Hacker News: mosburger

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.

New comment by mosburger in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

mosburger — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:48:33 +0000

Yeah, see also: Digital Equipment Corp until the mid 90s (where I did my co-op). Lots of brilliant people there, coasting on their legacy until they fell hopelessly behind from mismanagement and bloat. I was lucky to catch a glimpse of it at the end.

New comment by mosburger in "Why I chose Lua for this blog"

mosburger — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:52:48 +0000

Maybe the ubiquitous "to do list" app?

New comment by mosburger in "Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools"

mosburger — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:46:30 +0000

The UI looks a little dated, but I've been happy with 4K Roku. The UX is more functional if uglier than AppleTV.

New comment by mosburger in "Helium Browser"

mosburger — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:20:09 +0000

That's my (admittedly extremely limited) understanding. The Mozilla/Firefox people de-prioritized making Gecko a separate linkable library years ago, and it's no longer a straightforward thing to do. Which is a real bummer.

New comment by mosburger in "Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?"

mosburger — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:50:02 +0000

Oh I get it. I tried to convince him of the same thing. I figured the skills would be transferable to something less brutal once he inevitably burned out on the games industry. He started looking at less game-oriented programming jobs but he's now questioning his whole career path and considering going into teaching/education instead.

New comment by mosburger in "Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?"

mosburger — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:29:41 +0000

My son has been looking for an entry level position ever since graduating (last year, in 2024) with a Game Development degree at a pretty decent school. Right now he's teaching kids programming in an after-school program to keep from going crazy. Before that he did an unpaid internship. Things are looking pretty grim for him - I wish I knew how to help him. :(

New comment by mosburger in "AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study"

mosburger — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:12:09 +0000

The UK seemed generally slightly less strict than, say, Germany, France, or Poland. It sorta felt like it was splitting the difference between the US and the EU.