Hacker News: mosburger

New comment by mosburger in "Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos"

mosburger — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:47:41 +0000

I think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.

(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)

Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.

New comment by mosburger in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

mosburger — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:44:18 +0000

maybe they start by not adjusting your rates based on your habits, but just nagging you.

Aetna already notices when I don't pick up my prescriptions on time and emails me about it. So I could imagine a dystopian future where the insurance company makes you install an app instead of using an insurance card (or at least makes this the default/easier), and the app sends you a push notification when it senses you're too close to a McDonald's and says "Do you really need that double cheeseburger? It's your third one this week! (and Apple Health says your heart rate ain't looking so great)"

I know there are a zillion reasons this couldn't happen exactly like that now, (e.g., you'd have to give permission for all of this) but how far off is it?

Happier, fitter, more productive...

New comment by mosburger in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

mosburger — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:24:49 +0000

aw neat I'd love to try doing this for its predecessor GWBASIC (my first programming language on the Tandy 1000EX)

New comment by mosburger in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

mosburger — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:02:13 +0000

it'll become nefarious when they start selling it to health insurance companies.

New comment by mosburger in "Zed DeltaDB"

mosburger — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:21:31 +0000

I use it as a daily driver with few if any problems, but I'm on macOS. Maybe their Linux support is particularly crappy?

New comment by mosburger in "Could psilocybin be the key to treating anorexia?"

mosburger — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:41:31 +0000

Here's yet another anecdote of near-zero real value to add to the pile: I treated my severe treatment-resistant depression with ketamine infusions. It's obviously not the same as psilocybin, but I believe the current thinking is that psychoelics and dissociatives both have some positive effect on neuroplasticity, and that sorta checks out in my case. I'd say you need to combine it with some good cognitive behavioral therapy - it seemed to make CBT a lot more effective for me where it failed in the past because my brain was more open to rewiring. I haven't been re-treated in a few years now, but I still feel a lot better.

But you're also totally right - my story is just an anecdote, and these sort of headlines that used to have cannabis as a miracle cure for all types of things seem to have been replaced with headlines about psilocybin (or occasionally, ketamine) curing everything instead. I totally get the skepticism, but I'm a believer that we might be onto something w/r/t depression or other things that are treatable via CBT at least - the article mentioned "combined with talk therapy" ... not sure what therapy method was used alongside the psilocybin.

New comment by mosburger in "Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality"

mosburger — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:43:15 +0000

I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing happens for stuff in big box home improvement stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, too. Things like plumbing fixtures that appear to be identical to counterparts in smaller stores will have off-by-one or suffixed product numbers, and are made with cheaper plastic internal parts than when purchased elsewhere.

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).