Hacker News: JALTU

New comment by JALTU in "The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden"

JALTU — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:13:11 +0000

Management and leadership values, character, and integrity matter because it's unwise to assume there is some homogenous allegiance to customers behind the propaganda of putting the customer first. PE will and must squeeze for their margins as is their wont. They have learned it's unwise to draw attention to this.

Time to act accordingly.

New comment by JALTU in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)"

JALTU — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:52:02 +0000

I like this comment because it speaks to how we humans tend to not look (compare ourselves) down, but rather up. I don't strictly mean status, but...status. And the idea that one isn't reaching one's potential is clearly a source of ambition, for better or worse. The luck of you being you is a major part of this tension–how to play the "you" hand you have been dealt by the Divine Dealer of your particular Table.

Good luck, friends.

New comment by JALTU in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

JALTU — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:41:50 +0000

Your comment reminds me of advice I once got as a young person: small talk is an invitation to talk, and if you don't get traction with small talk, you're not ever going to get deep talk. So, hopefully the friendly vibe was a good start to build on!

New comment by JALTU in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

JALTU — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:42:28 +0000

Yes! And I recommend a post about "The Wealth Ladder" by Nick Maggiulli. A concept I love because I relate is the idea of how we are conscious about how much we spend on things, or we are not. Do you count the cost of a daily lunch vs. dining out at an "expensive" restaurant where you bought three glasses of wine? Does it even matter that you eat out, do you count the cost?

Great food for thought about one's attitude towards wealth: https://ofdollarsanddata.com/climbing-the-wealth-ladder/

New comment by JALTU in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

JALTU — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:00:57 +0000

No time for sadness? HA! War and suffering continues unabated, "surprise"!

No, sadness becomes part and parcel of...everything! At least nowadays: New awesome toy! Kid got bad grade. Fun vacation last week! Friend's daughter died. PR riding bike! Dad needs help with a thing.

To your point: Life is rich with living. And yes, friends without kids, etc. talk about and buy toys. Cool! But/and no offense, gotta go now.

Life is rich and richly nuanced.

New comment by JALTU in "I am building a cloud"

JALTU — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:35:43 +0000

We are building a religion, we are building it bigger We are widening the corridors and adding more lanes We are building a religion, a limited edition We are now accepting coders linking new AI brains

(Apologies to Cake. And coders.)

New comment by JALTU in "The Self-Help Trap: What 20 Years of "Optimizing" Has Taught Me"

JALTU — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:05:49 +0000

There is undoubtedly value in both the self-help advice and the self-reflection and self-assessment involved in deciding if the advice is for you.

That value likely will decrease with age and experience, but is still nice to consciously acknowledge and even reflect on, again after the lessons have been absorbed in whatever ways they have been absorbed, adjusted, or rejected.

Wherever you go, there you are. :)

New comment by JALTU in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

JALTU — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:15:39 +0000

I'm a manager too, but I'm also the new guy pushing the solution to a human problem: work management. SMAR, ASAN, MNDY, etc. Not only do people not want to be responsible for it (and in some cases simply be "not responsible"), not only is the internal solution "too time consuming", the only answer thus lands on hiring external consultants to implement and maintain massively-overkill-$olution$ in $aa$ like CRM, NOW, etc. which as you know, do not solve the same problems as the aforementioned SaaS.

"Now that I'm in management, I 100% get it." 100% and win or lose I am still going to fight it...

New comment by JALTU in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

JALTU — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:26:23 +0000

On the other hand, the poker apps encourage me to consider a career change. I regularly crush the "opposition" with my card-counting skills. World Series of Poker, I am all-in!!! ;-)

New comment by JALTU in "How will the miracle happen today?"

JALTU — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:12:57 +0000

Put another way, we are all competing with professional entertainers now. Sink or swim...

New comment by JALTU in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26"

JALTU — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:34:39 +0000

Regrettably, humans come along and need to prove themselves, so here we are. Being human: it's a feature, not a bug. (shrugs)

New comment by JALTU in "If you are harassed by lasers"

JALTU — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:43:06 +0000

It's in the title itself! lol

New comment by JALTU in "Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work"

JALTU — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 05:25:31 +0000

Brief anecdote: A friend hired an electrician to wire some things and he asked how the electrician's business was going. The reply was (paraphrased): We hired seven people two weeks ago, now only one is left because the rest either didn't show up, couldn't show up regularly, or couldn't focus on tasks long enough to get work done. We let them go because this is electricity. We are not going to pay for anyone's funeral!

New comment by JALTU in "Time travel is self-suppressing"

JALTU — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:02:26 +0000

Or Hollywood!

New comment by JALTU in "A community-led fork of Organic Maps"

JALTU — Tue, 13 May 2025 02:22:11 +0000

And, one doesn’t have crap being pushed at you while you’re trying to find your way, or businesses filtered out because…

New comment by JALTU in "But good sir, what is electricity?"

JALTU — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 19:11:54 +0000

I'm not sure that was the point of the poster's question about electricity, because I've heard the same assertion made by science writers and such.

Our current BFF, ChatGPT, says the question is about "charge" in that we don't know why particles have a charge. So what is a "charge" and why? Gravity is also presented as a thing we don't fundamentally (ontologically) know about. Interesting!

And not disagreeing with the desire to keep asking, nor with the desire to find a final answer. The author of the article puts it fairly well:

We don’t have philosophically satisfying insights into the universe at subatomic scales...there’s no straightforward explanation of what a bound electron actually does: it’s not orbiting the nucleus or spinning around its own axis in any conventional sense. Most simply, it just exists as a particular distribution of an electrostatic field in space.

New comment by JALTU in "El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender"

JALTU — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:35:46 +0000

"...gov't supervisors stopped publishing financial reports."

And you thought OKRs were bad! Ha ha ha, reports suck? Let's really make reporting consequential for individuals, like in China.

The irony is just that "reporting" is not a popular human activity, and why we have things like GAAP and try to enforce the rule of law...

New comment by JALTU in "The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster"

JALTU — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 21:04:45 +0000

Auto opt-in because again, we are what's for sale, not the software. And 'scuze me, gotta go check my gmail now...

New comment by JALTU in "Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today"

JALTU — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 22:26:50 +0000

Steel is real. And comes in colors other than black! :)

New comment by JALTU in "Young men now spend more of their free time alone than any other group"

JALTU — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 18:49:36 +0000

I'm a bit behind you in years, but/and am very comfortable doing things by myself or in small groups; I would say I even prefer being alone most of the time. As a manager in tech, there's plenty of human interaction at work!

I have been looking ahead and wondering about this however. Thx for sharing.