danielnaab

SEEKING WORK - Madison, WI or Remote

Freelance full-stack developer. I can take full responsibility for end-to-end development of your company's new application, or join an existing team in a development or advisory role.

While a generalist, my go-to platforms are generally Python and node.js. 17 years Python experience, 11 years Django.

I have experience building high-availability web services, traditional server-rendered web applications, and rich Javascript clients; and importantly, can help you choose the stack that is most appropriate for your needs.

* https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielnaab

* http://stackoverflow.com/users/32638/daniel-naab

* https://github.com/danielnaab

* http://blog.crushingpennies.com

Trump won't listen to traditional environmental groups. I think what is needed is for a right-wing organization to offer a conservative non-denier as an alternative, and mount a large public campaign to pressure Trump to change course.

Perhaps the scariest part of Trump is that he is such an unknown blank slate, but that also offers an opportunity if we recognize it.

I'm contacting my Republican Senator and making an, admittedly, futile attempt to appeal to his reason. Please consider doing the same: http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/

The first question to ask with any James O'Keefe video is "where is the raw video." He has a long and sordid history of fabricating these kinds of storylines.

Quick, someone feed the instructions for each of these sandwiches through an RNN.

> Decentralized has no immediate direct benefit for riders.

Yes, but decentralized could have a very direct benefit for drivers... considering that sans an army of driverless cars, driver supply is what makes Uber's "sharing economy" work.

(Not to mention that the insurance/license guarantees are not currently being satisfied.)

The software agent that consumers interact with would have to be responsible for determining the accuracy of ratings.

I suspect that the most important aspect of such a system would be trusted participants: eg, insurance companies, city licensing agencies, etc. If you get one hundred great, but fake, reviews from shell accounts, it would be rather meaningless if your city didn't issue you a license on the blockchain, or you claimed false insurance which was somehow disputed on the same blockchain by the legitimate insurer.

Interesting observations on the dynamic with "real cabbies."

I would envision a decentralized system including both "real cabs", whose parent company vouches for a driver's licensing, as well as independent drivers, whose insurance company does. But if any driver participated in a transparent network, their reputation would be important to them, and I would assume that would be a deterrent to taking fares you don't actually intend to pick up.

Good points. I meant "overnight" loosely, but I have a few other comments.

* Any software may be branded - no one needs to know the word "blockchain" when they use a well-designed app. If a driver may have more take-home pay from an open network, there is no reason they wouldn't list themselves there in the same way many drivers are on both Uber and Lyft.

* The blockchain would record all transactions in a manner that any software could get something similar to Uber's intelligence, with some allowances for the privacy of the rider.

* I've taken Uber rides that reek of cigarette smoke. If anything, many cab companies have standards that you can't guarantee with the closest Uber. But like you say, reputation systems could address those issues.

I agree, though, that the technical challenges are real and not trivial. In particular, the privacy concerns seem very real. I just find it difficult to believe that a multi-billion dollar industry will allow a middleman to take all their customers away when really the only thing that Uber sells is UX.

A decentralized ride solicitation tool with a reputation system, maybe blockchain-based, could kill off Uber and Lyft almost overnight. Especially if existing taxi companies embraced it. I want to know if a driver is licensed, insured, etc. Uber doesn't provide that, and I don't like the rent-seeking aspect of their service.

If it's winner-takes-all, it's only a matter of time until another winner takes all. I don't think we've seen the end of this market yet...

EDIT: Wow, two down votes in 10 minutes. Care to say why? There are a lot of incumbent players losing market share to Uber - how do they compete? It seems like the perfect opportunity for more of a SaaS business model built around selling integration with an open network. There are already reputation-based blockchain implementations. Why would a decentralized model not work?

Years ago, my impression was that the goal of the Volt was to be fully-electric with a range-extending flex-fuel generator that recharges the batteries (rather than a hybrid approach with a separate internal combustion engine to extend range).

Is this idea just totally dead for some kind of innate technical challenge? It seems that mechanically, the cost of a generator and one drive train would be preferable, if it were feasible performance-wise.

There are a lot of people building their own projects, as well as volunteering time to official campaign projects. https://coders.forsanders.com/

I've used a WeakMap for a kind of memoization.

Assume an immutable object may undergo an expensive transform that returns an object, which is then stored in a WeakMap keyed to the immutable. When there are no new references to that object, the garbage collector will clean it up, but otherwise the expensive transform may be avoided with a lookup on the WeakMap.

It provides a pretty nice way to decouple your caching from the rest of the codebase.

Calling it the "myth" of basic science is not instructive. Plus, the general gist of this article isn't new. But nonetheless interesting and accurate in many aspects.

But the old [BBC Connections](1) series brings home the inevitability of technical and scientific progress in amazing ways, such as how the introduction of the concept of bank credit led to refrigeration and the space shuttle. One innovation does inevitably beget another. Very much worth watching the whole series.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

Of course culture plays a role, as does education level of one's parents, access to opportunity such as good health care and higher education, the role of the criminal justice system in your community, the stress of dealing with basic material needs, etc, etc. Point being the cards are stacked against you if you are born into poverty, and those who escape it are basically the exceptions that prove the rule. So if we were sane, we'd focus our attention on leveling the playing field so as to lower the barrier to entry into the middle class, and not focus attention on blaming poor people for having poor values.

