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aalhour

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026) on Friday February 13, 2026 @08:52AM (#47002712)
Location: Germany (Munich)

Fully remote: Yes (and open to hybrid in Munich)

Willing to relocate: No

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aalhour/

Website: https://aalhour.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/aalhour

Resumé/CV: available on request (has personal contact info)

Email: a.z.alhour(at)gmail(dot)com

Technologies: Go, Python, Java, k8s, docker, AWS (backend/data infra)

About me: A software engineer with 15 years of experience (ex-Shopify, ex-HubSpot), with prior engineering management experience. I work on the backend, did data engineering in the past and am looking for a role in backend/data infra.

Re:Ask HN: What Is Your Hobby? on Wednesday September 24, 2025 @08:37AM (#45359452)
Martial arts, reading, long walks, lifting weights.
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone else pronounce CLI as "clee"? on Thursday September 11, 2025 @02:46PM (#45214804)
No,
I worked as a manager at a local German company in Germany with a strong Worker's Council team. Performance Management was run through them, they had comments, the process was adapted and managers were onboarded. This is not to say that performance management doesn't suck in general (because once you start having metrics, people start gaming them and you're almost superimposing it on people's way of working), but the Worker's Council didn't block it, because at the end of the day it was neither invasive nor exploitative.

EDIT: typos.

Re:Ask HN: Memory-Safe Low Level Languages on Monday May 05, 2025 @05:43AM (#43893300)
I haven't used Nim but your comment made me remember that language, yeah it was forgotten but I am not sure if it's completely abandoned, it seems that their team has been launching new language releases on a nice cadence: https://nim-lang.org/blog.html

Ask HN: Books or games to teach kids math

Anything that can teach a 3 years old kid math, assuming he knows how to count to 10. But also interested in resources that that would take him beyond that and get him to fall in love with math as he grows up.EDIT: typos

( Read More... | 8 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Ask HN: Book Recommendations on Scientific Thinking

What books would you recommend on the Scientific Method, Epistemology and scientific thinking in general?Books like this that I liked:- The Selfish Gene- Rationality: From AI to Zombies- The Scout Mindset- Asking the Right Questions (Critical Thinking)I've read "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" already and could barely finish it. I respect that Feynman is a great scientist but he came across...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average? on Sunday December 31, 2023 @03:57PM (#38827454)
No worries, I think your solution coverges with @Someone's above, if I am not mistaken. You're multiplying the probabilities for all values of j up to i for all values of i.
Re:Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average? on Sunday December 31, 2023 @03:54PM (#38827438)
I was aware that the Random function call gets evaluated in Python (and C) every time the loop iterates, I just couldn't imagine the probability distribution myself, I had assumed that all numbers are uniformally distributed but didn't cater for the sums. You're a legend! Now I see it. I wrote the following code to check out your argument and it checks out indeed :thumbs-up:

  def p(n):
    total = 1
    for i in range(1, n):
      total *= (100-i)/100
    return total


  for i in range(1, 100):
    print(f"p({i}) = {p(i)}")

The first 13 results:

  p(1) = 1
  p(2) = 0.99
  p(3) = 0.9702
  p(4) = 0.9410939999999999
  p(5) = 0.9034502399999998
  p(6) = 0.8582777279999998
  p(7) = 0.8067810643199997
  p(8) = 0.7503063898175998
  p(9) = 0.6902818786321918
  p(10) = 0.6281565095552946
  p(11) = 0.5653408585997651
  p(12) = 0.503153364153791
  p(13) = 0.44277496045533604
p(12) sits at 50%, of course it will be the mean! :D
Re:Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average? on Sunday December 31, 2023 @03:38PM (#38827340)
Yes, that's true. I don't want an average of 50. My initial guess of 50 is wrong. I am trying to understand why the average turned out to be approximately 12.
Re:Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average? on Sunday December 31, 2023 @03:36PM (#38827333)
Not sure that adds up, I translated the right side of the equality into a Python statement and it returns a number I am not sure how to interpret:

  1/99 * sum([(i-1)*i for i in range(2, 100)])   # 3266.666666666667
Both the median and mean are around 12 for 10K runs of the loop.

Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?

A friend of mine shared the following code snippet with me and asked me to guess how many times the loop will run on average: for(int i = 0; i < Random(1, 100); i++); I tried to guess the answer analytically and gussed ~50 but the empirical test was surprising to me. Can someone explain why the average is around 12?Runnable code: https://replit.com/@aalhour/RandomLoop#main.pyEDIT: Formatting.

( Read More... | 11 comments | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How do I get invite to Lobste.rs? on Saturday October 28, 2023 @06:57PM (#38054236)
me too please?
Re:Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker? on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @04:48PM (#36512370)
I just changed the DNS on my unrooted Android to AdGuard's, went into the YouTube and I still saw the ads. What am I missing?
Well, this is awesome. I see that they also have another one on Redis (https://build-your-own.org/redis/). That will be my next fun project. Thanks!

EDIT: typos.

Re:I.reddit.com Has Been Deprecated on Friday March 24, 2023 @05:58AM (#35287039)
It's so slow though. Is there a way we can help the contributors to make it faster?
Re:Ask HN: Favorite, timeless tech article/book on Saturday April 23, 2022 @03:28PM (#31137595)
"You and Your Research", a seminar Richard Hamming gave at Bell Labs

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Re:Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2021? on Friday December 10, 2021 @05:49AM (#29508474)
Would you recommend Healing Developmental Trauma to non-therapists? I am interested in the topic of trauma and how to heal it but have zero training on the subject.
* Thinking Fast and Slow

* The Selfish Gene

* Probability: For the Enthusiastic Beginner

* How to Measure Anything

* Rationality: From AI to Zombies

* Cynefin: Weaving Sense-making into the fabric of our world

* Major works of Friedrich Nietzsche

How can someone find good English speaking therapists in Germany?
Re:Go is not an easy language on Monday February 22, 2021 @06:48AM (#26223432)
What is horrible about Python wrt onboarding new engineers?

In my personal experience, I had an easier time getting onboarded on Python than Golang.

Orwell's 1984?
Re:System Design Interview book review on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @06:23PM (#25652685)
Can you share more about what resources did you study to bridge the FAANG L5 gaps in terms of knowledge and interview skills?

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