- Remote: Yes

- Willing to relocate: Yes

- Technologies: AWS, Python, Java, Node, Kotlin

- Résumé/CV: https://chrisdempewolf.com/Chris_Dempewolf_Resume.pdf

- Email: chris@chrisdempewolf.com

---

Backend engineer with 10 years of experience. Most of my work has been in data ingestion, ETL/analytics pipelines, distributed systems. I'm currently running my own company doing project-based AWS contracting work, but looking to return to a team environment.

- Water on Mars: confirmed 2004 - Organic molecules on Mars: confirmed 2018 - Complex organic molecules (e.g., DNA precursors) on Mars: 2026

We now know for certain that it is possible for complex organic molecules to be preserved for ~3.5 billion years on the Martian surface.

The big question everyone wants to know is if life ever existed on Mars. Now we know that it's possible for that question to be answer, since we have confirmation of complex organic molecules actually being preserved.

This legitimizes future missions/spending on life searching missions to the Martian surface.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000303

Points: 46

# Comments: 11

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000257

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

When I switched to iOS, I couldn’t find a decent app. Most had ads, sign-ups, excessive gamification, or mandatory subscriptions, and none were customizable enough. So I built my own.

Athena Math lets you

- Practice operations not normally found in mental math apps: modulo, square roots, percents, GCD and LCM - Tailor each session: set your time or problem limits, choose digit ranges (1–5), mix digit lengths (e.g. 55 + 436), and select any combination of operations you like. - A detailed stats screen that shows the time you spent on problems, problems per day, percent correct, etc. All graphs are filterable. - A history screen that shows all your sessions. - You can import and export your history for offline analysis or to transfer - Offline tutorials are included for all operations - Lastly, you can use it immediately. There are no accounts.

So far, it's received a positive response from the mental math community. It's an incredible feeling to have people actually value my work enough to pay for it. (This was my first app).

I've had a lot of fun building Athena math and using it myself. Practicing obscure operations like GCD, LCM and square roots has taught me to see patterns in numbers that I didn't see before. Overall, it's improved my number sense.

It's built in React Native + Expo/EAS. I use Fastlane to manage app store metadata (and store in version control), and it's using a serverless AWS backend for payment verification. History is stored locally in an SQLite database.

It's free to use! You're limited to 12 sessions daily, but if you wanna keep using for free, you can simply delete your daily sessions. You loose history and stats, but it's an option. You can also just set the time limit to infinity.

I know mental math is not the sexiest market, but I'd love feedback from the HN community -- on the app, the UX, or the technical setup. Any ideas for improvement? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813872

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751263

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

Unless you're actively working through a bunch of problems/examples, reading most books is a form of passive learning. That is, you are simply being told information. The Little Schemer is the only book I know of that is written almost entirely in the form of increasingly intricate questions to the reader (active learning). There are maybe about two dozen or so statements ("Laws" as the author calls them). Everything else is a question in an extended Socratic dialogue aimed at refining the reader's knowledge of Lisp, how computation arises from recursion, computation in general, and lambda calculus culminating in the y-combinator.

The Little Schemer is the most unique, most fun, most educational (in the sense that it _forces_ you to work your way through it) book that I've read. Moreover, it's a great way to grasp computation in a more abstract sense.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39133460

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Here are some of my most useful remaps:

- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"

- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).

- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.

- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.

- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.

I use Karabiner for Mac to do my remappings.

Though, the benefits to calculation come from the fact that the numerals are iconic, not due to it being base-20.