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> do they care if you come in and steal all their shit because you pickpocketed them? no way.

They most decidedly DO care if you do this.

valbacaon Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues

It's easy to think things are "apolitical" when resting on the laurels of the results of political struggles and revolutions that brought us to where we are.

The idea that you should be able to create and own your intellectual efforts, and to do so without coercion.

> political statement?

> If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift

Should you own what you create? Should you BE able to create? freely?

Should you be able to give and gift freely?

> some days structure

How do you think days are defined? Think "July" is a name that came absent of politics? What about October?

Saturday and Sunday are weekends? Since when did weekends exist as we understand and enjoy them without the action of political actors (union workers striking and other people fighting for labor rights).

What holidays are holidays? Which are national holidays? Those are all political.

valbacaon Tl;dv: Over 180k meetings left wide open

I remember while at Amazon, during the "everyone needs to be using AI in every way" push, one of my teammates was proud to present that he had figured out how to split the audio on his mac to record the meeting (because our meeting software didn't allow for recordings without consent) and fed this into speech-to-text and generated summaries of the meetings without any of us knowing (i.e. no consent).

I let him and our manager know that he'd just violated eavesdropping laws across state lines (he's in D.C. and I'm in WA; RCW 9.73.030).

It's amazing how many people don't think that "AI Notetaker" is the same as "I secretly recorded this (as possibly violated the law)"

valbacaon Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

> Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?

Amazon's Sentiment Analysis of Product Reviews was one of the very first forays into ML that the company had. They just keep wanting to re-use it everywhere.

valbacaon Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

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

valbacaon Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

Please read the book "Bullshit Jobs"

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

valbacaon Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

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

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

valbacaon Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit

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

valbacaon The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE

Everyone gets the first amendment

valbacaon County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

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.

valbacaon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

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

valbacaon I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

> I proceeded to do the work.

> I did the work.

> I worked.

valbacaon Go is portable, until it isn't

Unix philosophy strikes again

valbacaon Useful patterns for building HTML tools

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.

valbacaon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)

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

> This service has been suspended.

valbacaon Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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

No Silver Bullet still alive and well in 2026

valbacaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

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.

valbacaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

> 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.

valbacaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

> 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.

valbacaon Everyone in Seattle hates AI

Yes, absolutely

valbacaon Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files

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

valbacaon Anthropic acquires Bun

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

and when this bubble pops down goes bun

valbacaon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)

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).

valbacaon AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

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

valbacaon Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

Thank you for the response!

valbacaon Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux

I have a dumb and probably easily-googled question, but I trust the average knowledge here:

What's the best Video Card / Brand / Model for running games on Linux? I'm considering upgrading my old gaming PC and would rather also switch to Linux for gaming. (I'm already familiar with Linux for regular use and programming, but haven't gamed on it once).

valbacaon Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region

Amazon writing “culture”

valbacaon 60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

you should really educate yourself on lactose intolerance, or really how you view medical conditions in general. being a "bitch" or not has nothing to do with whether your body produces certain enzymes.

> Just one or two nights of pain

you shouldn't be allowed near children if that's your approach

valbacaon 60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

> ask if dairy is ok

> "we're in that part of town."

Given that lactose intolerance impacts non-caucasians much more, this reeks of racism

Lactose intolerance Prevalence by Race:

African Americans: 75-95%

Asian Americans: 70-90%

Native Americans: 70-80%

Hispanic Americans: 50-65%

Caucasians: 15-25%

valbacaon Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout

> It never made sense to me how such a ruthless and inhumane culture is sustainable in the long run.

It doesn't need to be sustainable in the long run: just needs to get to the next quarter and there continues to be enough desperate people in the US or India willing to be ground up in the machine for a chance to buy a house in a major metro

(Source: I was at Amazon for 10 years, finally quit last month)