Hacker News: jwsteigerwalt

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Working with AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding"

jwsteigerwalt — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:10:55 +0000

How about “Orchestration”?

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AI's Soaring Cost"

jwsteigerwalt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:57:15 +0000

This is less of an issue than the headline suggests. I worked for a publicly traded US company remotely. The company was based between Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach Florida. It was a roll of the dice each spring if the CFO would pull the trigger on a travel block for about 6 weeks around spring break when flights and hotels were most expensive. Approvals were available for critical projects. It was only ever about not exceeding a quarterly budget number; nothing else.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "The relay market powering token resellers and fraud"

jwsteigerwalt — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:37:06 +0000

Tokens are becoming a hard commodity. Subscriptions don’t work with hard commodities. Subscriptions work fine where fixed costs/capital investment are massive and service delivery is negligible. Think car washes and Netflix. The marginal cost of adding an additional subscriber to a streaming platform or a monthly car was membership is negligible. While there was substantial capital investment to generate the models, we are learning that the service delivery cost of tokens is real.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Don't Take the Black Pill [video]"

jwsteigerwalt — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:08:27 +0000

After 3 years in a US public company’s IT department between 2013 and 2016, I had been working in private closely help companies with revenue between $100 and $500 million the last few years. Cashflow to invest in good systems and software, but conscious about investments.

I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "DeKalb deputy charged with Flock camera misuse; more Georgia officers fired"

jwsteigerwalt — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 02:09:26 +0000

If you want a bit of irony, look up the Flock CEO’s home address (not terribly difficult). You will see it’s blurred out on Google Maps Street View

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

jwsteigerwalt — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:54:59 +0000

My propensity to participate was definitely decreased when I would always see others editing and nitpicking my contributions. The value and character of my contribution was unchanged, but now it was “shared” with someone else who edited it…

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines"

jwsteigerwalt — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:49:57 +0000

Correct, many people get worked up over the idea of the patents that could be in play here; plenty of good reason when that is a consideration. The court has already decided that the existence of a patent or licensing agreement is not relevant; It’s a contract dispute.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Half-Baked Product"

jwsteigerwalt — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:05:22 +0000

Well written. This applies much further than just equity raising startups.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor"

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:25:51 +0000

Farmers are not anti-technology, they are against technology that locks them out.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Do they know we can tell it's AI slop?"

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:09:48 +0000

You are spot on, this is why I am conflicted. How I feel does not matter. The net benefit to the company may not be the same as what I see.

Do they know we can tell it's AI slop?

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:38:29 +0000

What do I do when the entrepreneurs I work for send out AI slop in their communications?

I work for a great group of entrepreneurs as CTO/fCFO. They are all sales guys. In my childhood and professional career, I have seen so many toxic partnerships. I don’t waste any time on those anymore and I genuinely respect the guys I work for.

So, to the main question, what do I do when it’s blatant that they are just copying AI slop from Grok or chatGPT? I notice it all the time. But I genuinely respect these guys (unlike my son’s inadequate math teacher who pastes AI slop into emails to me…). It’s an 80/20 issue. For a majority of their audience, they make a positive and knowledgeable impression. But for the rest of us, it’s it takes them down a notch. I don’t want them embarrassing themselves in front of our bankers/financers/corporate partners.

Three recent examples: (1) Critique of a new SEO site pre-launch. We ended up firing the firm, but they lost all respect once the email was sent. (2) interviewing a new controller, so apparent when they pulled out canned questions from an LLM. (3) a proposed job costing procedure for a new entity/line of business. A 10 page document like I was used to seeing when I worked at public companies. Disconnected from the current state of the business.

I love these guys. Is it possible to send a message about how they are viewed without offending?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48303252

Points: 11

# Comments: 13

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "ADT says customer data stolen in cyber intrusion"

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:04:50 +0000

It’s an overstatement to call the 2021 incident a “hack”.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury"

jwsteigerwalt — Sun, 03 May 2026 04:03:08 +0000

I feel the same way. I only started using Mercury about 6 months ago and I’m continually impressed that it just makes sense.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "LinkedIn is illegally searching your computer"

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:39:32 +0000

LinkedIn is far from the only actor doing this. Browser extension fingerprinting is not new. LinkedIn‘s size, scope, network effects make this especially concerning.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app"

jwsteigerwalt — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:41:12 +0000

I disagree with the characterization that this is a security flaw unaddressed by Strava. Does anyone (French military in this case) really want Strava to be responsible to decide if the data is from a sailor on a military ship vs. a tourist on a cruise ship. Its operational security and the French military alone is responsible for polices and processes that maintain its security.

The idea that the public profile is the problem is ludicrous. The French military should have a problem with any geolocation data about its deployed sailors ever leaving its own networks.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

jwsteigerwalt — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:11:59 +0000

At some point you commit the time to learn what you need to. I like to think of the analogy to SEO. The veterans in the industry are not who they are because they were at the front of the line. It’s because they have the 15 years of experience under their belt.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Fined $48k for using a jammer to keep commuters from using phones while driving"

jwsteigerwalt — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:20:55 +0000

This is 12 years old…

He was incredibly lucky. Assuming there was no other criminal penalties, he screwed up royally and gets off with a fine he will be able to pay and a life that was not destroyed by the federal government.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "The recurring dream of replacing developers"

jwsteigerwalt — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:44:03 +0000

Nothing says it like this quote: “quickly discovered that readable syntax didn’t eliminate the complexity of logic, data structures, or system design”

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "Listen to Database Changes Through the Postgres WAL"

jwsteigerwalt — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:20:20 +0000

I have had great success in the past building business event alert systems for underlying salesforce data with Notify on Heroku data warehouse replications of salesforce. The potential for performance issues was always a nagging issue in the back of my head and this article is a great example why.

New comment by jwsteigerwalt in "I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel"

jwsteigerwalt — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:53:49 +0000

Considering that Microsoft perfected change control in the legal industry (ms word’s track changes), something can be done to add a degree of change control to spreadsheets.