arctangos

Hi, I'm a good senior backend developer with data science experience but [at least hope/think that I] am an excellent team lead and director.

My magic skills are a) creating high-performance development, research, and data science teams and organizations and b) squeezing water out of rocks.

Much of my career has involved doing just this. I like working with high performers and, on occasions when I've had to work with low performing teams, can usually turn them around. For reference, I've sometimes served in SCRUM master and PO positions. Devs generally like this since I tend to understand teammates' struggles and the work itself.

I'm just starting to look for new opportunities and would like to be approached in a relaxed way.

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Location: Utrecht/Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Remote: Yes, hybrid or in-person are also OK

Willing to relocate: No, but willing to travel frequently to Boston, MA, USA and throughout Europe.

Technologies: Python, Django, Clojure, Streamlit, SQL, Llamaparse, SKLearn

Resume/CV: https://albertrcarter.com/pages/resume/

Email: AL@ALBERTRCARTER.COM

It’s surprising to me that no one has mentioned llamaparse. My team has been using it for a while and is quite satisfied. If other people think that other services are better then I’d be interested in hearing why.

I’m curious about this api. I’d looked at it before but it didn’t seem like it could handle arbitrary input that didn’t fit one of the predefined schemas. I also wasn’t sure how much training data it needed. What has your experience been like?

There is a financial concept known as universal ownership. The gist of it is that most investors are more affected by the overall returns of the market than by the returns of individual stocks. As a result, rational investors should sometimes vote against their individual holdings’ short term interests in favor of the long-term interest of the economy. Limiting antibiotics for livestock is one of these. Not feeding cows chicken would seem to be another obvious one.

Unfortunately, many financial institutions have been slow to pick this up and may soon have an opportunity to learn about the consequences.

I work in the, "green movement." Since this movement is almost entirely volunteer driven, it is not typically well positioned to coordinate actions or balance tradeoffs. For example, the people working on banning plastic bags are typically concerned about bags stuck in trees and rivers or preventing soil permeability, not carbon emissions.

If one were to ask plastic straw or bag ban volunteers to go work on something else, they just... wouldn't. This would be different with employees but with volunteers there are rarely significant tradeoffs to consider.

A search engine would show that there this movement is not ignoring private jets. [1]

Lastly, perhaps this is not true of the parent commenter, but a last thing I'll note is that many people seem to believe that the, "green movement," is somehow powerful or well financed. This could not be farther from the truth.

The money most environmental orgs brings in from donations is dwarfed by what those same donors pay for gasoline, red meat, and other environmentally harmful products. Some percentage of these purchases is then funneled to fighting the causes that they just donated to. (Dear child commenters, I'm not shaming you for eating meat or buying gas. I also live in a society...)

That’s the, "green movement." We're out-gunned, under-financed, and, due to those constraints, almost impossible to coordinate. I personally am currently struggling to figure out how to afford per-seat pricing of password managers for my team of 5-10 hr/week volunteers. THAT is the level of shoestring budget that this movement is on.

Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but if you’d like to see a more coordinated environmental movement capable of weighing tradeoffs and focusing on big issues over plastic straw bans, I’d suggest donating, not just once, but repeatedly. Otherwise, the fundamental dynamics of volunteer based orgs just won’t change.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=environmentalists+block+jets

This is anecdotal but in my experience in large parts of Europe, this already practically exists.

From what I understand, in Germany at least, companies can demand that employees sign a non compete. However, once an employee departs the company, if the non compete agreement prevents the former employee from finding suitable work, the company must pay your salary until it can either prove that the non compete agreement is not the issue or until it releases the former employees from the agreement. Given those conditions, companies very rarely enforce their noncompete agreements and they’re functionally toothless.

Climate protests, action, and legislation on Hacker News seem to act as a special attractor for particular types of repetitive comments, describing the legislation passed/action taken as impossible or creating no change[1], or the people behing them as or the people behind them behind them actions as ingenuine, misguided, or as performance artists[2].

_I've added two links but a search can provide many more._

I would like to respond to some of these frequent critiques explain a bit about why such actions and legislation continue happening.

1) "Only X% Percent of Emissions… No _real_ effect"

A frequent talking point of such critiques has to do with the extremely small percentage CO2-equivalent reduction that might result from the given action. (An example of this is present in a sibling comment which implies that fighting climate change is futile, since even the United States and China combined only account for 43% of glocal emissions. I haven't verified the numbers.)

