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dmillar

Re:Computers Cannot Make Decisions on Saturday October 10, 2026 @01:03PM (#50034847)
And the free-will-is-an-illusion camp would have you continue to trace that back from why was the act of delegation made (probablistic) to the big bang. Implying that humans can also not make decisions.
Re:Ask HN: What're You Reading? on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @04:15PM (#49899714)
London Falling, fascinating story about a piece of London's underbelly. Same guy that wrote Say Nothing, which is also great.
Seeing 503s on Gemini via API as well
Re:Cloudflare Drop on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @05:02PM (#48837371)
Replit is used a lot in this context. Their agent is good, but their circumvent-policies-to-get-something-in-front-of-execs-quickly is an amazing and mis-priced feature.
Re:Cloudflare Drop on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @04:53PM (#48837274)
Low barrier services don't care who's first in this epoch.
Re:Another Day Has Come on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @07:14PM (#47870477)
You know it's big news when Gruber makes the HN homepage.
Re:Your Supabase Is Public on Monday December 22, 2025 @03:57PM (#46358986)
- Enable RLS

and/or

- Turn off the REST API (if you just use pg connections)

- Disable the JWT/anon token(s)

Well, I see we have very similar hobbies and careers! Nice setup.
Re:Jane Street's sneaky retention tactic on Monday June 30, 2025 @01:23PM (#44425781)
Strats as a role has been downplayed and realigned a lot over the last several years. Traditionally, a strat was indeed a "quantitative strategist" that sat on the desk, often next to voice traders, developing tools, pricing models, trading systems, etc.

One of the people I regard as the Godfather/OG strat is Emanuel Derman (https://emanuelderman.com/). Another transformative (in my time) person in the Strat complex was Marty Chavez (https://www.rmartinchavez.com/). Both amazing people on and off the trading floor.

Re:Jane Street's sneaky retention tactic on Saturday June 28, 2025 @01:12PM (#44406338)
Goldman has done this for decades, pushing it even further by having developed their own language (Slang), graph db (SecDB), and IDE (SecView). Many engineers resist working it in, but for any strat it's mandatory.
Re:Data Centers in Space on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @08:40PM (#43979500)
If this and/or the policies, leadership, and mindset that enable these kinds of things interest you, I highly recommend Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. IIRC, they outline data centers in space in his utopian introduction.
What the "right answer" is will vary widely on application and analyst. That's one reason there are so many coordinate ref systems. If you keep everything in 3857, you'll get answers in ~meters, but whether that's "right" depends on where and how large the distance or geom is and what your precision threshold is. So, really, everyone's needs are necessarily "specific."
DuckDB > geopandas, certainly for anything out of core. Though, I recently gave up on importing 70GB worth of large multipolygons (from a csv in hex wkb), and just used a postgis container. In concert with DuckDB's growth, I'd also mark the advent of geoparquet.

The big change, in my view, over the past decade in GIS software, is in compute and storage efficiency across the typical stack. DuckDB has become a part of this, but h/t to the advances from shapely, geopandas, geoparquet, and GDAL. There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram, and credit should be spread around. QGIS is great, too, though I feel there is market opportunity to apply 90/10 to its massive feature set and move it to the web.

Re:Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @02:10PM (#43559558)
Many criminal records, petty or otherwise, are public record. When archived, expunged or dismissed infractions never truly become that. A traffic violation or other petty misdemeanor from 20 years ago, that has been expunged from official record, can show up on a background check because companies archive public data. So, there is a flip side to this.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2024) on Friday August 02, 2024 @10:51AM (#41139248)
Arturo AI | MLEng and MLOps Roles | 130-190k DOE | https://www.arturo.ai/careers

Computer vision (segmentation) and aerial imagery experience a big plus for the eng role. Remote/hybrid. Proximity to Utah preferred.

python, pytorch, sql, stats, linux, mlflow, aws

if interested, send me an email : dmillar at the above domain.

