Hacker News: JonathanMerklin

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:54:30 +0000

Straight Outta Lynwood was a great album. One of the CDs that I took out of my case the most often as a struggling nerdling who was still a year or two away from having scrounged up enough spare cash for a secondhand iPod.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

JonathanMerklin — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:16:38 +0000

I'll bite. What's your argument, or at least the comment-sized gist of it?

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

JonathanMerklin — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:26:46 +0000

I agree with almost all of what you have stated, save for a minor nitpick: I frankly don't think most functional adults think about the Fields Medal, similar annual prizes, or the qualities of the innovations of their candidate pools. I also think that that's totally okay. I think among a certain learned cohort of adults it's okay to hope that, and I think it's okay to imagine an idealized world where having an opinion on this sort of matter is a baseline, but I don't think it's realistic or fair to imply that (what I believe handwavily to be a majority of) adults are nonfunctional for not sharing this understanding.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "S.A.R.C.A.S.M: Slightly Annoying Rubik's Cube Automatic Solving Machine"

JonathanMerklin — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 15:36:06 +0000

The cyclic group generated by e.g. RU has order 105 (so 210 total turns or 105 of each side, alternated). If you have some math know-how, check out [1]. If you don't, take my word for it: when I was a teenager playing around with cubes, I once had a similar experience trying to do the same thing you did - when I went relatively quickly it never returned to the solved state, but when I was very deliberate about each turn, I got the 105 result (not by counting back then, but by rough time estimate given the figure I just looked up). Both you and I probably accidentally threw in one or more double-turns (like a U2) in there, or undercounted and gave up well before the cycle had completed (I, too, had thought I'd made "hundreds" of moves).

[1] https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/4127/algebra-club/rubik-ta... - slide 41

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Jules, our asynchronous coding agent"

JonathanMerklin — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:09:21 +0000

I think it's possible that that may be an additional benefit (for Google), but to me it seems overwhelmingly more likely that the main explanation here is Conway's Law.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history"

JonathanMerklin — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:47:26 +0000

You've identified a potential strategy by which a computer can play like a 1300-rated player, but not one where it will "play like a 1300-rated human". Patzers can still find and make moves in your set of N (if only by blind chance).

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace (2012)"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 18:35:53 +0000

I want to note for the HN crowd that the book is in the "just technical enough to inform yet not scare off the layman, but not technical enough for the practitioner" nonfiction subgenre. Critically, there are a number of finer details that DFW gets wrong; if you're mathematically inclined and intend to read this, I suggest pairing it with a printed copy of Prabhakar Ragde's errata document hosted by the DFW fansite The Howling Fantods ([1]).

[1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/images/enmerrata.pdf

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:46:47 +0000

Perhaps not the hyphenated form, but I'd had a chat with a friend a couple days ago where we meandered around some surface level philosophy and I paraphrased a section or two from Thus Spoke Zarathustra about the rabble ([1]), so I'm sure that's why it was front of mind. I only used it twice just to be clear that it was referring to the same thing, I didn't intend for any semantic satiation or emphasis through repetition. My apologies!

[1] http://www.literaturepage.com/read/thusspakezarathustra-107....

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:00:55 +0000

Genuinely asking: is that huge in terms of their install base or revenue, or is that huge in terms of PR ramifications (like, "vocal minority" type of deal)? In my younger days I'd've had a heavily skewed pro-gamer and pro-authority-of-the-gamer-rabble viewpoint, but now at this phase of my life I can't help but feel the majority of the places I see Windows are all in business and education contexts (so just business, heyo). I'd be curious to know if the gamer-rabble still holds the kind of weight in the social media aggregate that, say, got the Kinect-as-mandatory stuff walked back.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Cold showers on overhyped topics (2017)"

JonathanMerklin — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 20:00:06 +0000

I get what you're saying, but "rule 34 also applies to scientific research" is a bizarre way to word it; the way I'd interpret that phrase out of context is just that it logically follows because scientific research is a subset of "things that exist".

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too (2022)"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 17:42:20 +0000

I don't claim to be in SBF's head, but the gist of the rationale for this type of thought is a hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time. Learning facts about reality is the only reason to consume text content; any purposeful reduction of signal-to-noise ratio is folly. Books should be blogposts. Blogposts should be bulleted digests. Maximize information density to minimize wasted time. Fiction is pure waste.

