brianolson

8 ms·

31.
by brianolson 3y ago
If that was true we would have already all switched to Java
32.
by brianolson 3y ago
I've been using math and C++ to do redistricting since about 2005 ( https://bdistricting.com/ ). It definitely occurred to me along the way that for the mere cost of a year or two of software engineer time, I could tot
33.
by brianolson 3y ago
For many years California had a bipartisan gerrymander that made the 60:40 D:R state have about 60/40 in its state legislature and US House districts and every seat was a safe seat. That's a certain kind of democracy death. :-&#x2
34.
by brianolson 4y ago
Location: US/Eastern (Boston-ish) Remote: Yes please! Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Python, AWS, PostgreSQL, C/C++, Java, Javascript, Linux, ... Résumé/CV: https://bolson.org/resume/ Email: i
35.
by brianolson 4y ago
https://betterpolls.com/ Tool for running online rankings/ratings polls. Use for low stakes stuff like deciding what movie to watch, group outing destination, club elections, etc. Can require google/fb login to de
36.
by brianolson 4y ago
The mobile page just says app. It needs to add 'or view this site on desktop'. I assumed this was a dumb site built mobile-app-only because I happened to first read about it while reading news on my phone.
37.
by brianolson 4y ago
Yeah, I don't want to use the Microsoft language (C#) Certainly not the Oracle Language (Java) I like the Google Language (Go) and it's BSD so maybe safe-ish? I'm not in that ecosystem, but I'd use the Apple language (Sw
38.
by brianolson 4y ago
SSD is pretty fast; but my app is actually trying to do more than 100_000 read-modify-write cycles per second and that still requires careful thought about the database and schema we're using. CPU and RAM are pretty fast. I do a live-c
39.
by brianolson 4y ago
They're suggesting 'government by jury', but what I expect it will turn out to be is 'government by the permanent bureaucracy'. The staffers who are there all the time will make suggestions to the current jury that
40.
by brianolson 4y ago
I’d probably like to charitably interpret some of these ‘no real value’ tokens as “debugging” or “dry-run” or some other kind of harmless experiment. They didn’t measure how much value was stolen by rug-pull maneuvers. Did 10,000 ‘fake’ tok
41.
by brianolson 4y ago
Romances that didn't happen because I chickened out, or that went badly because I screwed up in some way. Nothing to do with Hacker News, just Human stuff. I'm just a nerd who has been unlucky in love.
42.
by brianolson 4y ago
Oh hey, I made one too. https://betterpolls.com/ Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).
43.
by brianolson 4y ago
I did a high school science fair project in computer vision on one of these in 1996-1997. I'm still bitter that Logitech bought them out and cancelled the Mac version of the product and to this day I won't buy Logitech products.
44.
by brianolson 4y ago
I've studied redistricting and gerrymandering for 15+ years ( https://bdistricting.com ), and yes the punch line is that people don't even want geographic districts at least half the time. Sometimes you want 'your
45.
by brianolson 4y ago
Debugger? Logging? LUXURY! In my day we had ONE BLINKING LED and considered ourselves lucky!
46.
by brianolson 4y ago
There are new blockchains based on technology a million times more efficient than Bitcoin. Ethereum is trying to upgrade. Bitcoin is terrible, but this is fixable by using things other than bitcoin.
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by brianolson 4y ago
I'm grumpy about Visa/MC taking 3% of every transaction. I want a technofix for that. There are new blockchains that cost less than a penny per transaction use about a millionth of the wattage of bitcoin and I hope they turn out t
48.
by brianolson 5y ago
I've hated almost every* high-process environment I've been in. To me, "process" feels like overhead. Overhead is anything not contributing to the value proposition of the company's products or services. Overhead is
49.
by brianolson 5y ago
Impartial algorithmic redistricting. I wrote code to process the Census data into impartial compact districts for all the state US House districts and State Legislature districts. It's mathematically great, but politically inconvenient
50.
by brianolson 5y ago
I was an undergrad at CMU and Harper broke the curriculum. The Computer Science undergrad curriculum was that one should take Programming Languages (15-212) before taking the course on Compilers (15-312). But, for a couple years they offere
51.
by brianolson 5y ago
Alright, greybeards, might be time for a shave. (I'm going to.)
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by brianolson 5y ago
Reviewer needs to lighten up. I'm the senior software engineer on a lot of reviews lately and I see a lot of things I wish were different -- but they're not important. I won't let _bad_ style stay, but if it's just perso
53.
by brianolson 5y ago
Write your own. You can either learn a general purpose programming language that will do exactly what you want, and your skills will be portable, or you'll learn some ETL-vendor-lockin-domain-specific-language. Sure, they may do some t
54.
by brianolson 5y ago
(my day job is developer on Proof-of-Stake Algorand block chain, I'm a developer, this may not be polished official PR) Article's theory about malicious old blocks doesn't hold up. Let's say I start a new node and verify
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by brianolson 5y ago
Kids just don't learn to carve 'neeps the way they used to. ... Life is Neeps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypsNiixwLXQ
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by brianolson 5y ago
OnShape does it better. https://www.onshape.com/en/ But hey, new entrant into the market, keep trying! OnShape is expensive and could use some competition.
57.
by brianolson 5y ago
Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don'
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by brianolson 5y ago
I just bought land in Vermont and the state subsidized fiber network there is really impressive. It's not municipal/public-owned, but state-subsidized, but it still looks like the service is really good and comprehensively covers
59.
by brianolson 5y ago
I'd guess the layout of the town is a benefit? It's mostly dense-ish between the mesas of Los Alamos and the blob of White Rock. Other towns fade into low density and get a lot sparser, but you only get that in one neighborhood of
60.
by brianolson 5y ago
Random point of Los Alamos networking history: around 1995-1996 the school system (5 elementary schools, 1 mid, 1 high) were apparently able to get dark fiber strung between them. (I may be mis-remembering, it might have been dedicated serv

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