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girzel

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girzel
·el mes pasado·discuss
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?
girzel
·el mes pasado·discuss
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: [email protected]
I'm a 0-1 backend engineer, most recently owning the full AWS-based stack for a small startup. I thrive best in slightly volatile situations, reacting quickly to changing requirements, staying in communication to make sure everyone knows what's happening. Balancing new features against maintainability against stability. Low ego, and approaching unflappable.
girzel
·el mes pasado·discuss
Don't forget to mention location! This looks to be on location in Boston.
girzel
·hace 4 meses·discuss
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.
girzel
·hace 6 meses·discuss
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.
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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.
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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...
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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".
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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.
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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!
girzel
·hace 2 años·discuss
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 :)
girzel
·hace 7 años·discuss
SEEKING WORK: Seattle or remote, part time or short gigs only.

Programmer since 2006. Tech includes Python and Django, plus the usual HTML/CSS/JS. Common Lisp (and other lisp-likes), and some oCaml. Postgres.

The thing that interests me most is helping not-necessarily-technical organizations with their technical problems. CMSs, databases, tooling, automation. I really enjoy figuring out tricky problem domains, and making tools that are well suited to those domains, and to their users.

Email in profile.
girzel
·hace 7 años·discuss
I think hard links could. To take the up-thread example, you have one folder called "Vacation2018", and another called "BestDogPics". The photo of your dog on vacation lives in both folders, but hardlinked together.
girzel
·hace 7 años·discuss
> This doesn't make sense. They "File -> Save" to a location, right? That's a tag.

The folder-hierarchy version of "unwilling to go through and tag all their files" is saving all files to the Desktop.
girzel
·hace 8 años·discuss
Gnus in Emacs :)