Hacker News: Balooga

New comment by Balooga in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

Balooga — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:13:38 +0000

Costco?

[Edit] -- And I've frequented several independent coffee shops that are cashless.

New comment by Balooga in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

Balooga — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:14:34 +0000

I like to think back on this scene from Galaxy Quest, when the team sits around the conference table[1].

"I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" -- Sigourney Weaver

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CgQMJCpZI

New comment by Balooga in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

Balooga — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:33:35 +0000

That way of teaching got us to the moon, created transistors, produced the internet, smartphones, quantum computers, the very AI that everyone is talking about, vaccines, sent probes into space, cured diseases, fed millions, jumbo jets, basically every single thing that society has come to depend on.

New comment by Balooga in "Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors"

Balooga — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:27:24 +0000

> It might be borderline exploitative, but I have noticed that elderly individuals want a "solution" rather than a lesson.

Or they may have just aged out of fucks[1]

[1] - https://www.blog.lifebranches.com/p/aging-out-of-fucks-the-n...

New comment by Balooga in "Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors"

Balooga — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:24:59 +0000

My Dad could never build the metal model to understand that common concepts like copy/paste would work almost identically across different native Windows applications; "How do I copy/paste in an email?", "How do I copy/paste in a Word document?", "How do I open a file in Excel?", "How do I open a file in Word?".

The lightbulb just never went on in his head. And this was in the 90s and early 2000s when developers at least used MFC - probably the period of peak UX design.

Things have now gotten so much worse since then. Now, I struggle to remember how to add an attachment in MS Teams, which I use every day.

New comment by Balooga in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

Balooga — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:17:30 +0000

And is "model collapse" a thing when LLMs are trained on 100% LLM-generated code? Fun times ahead.

New comment by Balooga in "Langjam Gamejam: Build a programming language then make a game with it"

Balooga — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:38:33 +0000

There is OpenGOAL[1]. A re-implementation of the language that Naughty Dog used to created Jak and Daxter.

[1] https://opengoal.dev/

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:13:10 +0000

Keep in mind that Fielding used his "REST" principles to drive work on the release of HTTP 1.1 in 1999. He subsequently codified these RESTful principles in his dissertation in 2000. The first JSON message was sent in 2001. The reason RESTful is perfectly suited to the WWW is because REST drove HTTP 1.1, not the other way around.

Now days there are just so many use cases where an architecture is more suited to RPC (and POST). And trying to bend the architecture to be "more RESTful" just serves to complicate.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 17:05:11 +0000

> You describe how web pages work, web pages are intended for human interactions

Exactly, yes! The first few sentences from Wikipedia...

"REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave." -- [1]

If you are desiging a system for the Web, use REST. If you are designing a system where a native app (that you create) talks to a set of services on a back end (that you also create), then why conform to REST principles?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:03:21 +0000

Then that does not conform to the HTTP spec. GET endpoints must be safe, idempotent, cachable. Opening up a site to cases were web crawlers/scrapers may wreak havoc.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:46:10 +0000

There is one reason. The DELETE absolutely must be idempotent. If it's not, then use POST.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:43:52 +0000

> Fielding's paper doesn't provide a complete recipe for building self-discoverable APIs.

But it does though. A HTTP server returns a HTTP response to a request from a browser. The request is a HTML webpage that is rendered to the user with all discoverable APIs visible as clickable links. Welcome to the World Wide Web.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:27:37 +0000

The simplest case, and the most common, is that of a browser rendering the HTML response from a website request. The HTML contains the URL links to other APIs that the user can click on. Think of navigating any website.

New comment by Balooga in "US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders"

Balooga — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 22:29:13 +0000

Can the executive branch force arbitration via presidential order to limit the ability to form class action suites?

New comment by Balooga in "End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux"

Balooga — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:40:36 +0000

The problem I find happening too often is that everything works on the initial install. Then an update comes along and nukes sound. Then a few weeks later a round of updates fixes sound but breaks Bluetooth. Then a few weeks later an update nukes WiFi. Ok, connect via Ethernet. Three updates later Bluetooth starts working again.

Then everything works... until you try to adjust the display brightness.

This on pre-2020 Lenovo laptops.

New comment by Balooga in "WhatsApp introduces ads in its app"

Balooga — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 23:35:09 +0000

Africa runs on WhatsApp.

Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.

I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.

New comment by Balooga in "I used o3 to find a remote zeroday in the Linux SMB implementation"

Balooga — Sat, 24 May 2025 20:34:09 +0000

Between $3k and $30k to solve a single ARC-AGI problem [1]. Not sure if "100 runs" makes this comparable.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/02/openais-o3-model-might-be-...

New comment by Balooga in "Making video games (without an engine) in 2025"

Balooga — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:28:18 +0000

The library would continue to work but may no longer be usable if other dependencies require a later version of "n" that the abandoned library is incompatible with. Ruby or Python runtimes are the classic example.

New comment by Balooga in "Common mistakes in architecture diagrams (2020)"

Balooga — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:23:06 +0000

I have been involved in numerous "waterfall" software projects and the majority were successful. This is because the "waterfall" process was never as the Agile proponents describe it. Successful "waterfall" projects are always iterative.

You know what didn't work? SAFe Agile.

New comment by Balooga in "Cloudflare employee posts layoff call with HR and goes viral [video]"

Balooga — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:00:43 +0000

I don't know. Maybe treat others as you yourself would like to be treated?