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ketzu

1,657 karma · joined January 9, 2016

I am a software developer and former computer science researcher from germany.

If you're interested in what I do, feel free to contact me (hn@ketzu.net) or visit my website:

http://ketzu.net

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ketzu··on Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
After some digging it goes back to Adriaan de Groot (in 1946).

[1] (2011) has a summary in the introduction:

   de Groot presented chess players of varying skill, including some of the best players of the time, with an unfamiliar position and asked them to think aloud as they analyzed the position and chose what move they would make. de Groot found that, contrary to popular belief, the strongest players did not think further ahead than weaker players. World-class Grandmasters (GMs) searched at a similar depth and considered a similar number of options as mere chess experts. 
As [1] is also a somewhat reproduction of the original study, you can take it directly.

    Six Grandmasters, five International Masters, six Experts, and five Class A players completed the think-aloud procedure for two chess positions. Findings indicate that Grandmasters and International Masters search more quickly than Experts and Class A players, and that both groups today search substantially faster than players in previous studies. The findings, however, support de Groot’s overall conclusions and are consistent with predictions made by pattern recognition models.
Section 3 Table 2 is probably most interesting, they had 2 board positions and 2 groups sectioned:

Masters (2350+) | Intermediates (1800-2200)

(Mean values only, i tried inlcuding stddev but it was hard to read)

Positions Evaluated (A): 145.3 | 138.6

Positions Evaluated (B): 216.6 | 190.6

---

Max Depth (A): 11.7 | 9.4

Max Depth (B): 14.1 | 12.0

---

Mean Depth (A): 4.1 | 3.3

Mean Depth (B): 4.9 | 4.2

What i found interesting was that the "intermediate" group had a higher number of "base moves" they evaluated (eg Pos A: 5.6 | 8.6).

The previous studies (de Groot and another rperoduction from 1998) had "Nodes visited" for position A at 51.6 | 34.3 and 48.3 | 40.1 so similarly close together as the new ones, but much lower. (depending on your definition on "similarly close together")

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011...

ketzu··on Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
It seemed to me that in the chess community, average club players are usually considered (much) stronger than the average online player. (Especially because of the much larger number of lower skill players online.)

So if you measure amateurs via club players (=what people might have considered chess amateurs before), that might give you a different result from the average online player (=what people might consider average amateurs today).

It is much easier to imagine the 1600 FIDE OTB player doing 20-40 positional evaluations than the 1200 random chess.com scrub (eg me) doing the same.

ketzu··on Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
1940s to 1980s papers (the source of the claims) might think "amateur" means something different from people today. (they probably mean club chess players)
ketzu··on Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half
The Comment above used energy consumption of 600 exajoule.

200 twh = 0.72 exajoule

0.72/600 = 0.0012

Which is off by 100 because I forgot to multiply by 100 for percent, so 0.1%.

But if we are in twh we can get the tea numbers as well: ~300 billion liters per year, with ~100Wh/litre that would be ~30TWh.

So 30 vs 200 is about as close as I expected.

But this is all just for fun.

ketzu··on Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half
Isn't that only the energy of 1 liter per person per year? I think most people heat more water than that.

(Also I think bitcoin energy usage is also on the order of 0.001% of global energy use.)

ketzu··on US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech
> There should never be any kind of bailout that does not lead to public ownership, like any investment

Why no credit based bailouts?

ketzu··on Perspectiva Kogui: A message on artificial intelligence from the Kogui people
Fair point. It was mostly the part about linking the religious beliefs to "quantum" things that triggert that impression. I've removed it, it was unnecessarily mean.
ketzu··on Perspectiva Kogui: A message on artificial intelligence from the Kogui people
I read the english version twice, and I simply don't see the profoundnes others see.

Obviously they have the same right to weigh in as everyone else, but I don't see anything new here.

edit: removed an unnecessarily mean part.

ketzu··on Show HN: UK Farming Simulator
I wanted to close the "email me" window and reflexivly clicked on the "X"... :D
ketzu··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
How is the article going to clarify the opinion of another commenter? The whole section (that I've read) on the random numbers only mentions two trials, and I questioned what the commenter made out of that. (I don't think the random number part matters in the overall complaint of the other points.)

---

For comparison:

I clicked twice to generate numbers on random.org

The second generated numbers were

    Here are your random numbers:

    13     22 

    Timestamp: 2026-10-27 10:01:22 UTC
Should I send random.org an inquiry

> why would ~~AI~~ random.org pick two numbers, out of 1 to 25? Should that not be evenly distributed instead? Why is the AI so skewed?

(The first set of numbers were 20 and 12. Unfortunately I didn't get lucky to get 13/22 on the first try.)

ketzu··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
> Why is the AI so skewed?

We are talking about 2 trials, right? Or did they do more repetitions?

What would be the "correct" numbers to get from 2 trials that show an even distribution?

ketzu··on [dead]
Shortcut for people that want to check: https://wemove.eu/
ketzu··on Node2Shell evolves to HTTP2Shell, blast radius affects many HTTP libs and apps
`OpenAICompatible` is also a widely used phrasal description of a part/version of the OpenAI API that is supported by quite a lot of endpoints.

- https://lmstudio.ai/docs/developer/openai-compat

I've seen that used as a description for 2years or so.

ketzu··on Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
From the article:

> One of the first technical considerations of the modern fire escape was carried out by the Franklin Institute in 1881 after the Randolph Street mill fire in Philadelphia trapped 35 people inside. Their conclusion was that external egress paths, in other words, the bolt-on fire escapes had, quote, “comparatively little value.” They recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations, but that internal stairways, properly constructed, afforded the best means of escape.

