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tomkat0789

870 karma · joined June 10, 2015

PhD Engineer!
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tomkat0789··on Four Weeks of a Vegan Diet Alter Signs of Inflammation and Aging
Reminds me that I need to study the impacts of a vegan diet in the science literature to understand how aggressively I should be pursuing it. The times I’ve lived on a near vegan diet, I feel quietly better in lots of little unexpected ways. Happy to chase books or links if people have them lying around.
tomkat0789··on South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots
I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?
tomkat0789··on Bunk beds for economy passengers take off on Air New Zealand's new planes
This looks awesome! Before the pandemic I’d take a 16 hour flight leaving at midnight to where my wife’s family lives in Asia. This takes flying closer to long trains and it could be good!
tomkat0789··on Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task
Was it this one? This article has stayed with me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100677

tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2025)
SEEKING WORK Location: Chicago, IL Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, scikit-learn, pandas, numpy, scipy, MATLAB, C LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-thomas-01702183/ Email: mthomasmail@gmail.com

I'm a senior data scientist with a multidisciplinary engineering background spanning chemicals, renewable energy, and aerospace. Past projects have included abnormal event detection in chemical and energy systems, optimization, and signal processing and classification. I'm ready to take on any problem, in any industry, big or small, in data science, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, statistics, and any sort of modeling.

Reach out if you have questions about how you can extract knowledge from your large pile of industrial data. I'm always excited to learn about a new industry!

tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2025)

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, scikit-learn, pandas, numpy, scipy, MATLAB, C
  Résumé/CV: Available on request
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-thomas-01702183/
  Email: mthomasmail@gmail.com
I'm a senior data scientist with a multidisciplinary engineering background spanning chemicals, renewable energy, and aerospace (I'm ready to adapt to a new industry if necessary!). Past projects have included abnormal event detection in chemical and energy systems, optimization, and signal processing and classification. I'm ready to take on any problem, in any industry, big or small, in data science, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, statistics, and any sort of modeling.

I can do full time employment if you have big problems, or contracts if you only have a few little problems. I'm comfortable with developing and maintaining cloud-based, containerized, ETL services.

tomkat0789··on LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool
the new way all these online services suck
tomkat0789··on Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews
“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).”

Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning.

The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.

tomkat0789··on 'Better than a real man': young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends
I wonder if the article itself was written by an AI. The style seemed strange to me.
tomkat0789··on Comparing Tech Used for Apollo, Artemis NASA Missions
+1, I enjoyed that talk. He showed a diagram of the Artemis mission plan and said, “Does this make sense!?”

He also referred to a publication NASA created after Apollo titled “What made Apollo a Success” which is good reading: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...

“They gave you the playbook!” Lots of stuff that I’m glad somebody stood up and told the Artemis engineers and managers.

tomkat0789··on James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus
From your link;

“Near the solstice, one pole faces the Sun continuously and the other faces away, with only a narrow strip around the equator experiencing a rapid day–night cycle, with the Sun low over the horizon. On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.”

Very different from Earth! Wow.

tomkat0789··on Mark Twain's two-week stint as a Confederate soldier
Twain’s escape West is an entertaining memoir! He did a little bit of everything and accumulated some great (if a bit tall) tales. I remember it has the story of his first stand up comedy act, including a description of some people he paid to sit in the front row and laugh at everything. Getting scammed, getting lost, a gold prospector who worked with a cat, and a great story about a goat… “Roughing It” has it all.
tomkat0789··on Difficult to impossible travel across wide swaths of the U.S.
I switched from spammy weather apps and other sites to just using the NOAA years ago! The maps are basic but show me what I need as well!

My tax dollars at work! I’m very pleased.

tomkat0789··on 43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief
With all the lawyers in this country you’d think one of them on the train would use their hours long delay to assemble a law suit against the freight rail companies. What an insulting deal for taxpayers!
tomkat0789··on Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?
Work for 10 people, but they only want to hire 3.

SOURCE: my current company likes me and the other 2 gritty software engineers.

tomkat0789··on George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf
Yes! I spent many hours with Legos growing up!

I also remember playing a basic little kid video game about road construction. You’d select various heavy machinery to plow snowy roads and build bridges. I vaguely remember laying down pavement for a road being very satisfying.

tomkat0789··on George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf
I think he highlights some fundamentally toxic aspects of human nature with this bit:

“The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

The engineer in me wishes we could substitute the soldiers with construction workers or something, but I can’t deny enjoying war games growing up. These days “peace games” like Stardew Valley are more appealing to me, but maybe I’ma little odd.

tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Recommendations on how to become a Git expert?
I’m not a git expert, but little visualizers like these helped me get comfortable (coding work on and off for 10 years) with git bash:

https://learngitbranching.js.org/ https://ohmygit.org/

Merge conflicts are usually pretty tedious but not something I fear. I’d have to Google to know what precisely rebase or bisect are useful for.

