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brianolsonon Math has changed the shape of gerrymandering

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 totally build an _evil_ version of my impartial redistricting software that optimized for evil goals. But I obviously didn't want evil ends, and sadly no one even offered to pay me to be evil ;-)

brianolsonon Math has changed the shape of gerrymandering

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. :-/

I'd much rather have any algorithm that gives no power to any parties, and solves a better answer to the question "what is a district for?" (my short short: Local representation for local issues)

As other comments have also noted, lots of people don't want _geographic_ representation but some kind of other issue/identity Proportional Representation. Yup. Also true. My dream State Legislature has a PR Senate at-large across the whole state in batches of 20 or so, and a small-local-district House.

brianolsonon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2023)

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: icic@bolson.org

Principal/Architect Software Engineer with 22+ years of experience. Focuses in high performance, high reliability, distributed networks. Comfortable negotiating with stakeholders to design the right solution. Technical leadership of small groups and mentoring junior engineers while also directly contributing to the Software Engineering effort. Design new high performance software from scratch or analyze an existing system and improve its performance.

I want to make things I'm proud of that matter to people and make the world a better place; and I want to solve interesting technical challenges along the way.

brianolsonon Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

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-dup votes, or can allow anonymous votes.

brianolsonon Buy hi-resolution satellite images of any place on earth

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.

brianolsonon Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages

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 (Swift) if I had to.

Maybe the JetBrains language (Kotlin) is okay?

I hear lots of buzz about the Mozilla language (Rust), maybe they have a good history of open source stewardship.

The Guido language is pretty friendly (Python) ;-)

But I'm pretty done with the Larry language (perl)

brianolsonon I/O is no longer the bottleneck

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-coding interview question and I ask people do to a naive implementation first, then later I ask about possible optimizations. A third to a half of candidates want to do fewer RAM accesses and oh by is that the wrong avenue for this problem - especially when they just wrote their solution in Python and you could get a 10x-20x speedup by rewrite in C/C++/Go/Rust/etc.

Network is IO too. Network is pretty fast, datacenter-to-datacenter, but end users can still have their experience improved with better encoding and protocol; and outbound bandwidth bills can be improved by that too.

brianolsonon The Case for Abolishing Elections

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 is making decisions, and those decisions will probably 90% go with what the staffers suggest.

brianolsonon Do not rug on me: Zero-dimensional Scam Detection

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’ tokens start up, run a while, and rug-pull taking $1 with them? I’d guess that’s just ‘debugging’. Did a few big rug pulls run away with a million dollars? Can we detect _those_ better?

brianolsonon Ask HN: What's Your Biggest Regret?

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.

brianolsonon Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

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).

brianolsonon Connectix QuickCam: The First Webcam

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.

brianolsonon How to get rid of gerrymandering: the math is surprising

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 local rep' to talk to about local and regional issues, but all the argument is about ideological representation (party, culture, pet issue, etc.).

My best guess solution is a two part legislature, one house of small local districts, one house elected in at-large Proportional Representation.

brianolsonon You say “cave dweller debugging”, I say debug logging

Debugger? Logging? LUXURY! In my day we had ONE BLINKING LED and considered ourselves lucky!

brianolsonon On anti-crypto toxicity

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.

brianolsonon On anti-crypto toxicity

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 to be non-BS. I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.

brianolsonon Low process culture, high process culture

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 the friction and heat of a sloppy machine. So a couple job hops have been to smaller/newer companies that haven't gotten baroque yet.

* The exception was one company that knew it. The attitude was like, "yeah, we're kinda overbureaucratic, but we're gonna be _good_ at it." And indeed, the process slowed down the overall work a bit, but the process was kinda well done and not painful.

brianolsonon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

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, but I'm proud of it.

https://bdistricting.com/

brianolsonon On being a PhD student of Robert Harper

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 offered 212 in an alternate Java version instead of the usual ML. I wanted to take it in a _practical_ language instead of a horrible useless language, so I took the 212-Java version. Harper refused to accept that as a prereq when he was teaching 312 Compilers. Yes, I'm still bitter (20+ years later), and I still think ML is an annoying useless academic language no undergrad should be subjected to.

brianolsonon CDC infographic lets you know if your facial hair won’t work with a mask

Alright, greybeards, might be time for a shave. (I'm going to.)

brianolsonon Ask HN: I'm tired of intense code review cycles

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 personal preference and their way isn't actually _wrong_, I should let it go.

brianolsonon Using an ETL framework vs. writing yet another ETL script

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 things for you and make some things easier, but you have to learn their system, and in that time you could be writing your own that does exactly what you want.

brianolsonon Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus

(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 history since the beginning. Somewhere along the line I'm connected to a malicious node which hands me a fictionalized block. It would need to have been signed by not just one but about 30-45 accounts _which had stake at that time_. Proof-of-Stake attacks aren't about having 51% of the CPU that overwhelms a Proof-of-Work system, but about having 60-70% of the _value_ in the network. So, if Warren Buffet comes along and wants to spam our network, I guess he could, but that would destroy the network and destroy his value that he sunk into the network. _That_ is a guardrail for PoS systems as much as any crypto or consensus-protocol element (and the algorithms are right, original article misunderstands them).

brianolsonon When People Carved Turnips Instead of Pumpkins for Halloween

Kids just don't learn to carve 'neeps the way they used to. ... Life is Neeps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypsNiixwLXQ

brianolsonon Show HN: ChokokuCAD – A breakthrough CAD application on the browser

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.

brianolsonon Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

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't even need a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm. If I am simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an adolescence of B and mature into A.

brianolsonon Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos?

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 lots and lots of the state.

brianolsonon Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos?

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 White Rock.

brianolsonon Ask HN: Advice on bringing community broadband to Los Alamos?

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 service like T1 lines, but I thought it was a level up from that. I was the student representative on the committee setting up the first internet service to all the schools.)

brianolsonon So you want to build a house more efficiently

Framing is a plausible place to optimize, so how about steel? The factory cuts all the pieces to be assembled on site. It goes up real fast. This is what we want, right?