bumholio

Location: Romania

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: not in the next year or so (toddler duty), but open in principle and available to travel frequently in Europe

Technologies: Python, JS, Rust, Bash, DevOps, Linux, embedded C, PyTorch, electronics and robotics, transport and parking infrastructure and technology, navigating political bureaucracies

Resume: http://www.linkedin.com/in/p918345638147

email: mres at gmx.com

I am looking to return to technology after an 8 year stint into public service and political office. An engineer by formation, I am a very broad generalist, taking interest into various technical fields as well as social sciences - hence my venture into politics. I have managed transport infrastructure projects for my public sector employers but I also know my way around a git command line and a large codebase written in a dozen languages.

I am particularly interested in fast-moving startups that can benefit from my broad skill set. I am ready to get hands-on and handle any development and engineering tasks to support growth. Ideally, I would like to manage a team of like-minded engineers eager to make an impact.

I am available to work through my own company as a business-to-business contractor, handling my own taxes, etc., if that is beneficial, for example, to a US-based company.

Instead of banning proof of work they should firewall crypto assets from the traditional financial system.

"Let crypto burn" as they say, both figuratively and in the practical sense, let them burn resources but only it they can pay for them by creating value outside their own bubble, services for which people are willing to pay. Currently the massive impetus of the resource burn is crypto speculation, the hope that a substantial part of the traditional financial system will move to crypto systems and take advantage of the low regulations. That's the major promise of crypto that's driving adoption in the traditional space, regulatory arbitrage.

Expecting Galactica to produce truthful academic papers is just about as sensible as expecting to find a significant other among your kitchen appliances. Language models are a way to emulate the writing style of human produced content, only a fool would expect them to reason about the text to any level resembling a scientific standard.

Written language is a doorway to the full extent of human cognition; unless the problem domain is severely constrained (ie "What is the distance to Mars?"), you are very likely to fall into reflexive traps that rapidly devolve into AGI ("I think, therefore I am?").

If one could reliably detect this DLL injection in the process address space, then the correct "fix" is to crash immediately. Authors of such tools should seek another way of accomplishing their goal, preferably one that does not export their own bugs to innocent bystanders.

Google flights already has an "access to the overhead bins" tick box, but yes, there is space to improve the comparison.

Weight is largely irrelevant. The difference between a airliner full of 45Kg people versus 90Kg people constitutes about 5% of the total plane weight. Some fuel savings but would not be worth the aggravation, client humiliation, lawsuits etc.

What it boils down to is volume and time. A passenger takes up a seat regardless of how large he is (...) so he's charged for a seat. Luggage changes that equation far more than passenger body weight.

You aren't going without any luggage, but just what you can fit behind the seat in front - and you can fit multiple change of clothes there, I assure you.

So how far and for how long do you think someone can fly with a luggage that fits under their seat?

In any 1 week vacation to any destination around the world? People are diverse and you shouldn't presume everything about yourself applies to everybody else. I've been on dozens such vacations.

Firstly, travelers are consenting adults that should understand and accept the baggage policy - or use a different airline. The market is extremely competitive.

Secondly, as a person who has traveled backpack for years, I find the whole "luggage is an essential element of air transport" line quite offensive. It's a service I want to purchase but you won't let me because some guy might be confused by a price comparison app to buy a baggage-less ticket (mind you, not even by Ryanair themselves, on their website it is very clear what you get for the price). It's revolting.

This industry can only exist because labels and artists are not willing to sell tickets at the market clearing price, since they would be seen as exploitative by their own fans. So they sell the tickets are significantly discounted prices, in the hopes that at least some of them end up in the hands of the fans, saving face but creating a niche for a super-sleazy industry.

The solution I believe is to directly engage the fans and include with the price of the ticket benefits that only have value for fans. For example, when purchasing a ticket the market price is $100, out of which $40 is the price of the ticket and $60 is the "anti-scalping deposit" that fans get back when purchasing from their account with the band's site. So you would get $60 back in your account that you can use to purchase items valuable for fans such as limited edition CD, merchandise or even other tickets in the future (this is a bit tricky since scalpers can automate it, but exposes them to a major risk of detection and loosing the deposit, unlike the automation of the single ticket purchase, which either works or is risk free).

Providing this service seems like a nice idea to build a company on.

I think a solution that actually helps the commons is to time-bomb the "Commons Clause" for a 3-5 year period, after which the software reverts to full open source (similar to the GPL Time bomb discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492 ) This way, the developers get paid fairly, for what they actually deliver, but they can't lock the users in. If the developer dies, goes bankrupt or falls into a predatory phase where it milks the product for cash without reinvesting sufficient back (Adobe), then the project can be salvaged as open source by those who use it. An even better option is to allow any commercial developer, after the 3 year period passes, the option to fork and develop it's own version with similar licensing conditions.

