girzel

The application instructions mention an LLM honeytrap, but the application doesn't include any way to trip that trap. AND, submitting an application results in no automated "received!" email. Debugging brain says: maybe something misconfigured?

Hi HN,

  Location: Seattle, USA
  Willing to relocate: No
  Main Technologies: Python, PostgreSQL, more than I ever wanted to know about AWS
  Resume: https://ericabrahamsen.net/EricAbrahamsen_0505b.pdf
  Email: eric@ericabrahamsen.net

Don't forget to mention location! This looks to be on location in Boston.

Location: Seattle

Remote: Remote or hybrid (or in-office if there's a good reason!)

Willing to relocate: No

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-abrahamsen-32a8895b/

I am a problem solver, and my main tools are Python and Postgres, though my programming approach is informed by Lisp (many years of Emacs contributions), Prolog (the best kind of mind-bending) and OCaml (which I wish I was writing instead of Python).

I would like to be solving real-world problems: energy, logistics, communications, governance, trash removal. It's amazing what you can find out if you talk to people about their problems, and its amazing what you can solve with a concoction of fairly straightforward data science, ML, calculus, signal processing, and Rube Goldberg machines.

Email in profile.

It is a practice that leads, as a consequence, to insight. Insight is not information that might be read from a book, it is experience that uses observation to arrive at understanding and transformation. You can't just "decide to have" the experience without doing the work of transforming yourself through observation. People who have gone far in the practice do tend to say that there was never any goal to begin with, that they ended up where they started, but that's more of a metaphor than anything else. Someone who travels around the world and ends up where they started is in a very different place than someone who never left home.

Twenty minutes of searching didn't come up with any software jobs related to the Northwest Forest Plan. I'm PNW born and raised, and love old-growth forests more than pretty much anything. If I could find a SWE job doing something connected to this plan, I'd probably work for free^H^H^H^H^H^H be very grateful.

Interesting. Are you characterizing Kalman filters mostly as systems of control/refinement on top of alpha-beta filters?

I do feel like the core of it is essentially exponential/logarithmic growth/decay, with the option to layer multiple higher-order growth/decay series on top of one another. Maybe that's the gist...

Thanks for the recommendation! It would never have occurred to me to look at robotics, but I can understand why that's very relevant.

I read Feedback Control for Computer Systems not too long ago, which felt like yet another restatement of the same ideas; I guess that counts as "classic control theory".

Hi Chris!

I also felt like the essay suffered a lot from generalization -- Harrison happened to talk to these three people, and extrapolated way too much from that.

No thread on Kalman Filters is complete without a link to this excellent learning resource, a book written as a set of Jupyter notebooks:

https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...

That book mentions alpha-beta filters as sort of a younger sibling to full-blown Kalman filters. I recently had need of something like this at work, and started doing a bunch of reading. Eventually I realized that alpha-beta filters (and the whole Kalman family) is very focused on predicting the near future, whereas what I really needed was just a way to smooth historical data.

So I started reading in that direction, came across "double exponential smoothing" which seemed perfect for my use-case, and as I went into it I realized... it's just the alpha-beta filter again, but now with different names for all the variables :(

I can't help feeling like this entire neighborhood of math rests on a few common fundamental theories, but because different disciplines arrived at the same systems via different approaches, they end up sounding a little different and the commonality is obscured. Something about power series, Euler's number, gradient descent, filters, feedback systems, general system theory... it feels to me like there's a relatively small kernel of intuitive understanding at the heart of all that stuff, which could end up making glorious sense of a lot of mathematics if I could only grasp it.

Somebody help me out, here!

I attended Deep Springs 1996/97. The school goes through semi-regular cultural oscillations between "mean" and "nice"; between what we'd now call toxic masculinity, and sort of a peace-and-love hippie friendliness. Students play a large role in admitting the incoming class, and tend to admit people like them, until the culture swings too far in one direction and they start correcting.

It sounds like this guy visited during a "mean" period, which is too bad. I attended during an upswing into a "nice" period, and it felt well balanced. My application interview was one of the most memorable experiences of my life -- I'd never had anyone pay that kind of close attention to anything I'd written, or what I thought. It woke me all the way up, in a sense where I'd gone through most of my teenage years asleep, and was enormously bracing. When they finally let me out, I emerged into the main room, where some guy reading on a sofa looked up and asked, "How was it?" I don't remember exactly what I said, but it communicated something along the lines of "holy shit that was a thrill!". I still suspect he communicated my attitude back to the applications committee and that played a part in getting accepted.

So far as I know, no one during my two years visited the Cottontail Ranch :)

Exactly the same here. Every once in a while I think "let's see if Google has anything better for this query", and it never does.

