atulatul (u/atulatul)

atulatul commented on From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you." blog.hayman.net/2025/05/0... · Posted by u/mattl

ryancnelson · 4 months ago

i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...

One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.

atulatul · 4 months ago

Was the co-worker called Newman?

I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:

From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:

"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."

atulatul commented on Why blog if nobody reads it? andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-... · Posted by u/alexgiann

minimaxir · 7 months ago

Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.

However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.

atulatul · 7 months ago

> I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read

I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.

atulatul commented on Software development topics I've changed my mind on chriskiehl.com/article/th... · Posted by u/belter

vladde · 7 months ago

> Good management is invaluable. (I went most of my career before seeing it done well)

I don't think I've ever seen good management. Anyone care to explain what that would look like?

atulatul · 7 months ago

A couple of indicators I have seen:

1. For a non-manager, an indication that there is good management (project, process, etc.) in place is that the management aspect sort of seems to disappear/ moves into the background.

2. Communication becomes efficient or smooth.

How is it achieved?

1. High level goals and metric. And incremental upgrades to those. I think people/ teams need to get comfortable with one set of those before you want to improve better those metrics. Jira story points and velocity are not good metrics.

2. A manager acts as a buffer. A manager absorbs some shock and filters some data/ emotions which would otherwise flow between one (ideally more) pair of layers: one above them and one below them.

3. One kind of non-sense (from many kinds) is that people- junior or senior- are 'trying to prove their value'. This is why some people speak unnecessarily in meetings, emails go back and forth, senior management chimes in on low level issues, etc. A couple of good managers I saw were able to limit that- over a period of time.

atulatul commented on Ask HN: Have you been on jury duty? What was your experience like? · Posted by u/atulatul

marssaxman · 8 months ago

I have been called up a few times but only selected once. It was a minor crime, the trial was over in a few hours, and the members of the jury seemed to take the case more seriously than any of the other participants. The prosecutor was young and inexperienced, the defense attorney obviously expected his client to lose, the defendant was already behind bars for some other reason and didn't seem to mind staying there, the judge looked tired, and the cop whose testimony was the sole evidence in the case seemed annoyed about having to be present.

Members of the jury, however, paid close attention, listened carefully, considered the evidence thoroughly, deliberated at length, and... failed to reach a verdict. The prosecution's case boiled down to "this here cop believes that there man did the crime", and the varying opinions people have about the trustworthiness of such evidence seems largely to be a function of life experience, not easily reconciled.

atulatul · 8 months ago

this was insightful, thanks.

atulatul commented on Ask HN: Have you been on jury duty? What was your experience like? · Posted by u/atulatul

codingdave · 8 months ago

Definitely different than movies...

In my most recent case, it took one long day. 30 minute intro video on being on a jury. An hour to select the jury. 20 minutes of instructions. Then most of the day would be spent sitting down, hearing 10-15 minutes of the trial, then being sent off to a room so the lawyers could talk and negotiate. Over 8-ish, hours we probably spent an hour sitting as a jury, and the rest of the time just sitting in a conference room together waiting for the next bit of the trial. When all that was done, the judge gave us instructions, and we went to deliberate. That part was quick - about 10 minutes. We walked out, said our verdict, the judge said thanks, and we went home. (Not all deliberations are that quick.)

The bit of the lawyers getting up and talking to the jury is real. Opening/closing arguments, testimony, all that, is fairly accurate to movies. But that just isn't the majority of how time is spent. And movies skip the legal details - it felt like we spent as much time listening to the judge instruct us on the details of the law as we did the lawyers presenting their side.

atulatul · 8 months ago

Thanks. Any intrusion of privacy, threats, bribes, etc. like they show in some movies? Does the experience test your preconceptions, morals, ethics, etc?

atulatul commented on An Unreasonable Amount of Time allenpike.com/2024/an-unr... · Posted by u/memalign

treetalker · 8 months ago

This was a pleasant surprise and a pleasant read. Its message reminds me of the words of Shunryu Suzuki:

> As to progress -- we don’t know how much progress we made, actually, but if you practice it you will realize -- some day you will realize that our progress is not -- it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, you cannot actually make progress. The progress you make is always little by little. It is like -- to go through fog. You don’t know when you get wet, but if you just walk through fog you will be wet, little by little, even though you don’t know -- it is not like a shower.

