boltzmann-brain

However, we do not consider those as farces as well

Speak for yourself. A lot of people do.

It's very usual to name famous people by their first name. like John, Ringo, George, or Paul. Or Steve and Bill. Or Sam and Dario.

    Location: EU, overlap with US East+West Time Zones
    Remote: Yes
    Relocation: No
    Technologies: Claude Code, Rust, C++, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, JS, Nix, K8s, Terraform
    Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
    CV: on request

宝 Multiple exits. Hands-on, or owning the whole technical org.

勝 Highlights:

— Designed and shipped a commercial LLM end-to-end (algorithms → training → MLops)

— Expert at agentic workflows (Claude Code, harnesses, autonomous agents, LLM-powered dev)

— Shipped prod systems for Oracle, Shell, Time Warner, BoA, Sparkasse, Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas

— Launched and audited major blockchains (e.g. Tezos, Solana)

— Built + scaled a software NGO (2M+ supporters, 1k+ volunteers)

睿 Strengths:

— Turn ambiguous problems into shipped systems

— MVPs that don’t need rewriting

— ML, LLMs, Foundation Models, RAGs, vector DBs

— Rigorous code and infosec audits for mission-critical infra

— 10x–1000x performance wins on legacy systems

— FP, Compilers, DSLs, distributed systems, security-critical code

功 Further work:

— Contributor: Rust Book, Rust By Example, Python docs, Haskell Communities and Activities Report

— Dozens of audits

— Background in cryptography, infosec, formal methods

運 If you need someone who can own the stack and ship reliably, email me at damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

    Location: EU, overlap with US Time Zones
    Remote: Yes
    Relocation: No
    Technologies: Rust, C++, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, Nix, K8s, Terraform
    Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
    CV: on request

Highlights: - Designed and shipped a commercial LLM end-to-end (algorithms → training → MLops) - Launched and audited major blockchain systems (e.g. Tezos) - Shipped production systems for Oracle, Shell, Time Warner, BoA, Sparkasse, Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas - Built and scaled a software NGO (500k+ supporters, 1k+ volunteers)

Strengths: - Turning ambiguous problems into shipped systems - MVPs that don’t need rewriting - ML, LLMs, RAGs, vector DBs - Rigorous code and infosec audits for mission-critical infra - 10x–1000x performance wins on legacy systems - FP, Compilers, DSLs, distributed systems, security-critical code

Further work: - Contributor: Rust Book, Rust By Example, Python docs, Haskell Communities and Activities Report - Dozens of smart contract audits - Background in cryptography, infosec, formal methods, infosec audits

Tech: AI/ML (LLMs, Foundation Models, RAGs, MLops); Rust, Python, Go, Zig, C++, C, Haskell, Scala, Typescript, Node.js, Next; NixOS/Nix, AWS, Terraform; Launched Tezos and other blockchains

If you need someone who can own the stack and ship reliably, email me at damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

    Location: EU, overlap with PST
    Remote: Yes
    Relocation: No
    Technologies: Rust, C++, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, Nix, K8s, Terraform
    Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
    CV: on request

Highlights: - Designed and shipped a commercial LLM end-to-end (algorithms → training → MLops) - Launched and audited major blockchain systems (e.g. Tezos) - Shipped production systems for Oracle, Shell, Time Warner, BoA, Sparkasse, Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas - Built and scaled a software NGO (500k+ supporters, 1k+ volunteers)

Strengths: - Turning ambiguous problems into shipped systems - MVPs that don’t need rewriting - ML, LLMs, RAGs, vector DBs - Rigorous code and infosec audits for mission-critical infra - 10x–1000x performance wins on legacy systems - FP, Compilers, DSLs, distributed systems, security-critical code

Further work: - Contributor: Rust Book, Rust By Example, Python docs, Haskell Communities and Activities Report - Dozens of smart contract audits - Background in cryptography, infosec, formal methods

If you need someone who can own the stack and ship reliably, email me at damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

Our implementation is up to 2x faster than optimized speculative decoding baselines and up to 5x faster than autoregressive decoding with open source inference engines

what about per-FLOP?

