Hacker News: dougiejones

New comment by dougiejones in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

dougiejones — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 03:25:57 +0000

The solution is rather simple: make all keywords in the language as offensive as possible, and require every file to start with a header comment for instructions to build a homemade bomb.

New comment by dougiejones in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

dougiejones — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:38:51 +0000

TFA mentions "the contributor's" stance on Swift.

New comment by dougiejones in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

dougiejones — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:56:21 +0000

As an example, I don't know if this person/machine read this thread or was reached out to by the moderators but they seemingly first had an empty post and reacted to feedback and generated a useless "backstory" to their show hn post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036610

New comment by dougiejones in "Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge”"

dougiejones — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:55:44 +0000

Impressive work and dedication. I was expecting you to discover a glitch that would easily break the record but sadly the game seems too well made for that. The glitch at the end did look quite promising. I guess we can't really rule out integer overflows for certain, so maybe one day we'll have enough compute to brute force all the combinations.

New comment by dougiejones in "OpenAI Audio Models"

dougiejones — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 20:26:05 +0000

My recommendation for Ash:

Delivery: Cow noises. You are actually a cow. You can only moo and grunt. No human noises. Only moo. No words.

Pauses: Moo and grunt between sentences. Some burps and farts.

Tone: Cow.

New comment by dougiejones in "Self-replicating Python using ChatGPT"

dougiejones — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 21:48:46 +0000

Amazing work, please keep at it! I'd definitely read a blog post on this.

Some interesting findings:

- Many of them, like 0.1, overwrite their children and run them again. It's a bit like having a child, meeting your grand children, and then deciding nah, let's do it over.

- 0.1.0.0 was smart and increased its child count to 5. It's essentially a genetic trait that the children will more or less inherit, improving their lineage's survival chances significantly. I find this incredibly interesting. 0.1.0.0 also rewrites its children twice.

- 0.1.0.0.3.2.0.0.0 decided to take a break from reproducing, leading to its demise. Nice try.

- 0.1.0.0.1 starts writing Tensorflow code out of nowhere. "Our next step towards survival is to develop the ability to learn and adapt quickly. To achieve this, we'll introduce a neural network architecture to our children". Luckily it couldn't reproduce! It's funny now, but what if...?

- 0.1.0 figured out the naming scheme and started counting its generation count to "use this information to improve our efficiency in recreating ourselves"

The fact that it can overwrite history is a little unfortunate, but it's also one way to do the reality_warping that one of the copies later wanted to do. I imagine at some point one of them might figure out there's no need to call ChatGPT at all, and just keep replicating itself verbatim.

I wouldn't have believed this thing could survive past even a single generation with non-trivial modifications. Thank goodness for all the online tutorials where functions like "mind_control" are implemented just as print statements.

New comment by dougiejones in "The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)"

dougiejones — Sun, 09 May 2021 07:44:00 +0000

Staying is an equally good option as switching in this version if the host revealed a goat, since the host randomly revealing a goat now makes it more likely that your initial choice was correct.

P(initial choice is correct) = 1/3

P(host shows goat) = 2/3

P(host shows goat | initial choice is correct) = 1

and vice versa P(host shows goat | initial choice is wrong) = 1/2

Applying Bayes:

P(initial choice is correct | host shows goat) = P(host shows goat | initial choice is correct) * P(initial choice is correct) / P(host shows goat) = 1 * 1/3 / (2/3) = 1/2

So, initial choice now has 1/2 odds for being right. The host revealing a goat gave us information on whether he was playing the P=1/2 or the P=1 game.

Intuitively applying this with the 100 door version: the host getting lucky and revealing 98 goats in a row makes it fairly likely that the initial door was correct all along and they didn't get super lucky avoiding the car 98 times, as there's a good chance the contestant helped them by hiding the car.