Hacker News: mosburger

New comment by mosburger in "Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet"

mosburger — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:42:09 +0000

I was an internal beta tester for AltaVista while I was doing a co-op at DEC in 1995. Good times.

New comment by mosburger in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

mosburger — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:26:58 +0000

> wasn't there a quite recent incident where an American car manufacturer was leaking the real-time position of all their clients' vehicles?

You might be thinking about GM:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/...

New comment by mosburger in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

mosburger — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:23:33 +0000

Checkout.com (UK) might be another worth checking. :) [I'm a "payments guy" for my day job].

New comment by mosburger in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

mosburger — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:33:46 +0000

I wonder if the author considered moving payment processing to Adyen from Stripe? They're also EU-based and a bit more... well known? I liked integrating with them in the past.

New comment by mosburger in "iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet"

mosburger — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:09:01 +0000

IMO one of the cool things about Wallet is the notification that appears on the homescreen when you're in proximity of the venue or time of the event and automatically displays the pass when tapped. I wonder if "create your own" will be able to do that (I'm not sure how it would)?

New comment by mosburger in "Laws of Software Engineering"

mosburger — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:30:23 +0000

I said this elsewhere in the comments, but I think there's sort of a fundamental tension that shows up sometimes between DRY and "a function/class should only do one thing." E.g., there might be two places in your code that do almost identical things, so there's a temptation to say "I know! I'll make a common function, I'll just need to add a flag/extra argument..." and if you keep doing that you end up with messy "DRY" functions with tons of conditional logic that tries to do too much.

Yeah there are ways to avoid this and you need to strike balances, but sometimes you have to be careful and resist the temptation to DRY everything up 'cuz you might just make it brittler (pun intended).

New comment by mosburger in "Laws of Software Engineering"

mosburger — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:26:32 +0000

I think there is often tension between DRY and "thing should do only one thing." E.g., I've found myself guilty of DRYing up a function, but the use is slightly different in a couple places, so... I know, I'll just add a flag/additional function argument. And you keep doing that and soon you have a messed up function with lots of conditional logic.

The key is to avoid the temptation to DRY when things are only slightly different and find a balance between reuse and "one function/class should only do one thing."

New comment by mosburger in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

mosburger — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:26:22 +0000

I got Source Code Pro. My daily driver is currently 0xProto, but I didn't see that in the game (admittedly I think it's kinda rarely used).

New comment by mosburger in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

mosburger — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:33:36 +0000

sssssh! if this catches on we can keep our jobs! (j/k, mostly)

New comment by mosburger in "The Om Programming Language"

mosburger — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:42:51 +0000

ah, thanks, that's why my first thought was that "hey, this feels very FORTH like"

New comment by mosburger in "Ring owners are returning their cameras"

mosburger — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:16:59 +0000

I didn't return mine, I just threw it in the trash and replaced it with a local-only no-cloud Eufy. It works great.

New comment by mosburger in "Ring owners are returning their cameras"

mosburger — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:15:02 +0000

Yeah - I think it still a bit of a deterrent ... today, not everyone has a camera, and if I were a thief and one house had cameras while the place next door did not, guess which one I'm gonna rob?

But I wonder how much of that will wear off once everybody has one.

New comment by mosburger in "Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter"

mosburger — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:44:30 +0000

I understand your skepticism 100%, but I suspect you might change your mind if you, say, rented a car with it for a week. It's definitely a net positive for safety, and it probably costs the auto maker less than the seat belts (literally).

New comment by mosburger in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

mosburger — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:14:02 +0000

this is a great analogy despite it possibly coming off as snark.

I think it's hard for some people to grasp that programmers are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by shipping products to users, others are motivated to make code that's a giant elegant cathedral, still others love glorious hacks to bend the machine into doing things it was never really intended to do. And I'm sure I'm missing a few other categories.

I think the "AI ain't so bad" crowd are the ones who get the most satisfaction out of shipping product to users as quickly as possible, and that's totally fine. But I really wish they'd allow those of us who don't fall into that category to grieve just a little bit. This future isn't what I signed up for.

It's one thing to design a garden and admire the results, but some people get into their "zen happy place" by pulling up weeds.

New comment by mosburger in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

mosburger — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:10:23 +0000

Oh my god. This is me. If I were any better at writing, I could have written this, the author is even the same age as me (well, a year younger) and followed a similar trajectory. And a lot of what I've been feeling lately feels similar to burnout (in fact I've been calling it that), but it really isn't burnout. It's... this, whatever this is... a "fallow period" is a good term.

And I feel like an old man grumbling about things changing, but... it's not the same. I started programming in BASIC on my Tandy 1000 and went to college and learned how to build ISA cards with handwritten oscilloscope software in the Computer Engineering lab. My first job was writing firmware. I've climbed so far up the abstraction chain over a thirty year career and I guess I don't feel the same energy from writing software that first got me into this, and it's getting harder to force myself to press on.

New comment by mosburger in "VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV"

mosburger — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:20:48 +0000

I thought so too, they reminded me of the speedometer and analog clock (lol) in the '81 Rabbit I had in high school.

New comment by mosburger in "Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws"

mosburger — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:01:20 +0000

I think (I'm an American so take with a grain of salt) even the "proper lawyer reviewing terms" part can be deferred quite a while by being conservative with PII (which you should be doing anyway) and using a service like iubenda to deal with terms and cookie warnings when you first start out.

New comment by mosburger in "How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one"

mosburger — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:29:13 +0000

I didn't do this, but I did use a spare unsigned short (used for memory alignment) in the Quantum Atlas 10K II disk drive's servo firmware to store my wife and I's anniversary date just for yucks. :P

New comment by mosburger in "Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works"

mosburger — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:11:58 +0000

It used to be the case that the middle digit of an area code had to be a 0 or a 1. All the O.G. "cool" area codes like 212 are in this format, and the less desirable new area codes like 646 are not (yes, this is an accidental Seinfeld reference).

New comment by mosburger in "FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up.""

mosburger — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 19:17:54 +0000

There is, but it's an adjective, not a noun.