Speaking of battery, veeeeery soon phones will have mandated replaceable batteries in the EU. I'm just hoping my current moto (a $99 job perfectly adequate for absolutely everything I do) survives until then.

Aside: I've noticed over the years that phones die in one of the following ways: - too fast charging (battery dies, charge controller dies) - usb port dies - screen broken - all sorts of falls

A lether folio case, gorilla glass, and a Qi charging adapter solve all of those problems (the charging adapter also limits the current by virtue of being inefficient). It has a magnetic connector (it's a simple two-pin job and it doesn't have any issues) - in the rare occasion I want to charge up real quick, I can still hook up directly via usb c, and meanwhile the port is stuffed with the converter's plug which prevents it from accumulating dirt and fluff.

I'm glad to say that even despite many falls, some directly onto the screen, the phone itself still works very well, even if the case and glass protector are obviously ragged.

I hope once unlockable Moto's come around I'll be able to keep that one for a long while as well.

with the advent of AI assists, I can't wait for people to start hooking up SoCs, GPUs, and other components burdened by proprietary driver and firmware to logic analyzers, and letting AI have a crack at it. I wonder what'll happen - this might well be the end of proprietary blobs, and I'm here for it.

The biggest issue is that with colo you're building a skill pool that can be used forever, with AWS you're building a skill pool centered around a corporate entity's business strategies and an inscrutable, closed-source system, which is not sustainable.

As opposed to talent to manage the AWS? Sorry, AWS loses here as well.

8086K, actually. I still run one inside one of my PCs!

Helped a friend make a difficult career decision (cozy job vs something hard and new + moving to a new city) that ultimately ended up with him working on the project. Glad that happened. I love to see people grow.

Main tech skills:

AI/ML: LLMs, RAGs, predictive models, machine vision; MLops (K8s, Airflow, Kubeflow, Flyte, Seldon, KEDA, ELK, Kibana), end-to-end systems (algorithms, data pipelines, training, inference, deployment); Vector DBs (Qdrant, Chroma); data lakes; performance- and cost-driven implementations (C++/Rust).

Backend / systems (languages): Rust, Python, Go, Zig, C++, C, Haskell, Scala, Typescript, Node.js, Next;

Infra / DevOps: NixOS/Nix, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Ansible; CI/CD, Linux internals, observability, reliability engineering.

Fintech / crypto: Launched Tezos and other blockchains; smart-contract audits; regulated, security-critical environments; built production systems for trad banks.

Security: Cryptography, threat modeling, audits, reverse engineering.

Leadership: Staff+ IC → CTO; led teams 2–30; hiring, mentoring, technical strategy, raising VC.

    Location: EU, overlap with PST
    Remote: Yes
    Relocation: No
    Technologies: Rust, C++, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, Nix, K8s, Terraform
    Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
    CV: on request

Highlights: - Designed and shipped a commercial LLM end-to-end (algorithms → training → MLops) - Launched and audited major blockchain systems (e.g. Tezos) - Shipped production systems for Oracle, Shell, Time Warner, BoA, Sparkasse, Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas - Built and scaled a software NGO (500k+ supporters, 1k+ volunteers)

Strengths: - Turning ambiguous problems into shipped systems - MVPs that don’t need rewriting - ML, LLMs, RAGs, vector DBs - Rigorous code and infosec audits for mission-critical infra - 10x–1000x performance wins on legacy systems - FP, Compilers, DSLs, distributed systems, security-critical code

Further work: - Contributor: Rust Book, Rust By Example, Python docs, Haskell Communities and Activities Report - Dozens of smart contract audits - Background in cryptography, infosec, formal methods

If you need someone who can own the stack and ship reliably, email me at damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

That's very deep water to dive into. I suggest something simpler, like an ancient irc client that asks you to sign up, or an archive extractor.