This will ensure a healthy, competitive environment where the software can be monetized traditionally, yet the 4 freedoms are (eventually) satisfied. As a user, this is what you care about above all else; you will pay the commercial license fee to get the bleeding edge product, knowing you are in a way "leasing to own" the software and you will be able to fork it in-house if the way you use it diverges from what the publisher will want in the future.

Wikipedia quickly gets political. Even in technical articles, there is an incentive to impose one's own perspective for his field as the "authoritative" version. An important part of contributors, it turns out, are academics working in the field that more often than not are deeply vested in their version.

This is a great system for an encyclopedia that must find the best approximation of the truth, but I wouldn't call it "incentive free". Similar incentives in the social world (pushing out people that don't conform to the moderator's world view) could be disastrous.

Again, if we can't conserve it, it's impossible to waste it. It's a logical contradiction. It's like wind power, you either tap it and use it or not, either way it's gone.

The fact that it's difficult (impossible) to store helium long term is an argument against government intervention because it disrupts present consumption for no clear reason and with meager future benefits.

If one's account is suspended they cannot - by definition - access Trump's tweets.

Since that is clearly not true, one practical effect is that it's setting a very low bar the difficulty one should overcome before claiming they are excluded from official communication by the government.

If the necessity of logging out then logging back in (or merely opening an Incognito window with a single click) is a rights violation, then surely not having any kind of access to online communication by the government is a much worse violation. So the government should either cease to use the internet or should make it available to all citizens as a basic citizen right.

So if mr. Trump declares his Twitter account "not a public forum, but a section dedicated to publishing official supportive replies, that by default publishes all replies and selectively deletes those who aren't supportive", will that make things ok?

It's not like a town hall because there is no official charter for what the realDonalTrump Twitter is. It seems some people want to enforce their view that it's a public forum, while clearly violating mr. Trump's own 1st amendment rights by forcing him to promote on his Twitter page content that is damaging to him.

The "on his Twitter page" distinction is critical, because you can still use the wider Twitter public forum as before, and you can engage in the wider conversation, you just don't have the same visibility to his followers. You were evicted form a personal performance of the President juggling pink dildos.

Well, that discrimination exists on the current White House site. I just went there and on the front page I found this article, that quotes some people friendly to Trump's policies, many of them (ironically) sourced from tweets:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/wtas-support...

So why should these people be cited, but not others critical to the administration? Who gets to make that decision, and why can't they make a similar decision on Twitter itself?

Then... how do you propose to conserve it? If you can't speculate it, then by definition you can't ration it.

(By the way, if you read the article, it nicely explains how the US Helium reserve works and how it has been dismantled in recent years; so you can in fact store huge amounts of helium, should it ever make economic sense to do so).

Trump could “mute” users, meaning he would not see their tweets while they could still respond to his, she said, without violating their free speech rights.

Herein lies the problem: Trump does not want to block his critics from expressing their thoughts - he can't do that anyway. Nor can he truly block them from seeing his tweets. He wants their replies not to be part of the conversation started by his tweets. They can still comment, on their own pages, in their own articles, but their comments will not have similar visibility to the people that follow Donald Trump and related conversations.

And I think the court overreached to call it a violation of the rights to free speech. Because what the commenters really want is visibility, they want to piggy back on the large audience Trump's tweets have and exploit the way Twitter's algorithm highlights such replies, especially if they are 'considered important' though their own retweets, likes etc.

For example, I want to produce an one hour rant about how Donald Trump is a cretin that damages the US and the world, and have it uploaded on the White House website - an official communication tool of the US government - so that it has proper visibility. But the White House can rightfully deny that request without violating my freedom of speech. Twitter is a multi-user version of a similar software, which unlike whitehouse.gov is configured by default to allow such posts on other's users pages.

Markets can predict future shortages and rise prices in anticipation. Nobody wants to sell cheaply today if they can get more than the prevailing interest rate by sitting on the resource. And if we are talking about really long time frames where the risk/reward ratio is not clear, why should we assume the governmental decision is better than someone who has financial skin in the game? Maybe the conservation decision will actually be a bad outcome, conserving at a great present cost something that will be worthless in the future.

Global warming and other environmental problems have nothing to do with this. The environment is a shared resource so market participants have no incentive to preserve it, on the contrary, they rush to "use" as much of the common resource as possible and maximize present gain, before someone else kills the planet and there are no more money to be made. The solution there is to tax the externalities and transform the public resource into a private cost that must be minimized, thus preserving the resource. Helium is not such a public resource, it's private to those who have it, produce it and store it.