My coworkers have used gui tools to deal with git and I can’t understand how those work/translate to the commands. Git commit, add, push, status, and diff have gotten me pretty far!

Hopefully that helps!

tomkat0789··on Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent
A middle option could be to install a fake ring camera as a deterrent without the privacy hazards.
tomkat0789··on 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work
Time off for illness! That's nice. I wonder if one of the HR scribes tracked the days every person took off in an analog ERP system. Scribes seemed important, maybe they outsourced the basics to contractors.
tomkat0789··on The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
I'd love to hear some stories! People who failed, false positives, etc.

I recently contributed to letting in a false positive into my org. Properly interviewing people is a skill I need to develop!

tomkat0789··on Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses
I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab.

I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!

Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.

Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).

Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!

tomkat0789··on Reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles
I hated taking the SAT/ACT, but holy cow are we in the US in a better situation than Chinese students dealing with the Gaokao. A Chinese pen-pal once showed me some calculus problems from the Gaokao and the example I saw (a bunch of integrals) looked like a math test a sadist would create: long, complicated expressions just for the sake of complexity, "ugly" numbers that turned into messy fractions you have to carry around. I (a graduate engineering student at the time) couldn't identify any trick or educational point to the complexity, only the malice of the people giving the test.

EDIT: wording

tomkat0789··on Start Self Hosting
I always check for yunohost on these self-hosting threads. Standing up a yunohost on my raspberry pie has been on my to-do list for a long time.

Unfortunately their default for my raspberry pie didn't "just work" on the Saturday evening I tried it. It was my first foray with that raspberry pie, so installed a different server OS and spent the rest of the evening setting up a basic server for an HTML file and learning more about SSH. That was my experience as a non-IT engineer. I'd be interested in other people's experiences using yunohost (or sandstorm for that matter).

Maybe the solution isn't to make an idiot-proof stack of tech. Maybe we need a central repo of tutorials and how-tos so that any idiot could self host? Something better than the scattered YouTubes and blogs I remember seeing when I Googled after this.

tomkat0789··on Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors
> "SLS... its just not going to be a significant player in the future in space..."

> Boeing’s Starliner... continues to be delayed.

Man, is 'old space' good for anything? Over breakfast this morning I read the article below about problems from consolidation in defense. After a certain point, aren't these companies supposed to make money building things? Isn't there some will to succeed in the management above the engineers? How much longer will government bureaucrats allow the farce to continue?

https://www.ft.com/content/c408c7bd-466a-496b-9889-9f83cc85e...

tomkat0789··on Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station
I see several comments expressing that they haven't used the radio in years. I still use mine every time I get into my mid-2000s Honda! I'd be cursing the tech gods if they locked me into a single station! I guess I'm not the only one or nobody would have noticed the bug.

My knowledge and following of music is spotty, so radio is key to my discovery of new songs. On long road trips I tend to find good new (to me) songs, as well as get amused by some weird ones. A few highlights from the odd but fun stuff:

- Driving through rural Ohio at midnight I randomly seeked to a station playing "Clean Up the Ghetto by the Philidelphia International All Stars. - On a Sunday morning in southern Mississippi I heard some happy old dance music accompanied by the jolly but incomprehensible New Orleans drawl of the DJ. - Driving through West Virginia I heard "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" 3 times on the same morning on different stations.

I don't road trip extremely often but surfing the radio is something I look forward to when I do! I usually get a taste of the local culture and a window outside of my urban tech bubble.

tomkat0789··on Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life
I do a bunch of Meetups and watched this happen a bunch (EDIT: the going to a hobby event and never speaking again that is). About a year and a half after meeting a fellow regular of a hiking Meetup I finally felt not awkward inviting the lady and her husband to a board game night with my wife. Maybe the key step is to get with the regulars (or volunteer to be the coordinator?). I think the couple I've befriended have the same problem I have, which is why their schedule is so open for my silly ideas for socializing!

In my case the gateway to friendship was more hikes, and vaguely stale board game nights. We're trying to do something (making friends) that's difficult, that much is clear!

tomkat0789··on Soviet Military Maps of North America and UK
For a similar rabbit hole with US maps, somewhere (a Google away - sorry I'm on my phone) there's historic USGS Topo maps of the USA. Once I found Chicago maps going back to the 1890s, and moving through the years you could see the city grow explosively in the early 20th century.
tomkat0789··on Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
I just did a ctrl+f for Yunohost and only got one hit! Have more people tried it? What was your experience like? Hosting my own email will be a 2022 project of mine. My current plan is to get like a linode/personal server (my first test for myself is to host my own html website :) yes I'm new) to avoid customizing my home router too much.
tomkat0789··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell
Your day job is OK with this? I forgot what I signed, but I believe my contract has a clause that says they own all the technical output of my brain. Did you tell your manager you have a side hustle?

I've been thinking of something similar if I can build a sufficiently relevant specialty knowledge.

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