girzel

2 miesiące temudiscuss

The application instructions mention an LLM honeytrap, but the application doesn't include any way to trip that trap. AND, submitting an application results in no automated "received!" email. Debugging brain says: maybe something misconfigured?

girzel

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Hi HN,

  Location: Seattle, USA
  Willing to relocate: No
  Main Technologies: Python, PostgreSQL, more than I ever wanted to know about AWS
  Resume: https://ericabrahamsen.net/EricAbrahamsen_0505b.pdf
  Email: [email protected]

I'm a 0-1 backend engineer, most recently owning the full AWS-based stack for a small startup. I thrive best in slightly volatile situations, reacting quickly to changing requirements, staying in communication to make sure everyone knows what's happening. Balancing new features against maintainability against stability. Low ego, and approaching unflappable.

girzel

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Don't forget to mention location! This looks to be on location in Boston.

girzel

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

Location: Seattle

Remote: Remote or hybrid (or in-office if there's a good reason!)

Willing to relocate: No

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-abrahamsen-32a8895b/

I am a problem solver, and my main tools are Python and Postgres, though my programming approach is informed by Lisp (many years of Emacs contributions), Prolog (the best kind of mind-bending) and OCaml (which I wish I was writing instead of Python).

I would like to be solving real-world problems: energy, logistics, communications, governance, trash removal. It's amazing what you can find out if you talk to people about their problems, and its amazing what you can solve with a concoction of fairly straightforward data science, ML, calculus, signal processing, and Rube Goldberg machines.

Email in profile.

girzel

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

It is a practice that leads, as a consequence, to insight. Insight is not information that might be read from a book, it is experience that uses observation to arrive at understanding and transformation. You can't just "decide to have" the experience without doing the work of transforming yourself through observation. People who have gone far in the practice do tend to say that there was never any goal to begin with, that they ended up where they started, but that's more of a metaphor than anything else. Someone who travels around the world and ends up where they started is in a very different place than someone who never left home.

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

Twenty minutes of searching didn't come up with any software jobs related to the Northwest Forest Plan. I'm PNW born and raised, and love old-growth forests more than pretty much anything. If I could find a SWE job doing something connected to this plan, I'd probably work for free^H^H^H^H^H^H be very grateful.

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

Interesting. Are you characterizing Kalman filters mostly as systems of control/refinement on top of alpha-beta filters?

I do feel like the core of it is essentially exponential/logarithmic growth/decay, with the option to layer multiple higher-order growth/decay series on top of one another. Maybe that's the gist...

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

Thanks for the recommendation! It would never have occurred to me to look at robotics, but I can understand why that's very relevant.

I read Feedback Control for Computer Systems not too long ago, which felt like yet another restatement of the same ideas; I guess that counts as "classic control theory".

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

Hi Chris!

I also felt like the essay suffered a lot from generalization -- Harrison happened to talk to these three people, and extrapolated way too much from that.

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

No thread on Kalman Filters is complete without a link to this excellent learning resource, a book written as a set of Jupyter notebooks:

https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...

That book mentions alpha-beta filters as sort of a younger sibling to full-blown Kalman filters. I recently had need of something like this at work, and started doing a bunch of reading. Eventually I realized that alpha-beta filters (and the whole Kalman family) is very focused on predicting the near future, whereas what I really needed was just a way to smooth historical data.

So I started reading in that direction, came across "double exponential smoothing" which seemed perfect for my use-case, and as I went into it I realized... it's just the alpha-beta filter again, but now with different names for all the variables :(

I can't help feeling like this entire neighborhood of math rests on a few common fundamental theories, but because different disciplines arrived at the same systems via different approaches, they end up sounding a little different and the commonality is obscured. Something about power series, Euler's number, gradient descent, filters, feedback systems, general system theory... it feels to me like there's a relatively small kernel of intuitive understanding at the heart of all that stuff, which could end up making glorious sense of a lot of mathematics if I could only grasp it.

