HN user

aalhour

286 karma

https://aalhour.com

Posts35
Comments130
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Books or games to teach kids math

aalhour
11pts8
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Book Recommendations on Scientific Thinking

aalhour
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?

aalhour
1pts11
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Resources for Writing Linux Filesystems?

aalhour
9pts2
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Books on building databases similar to Crafting Interpreters

aalhour
33pts5
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Resources for Studing Ruby's Runtime and Internals

aalhour
7pts3
duckduckgo.com 4y ago

Is DDG Down?

aalhour
1pts3
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Favorite Parenting Podcasts?

aalhour
9pts2
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What interesting or hard computational challenges are you working on?

aalhour
8pts3
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Covid-19 vaccince in layman terms?

aalhour
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: A story-telling intro to Probability and Stats?

aalhour
1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Alternatives to “Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes”

aalhour
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What Is Your (Big) Data Architecture/Tech Stack Like?

aalhour
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: How to Prepare for an Engineering Manager Interview at Google

aalhour
15pts5
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What Have You Learned at Google as a Software Engineer?

aalhour
246pts151
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Resources to Self-Study Communication Systems

aalhour
3pts0
github.com 7y ago

Asynchronous SQLAlchemy with Aiohttp Cookiecutter Template (Py3)

aalhour
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: As an Engineer, how would you like to be interviewed?

aalhour
12pts38
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How do you use Kanban at work?

aalhour
41pts26
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How do you validate a business idea?

aalhour
25pts13
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How do you apply Boyd's OODA Loop in your life?

aalhour
23pts10
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How Do You Interview Tech Leads / Engineering Managers?

aalhour
4pts3
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Best informal introduction to Economics?

aalhour
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: What is your Golang web-dev tech stack?

aalhour
98pts46
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How do you search for a P.I. side project niche?

aalhour
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How to invest €10k in Europe today?

aalhour
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Those in Europe making €100K+ annually, what is your job like?

aalhour
57pts65
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Awesome-Compilers List

aalhour
8pts1
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Advice for a new Tech Lead?

aalhour
1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Ways to secure a mobile app's API back end?

aalhour
1pts0

Location: Germany (Munich)

Fully remote: Yes (and open to hybrid in Munich)

Willing to relocate: No

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aalhour/

Website: https://aalhour.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/aalhour

Resumé/CV: available on request (has personal contact info)

Email: a.z.alhour(at)gmail(dot)com

Technologies: Go, Python, Java, k8s, docker, AWS (backend/data infra)

About me: A software engineer with 15 years of experience (ex-Shopify, ex-HubSpot), with prior engineering management experience. I work on the backend, did data engineering in the past and am looking for a role in backend/data infra.

I worked as a manager at a local German company in Germany with a strong Worker's Council team. Performance Management was run through them, they had comments, the process was adapted and managers were onboarded. This is not to say that performance management doesn't suck in general (because once you start having metrics, people start gaming them and you're almost superimposing it on people's way of working), but the Worker's Council didn't block it, because at the end of the day it was neither invasive nor exploitative.

EDIT: typos.

I was aware that the Random function call gets evaluated in Python (and C) every time the loop iterates, I just couldn't imagine the probability distribution myself, I had assumed that all numbers are uniformally distributed but didn't cater for the sums. You're a legend! Now I see it. I wrote the following code to check out your argument and it checks out indeed :thumbs-up:

  def p(n):
    total = 1
    for i in range(1, n):
      total *= (100-i)/100
    return total


  for i in range(1, 100):
    print(f"p({i}) = {p(i)}")

The first 13 results:
  p(1) = 1
  p(2) = 0.99
  p(3) = 0.9702
  p(4) = 0.9410939999999999
  p(5) = 0.9034502399999998
  p(6) = 0.8582777279999998
  p(7) = 0.8067810643199997
  p(8) = 0.7503063898175998
  p(9) = 0.6902818786321918
  p(10) = 0.6281565095552946
  p(11) = 0.5653408585997651
  p(12) = 0.503153364153791
  p(13) = 0.44277496045533604
p(12) sits at 50%, of course it will be the mean! :D

Not sure that adds up, I translated the right side of the equality into a Python statement and it returns a number I am not sure how to interpret:

  1/99 * sum([(i-1)*i for i in range(2, 100)])   # 3266.666666666667
Both the median and mean are around 12 for 10K runs of the loop.

What is horrible about Python wrt onboarding new engineers?

In my personal experience, I had an easier time getting onboarded on Python than Golang.

Invisibilia. Unseeable forces control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. Invisibilia—Latin for invisible things—fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia/

99% Invisible. A podcast about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world. https://99percentinvisible.org/

Wicked problem 6 years ago

As per Dave Snowden, Wicked Problems lie in the Unordered side of Cynefin and mainly in the Complex domain (if they come from sociology).

Been there & won the battle. Talked to the other tech leads and convinced HR and the CTO with our position, that psychopath of a manager ended up getting fired during his probation period.

Did you try talking to this person? Did you try having a personal & private chat with them? Are they aware of the impact of their behavior on the environment and their colleagues?

If no, then how about you try talking to them, making them aware of the impact of their behavior on you? You could go like:

"Hey, I've been meaning to talk to you for a while but I didn't know how to put it best, I'd appreciate it if you listen to me until the end, I have observed <list non-judgemental observations> and I personally think of them as <list impact it had on you>, I'd appreciate it if you could express your ideas/talk to me/write me in a way that is more productive and constructive. I don't want our interactions to always end up being negative and I am actually looking forward to discussing a lot of your ideas in the future. What do you think?"

EDIT: formatting

I loved Ryan O'Donnell's "Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science" series, you can find it on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3J0oaFux3aafQm568bl...

MIT OCW has a course on Advanced Data Structures which is just great! You can find the Fall-2017 version of it here:

https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/fall17/

I also started reading the "Streaming Systems" book which is a great reading on distributed data-intensive systems, I recommend it:

https://www.amazon.de/dp/1491983876

Also, you might be interested in checking out the Apache Beam, Flink, Spark and Storm projects, a lot of things happening on the front of designing data-intensive distributed systems, hacking a side project in any of these might be a fun learning activity.

Best of luck!

Repl from Repo 7 years ago

It takes forever to open on my phone, tried different browsers and it still doesn't work, is this intended for desktop use only?