The UK still has a heavily embedded caste or caste-like social circumstance. Pharma and finance have somewhat eschewed this tradition, but even those industries still have its embedded lords and ladies. Many of their smartest head to the US (or elsewhere), and Brexit has set them back decades from achieving the "richest country" status. A software engineer can double their earnings by moving to the US (if they can manage to). The owners of capital are generally not creators, and until that changes nor will their economic station.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024) on Monday April 01, 2024 @03:01PM (#39897798)
Arturo.ai | MLOps/Data Engineer | Remote/Hybrid | Utah preferred

- Python, solid ML lifecycle experience, computer vision preference

- AWS SageMaker

- SQL, data strategy, data warehousing

- Desire to work in highly dynamic/changing environment

- $150k-180k plus bonus/equity

Please read the JD on the site. If interested, please send your MLOps, SageMaker experience, and any other information you feel is relevant to the email below.

* Unfortunately we unable to sponsor H1B/transfers at this time

[email protected] | https://www.arturo.ai/careers

Would be interested to also know how they handle per-title audio. With stereo -> 5.1 -> 7.1 and the sides and wide layout variants, how do they think about this during the inspection and encoding process? Being completely naive to Netflix's source media, and assuming it comes in a variety for formats and media, it seems like there are decision to make there. Though audio obviously has a much lower bandwidth burden, one would think there could still be QoE gains (and bandwidth savings) by doing things that AV1 can do with different scenes in something like OPUS.
You're right. Thinking back, I think I asked "what's the average distance" not "what's most probable".
You have two random uniform variables and the distance/difference/change between to finite points.

Put another way (and code it up if you want). Select two random uniformly distributed points between 0 and 1. Do this 10_000 times, whats the average distance between the two?

This gets to the question of "most probable" vs "expected value". A conversation I always welcomed.

Early in my career, when I first started interviewing, I used to ask a version of this to recent grads. It was never a make-or-break question, but I found it to be a great way to a.) see how people approach problem solving and probability and b.) see how they respond when you start asking whys (even if they answered/guessed 1/3). It's something that takes zero code to answer, and the intuition is easy to grok once explained.

The other part I particularly enjoyed was the people who initially guessed wrong, but then got to the answer intuitively almost always sent me code proving the answer.

For the record, my question was: "Two points are randomly and uniformly selected on a line 0.0 to 1.0. What is the most probable distance between the two points?"

Re:Why not use SSD space as RAM? on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @09:16PM (#39112811)
b/c it's slower
Re:Wall Street Journal Hedcut Stable Diffusion Model on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @04:37PM (#39110249)
This is a bit old in SD terms, but I wanted to post here if anyone ever wanted to use a fine-tuned SD model to create a WSJ-style hedcut of themselves (or others I guess).

* I wanted to express that this work would not be possible without Noli Novak's incredible artwork, and attribution should be given to her when appropriate (and certainly not to me) *

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024) on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @03:20AM (#38851865)
Location: Salt Lake City

Remote: hybrid/remote/on-prem

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, R, Spark, TensorFlow, data science, ML, Linux, AWS, PostgreSQL (most RDBMSs), containers, Git, JavaScript, React, management/leadership

Resume: https://donniemillar.com/donnie-millar-resume.pdf

Email: [email protected]

Former Goldman quant, published researcher, looking for senior or director-level quant dev/data science role at start-up or smaller firm

Re:Blogging Like a Hacker (2008) on Thursday December 21, 2023 @01:33AM (#38717666)
Zola

It does what I need. Fast, search-capable, markdown, and handlebars. The community isn't huge, but it's just what I need to get a little bit of writing online.

"HIRWAY: ...Just music. It allowed some space for my brain to get bored. Another thing that I learned was how much boredom was, like, an essential part of creativity. Maybe boredom is too strong of a word for it, but it's something like..." mindfulness.

I remember hearing Sam Harris (I think) say something to the effect of 'once you reach some stage/awareness of mindfulness, you can never be truly bored.' Like, if you're bored, you're not paying attention. That's stuck with me.

Agree, but I do think there are real clinical benefits to short trials like this. For example, it's good to have evidence that one could quickly improve their cardiometabolic health immediately after a cardiovascular event just by switching to vegan.

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