chess.com
However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.
They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.
There's a lesson in here.
Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
For the uninitiated, the idea is that a product needs good engineering + good marketing to be successful. Products with only one of them will fail. The idea of Berkson’s fallacy is that even though it seems that good marketing is negatively correlated with engineering (and vice-versa) it’s actually because the baseline level of engineering and marketing is low, and products which happen to excel in one don’t need to excel in the other.
Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.
Based on my daily frustrations with basically every piece of software, that already appears to be the status quo.
That’s the kind of elitist thinking that leads to Byzantine tech interviews and poor collaboration.
Edit: remove the dig at management which is too easy a scapegoat to explain all ills
"Hacked together" is the software equivalent of fixing things with duct tape. It sounds cool and fun, and is fun to do for your own playthings, but it is a terrible mentality for developing solid projects.
Pure anecdata, but I only know one person irl who prefers chess.com, and I never managed to get a straight answer from him as to why, other than "i just play there and like it more, maybe i will check out Lichess at some point, idk."
On Lichess the puzzles are less well organized and explained, the Lessons interface is arcane and much less polished in terms of content overall though there are gems if you hunt and eventually figure out the UI, and online play is likewise has a lot of small things all over that make a big difference.
Besides that I tend to use, and pay for, chess.com more for their other features than for anything directly UI related. Their puzzles are better. I think their post game analysis is nicer to use, the way they do analysis in general is easier to use than lichess I think. They also have a lot of learning material.
As far as playing games go, I have friends who use both and therefor I play on both. It's about the same as far as I'm concerned.
Or is that the same thing here?
I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that owning chess.com is 99% of their success if it's not great at the game or great at the engineering aspect.
Microsoft Teams? Good lesson to startups and companies in general.
"#20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
> 20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
I mainly joined for the unlimited post-game analysis and puzzles. I also like the app, it's fast and intuitive. Lichess is great too, nothing against them.
To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.
(that being said,
There are quite a few retired pros still earning in that cohort, so, yeah. The prize pool is pretty deep and 3,000 is still top 0.2%.
“Oops we accidentally put chess in front of everyone for a week and now they’re all playing it.”
One interesting event can kick off feed recommendations and start this fly wheel effect.
However, Google Trends also indicates a doubling of interest in chess as a search term over the past three months. Interesting!
There's a few possible drivers that are no doubt helping but it does appear that between one thing and another, chess itself is going viral.
The problem is that this only fuels the cycle. Casual players are scared away from lichess, possibly extending the rift between both sites...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
None of their explanations sounds at all plausible though.
Any suggestions from the HN crowd on what may have provided you an "ah ha!" moment for chess strategy in general?
If you're not motivated because it's confusing and unrewarding to fail, then persistence and practice is really the only solution.
1. Choose a chess opening and stick to it. That means you'll always know how to react at the beginning of the game. 2. Counting. If your piece has more defenders than attackers, it's safe. If you're attacking your opponent's piece more times than it's defended, you can control that square. One of the biggest issues I had when starting out was literally just miscounting attackers and defenders. 3. Basic tactics. There are three fundamental tactics in chess: pins, forks, and skewers.
Other than that, watching chess Youtubers is pretty helpful. Some good examples are Aman Hambleton's beginner videos[1], and Daniel Naroditsky's "speedruns"[2]. The latter can be slightly more advanced but still very understandable imo. There are other good channels like Hikaru Nakamura's, Gotham Chess, chessbrah, and Eric Rosen but I think the two I suggested are the best.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axRvksIZpGc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfjI4jEY58s&list=PLT1F2nOxLH...
Replacing chess with go. :P
His style of cheesey, caustic humor isn't for everybody. However, he GETS beginners.
"GM Ben Finegold's Message to Beginner Chess Players"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bCfwCyo18
"The Reason People Don't Get Better At Chess According to Ben Finegold"
* Start with climbing the rating ladder. He explains the basics and mistakes players at each level makes and how to avoid them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2huVf1l4UE&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6...
* Watch his games (ideally with 10minutes or more time control) where he explains his thought process behind each move and what he is anticipating. This is priceless!
* Analyze your own games after you play
Having said that, what really helped me other than various tutorials is the basic goal of the game. The goal seems like it's to checkmate, and I focused a lot of effort on that. And that is theoretically the goal.
But really, most of the time, especially in the beginning, you're not going to be spotting fancy checkmates and neither are your opponents. So your main focus in the beginning should actually be about winning a material advantage (capturing something of theirs without them capturing you in return.) Then, once you have an advantage, just try to trade off all the other pieces until there's nothing left.
I didn't understand this idea at first. But it makes sense like this - if you have the full board, except the opponent is missing a rook, anything can still happen. But imagine now almost all the pieces are gone, except you have that extra rook and he doesn't. Now, it's a much easier and winnable game, and there's nothing the opponent can do anymore. Of course you have to know how to win a rook endgame, but that's fairly easy to drill.
So my advice - drill how to win with two Rooks, with a Queen, and with one Rook. Then most games boil down to trying to get some extra material, and then trading off all the pieces, and then winning that endgame.
Otherwise they should consider Elixir/Phoenix as it is easily distributable and/or Rust if they need breakneck speed per thread.
I remember reading how Dropbox and other file sharing sites used hashing to create single instances of popular files and then just used pointers from accounts with that file to save disk space.
I would imagine a LOT of chess games probably start out the same and you can therefore store a pointer to where the game is on a subset of potential game starts and then write the difference as you branch out.
I may be underestimating the possible start conditions and/or the metadata storage cost (e.g. time in the game of each move doesn't go away).
Potentially some SIMD optimisations could be done in this direction
Maybe you could store all the moves in an array of 2 byte ints. I doubt you can have more than 32k moves in a chess game.
Assume 10kb per game in memory. You can run 1 million games on 10gb.
Store the moves in the end, run your analysis, etc.
Or am I missing something?
The game gets even more compact in that not all source and destination squares are possible at every move, etc. But, you're dead on in your estimate.
SCID uses 1 byte per move which is close to optimal (it splits it into 2^4 for piece and 2^4 for direction, with some edge cases).
SCID vs PC is a fantastic tool for chess players, I maintain a massive database of master games using it.
Chess is something I can open on my app and I can play on the bus or before bed. While it's not the most value adding thing in my life I am enjoying it for now.
By the way, I suck at chess. I struggle to beat 900 rated players. Any tips?
Is this a tortured analogy, or are their servers actually crashing under load?
Alternatively they might be doing something weird involving periodically flushing the database from memory and onto disc.
That wouldn't mean "crashing", but likely would mean the database wasn't usable as a database.
Glad i am using and supporting lichess instead
A web chess game is turn based with some basic logic to sync the clock. There are no secrets or complex state like many video games. Seems rather straightforward.
The hard part is scaling up everything around it:
- Stockfish real-time predictions
- anti-cheat monitoring
- the moderation tasks any social website needs
That being said, if any service suddenly saw a doubling of users within a month, plenty of sub-optimal architecture decisions can suddenly fall on their face which were otherwise adequate at the previous scale.
Sounds bizarre until you remember that over 80% of servers are still on prem
- on chess.com you can premove multiple times, each premove consume 0.1s on the clock
- on lichess, you can premove only one time, but it does not consume time on the clock
Also, from personal experience (so this is only anecdotal), the most toxic players (insulting in the chat, or ragequitting, ...) I met were on lichess.
Comments of the form "X is better than Y" are subjective and do not add any value/information to the discussion.
Just if their cheating algorithm says so and they feel like making it public.