girzel

Joined 14 years ago

Karma

1,269

Submissions

401

Member since

Dec 24

Once a translator and writer, now a software engineer. I like writing code, but I like problem-solving better, and best of all I like understanding problems by talking to people about them.

Also annoyingly enthusiastic about meditation, taiji, and Japanese woodworking.

You can reach me at [email protected]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago

Location: Seattle

Remote: Yes, or in-office/hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python (Django/FastAPI), SQL, AWS

Resume: https://ericabrahamsen.net/EricAbrahamsen.pdf

Email: [email protected]

I have nearly 20 years of Python experience, and 10 years of AWS experience. I thrive under constraints and pressure, am open to new challenges, and love to learn. I have proven ability to take new products from concept/design to working prototype, and am ideal as an early-stage 0-to-1 engineer. I'm also interested in sharing my experience as leader of a small team.

Comment · 5 months ago

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?

Comment · 5 months ago

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.

Comment · 5 months ago

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

Comment · 8 months ago

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.

Comment · 9 months ago

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

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...

Comment · 2 years ago

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".

Comment · 2 years ago

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

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!

Comment · 2 years ago

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 :)

Comment · 4 years ago

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.

Comment · 4 years ago

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.

Comment · 4 years ago

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!