Live data from Hacker News

Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

lichess.org

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#11
post #5

Lichess is incredibly well optimized [0] (and an amazing public service). I'm sure that this is very cost effective for TTT, so a win-win. [0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...

Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games. It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly mor…

> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.

That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.

Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#13

The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor. I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel th…

All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#14

The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor. I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel th…

Business is business. Non-competes expire. Don't waste your feelings on chess.com.

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#15
Lichess, you guys rock.

Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.

I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.

Keep on the amazing work,

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games. It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly mor…

> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest. That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clo…

Depending on the development cost of being in the cloud, it was probably the right choice. Optimizing for cost per user when you don't have product market fit is probably the worse early optimization.

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#17

The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor. I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel th…

All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.

Well for the chess world, open source world (BDFL), etc probably okay. For real world governments...

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#18
Love Lichess.

The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.

Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.

Re: Lichess and Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games. It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly mor…

> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest. That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clo…

> That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.

This. I kind of wish if more people knew about it. Also even 1% can be too big. I mean Lichess is literally having millions of people if not more, It's definitely within the 0.001% group.

I kind of wish to do something in this space in the future, I do feel like its just that people don't know about it. I have been thinking to approach some companies and just tell them how much they can save if they migrate and use open source solutions and these dedi servers and setting things on top of these dedi's/vps's.

I have been thinking of (within future), to contact a few companies and to actually have them save net money from migration while charging them a few hundred bucks a month and I can just have a very handful selection of companies (say 15-20) to have enough money so that I can eat french fries and manage their servers!

It feels a win-win-win situation for everyone except AWS/GCP/Azure who wish to suggest that scalability is hard etc. and this false premise for most if not essentially* all businesses.

Personally, I am also saying things like slack for example, I don't understand why people might want slack when things like matrix exist and can be self-hosted securely with proper 3-2-1 backups and for most intents and purposes is actually good if not better than slack.

To me, a bit of concern though with this and I am not sure if it is well-founded is what if I set these servers for them, now I will wish to set them up so that they have as little errors as possible but what if the companies start to think that I am doing nothing and then they stop paying my contracts after I have set them up on these dedicated. I guess I hope that they believe in the value of human support and I guess I am also a bit unsure of where do I find such businesses are.

My brother does some freelancing on the side and I ask him these things and he mentions that mostly he has to use AWS, I mention why not dedi and he says that he does what he is asked to do and that company wants him to use AWS so he uses AWS, so I guess within this context, I need companies who are atleast interested in being a bit more open about thinking about dedicated servers.

I am sure that there would be companies interested in all of this and I am interested in doing things for them but I am not sure about the middle part of connecting the two. I would be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts on all of this and have a nice day emsh!

Post reply on HN