All the evidence points the opposite direction... in the United States, you are unlikely to escape the economic circumstances that you are born into, especially if you are born into the top or bottom quintile: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/04/us/comparing-e...

This was also discussed last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063870

As an American in Wisconsin with Swiss roots (southwest Wisconsin has a strong Swiss imprint), your comment sounds so cool to me. It's much the same here... more cheese and sausage than the dietitians recommend, and while we don't have the Alps we have plenty of beautiful ways to work it off. Having visited family in Switzerland and seeing the country, I've come to appreciate how similar our regions of the world are.

Certainly, when it happens on the federal level it is of higher significance. It remains to be seen, if after scrutiny, Clinton engaged in official misdeeds by keeping her official communications private, but from the article it appears there are serious questions that need to be answered.

But that doesn't diminish my point. Scott Walker is a front-runner for the presidency, and by any reasonable account intentionally created an alternate IT system to bypass open records laws. Likewise, the Bush administration used a similar system hosted by the RNC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...) for the same purpose. We should demand that all public servants operate in a manner accessible to public scrutiny, not just the party we personally tend to vote against.

It's sad and surprising how often this pattern seems to repeat itself. For another example (that's probably not well-known outside Wisconsin), Scott Walker set up a private server in the Milwaukee County office for his internal communication with staff, likely at least in part to shield himself from scrutiny as his county staff did work for his campaign for the governorship:

- http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/court-set-to-rele...

- http://host.madison.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/former-...

Is 100% dual agency the norm? The industry definitely seems pretty opaque in regards to these issues. In my circumstance, the seller agent's contract stipulated that the agent earned 50% the buyer agent's commission for buyers lacking an agent. That worked well for me, as the seller had lower commissions and her agent's interests were also aligned with me. But I admit that going into the transaction, I had assumed there would be no commission for my half of the transaction.

It seems the value of this is highly dependent on the local market. A 2% commission on a $300k home is comparably priced at $6000 (and commission rates are negotiable), but a local agent will provide a lot of service difficult for a web app to compete with.

I can see the value in a market where seven figure homes are the norm, though. Most buyers don't want to negotiate a good flat rate with an agent. On the other hand, I bought without an agent and didn't feel too out of sorts during the process.

As a suggestion for the site: talk up the value the service provides over and above sending the offer letter. To me, that's where the value would lie.

Sharing of previous semester code (or quizzes, exams, etc) should enhance the learning process, not hinder it.

This is a bad and lazy policy for a school. Instructors should be creating assignments that cover the same material but are sufficiently different from one semester to the next that cheating isn't a problem.

When I was in school 15+ years ago, we had officially sanctioned ways of sharing materials from previous semesters of coursework. Is that uncommon?

For many use-cases, http://prose.io works well.

You can then use TravisCI (or the like) to trigger the site rebuild and deployment.

This doesn't directly address your question, but the "financialization" [0] of the economy has gotten us to the point where 9% of GDP (as of 2012) is consumed by the finance sector [1].

It's certainly conceivable that the risk management Wall Street provides has led to economic growth, but considering the systemic instability that led to the 2008 crash, I take that claim with a grain of salt.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [1]: http://tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-how-the-financial-sector-co...

Besides being a bad metric (solar installations have fixed up-front costs, with long lifespans)...

High labor costs per unit of energy is a good thing. Coal mining is resource intensive, and a significant portion of your energy dollar is going into paying for the cost of mining and transport. If a kWh of solar costs the same as a kWh of coal, all things equal, it is better for society for that cost to be spread among many well paid, middle class laborers.

Usually actions can be thought of as a consequence of a state change. For example, instead of exposing an API to send an email related to some business object, your backend should know to send an email when some corresponding state requires it.. e.g., send notification email when an order is created.

More flexible:

  GET /albums?artist=8
  GET /albums?artist=8&artist=10
  GET /albums?title='Blah'

I agree, we need service providers to unbundle. It's an abuse of network ownership to extend that control into monopolies/duopolies on network services, be it internet service, phone, or television.

But it seems apparent to me that what we really need is more publicly owned networks, at the very least on the local level. Let ISPs and other service providers (phone, television, etc) compete for the consumer over open fiber networks in the same way cab companies compete over publicly owned roads. Fund the networks with taxes on network service providers, and provide federal subsidies for rural networks.

As for my own question, it does look like the majority of the markets will see prices increases.

Health spending was growing at an average of 7.2% / year from 1990-2008, vs an estimated 3.6% in 2013. Certainly the slowdown is the result of more than just the ACA, but this is the relevant metric one should use when measuring its success at cost containment, not the fact that almost everything gets more expensive from one year to the next.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/early/2014/08/27/hl...

This should be titled, "two big screens aren't better that one big screen." I've had multiple desktops with two 21" CRTs, back when that made you a fancy boy, and had considerable improvement in workflow from it. Now, with my 27" Thunderbolt monitor, I can't imagine the frustration of having to turn my head instead of move my eye to change my mind's focus.

This transition was after having done most of my development on a 15" laptop, and re-learning how to be productive without distractions... everyone's mileage will of course vary, so blanket statements are worthless.