> When you go out when it is showering you will feel, ‘Oh, that’s terrible!”. It is not so bad but when you get wet by fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. This is how we make progress. So actually there is not need to worry about your progress. Just to do it is the way. It is, maybe, like to study language. Just repeating, you will master it. You cannot do it all of a sudden. This is how we practice, especially Soto way, is to do it little by little. To make progress little by little. Or we do not even mind, we do not expect to make progress, just to do it is our way. The point is to do it with sincerity in each moment. That is the point. There should not be Nirvana besides our practice.

Source: https://www.shunryusuzuki.com/detail1?ID=80

atulatul · 8 months ago

I did not post this earlier because what the post says and what I am going quote are not exactly same. Time on Progress-craft/ Problem Solving. But maybe at some level of abstraction, the idea is same.

Quoting from 'The Road Less Traveled' by M. Soctt Peck.[0]

Section on Problem-Solving and Time:

> At the age of thirty-seven I learned how to fix things. Prior to that time almost all my attempts to make minor plumbing repairs, mend toys or assemble boxed furniture according to the accompanying hieroglyphical instruction sheet ended in confusion, failure and frustration. Despite having managed to make it through medical school and support a family as a more or less successful executive and psychiatrist, I considered myself to be a mechanical idiot. I was convinced I was deficient in some gene, or by curse of nature lacking some mystical quality responsible for mechanical ability. Then one day at the end of my thirty-seventh year, while taking a spring Sunday walk, I happened upon a neighbor in the process of re-pairing a lawn mower. After greeting him I remarked, "Boy, I sure admire you. I've never been able to fix those kind of things or do anything like that." My neighbor, without a moment's hesitation, shot back, "That's because you don't take the time."...

> The issue is important, because many people simply do not take the time necessary to solve many of life's intellectual, social or spiritual problems, just as I did not take the time to solve mechanical problems...

> And this is precisely the way that so many of us approach other dilemmas of day-to-day living. Who among us can say that they unfailingly devote sufficient time to analyzing their children's problems or tensions within the family? Who among us is so self-disciplined that he or she never says resignedly in the face of family problems, "It's beyond me"?...

> Actually, there is a defect in the approach to problem-solving more primitive and more destructive than impatiently in-adequate attempts to find instant solutions, a defect even more ubiquitous and universal. It is the hope that problems will go away of their own accord.

>Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...

atulatul commented on Books I Loved Reading in 2024 thoughts.wyounas.com/p/bo... · Posted by u/simplegeek

Lyngbakr · 8 months ago

I've tried my damnedest, but simply cannot get into Rushdie. Given that Midnight's Children won the "Booker of Bookers", I thought that would be a great place to start. When I finished the book I turned it over in my hands wondering if I missed something or if I'm simply not smart enough to get Rushdie. I read a couple more of his books and the result was much the same, unfortunately.

atulatul · 8 months ago

After a few pages into Midnight's Children it made me a bit uncomfortable (not bored)- not for the story or characters like in other novels- where you identify with characters or feel for them, their plights, etc. It made me uncomfortable in reading the way the story was told. I wondered why was this book so loved, it does not seem like any good book I've read so far, in fact it somewhat destroys the ideas I have about how a good novel should be. And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved. With that understanding I 'decided' I was going to be ok with the discomfort I felt till I finished the book. And then creativity became visible and the discomfort sort of went away.

atulatul commented on Books I Loved Reading in 2024 thoughts.wyounas.com/p/bo... · Posted by u/simplegeek

matthew_stone · 8 months ago

Three Booker prize winners I’m particularly fond of:

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite

atulatul · 8 months ago

I haven't read Evaristo but I will add Salman Rushdie to your list. Particularly, Midnight's Children.

atulatul commented on More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market wsj.com/finance/stocks/st... · Posted by u/thm

thrance · 8 months ago

I fail to notice anything natural about this selection.

atulatul · 8 months ago

Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.