Hacker News: altrum

New comment by altrum in "Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions"

altrum — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:34:43 +0000

regardless, still likely came out ahead

How to get Hired at a Startup (as a student)

altrum — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:25:33 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/robechun/status/2045974706470404589

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47828656

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by altrum in "Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving"

altrum — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:44 +0000

Okay so how do you solve for calendar <-> inbox integration?

New comment by altrum in "How Learning Works: Components, Systems, Loops"

altrum — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 06:49:43 +0000

Was just thinking about this deeply, so I’m glad I ran into this!

On that note, any particular ideas on note taking as part of this learning process? Is it even necessary or is it suboptimal? Is there really something as effective note taking? Is it highly specific to an individual?

New comment by altrum in "Why the ‘Big Short’ Guys Think Bitcoin Is a Bubble"

altrum — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 05:52:47 +0000

My thesis on this revolves around the idea of "brands." I wrote about it more in depth here: https://www.robertchung.me/people-dont-understand-nfts

New comment by altrum in "Why the ‘Big Short’ Guys Think Bitcoin Is a Bubble"

altrum — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:07:18 +0000

Twitter, if they build their verification correctly, should determine NFT's sovereignty via the smart contracts, not the chains. Thus, CryptoPunks will only exist on one chain & one smart contract.

New comment by altrum in "Why the ‘Big Short’ Guys Think Bitcoin Is a Bubble"

altrum — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 06:32:54 +0000

Except you can't, practically speaking--as the price is baked into the "brand".

New comment by altrum in "Why the ‘Big Short’ Guys Think Bitcoin Is a Bubble"

altrum — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 05:12:18 +0000

That’s only because the infrastructure for it isn’t there yet. Doesn’t mean it won’t eventually happen

New comment by altrum in "People Don't Understand NFTs"

altrum — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 01:37:38 +0000

I agree with you on the physical components but you’re missing the point. If you’ve read the article you’d understand physical goods are different than digital ones. Look at the footnotes, I even point out that NFTs for physical items is not solved.

With digital goods, it is solved. If you have a brand (like cryptopunks or say, the US gov) and you produce some NFT—people can see and verify that the NFT is produced from those parties.

Again, I’m reiterating the same points in the article— it’s the same idea with open-sourced software. You can fork some code and “attempt to sell it” but you won’t go far because it lacks branding and trust.

Half the battle is branding.

Hope that clears it up

New comment by altrum in "People Don't Understand NFTs"

altrum — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 01:09:37 +0000

> (which I or anybody else who's sufficiently informed can assess)

But you can’t—that’s why the fake industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry and why StockX, a 4 billion dollar company, still end up selling fakes to consumers

New comment by altrum in "People Don't Understand NFTs"

altrum — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:57:32 +0000

Author here; I agree, and this is something I've been wrestling for years. The lack of centralization means it's impossible to reverse hacks or scenarios you mentioned--I personally think _some_ centralization is crucial, but not sure to what extend (and if that basically just means we should just have private companies like we do today).

New comment by altrum in "People Don't Understand NFTs"

altrum — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:53:56 +0000

I think "baseball cards" is a limited view of the NFT model, which is what's being argued in this article; it's essentially a programmable, global database.

Just like how we trust certain government records to be accurate & representative of ownership, each chain, if secure, can achieve the same functionality in a more open and decentralized way (also its inherently global, which can have huge implications wrt globalization)

New comment by altrum in "People Don't Understand NFTs"

altrum — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 00:48:45 +0000

Author here. Again, this is where "branding" comes in. Once people know which smart-contract is the real one, putting another transaction won't work.

Sure, some people may fall for fakes and buy an NFT from a duplicate smart-contract, but this only happens due to the current lack of infrastructure in the ecosystem.

People Don't Understand NFTs

altrum — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 23:33:21 +0000

Article URL: https://robert-chung.medium.com/people-dont-understand-nfts-3b83ff0dc629

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28846404

Points: 8

# Comments: 35

New comment by altrum in "AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance"

altrum — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 04:22:16 +0000

I worked on this feature when I was at Amazon—and the demographic we were after were mostly government & some non-profit organizations. The biggest thing with these orgs were that they _needed_ to have a clear and structured per-month budget over a long period (~year) OR they had to use up their funds before their grants “expired”

Also on a technical note, this allowed for some nice internal data models/patterns that could be utilized in further use-cases

New comment by altrum in "Investing in Clubhouse"

altrum — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 03:20:51 +0000

Have you gotten invited? Do you perhaps have an invite you can send me?

New comment by altrum in "Dynaglue: Make single-table designs in DynamoDB easier to query and update"

altrum — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 09:51:03 +0000

Very interesting. Are there any alternatives out there that we can use to compare?

New comment by altrum in "Sherbet: An Ergonomic Gaming Keypad"

altrum — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 04:57:31 +0000

Except that people want some kind of textile feedback for what they type—which is why SelfieType likely would only be just a “cool technology”

New comment by altrum in "Reid Hoffman's $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups"

altrum — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 04:07:13 +0000

This is a fascinating concept, but I wonder how it can impact the overall culture of a startup. More and more, I’m inclined to believe that the initial group (say, first 10-15 employees, including the founder) are the most important.

This, in turn, almost looks like a more specialized version of contractors. For those startups in the early incubation stage, I’m concerned this may actually hurt their chances of possibly—prolific development.

If carried out properly, however, I think this has really great potential; cash can often be a double-edged sword that also limits creativity and innovation. An effective “mentor” in this sense, will be way more beneficial than straight, cold, cash

New comment by altrum in "Building a static serverless website using S3 and CloudFront"

altrum — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 03:57:54 +0000

I am using media queries—while they work, they’ll flash the “unadapted” version depending on what component is rendered first. The alternative is to add some kind of loading aspect to each component but I think it’s not very scalable