If 77.4B is the accurate number we should more the double all our estimations for the full dataset.

Still not sure but here are some approximations using math/python.

🚢 Exploring Battleship configurations revealed surprising results! Initially, ChatGPT guessed 49 trillion configurations for the no-touch rule. However, our exploration showed a stark contrast.

First, we attempted a recursive simulation to calculate configurations, but it timed out due to the complexity of enforcing the no-touch rule, which requires checking every possible placement and adjusting the grid dynamically. This approach was inefficient and impractical.

Next, we shifted to a combinatorial approach, calculating maximum placements for each ship and applying a buffer to account for the no-touch rule. This method was more efficient, avoiding the recursive complexity by estimating blocked space without checking every configuration.

The results were eye-opening: 77.4 billion configurations when ships can touch, but only 5.3 million when they cannot. The no-touch rule drastically reduces possibilities by blocking more grid space, highlighting how small rule changes can have huge impacts.

Our findings show that the initial guess was off by orders of magnitude for the no-touch rule, emphasizing the importance of methodical analysis in complex systems.

https://chatgpt.com/share/66e70579-6460-8000-9d09-a668caf98ddc

GM!

Does anyone know how many Battleship combinations there are?

https://russell.ballestrini.net/exploring-battleship-board-generation/

Does only God know the number? 🦊🐺

Sorry for the very late reply. I still run a dehimidifier during summer too or at least I think it kicks on. The unit does blow cold air when it's running, like a mini AC. The basement now stays a consistent cool temp all year round. It doesn't feel that much colder during the freeze of winter, it's still warm enough for a basement. Hope you found an answer sooner and found some cost savings!

Benchmark: Ad Hoc vs Precomputed Boards for Battleship Solvers

Ad Hoc Computation:

The place_ships function generates boards randomly. Its time complexity is O(n), where n is the grid size (100 in this case). However, due to the random nature of ship placement, there might be multiple attempts required to place all ships successfully, potentially increasing the effective time complexity.

For each scale:

100 boards: 100 * O(n) = O(100n)
1000 boards: 1000 * O(n) = O(1000n)
10000 boards: 10000 * O(n) = O(10000n)
100000 boards: 100000 * O(n) = O(100000n)

Given the O(n) complexity of Battleship puzzles, we conducted a benchmark to compare ad hoc board generation with loading precomputed data. Here's the code and results:

import time
import random
import itertools

#import json
import orjson as json

from battleship_boards import place_ships


def load_random_subset(file_path, num_records):
    with open(file_path, "r") as f:
        total_lines = sum(1 for _ in f)
        f.seek(0)

        start_line = random.randint(0, total_lines - num_records)
        skipped_lines = itertools.islice(f, start_line)

        selected_lines = []
        for line in skipped_lines:
            try:
                parsed_board = json.loads(line.strip())
                selected_lines.append(parsed_board)
                if len(selected_lines) == num_records:
                    break
            except json.JSONDecodeError:
                continue

        return selected_lines


def generate_boards_ad_hoc(num_boards):
    return [place_ships() for _ in range(num_boards)]


def benchmark(scale):
    print(f"\nBenchmarking for {scale} boards:")

    start_time = time.time()
    ad_hoc_boards = generate_boards_ad_hoc(scale)
    ad_hoc_time = time.time() - start_time

    start_time = time.time()
    random_subset_boards = load_random_subset("battleship_boards_merge.json", scale)
    random_subset_time = time.time() - start_time

    print(f"\nAd hoc generation time: {ad_hoc_time:.2f} seconds")
    print(f"Random subset loading time: {random_subset_time:.2f} seconds")
    print(f"Efficiency gain: {ad_hoc_time / random_subset_time:.2f}x\n")


# Run the benchmark
for scale in [100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 1000000]:
    benchmark(scale)

Results:

(base) [fox@blanka battleship-solvers]$ python battleship_boards_benchmark.py

Benchmarking for 100 boards:

Ad hoc generation time: 0.00 seconds
Random subset loading time: 0.92 seconds
Efficiency gain: 0.00x


Benchmarking for 1000 boards:

Ad hoc generation time: 0.02 seconds
Random subset loading time: 0.92 seconds
Efficiency gain: 0.02x


Benchmarking for 10000 boards:

Ad hoc generation time: 0.21 seconds
Random subset loading time: 0.99 seconds
Efficiency gain: 0.21x


Benchmarking for 100000 boards:

Ad hoc generation time: 2.11 seconds
Random subset loading time: 1.66 seconds
Efficiency gain: 1.27x


Benchmarking for 1000000 boards:

Ad hoc generation time: 22.23 seconds
Random subset loading time: 1.95 seconds
Efficiency gain: 11.40x

Key findings:

• Ad hoc generation is faster for small to medium scales (up to 10,000 boards).
• Precomputed data shows slight advantages at larger scales (100,000+ boards).

