Hacker News: jaltekruse

New comment by jaltekruse in "Privacy nightmare, search box on Android requires sharing screen"

jaltekruse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:16:51 +0000

Sorry about the link, chrome was showing some old auto fill suggestion near where the clipboard contents appear. It looks like I can't delete posts that include text content and a link, as it creates a comment right away and blocks deletion. Recreated the post with the correct link, but I guess this now sits here as a sign of my shame for using my phone wrong while complaining about my phone ...

New comment by jaltekruse in "Privacy nightmare, Android now requires sharing your screen to search"

jaltekruse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:10:45 +0000

What the fuck is this, if you hold the home button on android it now enters a special search mode that refuses to let you run a search without sending your whole screen along with the search. And it is rather difficult to even get it to not do it. There is an "x" to leave, but if you miss that touch target it assumes you are highlighting some part of your screen you want to focus the search on and send the whole thing. My background image and things I keep on my homepage are not public data, fuck off Google

Privacy nightmare, Android now requires sharing your screen to search

jaltekruse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:10:45 +0000

Article URL: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/347374423/how-to-stop-whole-screen-searching-on-circle-to-search?hl=en

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425369

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by jaltekruse in "Privacy nightmare, search box on Android requires sharing screen"

jaltekruse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:08:29 +0000

Privacy nightmare, search box on Android requires sharing screen

jaltekruse — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:08:29 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qfol1e/they_are_planting_people/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425346

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by jaltekruse in "Seeking help spreading passion for CS with class on DIY Arduino game consoles"

jaltekruse — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:55:58 +0000

I've written a short 2.5 hour class for tech newbies to walk them through wiring together their own game consoles in breadboards. So far I've taught it to 90 people in the Twin Cities, I'm looking to see if I can get it spread to new communities. If you might be interested in teaching the class where you live I'm open to sharing my class materials.

I also have a related project I'm working on to make a follow up class about programming games for the consoles with the MIT Scratch platform. I have an in-progress Scratch to Arduino C++ converter. https://community.arduboy.com/t/first-arduboy-game-programme...

Also the Arduboy project that the class is based on it very cool, consider buying one of the new editions of the hardware, now with USB-C and link-cable support! (I'm not sponsored, I just want to support the project that made the class possible) https://www.arduboy.com/

Seeking help spreading passion for CS with class on DIY Arduino game consoles

jaltekruse — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:55:57 +0000

Article URL: https://community.arduboy.com/t/looking-for-instructors-to-teach-intro-electronics-with-breadboard-arduboy-clones/13193

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324993

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jaltekruse in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

jaltekruse — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:39:13 +0000

Adding new openly licensed learning resources to the Kolibri offline learning platform. It is designed to be deployed in communities that lack consistent access to the public internet. They currently have a significant amount of English language content, but are limited in what they have available in the dozens of other languages they have translated the core software into. I'm trying to bring in new resources and then try to lead an effort to do translations of the best materials I can find to make the platform more useful to more people.

https://community.learningequality.org/t/bringing-new-comput...

Also trying to recruit people to teach tech newbies how to build their own handheld video game consoles. Let me know if you might like to run a class where you live and i'll share my class materials.

https://community.arduboy.com/t/looking-for-instructors-to-t...

New comment by jaltekruse in "Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year"

jaltekruse — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:32:03 +0000

Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720

New comment by jaltekruse in "Keep Android Open"

jaltekruse — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:06:47 +0000

I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!

New comment by jaltekruse in "German tourist held indefinitely in San Diego area immigrant detention facility"

jaltekruse — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 12:36:04 +0000

While I don't agree with the response and long detention. This is the artists current Instagram bio. I understand it is likely hard to get a visa for a week that allows you to work, and it is a would be a lot more convenient to serve US fans with a brief trip rather than ask them all to individually fly to Germany. But it does appear she had a public declaration of her intent to work.

https://www.instagram.com/jessica.lia.tt/?hl=en Jessica Lia Blood Bank

Mexico - 06.12 -25.01

Los Angeles - 26.01 - 16.01

Berlin - 24.02 -20.04

Edited to add back locations, she has used fun UTF8 characters for stylized letters that got stripped out by hacker news.

New comment by jaltekruse in "German tourist held indefinitely in San Diego area immigrant detention facility"

jaltekruse — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 12:30:19 +0000

While I think the detention was completely unnecessary and cruel. It appears that her Instagram still lists dates she was planning to be in LA, right after a date range of being in Mexico, with a request for DMs under it for scheduling an appointment. It seems like this phrasing in the article of "accused of maybe violating her visa" could have disclosed that she looks to have a public declaration of her intent to work.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2024)"

jaltekruse — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:29:56 +0000

Location: Minneapolis

Remote: preferred

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Java/Scala, Apache Spark, Dremio, Apache Drill, Javascript, React, Express, NextJS

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HbrNUS-Mzf-3xSKxzjtD3ogYYSX...