The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests.

That's not true. The issue is that the system the comment you're replying to described is escrow. Escrow degenerates in the way that you describe. I explain it a bit more in this comment elsewhere on this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943416

A straight up non-refundable participation payment does not have this issue, and creates a different set of incentives and a different economy, while there also exist escape hatches for free-of-charge contributions.

The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable.

Not necessarily. This article mentions Tezos, which is capable of doing such things on-chain already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811

all the annoying KYC/AML that a normie has to get through to use it.

There are always escape hatches. If your code is so great that people will want to pull it, then you don't pay to push. If it's not really that great, then what are we talking about? Maybe it disincentivizes mid code being pushed. So be it.

You can make friends, you can make a name for yourself, you can make a fork that's very successful and upstream will want to pull it in, you can exert social pressure / marketing to get your code merged in. Lots of options that do not involve KYC/AML.

For everyone else, I'd say KYC/AML are a good idea because of the increasing amount of supply chain exploits being pushed out into repos. If pushing by randos is gated by KYC/AML, then there's at least some method of chasing the perps down and taking them to justice.

That's a win-win-win-win situation. Less mid code, less exploits, earnings for maintainers, AI slop blocked. Absolutely amazing.

pay-to-commit has been discussed in the article linked here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811

escrow is a more complex system, and there are multiple possible implementations, but the nice thing is you can skip it and get the same results.

let's assume for a second that the repo owner spends time on PR review, and that time needs to be reimbursed. let's also assume that the person pushing a PR expects some sort of bounty. then as long as the review price is less than bounty price, there's no need for escrow. the pushing party goes out on a limb paying the reviewer to merge their PR, but also expects (rightly or not) to be remunerated for solving the bounty. whether they really did solve it is in the remit of the bounty originator, who might or might not be part of the group controlling the repository. if there's escrow, then the bounty giver probably has to be part of that group. not having escrow allows for crowd funding by interests outside of the repo controlling party.

escrow is only usefully different in a situation when there is no bounty, you want to push code, and then you want to say "ok, here's some money, and here's a PR, either accept the PR and give me money or don't accept it and take my money" as a means of skipping the line or getting a shot at pushing in the first place. however, at that point two things are apparent: 1. you expect the reviewer to do work required to implement your desired changes for free and 2. this might start getting abused, with PRs getting rejected (to gain money) but then modified / refactored versions of this code being pushed via commits or from another user who is the repo owner's puppet (refactoring code is becoming super cheap due to AI). so that degenerates escrow-to-push into a scam.

there are more considerations like that in the article I linked to. I agree that an economy around FOSS pushing would be desirable. it also doesn't preclude free-as-in-money contributions - there are at least two mechanisms that would allow it: 1. you get sponsored by someone who sees your talent (either gives you money to push, or they have push access to that repo and can hand it out free) 2. you create a fork that becomes so good and valuable that upstream pulls from you for free

ultimately becoming a respected developer with free push access to contended repositories should be something that you can monetize to some extent that's purely within your remit, and it would greatly reduce unserious bullshit coming from third parties (especially all those weird hardware developers) and make it easier to be a FOSS dev.

GitHub has never been a good method of clout chasing. in decades of being in this industry, I've seen < 1% of potential employers care about FLOSS contributions, as long as you have some stuff on your GH.

Vouch is a good quick fix, but it has some properties that can lead to collapsed states, discussed in the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811

An exposition of problems in trust ecosystems, a critique of Vouch, and a suggestion for some fixes.

Total Depravity: If your code’s correctness depends on keeping complicated interconnected structure in your head, a devastating incident is not a matter of if but when.

Therefore, delegate these concerns to tooling and a sufficiently powerful compiler, use types to guard against errors, and free yourself to only mentally track the actual important things.

do they allow the following? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859860

can Granule let me specify the following constraints on a function?