These results align with our initial Big O complexity analysis, confirming the efficiency of ad hoc generation for typical puzzle sizes.

Interestingly, 1 million boards represent only about 1/30,000th of the approximate total number of possible Battleship configurations.

Nobody seems to have a definite answer to how many unique non-overlapping battleship configurations.

There were 10 dupes per 1M sampled using sort -u | wc -l

For 30B there could be 300,000 dupes or more statistically, in the total set.

With overlaps 74B as a best guess, without was about 30B, if this is wildly off let me know.

When I took two 1M samples (two million lines) we had 49 dupes.

cat battleship_boards.json battleship_boards.json.orig | sort -u | wc -l
1999951

>>> 2000000 - 1999951
49

What domain is the namespace for?

I know you have moved on with a different comment solution but I wanted to say that this primary issue was addressed, the profile page now has a link to go back to the thread. thanks for the attention!

What stock comments? are you talking about comments showing up under 127.0.0.1 or localhost?

stefanos82

Can you re-run your tests with node --jitless flag please? It should be a fair comparison.

to keep the CPU in healthy thresholds I lowered the concurrency to 100.

   real 0m22.188s
   user 0m14.702s
   sys 0m0.449s

It's still a lot faster but less so, 5x instead of 10x

could you explain why I would want to run --jitless in production?

stefanos82

I did not ask the comparison with production in mind, but to make things fair between one runtime that executes with JIT by default versus the CPython that does not yet, but we are getting there!

Ok try now, I just switched remarkbox to have SameSite: "None" and Secure: True.

You're welcome, sure thing.

If you are not logged in when you leave a comment, your comment will appear unverified until you verify it.

To verify, look for an email from no-reply@remarkbox.com with the subject Verification Code.

Once you have verified your email address, you earn the ability to verify, edit or delete any of your comments!

no, currently the system does not manage sales tax.

this could be a feature enhancement, but it is currently not being worked on.

Otherwise what happens is you just pay tax out of your gross earnings, adjust prices accordingly.

it would be on you to pay the tax, all money goes directly to your stripe account & then your bank checking.

Cannot be configured at the moment.

Work arounds:

• fork project & self host & change the hard coded values.

• create a pull request to make it possible to configure from Namespace settings.

Hope that helps.

It's currently a manual process, if you r a coder please check out this blog post, to get started on reviewing the code & proposing a pull request.

https://russell.ballestrini.net/russell-open-sources-remarkbox-and-make-post-sell-into-public-domain/

Sorry i am busy on Sundays, please read this 🙏

https://russell.ballestrini.net/russell-open-sources-remarkbox-and-make-post-sell-into-public-domain/

We need a pull request to make all the buttons configurable & allow for auto locale languages, based on user's client defaults.

Thank you, I love you. (Christ Conciousness)

♾️✌️🏹 ✊️ ♥️

Great work, you'll also need a custom domain. We may continue to discuss over email!

Thank you so much for the kind words.

I have this dream too:

• https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact
• https://www.unturf.com

Please write me anytime, I AM gathering a team.

K

<3

link? URI?

Hello Friends, what game?

I will build you a forum to talk in, faq.remarkbox.com is for Remarkbox.

If you tell me the name of the game, I will build a dedicated forum for your game or team or guild.

<3

Hello Friends, what game?

I will build you a forum to talk in, faq.remarkbox.com is for Remarkbox.

If you tell me the name of the game, I will build a dedicated forum for your game or team or guild.

<3

Hello Friends, what game?

I will build you a forum to talk in, faq.remarkbox.com is for Remarkbox.

If you tell me the name of the game, I will build a dedicated forum for your game or team or guild.

<3

Hello Friends, what game?

I will build you a forum to talk in, faq.remarkbox.com is for Remarkbox.

If you tell me the name of the game, I will build a dedicated forum for your game or team or guild.

<3

Postfix is a MTA which runs SMTP services, the default settings should be a closed relay only allowing outbound (from the python script). The SPF record should include an option to allow this server to send email on behalf of the domain.

