Hacker News: jaza

New comment by jaza in "Humpback whales are forming super-groups"

jaza — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:10:39 +0000

Seriously though, we have Star Trek IV to thank in no small part for this amazing humpback comeback success story. Live long and prosper!

New comment by jaza in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

jaza — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:34:28 +0000

Thanks for clarifying, I thought that sounded wrong - otherwise aeroplane engines would have to be "rebuilt", each and every time, after more than half of all international flights in and out of Australia (5000 miles, aka 8000km, is just down the road to grab a sausage roll for us!).

New comment by jaza in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

jaza — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:20:33 +0000

Very punny :P

New comment by jaza in "The End of Eleventy"

jaza — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:35:43 +0000

11ty is my favourite site builder. Hugo is better in terms of dev support / build speed / opinionated simplicity - and I've also used Hugo several times - but quite often I've run into a wall where Hugo isn't flexible enough to let me do things the way I want. 11ty lets you do (almost) whatever the hell you please.

I'm sad to hear that the "OG 11ty era" has ended. But, as others have noted, fortunately 11ty will live on, so long as folks keep using it and hacking away at it.

New comment by jaza in "The End of Eleventy"

jaza — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:25:38 +0000

Also sounds a bit like Joel Spolsky's desktop app CityDesk from back in the day.

New comment by jaza in "The End of Eleventy"

jaza — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:18:49 +0000

Check out TinaCMS. Works for editing Hugo sites. Not as nice as WordPress admin, but it's good enough for simple editing tasks.

New comment by jaza in "The End of Eleventy"

jaza — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:11:41 +0000

This. The 11ty sites that I've built (all personal sites that will only ever be edited by me) are all plain HTML, no markdown. 11ty is lovely and bare-bones and un-opinionated.

New comment by jaza in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

jaza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:13:06 +0000

Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!

New comment by jaza in "Keep Android Open"

jaza — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:32:30 +0000

My main bank is Commonwealth aka CBA (one of the "big 4" banks here in Australia). For a long time, I held out against installing their mobile app (on Android), and managed fine with their web UI (and with 2FA codes via SMS). Then, 2 or 3 years ago, I needed to start using PayID (sort-of Australia's version of Venmo, ie free instant transfers, except it's supported directly by all the major banks here). And I discovered that CBA had (deliberately?) only added PayID support to their mobile app, you absolutely can't use it in their web UI (last I checked). So I had to finally relent and install the mobile app. I started out only opening it on the rare occasions when I needed to send money to someone via PayID.

Then, a while later, CBA pretty much phased out SMS-based 2FA (or they said that if you had the mobile app installed then you can no longer use it?). Only other supported option is in-app 2FA (no support for third-party TOTP apps). So I had to start opening the mobile app every time I needed a 2FA code. Then, within the last year or so, they made a new rule, that in order to log in to the web UI at all (just initial login, I'm not talking about sending money or any other high-risk action), you had to receive a push notification via the mobile app and tap "allow". So now I literally can't log in to the web UI without also logging in to the mobile app!

So, unfortunately, "just keep using the bank's website on desktop" is increasingly and deliberately becoming not an option. I assume there are many similar stories with other banks around the world.

New comment by jaza in "A closer look at a BGP anomaly in Venezuela"

jaza — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:39:29 +0000

Considering that the internet was invented and built from scratch by the US military, US universities, and US companies, why are you surprised? And who do you suggest could or should manage much of the internet backbone, if not them?

New comment by jaza in "Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell"

jaza — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:16:54 +0000

Wow, lovely cartography and lovely works of art! And so many cities to choose from!

New comment by jaza in "Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable"

jaza — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:13:40 +0000

The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.

New comment by jaza in "URLs are state containers"

jaza — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 10:29:25 +0000

That's how it was in the good ol Usenet days! Eg alt.tv.simpsons. Not sure how URLs ended up being the other way round.

New comment by jaza in "China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990"

jaza — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 23:18:44 +0000

I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.

New comment by jaza in "Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)"

jaza — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:16:40 +0000

Yes! Exactly that - basics of unix - was one of the first-semester courses in my comp sci degree. It has served me well ever since.

New comment by jaza in "Benchmarking Postgres 17 vs. 18"

jaza — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:59:08 +0000

You don't pay for RDS because you care about IOPS. You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem. And because you (by which I mean probably the MBA management above you, rather than you yourself) care about it being an opex rather than capex cost, a lot more than you care about how much the cost is. And because ISO audit boxes get ticked.

New comment by jaza in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

jaza — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:49:45 +0000

Agreed. But I'd also be willing to bet big, that the cycle of "new AI breakthrough is made, AI bubble ensues and hypesters claim AGI is just around the corner for several years, bubble bursts, all quiet on the AI front for a decade or two" continues beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now.

New comment by jaza in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

jaza — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:37:54 +0000

True. We have our gods, same as every other tribe throughout history.

New comment by jaza in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

jaza — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:31:40 +0000

We've "succeeded" at space flight about as much as we've "succeeded" at AI. Yay, man on the moon! Over half a century later, and it turns out that the "next small step" - man on Mars - isn't so small and still hasn't been achieved. Anything remotely resembling sci-fi-style ubiquitous space travel remains exactly that - sci-fi!

New comment by jaza in "Show HN: I built a web framework in C"

jaza — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 01:07:23 +0000

I can accept that everything else is fake, but UNICORNS ARE REAL, dammit!