I am 100% in on OSMand and the whole ecosystem, but I still curse out loud every time I have to enter a street address into its address "parser". I know it's a hard problem, but it's horrible. None of the app's other shortcomings are meaningful to me.

This is incredibly helpful, thank you! It's going to save me hours of research.

I have a Das Keyboard that I am very fond of, but over the years have definitely started to wonder why a) the rows are staggered, and b) it isn't split. There's just so little reason to stick to this form-factor.

Thanks again!

I've enjoyed using types.SimpleNamespace:

    >>> from types import SimpleNamespace
    >>> d = {"one":1, "two":2}
    >>> ns = SimpleNamespace(**d)
    >>> ns.two
    2

All of my passwords are in the "pass" command line utility, where they're encrypted with gpg. I added my brother's gpg key as an encryption target, and his ssh key onto the sever where the git repo is stored, locked down to the git shell command. In the event of my untimely demise, my wife tells him the url of the git repo.

44, and just got my first job as a software engineer! (I've been programming since circa 2004, tho.)

I live in the Seattle's university district. Homelessness has doubled or tripled since COVID. The vast majority of them mentally ill.

Tell me how COVID ruined our citizens' moral fiber. Tell me how COVID made us soft on crime. Tell me how COVID suddenly tripled our population of mentally ill.

If we'd actually defunded the police, instead of saying we wanted to and then not, maybe there would be some money to care for people who are obviously incapable of caring for themselves. If we taxed our local corporations at all, maybe there would be some money for that.

Yes, there are plenty of people on drugs. You can put them in jail, and see where that gets you. Or you can treat addiction like the public health crisis it is. Fund the goddamn services, with tax money from Amazon.

The absolutely staggering level of income and wealth inequality we have experienced in the last decade has taken all of those problems and multiplied them tenfold.

This is the key, to me. Amazon moving out because of crime seems like some kind of full-circle irony, when they have contributed so much to that inequality in the first place.

I grew up in Seattle, and live here now. Crime and homelessness has been an issue for a decade or so, and it's become a much bigger issue (more spread out than it was) since COVID. None of that indicates getting "tougher" on crime/homelessness as a solution to our problems. Not to me, anyway.

Like a good FOSS nerd (and cheapo), I tried to steer my daughter towards Gimp rather than shelling out for Photoshop. She dug in her heels, and eventually I was able to divine that the reason was, the internet is chock-full of tutorials on using Photoshop to do all the kinds of art she wanted to do. The number of equivalently-useful Gimp tutorials was effectively zero. That's when I gave in.

I guess a variant of the network effect?

It's odd that in the whole course of this very long article, Moser doesn't use the word "power" in describing the relationship of English and its literature to the rest of the world, or the relationship of the language and literature to its own speakers. Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power -- economic and geopolitical power -- and yet he never quite comes out and says that.

Mizimura's "defense" of her writing against English; the elevation that occurs for a non-English writer when they are translated into English; the perceived "universality" of English; the resultant cultural guilt of English speakers: these are manifestations of power.

Likewise, the deracination of English, its divorce from specific place and people, is a result of power. He seems to think it is a result of a change in the culture: "I began to wonder if the culture that threatened other languages was hollowing out English, too. That culture goes by many disparaging names. It was called “corporate,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal”; it was taught as “Business English.” It was the vehicle of the infrastructure, for the most basic communication: for checking into a hotel, sending an email, participating in a sales conference."

But this is not a cultural problem, it is a power problem. Power in our current (American) society is inherent in the infrastructure he mentions. It exists within the movement of capital, within corporate law, within lobbying, within international trade. Language becomes hollowed out and denatured in this situation, because there is no culture, culture is not required to run the machines of power.

Likewise the observation that the international literature that we're comfortable with (I say "we" here, as I am also a white, middle-aged, middle-class, American literary translator) reads much like our own. We seek out foreign literature that feels like it was written for us: it feels that way because it was written by and for an equivalent socioeconomic class, one that simply hails from a different country. Moser says we might benefit more from reading literature from Paris, Texas than we would from Paris, France: that is because this putative literature from Texas comes from a world that does not have power. It is more educational to reach across power boundaries than it is to reach across language boundaries -- if all you end up finding in the latter case is your international peers.

He describes a language as an old city, and says very emphatically that what is needed to keep that city in good repair is people, the participation of people and their community. But that is exactly what we don't need in middle and upper class America. We do not have culture. We have structures of power, and culture is surplus to its purposes. The English language as we speak it now seems flat and vacuous because it is not strictly necessary; it is providing no vital function. Tweets and memes are sufficient for us, because almost nothing that matters in the system we live in depends on the skillful, thoughtful use of language. There's no sense in mourning young people's lack of reading habits. Nothing they find in those books will tell them how they might live in the world. The books are no longer necessary to them in a way that they might have been necessary to earlier generations.