This log line tells you what gmail claims happened:

Nov 30 11:11:09 Ubuntu postfix/smtp[12035]: AD0EA4205D: to=<I-Do-Exist-victim@gmail.com>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.24.27]:25, delay=3.3, delays=0.01/0.01/2.2/1.1, dsn=5.7.26, status=bounced (host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.24.27] said: 550-5.7.26 This message does not have authentication information or fails to 550-5.7.26 pass authentication checks. To best protect our users from spam, the 550-5.7.26 message has been blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.26  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for more 550 5.7.26 information. s5si23402633plp.197 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command))

Are you sending through an SMTP server that is covered by the SPF record?

Reference:

• https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication

I look forward to your ideas and emails. I agree about fediverse and the barriers to getting started.

I have a feeling HTML/CSS knowledge will help a lot in the future, since it has been the lingua franca of the web and will likely carry on marking up our digital worlds in what comes next! <3

Nice to meet you! Yup, I AM familiar with the Fediverse and think it could morph into a Permacomputer implementation.

I have a Mastodon server if you want to find me there!

https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact/

You are welcome!

Short answer, I dogfood Remarkbox, as a user first, founder second.

Some reading material to persuade your trust:

• https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26038501
• https://youtu.be/RD0FZ-ddido

I am familiar with this project but I'm lacking the expertise to implement into Remarkbox.

I would like to add support if it were straight forward and I had a mentor or guide to hold my hand.

Anyone know webmentions and want to mentor me on implemention (Python, Pyramid)?

Install the public key (.pub) as a DNS TXT record, where the record name ("selector") is 20180605._domainkey and the value body is:

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQDcplYPRsqIFwXuggtH2XgQDMX+e+6sGnWdV8ld/FR9zgRAxB+DeiCEVooVvYt2JRZUEokgDFvys82Q+JTbN4qHNz19bdcBGrnTsnIFaQYpgeQYmPLdDtcWRKzTYMRNCnRmmEXyGv7WIDcaTapIq9NFgLmy1QT7ZTxuNjQtDB/2LwIDAQAB;

You may choose any selector, I happen to like to use YearMonthDay. Additionally you will substitute your public key in place of mine. Put each the line of the public key on a single line in the TXT record.

Yes, in your Namespace Settings please click the checkbox labeled "Enable Moderation".

If checked, hide new comments until approved by a Namespace moderator.

References to Permacomputers which I like for the most part (growing list):

• https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/slab/

Some prior references to Permacomputers which I like for the most part (growing list):

• https://codeberg.org/sejo/compudanzas/src/branch/main/src/permacomputing.gmo
• https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/slab/

I quit too, congrats and thank you for this essaay which resonates with me down to my core. If you want to help rebuild a better Internet, I'm trying to rally a team here at unturf dot com.

Welcome friend!

да. Remarkbox работает везде, где поддерживается HTML, включая WordPress.

da. Remarkbox rabotayet vezde, gde podderzhivayetsya HTML, vklyuchaya WordPress.

Yes. Remarkbox works anywhere HTML is supported, including WordPress..

Welcome!

Welcome!

Email is required, it's the only piece of identifying info which is mandatory to collect from new users.

Once user is verified and authenticated they no longer need to input an email.

It is up to the Namespace owner whether or not unverified comments show up.

It's allowed, checkout this page:

https://faq.remarkbox.com/67cff7b6-a1f8-11e7-9e83-040140774501/how-do-you-add-an-image-to-a-comment

Hey @sreeman -

You will definitely want to use the custom domain when registering with Remarkbox, but in fact you may register both, each will have it's own owner id so they will be treated as separate websites (for example, you could do your comment testing on the github.io domain before transitioning to the production domain)

I've never used Github pages before but it seems like it may host static web sites so any page you put the snippet will have the comment page appear. Depending on how you are building your web site's static pages will depend on if you may automatically add comments to a blog post article for example.

If you have a repository which I may look at I might be able to offer specific guidance on your HTML or static site generator.

Reach out here if you need more specific help: https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact/

Good Luck!

Remarkbox is pay-what-you-can and does not require a credit card.

Often when people experience this issue it is because Remarkbox is not able to verify that you own the domain. This can happen when there is a mismatch between the domain used to register the Namespace and the domain that your site is hosted on.

Another common issue is that Remarkbox could not reach your site or if it can, it was not able to parse the Namespace owner key (UUID).