Somebody help me out, here!

girzel

2 lata temudiscuss

I attended Deep Springs 1996/97. The school goes through semi-regular cultural oscillations between "mean" and "nice"; between what we'd now call toxic masculinity, and sort of a peace-and-love hippie friendliness. Students play a large role in admitting the incoming class, and tend to admit people like them, until the culture swings too far in one direction and they start correcting.

It sounds like this guy visited during a "mean" period, which is too bad. I attended during an upswing into a "nice" period, and it felt well balanced. My application interview was one of the most memorable experiences of my life -- I'd never had anyone pay that kind of close attention to anything I'd written, or what I thought. It woke me all the way up, in a sense where I'd gone through most of my teenage years asleep, and was enormously bracing. When they finally let me out, I emerged into the main room, where some guy reading on a sofa looked up and asked, "How was it?" I don't remember exactly what I said, but it communicated something along the lines of "holy shit that was a thrill!". I still suspect he communicated my attitude back to the applications committee and that played a part in getting accepted.

So far as I know, no one during my two years visited the Cottontail Ranch :)

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

Exactly the same here. Every once in a while I think "let's see if Google has anything better for this query", and it never does.

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

I am 100% in on OSMand and the whole ecosystem, but I still curse out loud every time I have to enter a street address into its address "parser". I know it's a hard problem, but it's horrible. None of the app's other shortcomings are meaningful to me.

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

This is incredibly helpful, thank you! It's going to save me hours of research.

I have a Das Keyboard that I am very fond of, but over the years have definitely started to wonder why a) the rows are staggered, and b) it isn't split. There's just so little reason to stick to this form-factor.

Thanks again!

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

I've enjoyed using types.SimpleNamespace:

    >>> from types import SimpleNamespace
    >>> d = {"one":1, "two":2}
    >>> ns = SimpleNamespace(**d)
    >>> ns.two
    2

I consider it a bonus that the dict keys are grouped as attributes on an object :)

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

All of my passwords are in the "pass" command line utility, where they're encrypted with gpg. I added my brother's gpg key as an encryption target, and his ssh key onto the sever where the git repo is stored, locked down to the git shell command. In the event of my untimely demise, my wife tells him the url of the git repo.

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

44, and just got my first job as a software engineer! (I've been programming since circa 2004, tho.)

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

I live in the Seattle's university district. Homelessness has doubled or tripled since COVID. The vast majority of them mentally ill.

Tell me how COVID ruined our citizens' moral fiber. Tell me how COVID made us soft on crime. Tell me how COVID suddenly tripled our population of mentally ill.

If we'd actually defunded the police, instead of saying we wanted to and then not, maybe there would be some money to care for people who are obviously incapable of caring for themselves. If we taxed our local corporations at all, maybe there would be some money for that.

Yes, there are plenty of people on drugs. You can put them in jail, and see where that gets you. Or you can treat addiction like the public health crisis it is. Fund the goddamn services, with tax money from Amazon.

girzel

4 lata temudiscuss

> The absolutely staggering level of income and wealth inequality we have experienced in the last decade has taken all of those problems and multiplied them tenfold.

This is the key, to me. Amazon moving out because of crime seems like some kind of full-circle irony, when they have contributed so much to that inequality in the first place.

I grew up in Seattle, and live here now. Crime and homelessness has been an issue for a decade or so, and it's become a much bigger issue (more spread out than it was) since COVID. None of that indicates getting "tougher" on crime/homelessness as a solution to our problems. Not to me, anyway.

girzel

5 lat temudiscuss

Like a good FOSS nerd (and cheapo), I tried to steer my daughter towards Gimp rather than shelling out for Photoshop. She dug in her heels, and eventually I was able to divine that the reason was, the internet is chock-full of tutorials on using Photoshop to do all the kinds of art she wanted to do. The number of equivalently-useful Gimp tutorials was effectively zero. That's when I gave in.

I guess a variant of the network effect?

Submissions

Arete Project: A Deep Springs College for Women

BBDB on EIEIO – An Introduction to Object-Oriented Emacs Lisp

Is it the 40th anniversary of Emacs?

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