Given the vast mass of CO2 that human actions put into the climate, it is unreasonable to expect single piece of legislation or action can to solve this problem. Only the very largest pieces of legislation or actions can even be expected to make a noticable dent.

To claim that actions or legislation are innefective because they are relatively minor compared to the size of the problem can be reduced to asserting that large problems cannot be solved, since solving them involves mutliple steps. This is false.

2) "Misguided hypocritical performance artist clowns"

These types of critiques are applied mostly to activists but occasionally to legislators as well. Actions that make the news seem especially created _to_ make the news, so it seems reasonable to consider them performances of some sort or another.

It is also worth considering _why_ these are such performances. My impression is that activists are actively seeking to create media attention for an issue that has typically not received the media coverage it is due.

(For example, according to the IPCC, the most populated areas of the country where I currently live will be underwater in the next century, but the near certainty of this never makes the news except for rare occasions when it floods or when activists block the airport.)

If this is the case, blocking private jets is a convenient rhetorical springboard for garnering media attention rather than the main idea behind action. The point was to "earn" media coverage of the climate crisis, not to block planes. Given that this action was briefly on the frontpage of hacker news and my local news, it seems to have worked.

Well-intentioned and direct criticism of the headline, whether that is blocking private jets or people gluing themselves to paintings, feeds algorithms, helps the activists' end goals, and misses the point.

(Scott Alexander touched on this in 2014. [3])

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Many dismissive comments on HN come from individuals whom seem to have opinions at odds with the scientific consensus. Others would prefer to see activism or legislation that makes a larger impact, is more effective, and is less disruptive.

If you are in the later category, please consider asking yourself what actions you have personally taken make a meaningful difference for the climate crisis. Please also ask yourself whether your actions can scale to other people, and what it would take to scale them (media coverage, network effects, etc.)

_I personally consider voting, lobbying, and dietary changes to be effective but don't believe that they scale very well._

Activism and legislation are both complicated fields existing within larger climatic and political systems.

If you have not recently attempted to take such actions, found them effective, and attempted to scale them enough to generate some network effects (via media coverage or otherwise), I would personally doubt your ability to provide more useful analysis than the people doing work in this field.

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The people behind such actions and legislation are trying to create positive change. Sometimes they fail. Other times, they succeed. It's clear to me that many commentators do not understand how or why this is the case.

In my opinion, "Why?" questions may be helpful. "What!" type reactions are less so.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25134077 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33359991 [3]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

Sex worker is used as a term to describe someone working in the sex industry. This includes pornography actors, onlyfans models, prostitutes, and many other things. I believe that people working in the industry prefer this, as it emphasizes that what they do is in fact work.

I am an EU resident (Netherlands) and have wanted to make a DIY air filter for myself for several years. Unfortunately, I simply can’t find any flat box fans on the market. Would someone else in the EU be willing to point me in the right direction?

I hope that advocates of purchasing power parity comparisons are prepared to factor in implicitly consumed but not easily purchasable goods. Otherwise, they would miss out on many of the things that truly matter in life.

For example, in the EU, my middle class neighbors’ children safely bike and ride the train to and from their excellent publicly funded schools, after school activities, and friends’ houses requiring little to no adult supervision while in transit.* What do private schooling, chauffeurs, and security personnel cost in the US, anyway?

*Of course, COVID does interfere somewhat with this, but this is true worldwide.

This middle ground currently governs most interactions between people in cars and people on bicycles. This fails in practice, as criminally irresponsible drivers are able to speed away from crime scenes while their victims are injured, dead, or otherwise incapable of seeking redress.

It’s awfully hard to tell whether this is parody or not, but yes, media are “allowed” in. In fact, far as I can see on the various vids, anyone can just walk in

The authors don't include some extremely nasty feedback loops the appear to currently be happening. For example, methane release from permafrost melt.

As a result, the simulation appears to be misleadingly optimistic.

- This tool is based on climate interactive's previous one, C-Road.

- in the C-Road simulation when you click on parameters -> assumptions to add parameters about methane release through permafrost melting and human activities. By default, it's set to zero, but even their maximum values don't seem as impactful as I would expect.

- in EN-Road simulation (this one) the methane release parameters are removed! So, no possibility to add any positive feedback loops. It feels like the relation between CO2 and temperature is a simple linear equation, or close to it.

Large releases of atmospheric sulfuric particulates tend to be highly correlated with mega-droughts in the southern hemisphere and disruption of the African and Indian Monsoons, leading to famine and mass displacement.