If you have a test domain please register that domain as it's own Namespace separately.

I hope this helps!

Hey Meli, I'm glad you figured it out. Yeah the domain needs to perfectly match whatever the browser ends up with after redirects and such.

Thanks for joining the community!

Yup

Hey owenshen, I'm the founder and creator of Remarkbox. Remarkbox is now "pay what you can" and Namespace owners have access to all Namespace settings in the dashboard now, including CSS. Furthermore if you have ideas on how to make the UI feel less cramped for a better overall reader experience, please contact me if you want to help! Thanks for using the service and the support.

As for the particular issue, I thought most browsers allow for extending textarea tags by grabbing the right-bottom corner and dragging down. My assumption was that people planning to write a longer comment would use that. Perhaps that assumption is flawed.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html

By default the avatar is built in using the first letter of the user's display name. A user may toggle to gravatar from their user settings page to use that instead.

Thanks for the feedback, I've recently upgraded the Remarkbox code base to Python 3 and I've updated the blog post with my new solution which should work for both Python 2 and Python 3.

Thank you for the feedback, I've updated the instructions above.

Remarkbox works anywhere that supports HTML.

This is a config option in the Namespace settings. It's up to the site owner to choose.

Hey there YourDigitalRights -

You seem to have a good understanding of the types of tools Namespace owners may need to help comply with these new legislation and efforts. Could I setup some time to discuss what we have and what we need? If yes please email me to setup a meeting.

https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact/

For read only operations we have a cache-able endpoint which returns all threads and comments in a single JSON endpoint.

Look at your Namespace setting for more details.

No endpoints are currently planned for API crud interactions but I understand the desire and benefit and will think about the possibility.

I'm looking to build a toggle button for dark mode.

OK, good luck!

Should, yes.

Confirmed. We should address this too. I'll take a look at it shortly.

Update: this was fixed in production.

Well yeah, haha.

Reference: https://my.remarkbox.com/cc62eb06-8e4b-11ea-93cc-040140774501/clicking-a-user-on-a-site-with-remarkbox-installed-shows-all-that-user-s-remarkbox-comments-everywhere#c7e3bb2a-68eb-11eb-8f86-040140774501

Got any opinions on what we should do instead regarding this? quick fix would be to remove this page entirely.

I think we should be all set, you should be able to do the moderation from here. Either approve or disable nodes. There's not much more to do besides that I think.

Great work on the CSS over here, looks really good!

I'm gathering people interested in seeing or modifying the source over on IRC server Freenode in channel Remarkbox.

If you have a bitbucket.org account please let me know. (otherwise I'm considering moving the code base to gitlab or github)

Hmmm. Good call out. We should address this.

Wondering if you want to see the codebase or help tweak things on the internals. BTW that moderate button was a mistake. I'm not sure why it was there, but it was added back in May 2018. I think I was distracted building out two features at once. I'm shipping a change to remove the moderation link.

The code base is Python, are you familiar?

Ok I was able to reproduce the issue. I will have a fix shortly. Likely after dinner I will pick it up.

Oh you know what, I don't think I've tested the moderation code in a while, I don't have it enabled in my Namespaces so a defect might have found its way into the code base.

I'll follow up shortly, going to look at logs.

This might be useful for dark theme:

https://my.remarkbox.com/embed/ns/sci-hub.41610.org/sci-hub.41610.org.1612547886629.css

You may control CSS from the Namespace settings.

Very cool, love the art. Thanks for joining up more goodies planned for the future!

Yup, Remarkbox reaches out to verify your control over the given domain by checking for the UUID in the snippet.

Remarkbox is likely unable to reach your web page. I'll take a look and follow up on this thread.

Internet credits and maybe build a team to build more things and give those things away for free too.

I cut a personal video regarding this and questions about the source code during my lunch break yesterday:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD0FZ-ddido

Mostly I'm giving it away because I can and nobody is going to stop me.

I'm looking for Python engineers who want to hack on features or change behaviour for their own sites and want to contribute to the cause. Planning to grow Remarkbox as big as possible and eventually allow it to become a "utility".

Not yet, but this might be worth creating a new thread on the Meta forum regarding this feature request.

So currently Remarkbox supports hot linked images.

For example:

<img src="https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-minified.png" width="200px">

renders like this:

In the future, in the Namespace settings, we will allow an access/secret API keypair and an S3 bucket or Digital Ocean Space to hold user attachments.

