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aaronchall

1,441 karma · joined February 4, 2014

I've been a financial advisor, business professor, and now I work as a Python programmer in finance and CS professor.

linkedin.com/in/aaronchall

I've been active on Stack Overflow for more than a couple of years, and now have my Python gold badge and am in the top 0.1% of all time by reputation, and consistently in the top 100 (.05%) for recent measures by month/quarter/year, and they say I've reached about 150 million people.

I'm now an elected moderator on Stack Overflow, and I try to consistently do the right thing for all users.

stackoverflow.com/users/541136

submissionscomments
aaronchall··on Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning
I'm sure the day after Russia withdraws from Ukraine they're going to demand the pipeline from Russia be restored and everyone they suspect involved involved in the Nord Stream blasts extradited too.
aaronchall··on The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study
I clicked through hoping you were wrong, saw the first page, and thought, ah, this is legible... then I got to the code blocks and was completely blinded.

I'm not sure what to tell authors of such pages...

aaronchall··on Horseshoe Theory of Politics
> Hitler was akshually a leftist

Have you not read his very consistent and personally defended party platform? He also said that the communists were close enough in ideology to join his party.

The idea that the communists were the opposite of the Nazis and fascists was an idea spread by the communists to create confusion and try to improve their own image.

aaronchall··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Ok, then for this you need minimum of two bits - one for kingside Rook and one for the queenside Rook, both would be set if you move the King. You also need to count moves since the last exchange or pawn move for the 50 move rule.
aaronchall··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Castling requires no prior moves by either piece (King or Rook). Move the King once and back early on, and later, although the board looks set for castling, the King may not.
aaronchall··on How to get coworkers to stop giving me ChatGPT-generated suggestions?
On these sites the idea is that answers belong in the top-level answer posts where they can be voted up and down for the purpose of sorting the competing ideas and forms of responses to the primary question post. Criticisms should remain in the comments until they are integrated and addressed in the answers, at which point they are obsolete and can be removed. Therefore chats belong elsewhere, and are helpfully moved into chat rooms, which you can click through to and read if you're interested.
aaronchall··on Why Do Economists Get Paid More Than Sociologists?
True
aaronchall··on Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
Perhaps close in absolute terms but still less than half the total price.

I have never had to replace a screen before, but I have bought new batteries to replace on my own. An easily replaceable one would be nice.

aaronchall··on GitHub deleted accounts of people who contributed to Tornado Cash repos
Just reading the comments, I also was thinking this was about Python's tornado library until I recognized it wasn't that. The title needs improvement.

CC @dang

aaronchall··on Why is it so hard to give Google money?
This. And then escalate to senior management, all the way to Sundar Pichai.

Additionally, write your congressional and local state representatives, and give them the facts.

aaronchall··on Why is it so hard to give Google money?
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence in these threads about how friendly Googlers used to assist with these issues before management prevented it.
aaronchall··on Categories for Your Note Archive Are a Bad Idea (2015)
Categories are mutually exclusive.

Tags aren't. I much prefer searching in intersections of tags to searching for needles that may be in different haystacks.

aaronchall··on Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals
I agree we should probably say "licenses" and not "medallions" when talking about policies all over the world, it's just that medallions are known as the worst example of corruption and regulatory capture, protecting incumbents while incredibly claiming this helped stranded people who need to get home when no taxis can be found.

At the peak these licenses were going for a million dollars each.

I think Uber, Lyft, and others are serving a great good in substituting for taxis in filling the need for road travelers. Taxi drivers may argue that the drivers are being abused, but we can't all have (nor do we all want) jobs with lots of protections.

Being a driver should be a job anyone could take while on the road to reaching their dreams in life, and not restricted to a lucky few who demanded the government give them a monopoly on the gig.

aaronchall··on Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
I homeschooled in 8th grade and I loved it.

- No commute to middle school, which returned me an hour of my day right there.

- No bullying from the soon-to-be dropouts.

- No gross school lunches or having to tote around a smelly lunchbag/box/cooler.

- No carrying a pile of books everywhere because the administration banned bookbags (drugs or weapons or something like that...), and no dealing with the worst students who always had their hands free because they didn't care if they had their books.

- I went as fast as I wanted through my Algebra textbook (doing up to 8 lessons a day.)

- Went to a science class taught every Friday in the next city over with demonstrations of chemistry and physics.

- Played my trombone the homeschool band, we performed at Disney World and local recitals too.

- Made some friends in the homeschool group.

- I disliked the English and History exercises but I did them in weekly batches to get them done. And I read lots of books from the big city's library which was far superior to the school or local city's library that I would have to use later when high school let out.