Email: altekrusejason@gmail.com

Experience with database internals (Apache Drill, Dremio, Spark), full stack web dev, edtech including LTI integrations. Experience in early startups, created freemathapp.org used by ~5k students during the pandemic to solve 300k math problems and get feedback from their teachers. Hobby interest in Arduino and hardware hacking as well as video game dev.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Delta Lake vs. Parquet: A Comparison"

jaltekruse — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 14:33:55 +0000

If the format is splittable you generally can get similar benefits, and parquet files have metadata to point a given reader at a specific chunk of the file that can be read independently. In the case of parquet the writer decides when to finish writing a block/RowGroup, so manually creating smaller files than that can increase parallelism. But you can only go so far as I'm pretty sure I've seen spark combine together very small files into a single threaded read task.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Godot Game Engine"

jaltekruse — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 18:19:47 +0000

https://itch.io/games/tag-godot/tag-open-source

You can look through this list for games that have the little "playable in browser" badge, but that doesn't appear to be a search filter option. You can also remove the open source tag from the filter to get more results.

Here are direct links to some examples

https://mahda.itch.io/scream

https://alzter-s.itch.io/supertux-classic

Edit: see the comment from sxx, they found the right filter. There is a "platform" field that can be set to web, separate from the tags.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Rate The Landlord: Anonymously share information with tenants like you"

jaltekruse — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 13:00:59 +0000

I could barely believe this story when a pretty big youtuber had his upstairs neighbor flood his entire apartment, mold started growing everywhere and all his landlord offered was signing a new long-term lease on a different unit he didn't want.

He ended up somewhat deliberately staying after he got it out of them that they couldn't legally kick him out quickly, and he was trying to finish the purchase of a house at the time. But it seemed nuts that the landlord wouldn't be on the hook to provide him housing through the term of his lease without signing a new contract, or pay some large amount to break the contract that could have helped him cover a temporary mold-free option.

https://youtu.be/2R-KDji7tGE

New comment by jaltekruse in "Laid off by Big Tech, then recruited for contract work – at the same place"

jaltekruse — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 16:04:41 +0000

I worked in a factory for a few months as a temp and a bunch of my co-workers that had been with the company for years had this exact thing happen to them, a few years after the 2008 crash. I believe it was a little different in that people were asked to take the change in their classification or leave, rather than being let go and then hired back separately. I know engineers that work outside of software that had to take mandatory unpaid time for the same reasons. I guess we just need to hope we end up with that "soft-ish" landing the Fed was talking about instead of a big recession or we're going to hear a lot more stories like this.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company"

jaltekruse — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 14:22:28 +0000

I see this as just as simple and misguided of a take as noticing that affirmative action is racist. People have been making this argument forever, we passed all laws and did all the work we needed to when we ended slavery, oh wait nope we got it right in 1967 with the civil rights act, no more work to do, the only tragedy left is that the damn "riff raff" and lefties just can't stop talking about race. They're the real racists!

This thread is depressing as fuck and really is making me rethink how often I ought come to this site, and interact with this community. And I really didn't realize how much this toxic bullshit was pervasive in tech. I am going to be participating more in DEI initiatives going forward, while taking the feedback and criticism of the OP into account.

New comment by jaltekruse in "Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company"

jaltekruse — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 14:53:30 +0000

Is the top comment on this thread seriously a reverse racism rant?

You are right about something, affirmative action is racist, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to try to balance out current inequities. I strongly believe people making arguments like yours, people fighting against affirmative action need to propose an alternative rather than just complain about it.

There are lots of people alive today that couldn't drink from the same fountain or use the same bathroom as white people, and people who had friends and family members lynched (and in the eyes of many George Floyd's death was a lynching). Their neighborhoods were bulldozed to make the highways and they were systematically excluded from housing by redlining. You won't convince me for a second that their children and grandchildren got an equal opportunity. There is so much evidence of systemic disadvantaging of PoC communities today too, underfunded schools because of how we fund schools with local property taxes, turning lots of the public school system into effectively fancy private schools for families well off enough to live in rich neighborhoods.

So I will say it again, I do think at the surface level affirmative action is racist, but it's such a simple thing to realize it seems extremely pointless to even bring up. It is fighting centuries of truly heinous racism and genocide with just a tiny bit of an attempt at positive racism and white people still find a way to be pissed off they aren't getting everything the "deserve".

New comment by jaltekruse in "Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?"

jaltekruse — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 22:59:15 +0000

https://freemathapp.org

My Open source site where you can record math work like you would write it on paper. Uses a quick copy and edit workflow to save some of the repetitive writing out expressions involved in solving many types of problems when you show all of your work on paper. Also has tools for a teacher to grade a class full of assignments with similar work shown in groups.