Hacker News: valbaca

New comment by valbaca in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

valbaca — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:22:51 +0000

or a simpler version: "A stitch in time saves nine...but I charge by the stitch"

New comment by valbaca in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

valbaca — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:03:50 +0000

Please read the book "Bullshit Jobs"

Most SWEs are a mix of Duct tapers and Box tickers, and their managers are Taskmasters.

New comment by valbaca in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

valbaca — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:43:56 +0000

"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent"

"...you said on an iPhone. Heh. Gotcha."

New comment by valbaca in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

valbaca — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:47:48 +0000

Police aren't "protected persons"

> civilians who find themselves in the midst of an international armed conflict or military occupation and are in the hands of a foreign power

New comment by valbaca in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

valbaca — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:17:17 +0000

Everyone gets the first amendment

New comment by valbaca in "County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security"

valbaca — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:46:54 +0000

This just shows that even in the most obvious cases, if a cop wants to fuck up your life it might only take SIX YEARS to get back to normalcy.

New comment by valbaca in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

valbaca — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:53:18 +0000

This is awesome. Perfectly solving a problem, showing off tech, and adorable.

New comment by valbaca in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

valbaca — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:50:53 +0000

> I proceeded to do the work.

> I did the work.

> I worked.

New comment by valbaca in "Go is portable, until it isn't"

valbaca — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:39:48 +0000

Unix philosophy strikes again

New comment by valbaca in "Useful patterns for building HTML tools"

valbaca — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:33:52 +0000

HTML tools are a good name. I called them something like "a local html file"

One problem I solved with this was a packer needed to scan a few (10-40) ids into his barcode scanner. It was not enough where pulling up their bulk-id-uploader program but also too tedious to go to some "number to barcode" website.

Turns out, barcodes can be made from a google font!

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Libre+Barcode+39

You can just display a number using that font. Then hooked up a for-loop that's progressed by pressing the space bar: paste in IDs, scan first, space, scan next, repeat.

New comment by valbaca in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)"

valbaca — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:50:00 +0000

FYI, looks like keyvalues.com didn't pay their bill

> This service has been suspended.

New comment by valbaca in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

valbaca — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:48:42 +0000

> That's a little more than 10% productivity, so not anywhere close to 10x.

No Silver Bullet still alive and well in 2026

New comment by valbaca in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

valbaca — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:14:52 +0000

You didn't read far enough:

> Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

> Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.

> Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.

> The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.

New comment by valbaca in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

valbaca — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:12:54 +0000

> what's the difference?

Did you read the article? Charging what's actually on the price tag is the first thing that's the difference.

New comment by valbaca in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

valbaca — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:04:19 +0000

> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”

LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.

We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.

New comment by valbaca in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

valbaca — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:00:46 +0000

Yes, absolutely

New comment by valbaca in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

valbaca — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:46:24 +0000

Given the absurd amount startups I see lately that have the words "healthcare" and "AI", I'm actually incredibly concerned that in just a couple of months we're going to have an multiple, enormous HIPAA-data disasters

Just search "healthcare" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108941

New comment by valbaca in "Anthropic acquires Bun"

valbaca — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:11:13 +0000

> If Bun breaks, Claude Code breaks. Anthropic has direct incentive to keep Bun excellent.

and when this bubble pops down goes bun

New comment by valbaca in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"

valbaca — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:00:28 +0000

Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

Backend: Java, Kotlin, Python, Node.js, Spring, GraphQL, REST APIs, Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB

Frontend: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Next.js

AI/ML: LLMs, RAG systems, Prompt engineering, Fine-tuning, Evaluation/guardrails (Bedrock, OpenAI)

Cloud & Distributed Systems: AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, IAM, CDK, Kendra, Bedrock), Docker, Serverless architecture, CI/CD

DevTools & Infra: Terraform, Git, Observability tooling, Event-driven microservices

Resume: https://bit.ly/3KyMDHm

Email: valbaca@gmail.com

---

Staff engineer with 14+ years experience building high-scale backend systems (Java, Kotlin, Python, AWS, Kafka, DynamoDB) and full-stack products in React + TypeScript used by millions at Amazon, AWS, and Indeed. Looking for roles where I can own architecture, ship quickly, and work across frontend + backend to deliver real product impact (AI experience included, but not the only thing I bring).

New comment by valbaca in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

valbaca — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:34:21 +0000

yeah, he was an absolute clown. just laugh at clowns and move on