This is an overly pessimisstic statement of the situation! And I am only partly Marxist -- I do not believe that it's all down to economics. But I believe we've created a machine, which we live inside of, which requires us to exercise very few of our human faculties in order to sustain its operation. It is no surprise if we start to lose those faculties.

Butterpat is another "new but like old" cast iron company: https://butterpatindustries.com/

When you stop using signal, you can log in to the signal website and say "I'm no longer using Signal"; that will solve the problem with your Signal-using contacts. I just checked and it looks life you have to deregister your account from within the Signal app (ie, can't uninstall first). I'm pretty sure it used to be more lenient: I remember friends being able to deregister their numbers after the fact.

Thai cooking uses it in near everything, including fried rice. And most stir-fried veggies. I've been stewing collard greens in chicken broth and fish sauce: delicious!

Well anything can be chalked up to lack of experience -- I'm sure if I was programming OCaml every day it wouldn't be an issue. Nor would I try to categorically claim the syntax is flawed!

But so much of the syntax, particularly around function calls, is simply a long row of whitespace-separated tokens, and I feel like my brain has to do extra work to parse what's what, and figure out associativity, and constantly remember what the ~ and the ? are doing. This[1] section of the tutorial makes perfect sense when you read it, but that doesn't mean you can easily scan a long function call with a lot of arguments, and instantly see what's happening.

The block-level syntax is great. But it got to the point where if I didn't write/read OCaml for a few days in a row, I forgot how it worked. And that's simply calling a function, nothing esoteric.

[1] https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/labels.html#When-and-when-...

I really wanted to settle on OCaml as the "real programming language" that I would learn for any "serious programming" I had to do. I couldn't make it stick (in part because I don't actually do any "serious programming") precisely because of the syntax.

There's too little of it! OCaml seems to take a "you don't need syntax except when you need syntax" approach, which I found very destabilizing. One of the major online OCaml tutorials said something like "If it doesn't work the way you expect, try adding parentheses", and I thought "Oh hell no. In a Lisp I know exactly how many parentheses I need: all of them". I prefer not having to think about it, and letting the parentheses become invisible to me.

But otherwise I have a deep and irrational fondness for the language, and still wish I'd been able to make it stick.

I'm not sure we want to distract Drew from Sourcehut (and running an email service sounds deeply distracting), but I would love to know what FLOSS email hosting service Sourcehut might see fit to support, as in the other thread about Openstreetmap.

I loved reading the opening of this article because it felt like a voice from the "other side of the aisle" that I could actually understand and potentially engage with. I do not (shame on me) make a project out of reading and digesting right-wing discourse: if it sounds like Tucker, I flush it. But it was refreshing to hear this voice, which does not sound like Tucker. Never mind that "women, liberals, urbanites, and people of color" are probably buying more guns in order to defend themselves against Proud Boys, et al, these are still statements that seem grounded in reality, and display no more emotional bias than I've likely got in the other direction. Anyway, I was quite relieved to read this.

Millions of people of all walks of life have been buying firearms in record numbers as more rational people reject the culture war around this topic and recognize the need for self defense is still very real, even in an ‘advanced’ society. Women, liberals, urbanites, and people of color are some of the fastest growing groups of firearm owners, for example.

Regardless of politics or background, you are welcome here. We believe in modern and responsible gun ownership — and think our communities and civil debates will be much better off if people at least accurately understood the topic of firearms before arguing about or fearing them.

I'm not sure how much of a breakthrough these conclusions are (basically, psychedelics weaken habits of perception and thought, allowing us to experience the world more directly), but it was fun to read anyway.

I'm on year three of meditating, and the above sounds a lot like one of the primary "jobs" of meditation: to break down habitual thoughts and reactions, and apprehend things more directly. This applies more to the emotions and reason than it does directly to the senses (as in LSD), but it can result in absorptive states (jhana) that feel a lot like the oceanic flow you get from mushrooms.

Coincidentally, my youngest daughter is nearly three years old, and it's been a weird experience watching her developing brain furiously piecing together the ego, sense of self, and habits of thought that I, forty years older, am now furiously trying to break down.

I like how Amazon has a "public list" and "private list" by default, in addition to all the custom lists you can make.

Seems like the reasonable thing to do in the above case is to have a default "shopping list", and if someone puts an item into their cart and doesn't buy it within the allotted time, it gets automatically moved to the "shopping list". Make the shopping list highly visible on all the cart-related views. Problem solved?