It's a good example of the same underlying economic incentives. An EDA title is used by a few tens of thousands of professionals, at best. Large investments into making it more user-friendly and stable is not really worth it in the grand scheme of things. It needs to be just the minimal viable product that can get the chip out the door; it will be complex and feature packed rather than usable, and the engineers will learn to navigate around it's idiosyncrasies and bugs just like they solve other technical problems, it's what engineers do.

The chip itself though, that's a whole nother thing. Especially the process that works across multiple designs and becomes an asset for the company. Any nanosecond shaved here improves the capacity of the foundry to compete and helps a billion people complete the task 1% faster or have 1% more memory. The customers have no reason to work around a less performing product, they will just buy from the competition.

So you get this strange combo of supernatural hardware assembled with atomic precision by garbage software written in Perl by an outsourcing guy with 6 months total programming experience.

It's just incredible how complex and advanced the hardware got, but at the same time, how crappy and inefficient the software on top of it is. I know it's simple economics and the chip foundry has an economy of scale that the Electron developer lacks. But it still feels like we're all eating garbage out of golden plates.

By the end of the next decade we will probably reach the end of what is physically possible in device fabrication, so competition will have to move to design and software efficiency.

I think I've cracked it: it does not work in Firefox Private mode.

Can't really figure it out. I try to login and put mastodon.social in the Add instance field, but I get an error:

Error: undefined. Is this a valid Mastodon instance? Is a browser extension blocking the request?

10 times the distance to the Moon at an average speed of 0.1c takes about two minutes. So you would launch thousands of these crafts in the general direction of the target system and hope that at least one survives the micrometeorite onslaught and passes close enough to the target planet to snatch a few pictures. Or maybe even aero brake in the very thin heliosphere or gas giant upper atmosphere and enter a highly elliptical Centauri-centric orbit.

Or accidentally start an interstellar war.

I'm not sure that's an advantage. It adds a strong political component to something that's unlikely to be a cost effective weapon. So foreign powers will contest it and domestic powers will be unlikely to put their weight behind it. Kind of like nuclear rockets - in theory a workable technology, yet so controversial nobody will touch it.

The problem with that approach is that the company must commit. You can't embed 100 candidates into your team but you can easily send 100 identical homeworks and then only bother to analyze those that make it to the face to face interview. As a bonus, it optimizes for subservience, a perennial business resource.

This century, it will not. We are very far from a technology capable of achieving what Starshot proposes. Accelerating the spacecraft to a fraction of the speed of light using a laser would require power densities that would instantanously turn all known materials to plasma. The best mirrors and coatings are many orders of magnitude too dark. The required laser and energy bank would be, for all intents and purposes, a comics megaweapon capable of blowing spacecrafts from orbit, or, with proper space reflectors, incinerate enemy installations anywhere on the globe in seconds.

The craft would be completely unable to brake so it will pass past the target planets in a matter of minutes. It's unclear what kind of sensors could be employed to detect anything and we certainly lack the technology to beam and receive back signals sent by a postage stamp craft 5 light years away. Let me rephrase that: we haven't got even a theoretical model of a system that would allow communication at such vast distances with milliwatt power sources.

Needless to say, nobody is seriously working on this, nor will they for many decades at least.

Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing

Is this a rural rule of thumb? Looking around me, I see people routinely paying 5-10 times their annual income to get a crappy city apartment and spending the majority of their income making mortgage payments. The alternatives, spending the majority of their income on rent or moving to an area where the majority of the income would vanish, do not seem better.

It's also like the difference between poverty and ignorance.

If you can't decide beforehand if you can support an open source project or if you should go for a commercial product, I think a solution is to time-bomb the "Commons Clause" for a 3-5 year period, after which the software reverts to full open source, similar to the GPL Time bomb discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492

This way, the developers get paid fairly, for what they actually deliver, but they can't lock the users in. If the developer dies, goes bankrupt or falls into a predatory phase where it milks the product for cash without reinvesting sufficient back (Adobe), then the project can be salvaged as open source by those who use it. An even better option is to allow any commercial developer, after the 3 year period passes, the option to fork and develop it's own version with similar licensing conditions.

This will ensure a healthy, competitive environment where the software can be monetized traditionally, yet the 4 freedoms are (eventually) satisfied. As a user, this is what you care about above all else; you will pay the commercial license fee to get the bleeding edge product, knowing you are in a way "leasing to own" the software and you will be able to fork it in-house if the way you use it diverges from what the publisher will want in the future.