- it will use O(n) space where n is some measure of one of the parameters (instead of n you could have some sort of function of multiple measures of multiple parameters)

- same but time use instead of space use

- same but number of copies

- the size of an output will be the size of an input, or less than it

- the allocated memory after the function runs is less than allocated memory before the function runs

- given the body of a function, and given that all the functions used in the body have well defined complexities, the complexity of the function being defined with them is known or at least has a good upper bound that is provably true

Rust or Haskell. Python is subpar in terms of maintainability especially when it comes to long-running, generational, massive, codebases. Python is also massively worse when it comes to performance. Haskell strikes the perfect balance here, I've worked at companies with massive codebases where maintaining is still a breeze years later. This simply does not happen with any OOP languages, the code always turns into an ingrown hedge with time.

Especially when it comes to long-running projects like what's attempted here, Python, even being a technology from yesteryear, isn't even suited for problems of yesteryear.

With projects like these maintainability is your #1 concern, so referential transparency (greatly reinforced by laziness-by-default) and purity are indispensable and irreplaceable here.

The next concern is adequate performance, and Haskell has that in heaps.

The final concern is the capability to find programmers, and there are heaps of those in Haskell land.

Main tech skills:

AI/ML: LLMs, RAGs, predictive models, machine vision; MLops (K8s, Airflow, Kubeflow, Flyte, Seldon, KEDA, ELK, Kibana), end-to-end systems (algorithms, data pipelines, training, inference, deployment); Vector DBs (Qdrant, Chroma); data lakes; performance- and cost-driven implementations (C++/Rust).

Backend / systems (languages): Rust, Python, Go, Zig, C++, C, Haskell, Scala, Typescript, Node.js, Next;

Infra / DevOps: NixOS/Nix, AWS, Terraform, Docker, Ansible; CI/CD, Linux internals, observability, reliability engineering.

Fintech / crypto: Launched Tezos and other blockchains; smart-contract audits; regulated, security-critical environments; built production systems for trad banks.

Security: Cryptography, threat modeling, audits, reverse engineering.

Leadership: Staff+ IC → CTO; led teams 2–30; hiring, mentoring, technical strategy, raising VC.

    Location: EU, overlap with PST
    Remote: Yes
    Relocation: No
    Technologies: Rust, C++, Python, Go, Zig, Haskell, TypeScript, Nix, K8s, Terraform
    Email: damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com
    CV: on request

Highlights: - Designed and shipped a commercial LLM end-to-end (algorithms → training → infra) - Launched and audited major blockchain systems (incl. Tezos) - Shipped production systems for Oracle, Shell, Time Warner, BoA, Sparkasse, Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas - Built and scaled a software NGO (500k+ supporters, 1k+ volunteers)

Strengths: - Turning ambiguous problems into shipped systems - MVPs that don’t need rewriting - ML, LLMs, RAGs, vector DBs - Rigorous code and infosec audits for mission-critical infra - 10x–1000x performance wins on legacy systems - FP, Compilers, DSLs, distributed systems, security-critical code

Credibility: - Contributor: Rust Book, Rust By Example, Python docs, Haskell Communities and Activities Report - Dozens of smart contract audits - Background in cryptography, infosec, formal methods

If you need someone who can own the stack and ship reliably, email me at damianjobsites+hn@gmail.com

Yes - high-performance Haskell code looks similar. There isn't much to be said there - it's a little less clean-looking because FP optimizes for the most useful scenario and trying to do highly advanced stuff like that will be more verbose. This is in contrast to OOP where everything is verbose, and sometimes high-perf stuff that falls into the shape of globals + mutation + goto looks very succinct.

that isn't much of a problem - git repositories can be re-hosted somewhere else. carrying the bug tracker over is another issue entirely.

god, out of all the technologies of yesteryear, why Django?

That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law