Hacker News: AMerrit

New comment by AMerrit in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

AMerrit — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:40:17 +0000

Yep, I worked at a small company that got bought by a bigger one. We had a solid if aging product to support which was one of the big players for the niche. Once there was a leadership change, 2/3 of the devs got put on building a replacement software. Then in a couple of years our subgroup got spun off and sold to PE and the v2 project was shelved for another brand new design to align with the new ownership. I left just before the spin-off, but witnessed how the original software slowly rotted away and all of the marketshare dominance we had for that area slipped away.

Devs love new tech and the product people love something new to put their stamp on, but chasing that high can be ruinous.

New comment by AMerrit in "Chess invariants"

AMerrit — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:43:38 +0000

A nice read. I've been playing around with my own chess program and trying to implement a lot of chess variants like Double Chess and 7 Queen's Chess.

New comment by AMerrit in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

AMerrit — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:32:51 +0000

I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.

New comment by AMerrit in "Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop"

AMerrit — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:09:20 +0000

Yeah it's def going for an XP clone feel. Although it's not 1:1, I assume to skirt copyright.

New comment by AMerrit in "Overseas fakers using AI videos to push a narrative of UK decline, BBC finds"

AMerrit — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:39:37 +0000

Yes, this is story immediately came to mind to me. It also shows that the idea of poor people in the global south doing this for money isn't quite the entire story either. Most of the people exposed seem to be young Dutch people trying to make a quick buck attacking Canada.

New comment by AMerrit in "Toxicity on Social Media"

AMerrit — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:32:18 +0000

There are still good niche and well moderated subreddits, but the big ones are pretty annoying. Lots of most extreme version of headline/summary to get the clicks. Tonnes of bot comments, especially with the rise of LLM. Repetitive joke responses.

New comment by AMerrit in "Coursera and Udemy are now one company"

AMerrit — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:25:51 +0000

Coursera used to be good, and I've found the occasional good course on Udemy, but neither are particularly great right now in my opinion. Well curated learning materials are such a unicorn.

New comment by AMerrit in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

AMerrit — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:24:45 +0000

I worked for a small company acquired by IBM in 2011. We had a good 5-6 year run where our product sales went up (largely because so many IBM people were selling it) and we were largely left alone. Once things slowed down a bit the IBM rot set in quick though. These days I think all that's left is a skeleton crew maintaining the obligatory long term contracts around the main product, every other part of the original company has been picked clean.

New comment by AMerrit in "The Stupid Programmer Manifesto"

AMerrit — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 13:46:01 +0000

Some of the things in this are a bit much, but I think some of this comes from the cult of the 10x developer. I feel like I'm a 10x developer on some very specific things, and a 0.5x developer when it comes to others, but that I'm mostly an average 1x dev. I think a lot of devs are like this, they get really good at some specific stuff, but feel lost as soon as they start looking at some new project on a totally different stack or in a different area. Like when I first migrated to using git from svn I definitely had a productivity drop from screwing stuff up, but I eventually adjusted. Most devs I know went through something similar, shot themselves in the foot a few times and then acclimatized to the new tool, not many instantly switched without a productivity drop.

New comment by AMerrit in "Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)"

AMerrit — Tue, 02 May 2023 16:53:49 +0000

I agree with this take somewhat. I used to work with a guy who would talk about his great Sunday afternoon spent coding, or take a week off to write a book about being a more efficient developer. A fine enough co-worker and very dedicated to his job, but when he burnt out he burnt out hard.

Lots of developers have various degrees of that "revenge of the nerds" syndrome, but many (including myself) get over it somewhat as you get through a few waves of cool new tech fads, crunch times, and boring projects that have to get done and it just becomes a job to do.

New comment by AMerrit in "‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’"

AMerrit — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:05:28 +0000

I've been working in an office environment for over a decade now, and every time I start at a new office figuring out the scanners/printers is always a hassle. This really isn't a Gen Z thing as much of a scanners/printers suck thing.

New comment by AMerrit in "The legacy of fy_iceworld, Counter-Strike’s divisive, popular custom map (2020)"

AMerrit — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:13:08 +0000

I didn't do Starcraft, but remember "Footies" maps in WC3 which sounds exactly the same as "Commandos". It was insanely popular, but never lived on like DOTA did. It is sort of funny to think of it as a sort of evolutionary dead end, or maybe it lives on somewhere else?

New comment by AMerrit in "The legacy of fy_iceworld, Counter-Strike’s divisive, popular custom map (2020)"

AMerrit — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 13:44:44 +0000

Wow, that comment and the archive.org link he posted seal it for me. I played fy_iceworld a bunch at my local lan cafe a lot 2002-2003 but never thought that it could be something escaped from the internet cafes of Taiwan made by a 15 year old.

New comment by AMerrit in "Maryland law limits homeowner association control over eco-friendly yards"

AMerrit — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 13:21:53 +0000

The freedom to conform

New comment by AMerrit in "Canada police charge Hydro-Quebec employee with China espionage"

AMerrit — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 16:35:27 +0000

This sounds more like a case of an ambitious dummy being prodded into being a stooge that leaks IP rather than purposeful espionage on his part.

New comment by AMerrit in "1 in 4 Gen Z-ers plan to become social media influencers"

AMerrit — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:55:54 +0000

Yeah I had dreams of making video games when I was younger (and still daydream about it sometimes now) and even got to the point of doing some work in modding communities and playing around with my own simple games/clones. Lots of these Gen Zers will likely start TikTok channels or such, but once you find out how difficult it is to make it to the top you tend to at least redirect. Led me to a job in Cybersecurity, and I'm sure most of these kids will turn out fine as well.

New comment by AMerrit in "Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework"

AMerrit — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:22:05 +0000

Looks like a schema for data in a SIEM+ but without the actual SIEM software. I like how the categories are broken down in this and the depth of the fields. Very data first, but there really could be more breadth to the categorizations.

New comment by AMerrit in "Elon Musk says that the environment would be fine if we doubled our population"

AMerrit — Tue, 17 May 2022 18:34:46 +0000

Sure we could double the human population, but it all depends on where we cluster and how much of a drop in standard of living people are willing to put up with.

New comment by AMerrit in "TikTok's ad revenue to surpass Twitter and Snapchat combined in 2022"

AMerrit — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 17:26:18 +0000

TikTok ads are all video based afaik. Since video ads are more "valuable" I totally get how that could give them a nice boost over twitter or snapchat as they grow.

New comment by AMerrit in "Are film critics losing sync with audiences?"

AMerrit — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 16:53:42 +0000

Interesting that the gap is with lower budget movies. It goes along with my gut feeling that mid budget movies are disappearing (I have no data to back that up), and it's as if the studios have optimized movie making into two types:

#1 The big budget crowd pleasing blockbusters. A few flop, but generally audiences like them and they don't do anything critics can complain about too much.

#2 Highly targeted low budget movies. There are small but consistent audiences with endless appetites for horror, action/thriller, etc films even at lower budgets. This seems to be where the biggest disconnect is, the genre fans highly rate their genre films even if it's direct to streaming fluff, while the critics see them as flawed, and broader audiences just don't watch them.