I feel like most people who have ever had that mental model of reading evolve past that type of thinking and settle into the "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" mode of thinking by the time they reach high school (yours truly included). Not to mention one often needs to take a moment for newly acquired information to "settle", and language that's (loosely) bridgework between facts is what grants that moment.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics [pdf]"

JonathanMerklin — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 05:05:16 +0000

Worth noting for the interested reader that's disappointed upon reading your comment that there's also a Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (ISBN-13: 978-0691150390, ISBN-10: 0691150397).

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "History of Math"

JonathanMerklin — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 20:50:47 +0000

A math history book about one specific area of study written more in a popsci style that I liked: one of my favorite authors (David Foster Wallace) wrote "Everything & More: A Compact History of Infinity" which I'd call a 7/10 pop math experience and a 6/10 DFW experience, which is still a pretty good deal.

If you're no Math PhD but you are mathematically inclined (e.g. I studied plenty of math as an undergraduate but left to play the software industry game thereafter) you should have the errata document handy (I'll link the parent page that has other paratext [1]) - the author is a math enthusiast but not a mathematician and gets some of the finer details incorrect.

I also read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh and recall liking it, but I can't recall if it holds up under either mathematical scrutiny or the scrutiny of a more refined palate.

[1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/everything-and-more.ht...

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia"

JonathanMerklin — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 21:02:59 +0000

I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste the "æ", I learned that "alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether", which was enough news to me that I felt it worth commenting. Fair play!

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge"

JonathanMerklin — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 06:44:15 +0000

I haven't heard the "square root of employees are critical" rule of thumb. I have previously heard of Price's Law - paraphrasing: "half of the output is created by a square root of the organization". But as I understand it, there's not a notion of criticality. What if 80% of your output is critical? What if the n-n^0.5 group is on critical output and your square root group is slinging schlock at high volume?

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "“tipflation” and “tip creep” are sparking a backlash"

JonathanMerklin — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 21:50:32 +0000

What fight do you recommend I take? The way I see it, if I balk at additional fees, taxes, and tips, there is a relatively high risk that I don't even receive the product or service - which is no different than my current strategy of, loosely, "spending within my means plus a 50% buffer", with the added detriment of wasted time and effort on the haggling process.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "“tipflation” and “tip creep” are sparking a backlash"

JonathanMerklin — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 19:33:35 +0000

The system is bad, no doubt, but I personally have spent almost a decade living and interacting with reality with a hard fast personal rule that every numeric value I see fronted by a "$" is only 2/3 of the actual price, and adjust my purchase habits accordingly. It's not a hard conversion to make, and the amount of times it's an underestimation are greatly eclipsed by the number of times that it's spot on or even wrong enough to be a "good deal". Life's too short to be a pessimist all the time, but in certain contexts it helps to live by the adage that if you expect the worst, you'll rarely be disappointed.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "Even More Bay Area House Party"

JonathanMerklin — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 19:47:58 +0000

FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which game the author/commenter wishes to finish.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”"

JonathanMerklin — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:41:11 +0000

Yeah, I've used it in Haskell for ignored variables, holes, type wildcards, etc.

Another interesting little rabbit hole that this little conversation led me to: In the Chrome (and Firefox) developer tools, the variable for the previous output is "$_", which I imagine that is the case because of how common it was to assign the main export of the Underscore.js library to "_" (and in the days before a lot of websites would mostly e.g. have their site's code in a webpack-induced closure, they would e.g. grab underscore (or lodash, in those times?) from a CDN and pollute the global scope).

Since _ is a valid identifier, it also turns out that in Node.js's REPL, it warns you when you clobber _, but (weirdly) not if the clobbering is with a block-scoped declaration.

  $ node
  Welcome to Node.js v18.12.1.
    Type ".help" for more information.
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  'asdf'
  > var _ = 1
  Expression assignment to _ now disabled.
  undefined
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  1

  $ node
  Welcome to Node.js v18.12.1.
  Type ".help" for more information.
  > const _  = 1
  undefined
  > _
  1
  > "asdf"
  'asdf'
  > _
  1

And obviously, there's no warning for assigning to it outside of the REPL (`node -e "var _ = 2;"`), which makes obvious sense to me.

New comment by JonathanMerklin in "A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”"

JonathanMerklin — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 23:43:15 +0000

I just checked and this is true for the Node.js REPL (Tried in v12, v14, v16, and v18) as well, which I'm also just learning for the first time (and I had the same workflow as you before this). Neat!