Hacker News: DougMerritt

New comment by DougMerritt in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

DougMerritt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:55:15 +0000

It's a humorous reference to a (in-)famous serious post by Stallman, see https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html

New comment by DougMerritt in "OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio"

DougMerritt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:47:40 +0000

1. It says it is $8/month, which is not mentioned on the github page, so I had been thinking it was free in addition to being AGPL-3.0; it links to https://snapify.it/ which is where I see the fee.

2. It says "for everyone" but looks like it might be Linux-specific, and it doesn't say anything about which OSes are supported.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Introduction to Computer Music (2009) [pdf]"

DougMerritt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:36:21 +0000

This appears to be mercifully shorter and less intimidating than the must-have bible, "Curtis Roads. The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press, Cambs, MA, 1996".

It says it was originally published by Wiley in 2009, and the rights reverted to the author in 2025, whereupon the author released it on the net for free.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Almighty Lisp: Lisp and Emacs Essentials Book"

DougMerritt — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:47:55 +0000

I think he should fix that, but meanwhile see: https://almightylisp.com/book/essentials

New comment by DougMerritt in "Are compilers deterministic?"

DougMerritt — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:13:15 +0000

It's not uncommon to have a regression test for compilers that are written in their own language (e.g. some C compilers): compile each new version with itself, then use that to compile itself again, then use the result on unit tests or whatever, which should yield the same results as before.

The point being that determinism of a particular form is expected and required in the instances where they do that.

(I'm not arguing for or against that, I'm simply saying I've seen it in real life projects over the years.)

New comment by DougMerritt in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

DougMerritt — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:35:14 +0000

That's an excellent question, but the answer would depend on goals and the evaluation system used.

It seems to me that CEOs have a different opinion than anyone who cares instead about actual people.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Stop using natural language interfaces"

DougMerritt — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:20:43 +0000

SO is the website Stack Overflow.

New comment by DougMerritt in "New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books"

DougMerritt — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:52:24 +0000

Life mimics art.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Alzheimer's disrupts circadian rhythms of plaque-clearing brain cells"

DougMerritt — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 06:28:33 +0000

Yep; this has frustrated me for two decades.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Ask HN: Do LLMs perform worse in languages other than English?"

DougMerritt — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 19:11:40 +0000

For the languages that we westerners regard as having very exotic grammars -- not like Chinese, which is comparatively straightforward, but like the aboriginal languages of Australia -- AFAIK there's no experience on such subjects yet.

For the world's most common/famous languages (English, Mandarin, Portuguese, etc) there's every reason to think that it's just a question of how much training data is available for training up an LLM.

In particular note that the Chinese experiments with their Deepseek LLM technology does well with both Mandarin and English, which all by itself is fairly illustrative.

If "exotic" grammars turned out to pose a major problem for LLMs, that would possibly challenge some of the most mainstream theories about linguistics, so I regard that as unlikely.

New comment by DougMerritt in "A quiet change to RSA"

DougMerritt — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 02:06:55 +0000

And it's not even a full moon.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently"

DougMerritt — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 22:33:27 +0000

You're arguing with people talking about how things are currently by talking about how things could be or should be and how people should change how things are.

That can be a great topic on its own, but it's not the same topic others are discussing.

And unless I missed it, you didn't say "let's switch the topic", you just went off in your own direction.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough (2023)"

DougMerritt — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:53:07 +0000

Why aren't they satisfied with merely pondering strats made in US vs Mexico vs Japan vs Indonesia? Careful reviews of quality versus price (which of course varied over time) always showed more correlation with sometimes-unwarranted reputation than with reality.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Cosmoe: BeOS Class Library on Top of Wayland"

DougMerritt — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:35:51 +0000

Since the topic arose, FWIW, here in the U.S. it's common to have one power socket in a room (e.g. living room, bedroom) controlled by wall switch, and multiple other power outlets lacking such a switch.

I'm not in the industry, but I think the idea is that, in the absence of built-in lighting, one should be able to add lamps to a room that can be turned on/off by a handy power switch next to the room's entrance.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Snorting the AGI with Claude Code"

DougMerritt — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 23:18:39 +0000

> It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all.

Those are two different groups of humans, as you implied yourself.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study"

DougMerritt — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 19:49:35 +0000

...which needs more to explain it, such as (if true): "the diversity originating in Africa did not migrate out of Africa, and the gene lines that did leave Africa did not develop as much diversity as had existed in the ancestral gene pool, despite facing far more diversity in climate than exists in Africa".

And then I would again ask of the latter, "what? Why not?"

Ultimately: Why did Africa stimulate so much gene pool diversity? It seems more homogenous in environments than the rest of the world that Homo Sapiens emigrated to.

And there would have been cross-breeding between African subpopulations. Environmental barriers in sub-Saharan Africa are minimal in terms of gene movement, aren't they?

New comment by DougMerritt in "Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study"

DougMerritt — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:39:04 +0000

Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.

New comment by DougMerritt in "Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study"

DougMerritt — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:37:28 +0000

What lead to this?

New comment by DougMerritt in "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College"

DougMerritt — Sat, 10 May 2025 23:41:44 +0000

"Let rich kids party and hook up for 4 years, and then hand them a well-paying career."

It's been done, of course (by their parents in those cases).

New comment by DougMerritt in "Show HN: I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code"

DougMerritt — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 23:31:28 +0000

Sometimes, sometimes just optical, but in any case, there's even a guy, Ken Sherriff, who has been doing this as a hobby for ages. It's not like this is merely theoretical.

https://www.righto.com/search/label/reverse-engineering