Hacker News: polivier

New comment by polivier in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

polivier — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:40:27 +0000

I do feel like we as a society are moving in the direction discussed by the article, as a general trend. But this is not my personal experience. We live in typical suburbs, and we are lucky enough that our street has a bunch of like-minded young families that let their kids play outside. Our street really feels like what you would imagine if you were thinking of a typical street in the 1960s. Kids aged 5 to around 10 playing ball in the street, going in each other's yards/houses, etc. There's a Catholic church less than 1km away, and at 6pm every day the bells ring. All the kids go back to their houses for supper when they hear the bells. It's great.

There's a kid (7-8 years old I think) a few houses down that carries a walkie-talkie with him during the summer. He'll be out for several hours (probably not farther than 10 houses away from his own house), and his mom checks on him every now and then using the walkie-talkie. I'll buy a set for own kids this summer for the exact same purpose.

The only thing I'm kind of scared of are the cars, because they tend to drive too fast (for my taste) and kids tend to not always look when they cross the street when they're too excited playing their games.

Edit: I just remembered that a few years ago, the cops showed up because there was a complaint about our kids being left unsupervised. They were playing in the backyard, which is completely fenced off, while we were inside cooking supper. Our kitchen window faces the yard so we could see them, and the window was open so we could hear them. At least the cops realized that the complaint was BS and didn't even come inside to check for anything. We live in Canada.

New comment by polivier in "Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire"

polivier — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:19:56 +0000

Kind of: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7966/what-are-ta...

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

polivier — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:52:06 +0000

  Location: Canada
  Remote: Preferred (could do ~2 days/week on-site)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Various optimization tools (CPLEX, Gurobi, OR-Tools, etc), Python, C++, some Common Lisp, Bash, Linux, and others
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PhilippeOlivier/curriculum-vitae/blob/main/OLIVIER_Philippe_CV_en.pdf
  Website/blog: https://www.pedtsr.ca
  Email: See CV or website

I'm Phil and I have a PhD in computer engineering, specializing in operations research: mathematical optimization (MILP, etc), constraint programming, and others. For the past several years I've implemented custom, production-ready solutions for a variety of problems (scheduling, routing, and so on). Recent work includes a constraint programming solution for goal-based selection of indexes in Postgres, a heuristics-based scheduling tool used in hundreds of vehicle workshops around the world, and an optimization model used for scheduling autoclave cycles in a drug manufacturing facility. I'm also open to freelancing.

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

polivier — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:52:52 +0000

  Location: Canada (Montreal)
  Remote: Preferred (could do ~2 days/week on-site)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Various optimization tools (CPLEX, Gurobi, OR-Tools, etc), Python, C++, Bash, Linux, and others
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PhilippeOlivier/curriculum-vitae/blob/main/OLIVIER_Philippe_CV_en.pdf
  Website: https://www.pedtsr.ca
  Email: See CV or website

I'm Phil and I have a PhD in computer engineering, specializing in operations research: mathematical optimization (MILP, etc), constraint programming, etc. For the past several years I've implemented custom, production-ready solutions for a variety of problems (scheduling, routing, etc). Recent work includes a constraint programming solution for goal-based selection of indexes in Postgres, a heuristics-based scheduling tool used in hundreds of vehicle workshops around the world, and an optimization model used for scheduling autoclave cycles in a drug manufacturing facility. I'm also open to freelancing.

New comment by polivier in "Linux is good now"

polivier — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:06:15 +0000

You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.

New comment by polivier in "The Polyglot NixOS"

polivier — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:41:09 +0000

A common issue with most package managers is that if you have A installed, and then you install B which depends on C, and that C happens to also be an optional dependency of A, then uninstalling B will not uninstall C as C won't be orphaned (because of A).

The Evolution of Cooperation [pdf]

polivier — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:12:21 +0000

Article URL: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axelrod.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46263113

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by polivier in "We Need to Die"

polivier — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:04:15 +0000

> And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.

If one can make a good argument that people living forever would have too many downsides in the long run, one might reasonably not want others to live forever. This is similar to environmental policies. Even though one may not live through most downsides of current bad environmental policies, one may still want good environmental policies for the sake of their children.

New comment by polivier in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

polivier — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:20:49 +0000

I have found that duplicated tabs can be useful e.g. for pages where footnotes are not hyperlinked in the text. When this happens I open a duplicate tab and scroll to the bottom of the page on it.

New comment by polivier in "Credit card imprinter"

polivier — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:03:53 +0000

I remember this from a taxi ride in the early 2000s. Even then they were pretty rare.

New comment by polivier in "Biconnected components"

polivier — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:49:39 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming

New comment by polivier in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2025)"

polivier — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:04:17 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Canada | Remote | Operations Research

I'm Phil and I have a PhD in computer engineering, specializing in operations research (mathematical optimization, constraint programming, mixed-integer programming, etc). For the past several years I've implemented custom, production-ready solutions for a variety of problems (scheduling, routing, etc). Recent work includes a constraint programming solution for goal-based selection of indexes in Postgres, a heuristics-based scheduling tool used in hundreds of vehicle workshops around the world, and an optimization model used for scheduling autoclave cycles in a drug manufacturing facility.

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PhilippeOlivier/curriculum-vitae/blob/mai...

Website: https://www.pedtsr.ca

New comment by polivier in "Prime Number Grid"

polivier — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 12:58:30 +0000

Are you talking about the patterns found in the linked website of the parent comment? Because there clear patterns there.

New comment by polivier in "Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian"

polivier — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:10:04 +0000

I switched from Arch to NixOS and I know many others who did too. For users inclined to use a distro such as Arch, NixOS feels like the natural next step.

New comment by polivier in "The Ski Rental Problem"

polivier — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 15:16:06 +0000

Kind of, in the sense that you need to make a decision about something mid-way when there is still some unknown information ahead of you.

New comment by polivier in "The untold impact of cancellation"

polivier — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:41:33 +0000

These are probably the only exceptions.

New comment by polivier in "The untold impact of cancellation"

polivier — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:34:42 +0000

> This is why we have a justice system, so that there is one place where you can say "that is wrong" and "that is right".

In most (all?) Western countries, cheating on your spouse is not illegal. But 99% of the people would say that "it is wrong".

New comment by polivier in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2025)"

polivier — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:46:32 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Canada | Remote | Operations Research

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PhilippeOlivier/curriculum-vitae/blob/mai...

Website: https://www.pedtsr.ca

New comment by polivier in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

polivier — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:44:03 +0000

> would just be a very heavy bike for the rest of the stage

Bikes in the Tour de France have a minimum weight of 6.8kg imposed by the UCI. So if you manage to build a normal bike that weights 5kg, you still have 1.8kg of weight available to try to add some more hidden power "without adding more weight to the bike" (small battery+engine, small compressed air tank, whatever).

New comment by polivier in "Org tutorials"

polivier — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:14:48 +0000

`org-mode` used with Emacs is the tinkerer's dream playgound. Apart from the basic markdown stuff, there are so many wild things you can do. For example, org code blocks are not just the basic markdown code blocks that show formatted code. Org code blocks can actually be executed and can show the output of the code, inline. So you can write code blocks (that may include data found in variables/tables/etc elsewhere in the org file), then "refresh" your org file and all the inline outputs of the code blocks will be updated.