If I had stuck with the homeschooling system I could have finished my BS at the same time I finished high school by taking all my classes at the local university - but I would have probably not double-majored.

My experience with home-schooling gave me a big insight to my high school experience. I asked for privileges such as staying in classrooms during lunch or pep-rallies to play chess or read, and I usually got them because I was well-behaved, respectful, and demonstrated I could be trusted.

But I also resented the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the public school administration's dictates built around maintaining order due to worst behaving students (for example, I couldn't wear a ball-cap on a bad hair day because the resource officer caught kids hiding drugs in caps - knocking a cap off would start brutal fighting). Compared to that system, homeschooling was a kind of utopia to me.

The only downside was not being around the friends that I grew up with. Fewer birthday parties and such. But there was more hanging out with a much smaller set of friends who were all homeschooling, and making new friends in the local homeschool resource group. I went back to high school in 9th grade on the theory that I missed my friends and wanted to be involved in student government and other clubs. But they weren't as friendly as I remembered, and student government and the other clubs did basically nothing. So I spent my 12th grade year at the local university full time, which gave me the freedom I sorely missed from 8th grade. My only regret was not doing it sooner.

aaronchall··on Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
I'm using i3, specifically i3-gaps and I'm rather interested in switching.

I don't have nvidia.

Where can I learn more?

aaronchall··on Coinbase is rescinding already-accepted job offers
So a company isn't allowed to raise the bar?
aaronchall··on Lidl’s parent company launches cloud unit to offer ‘Made in Germany’ AWS rival
Isn't "Made in Germany" Hetzner's thing?
aaronchall··on Would You Take Out a Loan for a Pair of Jeans? (2017)
A 0% financing bakes the seller's profit into the price paid and just makes it less rewarding to pay it off early.
aaronchall··on Ask HN: My annual plea for dark mode
This is what I use, and it works really well on a simple site like this one.

In Chrome, go to chrome://flags and search for Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents and select "Enabled" (or a similar option, I prefer "Enabled with increased text contrast" sometimes.)

That said, it shouldn't be hard for the site to add a bit of css like:

    @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    ...
and thus respect the preferences of the users without having to resort to using a specific browser, plugins (whose code may or may not have vulnerabilities), or whatever user hacks we can come up with. (@dang, what do you think?)
aaronchall··on Results from first US trial of genetically modified mosquitoes
That's the problem when a slippery slope becomes a landslide and next thing you know, the sky is falling.
aaronchall··on Don’t Cook Yourself with RF Energy
Sounds like a way for them to pretend to be cautious and safe, relative to the west. How seriously do they take these "limits"?
aaronchall··on Automate Public Certificates Lifecycle Management via RFC 8555 (ACME)
I recall stories of Google arbitrarily declaring users persona non grata, ruining the user's business and even their life, with no recourse.

Is this another such risk vector?

aaronchall··on Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
In Spanish and Portuguese "espond" means to answer. Perhaps it's a bit of cynical differentiation signalling.

If so, you'll certainly never hear their gratitude for pointing out the error so it can be corrected.

If not... hey, perhaps you will. Good luck.

aaronchall··on A project with a single 11,000-line code file
If you divide a single 11k-line file into 20 files averaging 550 lines per each, by semantics and levels of abstraction, your code will quite possibly be easier to read, maintain and add to. Maybe. Perhaps.
aaronchall··on State of OSS Monetization
The quote is more like "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil".

Money merely represents value. If we fairly created value for others, it is fair to be able to get money representing that value in return.

Making money ethically is something that should be encouraged - it means creating more value for other people.

aaronchall··on 40 Years of Failure: IRS Unable to Fix Computer System
I would really like to see the IRS get this done and done well. There's really no excuse for their inability to give us a preliminary tax report, allow us to input the details they don't have, and pay our taxes without all the wasted time and effort.
aaronchall··on Dominance hierarchy within Russian economy
I retweeted bits of that thread last night, great analysis from an interesting point of view.
aaronchall··on Prediction that Kyiv falls to Russian forces by April 2022 goes from 90% to 26%
I was thinking this every time I read the news back when Putin was saying this.
aaronchall··on Prediction that Kyiv falls to Russian forces by April 2022 goes from 90% to 26%
I suspect Russia is going to have big problems with revenge-seekers.
aaronchall··on Ask HN: What’s the most secure OS for servers? Why?
Why not build your own distro with NixOS?

It seems to have all these upsides combined with a domain-based configuration that makes the configuration of what you need, whatever you need, quite easy, at least for the well-traveled paths.

And it's powerful enough that when you learn the language (which is small) and the necessary builtin functions (of which there are many, but there's a huge body of existing work that makes it easy to find examples) you can customize your system to your heart's desire.

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