I took "The recognized the fact that it was the only practical choice in some situations" as a much less general statement than

> External fire escapes are the best they could do 150 years ago

ketzu··on Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
> We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

Based on the video, external fire exits were a bad idea from the start and were recommended against 150 years ago, but inertia is hard to overcome.

(unless I Completely misunderstood)

ketzu··on Libreboot 26.10 "Ominous Olive" released with UEFI, Chromebook support
Some of that reads really funny.

Also

> https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

Feels more like a software discovery list than an indictment. Thanks for the categorization.

ketzu··on CPI-U rises 7.2% annualized in September (3.7% YoY)
> The people who complain about CPI do so because CPI IIRC bases "shelter" off of rental costs.

My experience with people complaining about CPI is usually simply that the numbers don't match their feeling.

Looking at the description [1] is really interesting:

> The shelter component of the CPI includes two major items: rent of primary residence and owners' equivalent rent (OER). Rent of primary residence, or simply rent, refers to the cost of renting a place on the market. [...] OER refers to the amount of rent that a homeowner would be paid if they were renting out their own home in the market. [...] is calculated by splitting the non-recurring cost of buying a home real estate into rental payments

I got a bit tired reading [2] for more details, as it isn't even my countries CPI...

> The expenditure weight in the CPI market basket for OER is based on the following question that the CE Survey asks of consumers who own their primary residence: “If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?”

Left me a bit unsatisfied, but I'll keep it at that. The followup question would be how much rent prices deviate from housing prices. I am sure that has a lot of data though.

[1] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/24/cpi-house

[2] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

ketzu··on Gemini 4 Argon
After checking again, now it is available as well. Same as for you, it doesn't show in jules and antigravity.

However, my experience with the gemini, jules and antigravity apps was awful. So it is difficult to pin that on the model.

I wanted it to give me a proper comparisson for VPSes or server options and it took so much babysitting and it couldn't produce reliable pricing information or visulalisations.

ketzu··on CPI-U rises 7.2% annualized in September (3.7% YoY)
> clothing, *shelter*, fuels,

(Emphasis mine)

> Convenient how it never tracks housing cost increases

I think that is included in shelter. I might be wrong.

ketzu··on CPI-U rises 7.2% annualized in September (3.7% YoY)
> CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)

And CPI is "Consumer Price Index", aka inflation measurement.

For anyone unfamiliar with the title. (Like me)

ketzu··on Gemini 4 Argon
I checked gemini, set it to "gemini 4 argon" and it offered me Pro and Ultra to get access. I checked the normal plans, saw there is also plus.

Okay, so I'll get Pro to try it.

I subscribe.

No gemini 4.

The most generous reading I have is that it's a mistake. But I also downloaded the PC app, and now I really wonder why I did that, it seems to offer nothing beyond the web experience and also doesn't even know its a local app. (When asked about its capabilities it always responded with reasons pertaining to it being a web app.)

ketzu··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
The fun part is that it is effectively impossible for us to estimate the actual trade off, so we can simply assume that our prefered solution is the economically correct one!
ketzu··on Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school
Primed by discussions of Americans on corporal punishment of children, I expected much much worse.
ketzu··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
Fingerprinting based tracking is already covered by gdpr.

Fingerprinting itself is also not new.

ketzu··on Passkeys are a trap
> 2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"

I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.

ketzu··on What driving across Europe costs in tolls, vignettes, bridges and fuel
Really cool to see data like that!
ketzu··on What driving across Europe costs in tolls, vignettes, bridges and fuel
> The lesson here is that in situations where you have a clear public good that (almost) everyone needs and consumes, like roads and infrastructure, it's better for (almost) everyone if the government simply pays for it out of the general fund and doesn't try to nickle-and-dime the populace to tax "usage".

Why is that the lesson? That's not obvious to me at all.

Taxing roads can still have a worthwhile steering effect, can be used to even cost as local tax payers are not necessarily the main beneficiaries of the roads, or can make large infrastructure projects like tunnels or giant bridges worthwhile.

Obviously, there's also arguments for free access.

ketzu··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
Vps:

  * kubernetes for learning and a lot of followup just because it enable easy deployment t9 play around witg things (argocd, openbao, uptime kuma, victoriametrics, cnpg/postgres, cloud beaver, traefik)
  * keycloak for everything that supports it or can be made to support it without patching it
  * personal website (via WordPress)
  * grafana for monitoring my side project
  * foundry to play DSA with friends
  * various small hobby stuff
  * best: paperless ngx
The kubernetes infra was a pain to setup once, and a docker manager like portainer would have been enough. It was fun to learn and the declarative argocd flow makes it really easy to deploy small projects to try them out, especially as I can now ask Claude to generate all the yamls, I commit and all is up.

Minipc:

  * proxmox host
  * home assistant
  * open media vault, jelly fin for digital versions of my DVDs because it is easier than using the physical dvds
  * past: opencode/Claude dev VMs
  * Hermes to play CEO for my side project (just as an advisor, he has little actual connectivity)
  * pihole for local dns and adguard
  * Caddy for local tls
(half the ram died on my minipc making Claude dev annoying so I moved it to my pc as an on demand vm)
ketzu··on Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
> The only keys that exist twice on the keyboard are modifier keys

> The Return or Enter keys do not need to exist twice

I use the doubled enter key much more than i have ever used the secondary modifier keys.

It is very convenient for quickly entering numeric only data with one hand, especially as it is the hand that would naturally use the big enter key.

ketzu··on When random is not actually random enough
I wonder how much of the problem is how randomness is usually taught it encountered.

Most cases I have seen is a version of

    srand(time(NULL));
    int r = rand();
Most people think "I understand this and I can use this" and just throw on top whatever they need beyond that. I was most people too.
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