I will have to deplatform any site which does not follow the terms of service. That said, If I believe in their cause, I might try to help them find an alternative place to run Remarkbox and we would export them out of Remarkbox proper. (I'm sure you have ideas). If you want to discuss this further we might want to take this "offline".

The original title was:

Show HN: Remarkbox is now pay what you can

The HackerNews mods switched it to:

Show HN: Remarkbox – Hosted comments without ads or tracking

Because I learned early on that there isn't any money in that and I have better ideas in the works for targeting that market, for example: makepostsell.com

And I can give away Remarkbox for free because I have money and I know how to scale stuff for cheap.

Ah, yes, that's one of my favourite episodes. Great series, I wish I could write some episodes, the stuff my unconscious provides me is much darker.

Anyways, yeah, my idea tries to figure out how I would build the tech in the safest way possible. Nobody wants to actually watch uncut work, so there would need to be a workflow for shooting, editing, publishing, and searching, and hopefully ways for near instant recall.

This is part of the reason why I would want the raw video to be kept "at location" and protected that way. It's only a problem when you send the raw stream to somebody else's computers where it becomes a privacy issue.

I'm a YouTuber who uses the tech in this blog post to manage my raw data.

Its no longer fiction...

https://youtu.be/OU-YTwb8_Wo

Hey as you might have heard Remarkbox is now Free!

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html

If you would like to see the source code and potentially hack on the code base, please reach out to me: https://russell.ballestrini.net/contact/

A number of people have asked for various features or behaviours and I'm planning to build the ones that are important to me.

That said, if you know how to code, and there is an over lap with something you wish existed or some behaviour you think Remarkbox should do or do differently, and you have the skills to work with Python, I'd be willing to get you a copy of the code base and help you get it up and running on your workstation. That way you can build out your branch and get it reviewed and merged upstream.

I have a number of projects in mind from the feedback on this latest HN post (we hit #3 for a short while!)

Anyways if this sounds like you lets get in touch and scale Remarkbox to the moon. : )

If you are wondering why Remarkbox isn't open source already please watch my very personal response video I cut today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD0FZ-ddido

It's in all of our best interest to keep the Remarkbox source code closed, for now at least while we grow and take market share.

If you click the link, it will verify your account and you will be able to receive email notifications as well as configure a username and edit your comments. It's not a phish, it's working as expected.

Yeah those junipers grow tall, I've no idea where to grow them yet. Maybe some guerilla gardening in my future, lol!

I agree that it's moderated more than it needs to be and also bias'd toward AWS (erm Amazon) over Google, for example the popularity of the Beso exit letter to employees.

I'm sure eventually we will have a "Hacker News" for Googlers where only Amazon is smeared in public. The Internet is fracturing more into silos.

I'm just going to join both when it happens, diversity of thought and all that.

I'm not going to inflame the situation because I really love HackerNews but my post was sent to the 2nd page while their mods tried to figure out what to do about me.

They renamed my title and then the post had to fight its way back to the top.

That said I'm grateful for the chance to have found you! Cheers mate!

Welcome!

Thanks mate, you've seemed to have figured it out.

Thanks!

Hey there, we don't have Akismet integration yet. I'm going to place that into the backlog. Please consider creating a thread over on the Meta forum with other ideas.

Welcome!

So Remarkbox works even when Javascript is disabled. This is a feature, not a bug that the page reloads but yes, we might be able to enhance the experience when we detect Javascript as a capability of the browser.

Welcome!

I can't review the safety of this TOR link. Please be careful if you click it.

Awesome. Glad it makes sense to you. Keep blogging my friend!

Thank you for the suggestion. We should make a thread regarding this idea in the Meta forum.

Welcome!

The ability to remove or edit a comment, or lock a thread.

Eek, if you can reproduce the CSRF issue please create a thread on the Meta page.

Did you conflate the two blog posts? I don't mention disqus at all in this post.

Welcome. Good luck and keep blogging, friend!

Actually not all parts are open source, yet. Open source would be the end game if pushed to it since I already have lots of open source out there.

Disqus started properly and then sold themselves to an advertisement agency. I would not consider them big tech but I would consider what they have done wrong to the site owners and the public at large.

I think when the first person complains about spam, that's when we introduce the option of using custom Akismet API keys and then build out some UI for separating spam from ham.

Thank you!

Thanks mate. Verify your email address for the ability to edit comments.