Of course, It's very difficult to establish causality, but there's some information about it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209471...

climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/GeoengineeringJGR9inPress.pdf

https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughsy02voln/page/n6

Cars reduce noise compared to subways squealing and rattling, compared to commuter rail horns blasting, and compared to the big engines of diesel buses.

As a US citizen living in Germany, I have to disagree. I live one very quiet residential block from a nationwide major rail artery and do not hear or feel the trains. Noisy, squeaky, rattling, rail horn blasting trains are a choice made by underfunded, weak, and poorly organized governments and transportation organizations. In the US, it is only that way because the US has chosen to prioritize cars over all other means of transportation.

When I have a problem getting a framework or library to do the thing it’s meant to do, my first instinct isn’t to debug it and submit a PR, but to look at my strategy and figure out where I’m going wrong.

In this case, maybe SF is trying to send you a signal: you probably shouldn’t be driving in it.

If you can’t change you strategy, then consider changing frameworks: LA historically has had extremely high parking minimums, though that does present its own challenges.

I find it disheartening that it takes studies of this nature to reshape regulations. Glyphosate (as Roundup) has been the bestselling herbicide on the market since 1980. Among bee-keepers, asserting that "roundup kills bees" is about as controversial as "rain makes things wet."

The US regulatory environment treats artificially prepared chemicals as innocent until proven guilty. A safer approach (recently adopted in Europe) would be to guarantee the safety of industrial, agricultural, and household chemicals before they are allowed to go to market.

On a potentially related note, sperm counts in the western world have been declining precipitously since 1990. I'd bet that glyphosate and/or other common poorly regulated chemicals have something to do with this.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropp...

.6 m is quite devastating, but less so for US housing than for food security. Some of the world's producers of food are almost at sea level. If you'd like a hard nosed data and finance driven look at what global warming means, I'd recommend taking a look at this

https://fi.intms.nl/fi_43a1c02c/files/downloads/201808-jerem...

I did a project on this some time ago. Columbia gas was one of the worst offenders for sheer volume of leaks. Not only is it normal to leave leaks unfixed, frequently they disappear from the public record without any recorded nearby fixes.

It'd be interesting to see whether there's a correlation between explosion and leak location.

Github: https://github.com/RogerTangos/LostLeaks/tree/master/data

Overview (just for the Boston Area. I didn't do the analysis for Columbia gas.) http://lostleaks.csail.mit.edu

I'm happy to lend a hand for the Columbia 2016-17, and 2017-18 data if others want to join in.

disclaimer: I work here as a programmer and it's a small company.

This is an excellent group of people to work with. The people are thoughtful, considerate, intelligent, and just generally nice to be around. I'm regularly challenged with intellectually interesting problems and expect that to continue.

Lastly, I'll add that as a walker in NYC (no car, no bike), I have no fear of being struck by cars. I fear bikes. I rarely see bikes obey traffic laws at all, and have frequently come 1-2 feed away from being side-swiped while a bicycle blows through a red light. Since you're so passionate about this I'm sure you follow traffic laws, but maybe you'll be inspired to take a look at bike behavior too!

I strongly agree that more research is warranted. I bike and walk, live in an area where bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure varies greatly, and would like to add some insight into this issue.

I have a strong preference for following traffic laws, but often don't.

In areas where the bicycling and pedestrian infrastructure is well developed, I almost always obey traffic laws. In areas with less developed infrastructure, I break them. Anecdotally, I find this to also be true of other pedestrians and cyclists.

I suspect that this is because the social contract for non-drivers is broken. That is, the implicit agreement that non-drivers will give away some of their individual freedoms for some benefits like convenience or state protection.

When the infrastructure is bad, missing, or unenforced, following traffic laws makes me less safe, and it is certainly an inconvenience. The risk of being ticketed is low, so I see no reason not to break the law.

For example, if I expect traffic to ignore crosswalks, there's not very much reason for me to walk across them. It's probably safer to cross whenever I am whenever I see a break in traffic.

Likewise, I sometimes run red lights on my bike. I do this in situations where the cross traffic is clear, and there either isn't a bike lane, or when it's blocked. This allows me to avoid merging with traffic at an intersection, which is safer for me.

Many people also break laws simply out of convenience. That makes sense. They're used to ignoring the law, and the people around them do it too.

I want to follow the law. My experience is that non-car infrastructure allows me and others to do that safely. I'd really love to see whether this is backed up by data, or it's just my own experience.

a) This is a remarkably neat idea. b) It probably shouldn't have to exist.

... which just about sums up the Objective-C experience