Hacker News: aalhour

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)"

aalhour — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:52:49 +0000

Location: Germany (Munich)

Fully remote: Yes (and open to hybrid in Munich)

Willing to relocate: No

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aalhour/

Website: https://aalhour.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/aalhour

Resumé/CV: available on request (has personal contact info)

Email: a.z.alhour(at)gmail(dot)com

Technologies: Go, Python, Java, k8s, docker, AWS (backend/data infra)

About me: A software engineer with 15 years of experience (ex-Shopify, ex-HubSpot), with prior engineering management experience. I work on the backend, did data engineering in the past and am looking for a role in backend/data infra.

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: What Is Your Hobby?"

aalhour — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:37:52 +0000

Martial arts, reading, long walks, lifting weights.

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: Does anyone else pronounce CLI as "clee"?"

aalhour — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:46:08 +0000

No,

New comment by aalhour in "The German Works Council has blocked Amazon's performance reviews"

aalhour — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 09:16:27 +0000

I worked as a manager at a local German company in Germany with a strong Worker's Council team. Performance Management was run through them, they had comments, the process was adapted and managers were onboarded. This is not to say that performance management doesn't suck in general (because once you start having metrics, people start gaming them and you're almost superimposing it on people's way of working), but the Worker's Council didn't block it, because at the end of the day it was neither invasive nor exploitative.

EDIT: typos.

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: Memory-safe low level languages?"

aalhour — Mon, 05 May 2025 09:43:38 +0000

I haven't used Nim but your comment made me remember that language, yeah it was forgotten but I am not sure if it's completely abandoned, it seems that their team has been launching new language releases on a nice cadence: https://nim-lang.org/blog.html

Ask HN: Books or games to teach kids math

aalhour — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 18:05:12 +0000

Anything that can teach a 3 years old kid math, assuming he knows how to count to 10. But also interested in resources that that would take him beyond that and get him to fall in love with math as he grows up.

EDIT: typos

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070086

Points: 11

# Comments: 8

Ask HN: Book Recommendations on Scientific Thinking

aalhour — Fri, 31 May 2024 11:03:39 +0000

What books would you recommend on the Scientific Method, Epistemology and scientific thinking in general?

Books like this that I liked:

- The Selfish Gene

- Rationality: From AI to Zombies

- The Scout Mindset

- Asking the Right Questions (Critical Thinking)

I've read "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" already and could barely finish it. I respect that Feynman is a great scientist but he came across too full of himself in the book.

I'm planning on reading "The Beginning of Infinity" sometime this year and I am collecting more recommendations.

EDIT: Formatting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40533506

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?"

aalhour — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 20:57:00 +0000

No worries, I think your solution coverges with @Someone's above, if I am not mistaken. You're multiplying the probabilities for all values of j up to i for all values of i.

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?"

aalhour — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 20:54:29 +0000

I was aware that the Random function call gets evaluated in Python (and C) every time the loop iterates, I just couldn't imagine the probability distribution myself, I had assumed that all numbers are uniformally distributed but didn't cater for the sums. You're a legend! Now I see it. I wrote the following code to check out your argument and it checks out indeed :thumbs-up:

  def p(n):
    total = 1
    for i in range(1, n):
      total *= (100-i)/100
    return total


  for i in range(1, 100):
    print(f"p({i}) = {p(i)}")

The first 13 results:

  p(1) = 1
  p(2) = 0.99
  p(3) = 0.9702
  p(4) = 0.9410939999999999
  p(5) = 0.9034502399999998
  p(6) = 0.8582777279999998
  p(7) = 0.8067810643199997
  p(8) = 0.7503063898175998
  p(9) = 0.6902818786321918
  p(10) = 0.6281565095552946
  p(11) = 0.5653408585997651
  p(12) = 0.503153364153791
  p(13) = 0.44277496045533604

p(12) sits at 50%, of course it will be the mean! :D

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?"

aalhour — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 20:38:32 +0000

Yes, that's true. I don't want an average of 50. My initial guess of 50 is wrong. I am trying to understand why the average turned out to be approximately 12.

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?"

aalhour — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 20:36:52 +0000

Not sure that adds up, I translated the right side of the equality into a Python statement and it returns a number I am not sure how to interpret:

  1/99 * sum([(i-1)*i for i in range(2, 100)])   # 3266.666666666667

Both the median and mean are around 12 for 10K runs of the loop.

Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?

aalhour — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 20:05:21 +0000

A friend of mine shared the following code snippet with me and asked me to guess how many times the loop will run on average:

  for(int i = 0; i < Random(1, 100); i++);

I tried to guess the answer analytically and gussed ~50 but the empirical test was surprising to me. Can someone explain why the average is around 12?

Runnable code: https://replit.com/@aalhour/RandomLoop#main.py

EDIT: Formatting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827068

Points: 1

# Comments: 11

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: How do I get invite to Lobste.rs?"

aalhour — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 22:57:48 +0000

me too please?

Ask HN: Resources for Writing Linux Filesystems?

aalhour — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 20:55:06 +0000

Where can I begin learning how to write Linux filesystems?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37784176

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?"

aalhour — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:48:23 +0000

I just changed the DNS on my unrooted Android to AdGuard's, went into the YouTube and I still saw the ads. What am I missing?

New comment by aalhour in "Ask HN: Books on building databases similar to Crafting Interpreters"

aalhour — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:03:12 +0000

Well, this is awesome. I see that they also have another one on Redis (https://build-your-own.org/redis/). That will be my next fun project. Thanks!

EDIT: typos.

Ask HN: Books on building databases similar to Crafting Interpreters

aalhour — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 11:14:20 +0000

Hey HN,

I was wondering if there is a book on building databases that's written in a similar fashion to "Crafting Interpreters". A book that would teach you about databases while having you build one yourself.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36504838

Points: 33

# Comments: 5

Ask HN: Resources for Studing Ruby's Runtime and Internals

aalhour — Tue, 16 May 2023 11:13:32 +0000

Hey folks, I am interested in learning more about Ruby's internals and it's runtime, topics such as: garbage collection, concurrency, memory management ... etc. What would be a good place to read on these before jumping right into the C code? Thanks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35960181

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

New comment by aalhour in "I.reddit.com Has Been Deprecated"

aalhour — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 09:58:44 +0000

It's so slow though. Is there a way we can help the contributors to make it faster?

Is DDG Down?

aalhour — Thu, 12 May 2022 09:35:19 +0000

Article URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351406

Points: 1

# Comments: 3