HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mark_element

182 karma · joined May 18, 2016

Data Scientist @ Element Analytics [firstname] @ elementanalytics.com
submissionscomments
mark_element··on Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit
If you have an Alexa you really need to try playing Jeopardy on it. The Jeopardy Alexa skill and Akinator skill are fairly quick casual games that are very worthwhile.
mark_element··on Ask HN: If my company bills me out at $165/hr what should my salary be?
Not OP but heath insurance, taxes and other costs that can be marked down exactly as being for Employee #X are in the 40%.

Paying for an office having light, power, internet, management, and a mailroom is in the 20%.

mark_element··on Ask HN: If my company bills me out at $165/hr what should my salary be?
This seems pretty accurate. A lot of consultancies or professional services models also have a hefty bonus structure. This can strongly impact your total compensation.
mark_element··on Carbon Removal Technologies
I'm quite impressed by this presentation. There is a tremendous amount of content here to excite some different audiences about opportunities for planet scale changes.

I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.

mark_element··on Apple Supplier List – Top 200 [pdf]
One small error on the list: The Chemours Company 7685 Kiln-DeLisle Road, Pass Christian, Massachusetts, USA

That should actually be Mississippi not Massachusetts. It is probably the source for the white pigment used in many Apple products as it is one of the largest TiO2 plants in the world.

mark_element··on Commons Clause
I don't like the naming. "Apache 2.0 with commons clause" is not the right way to describe this licensing paradigm. It is fundamentally no longer Apache 2.0. I appreciate the motivation, but think it would better serve everyone to just make a new "Redis License" that describes the terms.
mark_element··on Improving our account management policies to better support customers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
mark_element··on Making $60k a month from a podcast on software engineering
During the online poker boom there were many such stories. The amount of money moving around online poker in 2005-2009 was just insane.

Lots and lots of people went from 1k or less invested to moderately wealthy. I knew multiple people personally in college then who went from ~0 to > 100k.

mark_element··on Broadcast camera lenses at the Olympics can cost as much as a Lamborghini
A note, why do they use such small sensors (11mm) rather than the large sensors in full-frame DSLRs (42 mm)?

Didn't quite get that constraint as being absolutely necessary.

mark_element··on Introducing the premium full-archive search endpoint
It sure seems that way. If I understand their copy correctly this looks really really really expensive. I'm assuming the tweets per request is the limit to the result set returned, which is crazy small.
mark_element··on SoftBank said to be trying to buy a big stake in Uber at a discount
This should let early employees and any investors who want to get out to get liquid. Otherwise they might have trouble unloading their equity without some other mechanism being made available by Uber's board.
mark_element··on Intractable Problems in Control Theory (1986) [pdf]
Very surprised to see this on HN front page.

Control theory is a fabulous subject and has nice relationships to computational theory because classical (and more modern [s/d/o/nl/MPC] control theory) are obsessed with optimality, reachability and provable optimality and stability. In practice most control systems in the world are not designed nor run under the assumptions necessary to have an optimal controller. This is a field with a tremendous gap between theory and practice.

mark_element··on SpaceX: Making Life Multiplanetary [video]
Highlights for me: Started ordering stuff for the mars ship now, started facilities construction, possibly hitting a first launch in 2022 and a second launch window in 2024.

An extremely aggressive and impressive timeline.

mark_element··on Alphabet Finishes Reorganization with New XXVI Company
It is more like how Berkshire Hathaway owns Duracell and GEICO and actions in one don't directly impact another.
mark_element··on Letter from Benchmark to Uber Employees [pdf]
Benchmark here has quite different time pressure than potential common stock holders. They need to get liquid.
mark_element··on First large-scale deep-sea floating offshore wind farm
It is important to note that Statoil is majority owned by the Norwegian government so it's priorities are maybe a bit more complicated than more independent multinational oil and gas companies. Although all the big energy companies have major alternatives portfolios and innovations strategies too.
mark_element··on Chipotle Reports Findings from Investigation of Payment Card Security Incident
Agreed. Looks like this a big deal™. Would love to know the method of spreading across all their point of sales, were they running on windows?
mark_element··on Pharmaceutical company wins $1M in legal fees from patent troll and Stanford
Yup. I feel like I won a small prize at some point on a campus tour for knowing this fact.
mark_element··on Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?
Response to your response to GP's edit. Pretty sure GP was talking about him and his spouse not him and you.
mark_element··on The D Garbage Collector
https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html
mark_element··on Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: report
They are also giving away free coffee at the CalTrain station in SF today to try and gain mindshare for recruiting new employees for Meraki at least.
mark_element··on Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences
It doesn't do well on the classic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
mark_element··on Frances Arnold wins 2016 Millennium Prize for directed evolution method
Well deserved. The synthetic biology and metabolic engineering communities are booming these days and Prof. Arnold helped popularize some important ideas in directed evolution.
mark_element··on OpenAI Gym
Previously on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11582345