Hacker News: dbdoug

New comment by dbdoug in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

dbdoug — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:33:57 +0000

> you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.

Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one

New comment by dbdoug in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

dbdoug — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:18:05 +0000

Hey, I'm nearly 80 years old. I haven't written a line of code in over 10 years. But I'm coding now, with the help of Claude & Gemini, and having a great time. Each block of Python or Applescript that they generate for me is a much better learning tool than a book - I'm going through the code line by line and researching everything. And I'm also learning how to deal with LLMs and their strengths & weaknesses. Correcting them from time to time when they screw up. Lots of fun.

New comment by dbdoug in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

dbdoug — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:25:04 +0000

From Gemini:When you take those two shapes and combine them, the resulting image looks like an umbrella.

New comment by dbdoug in "Show HN: I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM"

dbdoug — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:09:39 +0000

Houses have 4 sides....

New comment by dbdoug in "The AI coding trap"

dbdoug — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:16:50 +0000

>We _already_ live in a world where most of us spend much of our time reading and trying to comprehend code written by others from the past.

In 1969 as a newly hired graduate working for the largest construction company in the country, one of my first assignments was to read through a badly formatted COBOL source code listing on paper, line by line, with 2 others. Each of us had a printout of a different version of the software, trying to discover where exactly the three versions were giving different outputs. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

New comment by dbdoug in "Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia"

dbdoug — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 03:29:37 +0000

And a month's supply of generic tadafila 5mg in Brasil costs less than USD$7.00

New comment by dbdoug in "Viagra improves brain blood flow and could help to prevent dementia"

dbdoug — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 03:20:10 +0000

I can (at the ripe old age of 78) confirm this completely. Without stimulation, nothing except facial flushing. With stimulation, and only with stimulation, a functioning erection.

New comment by dbdoug in "Tell HN: Automatic fraud detection is making my life hell"

dbdoug — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:36:47 +0000

Strange. I live in Canada, and visit Brazil often. I have never had any trouble using my only Amazon account to log in to Amazon USA, Amazon Brazil, or Amazon Canada. I have both Brazilian and Canadian addresses set up as shipping options on my account, and I often make purchases on Amazon Brazil while in Canada and have them shipped to the Brazilian address.

New comment by dbdoug in "Fatal grizzly attack renews debate over how many bears are too many"

dbdoug — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 16:45:06 +0000

How about 'Fatal car crash renews debate over how many cars are too many'

New comment by dbdoug in "iPad Pro M2"

dbdoug — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 19:31:54 +0000

Paperlike is pretty pricey. I bought a similar screen cover on Amazon Canada by Bellmond for CAD$20. Works great!

New comment by dbdoug in "Explore ISS on Google Maps"

dbdoug — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 16:37:04 +0000

I have the same problem in Chrome

New comment by dbdoug in "How law enforcement is trying to avoid disabling Face ID"

dbdoug — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 03:17:51 +0000

I have blue blocking glasses (by Cyxus) and Face ID works fine with them on or off.

New comment by dbdoug in "The Octonion Math That Could Underpin Physics"

dbdoug — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 04:26:44 +0000

'Looking like an interplanetary traveler, with choppy silver bangs that taper to a point between piercing blue eyes' WTF? for a few minutes, I thought this was a serious article by a serious journalist. Apparently not.

New comment by dbdoug in "The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services"

dbdoug — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 23:47:47 +0000

I pay and, as I mentioned before, when I open the Guardian main site, Ghostery only picks up 4 trackers.

New comment by dbdoug in "The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services"

dbdoug — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 03:01:34 +0000

I just tried opening the Guardian site and Ghostery reports only 4 trackers. One of which is Facebook.

New comment by dbdoug in "Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?"

dbdoug — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 18:10:17 +0000

VBA/MS Access - active databases for several clients.

New comment by dbdoug in "Thank HN: From Google form to $1k in revenue in one month"

dbdoug — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 03:21:35 +0000

FWIW, I just turned 70 and I'm still being offered more coding work than I want. It is VBA, though :)

New comment by dbdoug in "Russian ship loitering near undersea cables"

dbdoug — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 01:11:13 +0000

I'm a daily user of the marinetraffic site, and it's pretty fragile at any time.

New comment by dbdoug in "Average age of StackExchange users for each tag"

dbdoug — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:18:14 +0000

I would be interested in seeing an age profile. I, for one, removed my birth date after being flamed about my age. I've been programming since 1962 :)

New comment by dbdoug in "IQ scores in relation to web browser choice"

dbdoug — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 05:08:42 +0000

A couple of points. First: In the paper, Aptiquant claims that over 100,000 took a Weschler (IV) test in 4 weeks. According to wikipedia, a Weschler test takes about 15 minutes. That's an awful lot of people looking for free IQ tests, and spending 15 minutes each on the site. Second: Check out Aptiquant's site. Maybe I'm stupid, but I was unable to find a single active 'Free IQ Test' link.

And another - Aptiquant's results (if they are real) are from a self-selected group. Does the need to take a free online IQ test relate to your IQ?