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w1

131 karma · joined June 18, 2018

full stack machine learning engineer

you can contact me at ["won't", but without the not, which also happens to be the abbreviation of a common english male name] at thorbjorn444.com

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w1··on I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
The magnitude of negative responses to this comment is very encouraging.

Not because I agree with my sibling comments, but because I strongly agree with the parent, making me think my org and I are much earlier than I thought. :)

w1··on America's Geothermal Breakthrough
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).

Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.

w1··on Is the world becoming uninsurable?
No

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

w1··on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.

This site doesn’t represent the world at large.

I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.

For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.

w1··on Suits, money laundering, and linear programming
This is also a problem for accountants, trying to do “account reconciliation” to determine which transactions contribute to a given balance.

I made a simple tool that does this client-side for an accountant friend a while ago: https://reconciliation.spcdx.com/

(Warning: runtimes do quickly scale, due to the time complexity described above)

w1··on How a Gas Compressor Station Works
>> You don't repeatedly recompress along the pipeline length

Yes, you do. That is the primary purpose of transmission compressor stations. You may just lose a few psi per mile or something, but over the course of 100s of miles..

w1··on Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.

Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.

I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.

"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...

w1··on The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen
>> people that self-select to homeschool their children are going to diverge from the general population

Yes, but not necessarily in a way that is correlated with higher educational performance for their children.

w1··on The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen
speaking from the sample size of all the other kids i knew in homeschooling groups, the modal outcome (for my 90s / early aughts cohort) is bad.
w1··on Show HN: Will I run Boston 2025?
Note that the root site (https://getfast.ai/) also has a marathon time predictor, based on your Strava data.
w1··on Homeowners fined millions after buying properties used to grow illegal weed
maybe this is better: https://casetext.com/case/thomas-v-cnty-of-humboldt
w1··on Using Your Vector Database as a JSON (Or Relational) Datastore
Postgres (with pgvector) is an unbelievably goated vector db. Idk why anyone would use anything else.
w1··on A startup allegedly 'hacked the world', then came censorship, and now backlash
Per [this story](https://www.thedailybeast.com/who-is-killing-all-these-stori...), yes.
w1··on Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
Emporia, KS.

Home of a small college and a few large obscure athletic events (Unbound Gravel and disc golf nationals). Kansas is also a very reasonable state, politically, compared to much of the midwest. Less than two hours from decent sized airports (MCI and Wichita).

w1··on Ask HN: Is Your Child Lonely?
That all said, these are potential positive consequences, observed in retrospect, from what was an extended adverse and painful event. I have been very fortunate with my outcome, but nearly all of my friends and family members who were homeschooled were have had serious issues, ranging from mild maladjustment to suicide.

If anyone is seriously considering homeschooling and wants to hear a contrary opinion, please feel free to send me an email :)

w1··on Ask HN: Is Your Child Lonely?
Great question. I think the most noticeable impact on my personality is a strong fear of being alone, which has led to me sometimes prioritizing my relationships over personal achievements. I regretted this impulse when I was younger, but I have come to appreciate it now.

This also gave me a “growth mindset” at an early age. I realized in ~9th grade that I had no idea how to hold a conversation with someone, which forced me to view my social skills as something dynamic which could be improved. People are now very surprised to hear I was homeschooled, so I think my efforts to improve my communication skills have born fruit.

I can only speculate on how much the rest of my current personality was influenced by that experience; either directly, or from secondary effects like reading a lot (in place of socializing) at an early age.

w1··on Ask HN: Is Your Child Lonely?
+1 to this. I was homeschooled K-8, and the loneliness I experienced then puts a significant strain on my relationship with my parents to this day.

I think I agree with the parent comment when I say that homeschooling seems to be looking for pennies of potential academic advantage in front of the steamroller of serious maladjustment.

w1··on Morse Code Palindromes
related: the silly scavenger hunt i made for my family and friends last christmas:

https://www.christmaspuzzle.net/

w1··on My Journey as a Self-Taught Programmer
self-taught data scientist/machine learning engineer, currently at a FAAMG company. ive been doing ml professionally for about five years now, and im ten years out from my bachelors in mechanical engineering from a no-name school, my only higher education.

i pivoted from a traditional engineering job by automating my job, then implementing a few ml systems for my company, until i could justify a title change.

im a big believer in taking on tasks slightly outside my confort level, forcing myself to learn how to do them well.

w1··on Launch HN: Enombic (YC S20) – Create your own stock indexes
Have you considered allowing the creators of a popular index to receive a small fee, similar to current ETF commission structures?

Y’all seem like you’re in a great position to create a vibrant community for the next generation of investors, and giving financial influencers a return could help bring people to your platform.

w1··on Taboola to go public at $2.6B valuation
It was one of these?

https://getpopspots.com/

If they’re not tracking your demographic data yet, they’re trying to...

w1··on Four-day week means 'I don't waste holidays on chores'
I worked a 9/80 for years. It was awesome. I think the trick to this working well is for everyone to get the same Friday off. Companies who didn't do that saw serious productivity hits.
w1··on PostgREST: REST API for any Postgres database
How is Postgraphile different from Hasura?
w1··on Deep geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout
also fwiw, the induced seismicity from fracking was found to come from injected wastewater associated with post-frac oil production [1]. it's my understanding that the majority of these geothermal systems are injecting about as much as their pumping up, so stress doesn't build/you don't have that issue.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/natural-hazards/earthquake-hazards/scie...

w1··on Is Twitter Down?
Timeline is down, but you can look at feeds for hashtags or individual users.
w1··on Indoor CO2 may reach levels harmful to cognition by the end of this century
I don't think this exists on a small scale yet.

On industrial scales, CO2 is commonly removed with reusable scrubber chemicals, referred to as a group as amines. The amine acts as a CO2 solvent, removing the CO2 from the bulk gas. The 'rich' amine is then cycled to a separate location in the process where it is heated up, causing the CO2 to bubble out of solution, regenerating the amine for reuse, etc.

I don't see any reason in principal why this can't be miniaturized, but it would be a challenging engineering problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating

w1··on Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline
yes! i know this is a hyperbolic example, but infinite clean energy would clear up a lot of problems on this list.
w1··on Show HN: Rent vs. Buy Housing Calculator
Hey folks, I built this NPV calculator in Python a couple years back, before I bought my first house. Here it is again, rewritten it in React/Recharts. Let me know if its helpful and if you have any feedback!
w1··on Ask HN: Why not give unpaid leaves?
I worked a "9/80" schedule for a few years, in which we nominally worked 9 hours per day, but had every other Friday off. Even that was enough to significantly improve my quality of life.
w1··on GraphQL Query Generator
Hasura has been a godsend for me. I'll be using it for all my MVPs for the foreseeable future.
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