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markalexander

1 karma · joined July 19, 2021

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markalexander··on What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
People in general or people in tech? Well what’s the typical mortgage multiple, 6 or 7 times salary? So for the latter, it seems pretty attainable to get an apartment at the lower end of the market to start out on. Correct me if I’m wrong, though.
markalexander··on What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
Sort of. Often a big chunk of your CoL is going into a massively appreciating asset. People always seem to ignore this when talking about the top n most expensive cities in the world. You can literally sell your apartment and go live in a mansion most other places on the planet when you feel like it.
markalexander··on Drone users face new rules across Europe and UK
There are two distinct things: an operator ID and a flyer ID. The first is basically just a register of ownership. No test or competency, unlike the latter, which does require you to show you know a little about the rules.

For sub 250g drones without a camera, you don’t need either of these. If it does have a camera, you need an operator ID but not a flyer ID. So you have to fill out a form with your name and address, and stick the ID to your drone, but there’s no certification element like there is when you have a heavier drone and need a flyer ID too.

markalexander··on Drone users face new rules across Europe and UK
Well, member states are free to go beyond the EU rules and add their own local ones, so it might be true in those countries. I don’t believe you need insurance for hobby activities in the UK, though I’m not an expert and open to being corrected.
markalexander··on Drone users face new rules across Europe and UK
I believe it’s because a UAV is only called a ‘drone’ in these regulations if it’s at least 250g.

I agree the rules are annoyingly confusing and the information is spread piecemeal over multiple documents. They should fix that.

markalexander··on Drone users face new rules across Europe and UK
The camera means it needs registered, but it’s not very onerous and there are no competency requirements. The new rules actually give you more freedom in terms of where you can fly, so it’s a good deal IMO.

You only need insurance for commercial operations.

markalexander··on Drone users face new rules across Europe and UK
I have one and I’m in London. My understanding is these new rules actually free things up significantly for drones in that weight class. Previously, you couldn’t fly over ‘congested’ areas, near people, buildings, etc. So it was very difficult to fly fully legal around London. The new rules remove those restrictions.

All they require in exchange is registration for £9/year. The sub 250g drones don’t require you to do the online certification or get a flyer ID.

London still has a bunch of special security zones you can’t fly in, so you won’t be getting any nice shots of Canary Wharf, but it does open things up a lot. I’m concerned that the police won’t be up to date with the new regulations though, and apparently they can just seize your equipment and make it very painful to get back.

markalexander··on Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
Sure, I've spent some time in Norway, I get it. It's definitely very different to societies like the UK or US.

I'm not fundamentally against open tax records like this, but even in Norway there are bad actors and if we are going to play a game of 'how can this be exploited', I think it's definitely possible to do so.

I can't really agree that a 500 limit with notification is 'in practice' the same as no limit with no notification. Data mining and other techniques are possible at scale but not with only 500 records. It also makes exploitation more profitable. Harvesting data for e.g. commercial targeting is not very appealing for n = 500. It's definitely appealing at n = 5 million.

Do the press abuse it in this way? Well, they don't publish stories about doing it. But how would you really know otherwise until some scandal breaks? Are lookups by press orgs also open to public inspection? Maybe you have some freedom of information laws that would let you request that data.

markalexander··on Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
I’m not sure how delayed records would stop you working out disability status or any other sensitive status that affects tax paid. The tax regime for any given year is presumably public info.

People are notified but that’s hardly going to stop someone seeking to upset you as in the example scenario.

Though as I understand the press can do mass lookups with no notification. Don’t you find that disparity concerning? The idea that the government gets to decide what counts as ‘press’ is already something people from countries that don’t operate that way would consider objectionable. Let alone giving them the power to decide who should be 'outed' for their tax affairs.

To be fair, that's perhaps more an issue of this particular implementation, rather than fundamental. But it's an example of how it can be used to entrench the establishment.

markalexander··on Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
Ethical is a bit of a wide term but I’m sure it’s easy to construct situations that are problematic.

E.g. an abusive ex partner can check whether you’re likely to have switched job, even from the most basic info. If tax paid is revealed then you can work out what government benefits a person might be on, including those relating to health and disability.

Isn’t the implementation in Norway such that the press have special access not afforded to individuals? That also seems pretty questionable.

markalexander··on 5G Just Got Weird
Computing is getting closer and closer to the edge. One example, as you said, is putting it at the CDN PoPs, but even beyond that you can put your compute into the CSP locations.

E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/wavelength/, but if you’re big enough I’m sure you can make more interesting deals.

markalexander··on Show HN: Spaced-repetition flashcards linked to your learning materials
Having spent a lot of time making a similar tool this is pretty difficult. Two issues: (1) highlighting and annotating across (partial) XML with rendered output is very hard without some understanding of the rendering, you can't really just say that a particular highlight is a fixed bounding box or interval; and (2) obviously, web content can change, so even if you could do the above what happens to your annotation highlight from character 5 to 10 when the document shifts?

Personally, I gave up and just converted the web page in question to PDF, and annotated from there. Then you get easy document position markers and no changes over time. I would also be very interested in a system that could do proper webpages natively, though.

markalexander··on Machu Picchu was purposely built on intersecting fault lines: research (2019)
The particular sentence in the article is only slightly uncommon in terms of difficulty, so I don't really see how I've implied that my English is 'great'. Passable, maybe. We might have different standards.

Nice high-brow segue from "you're obviously a Trump supporter" to "civilisation is in decline due to anti-intellectualism", though. Hint: I'm British. Talk about ethnocentrism.

I'm not really sure how I can constructively help you with the sentence in question without literally parsing the tokens for you and identifying the parts of speech, objects, subjects, etc. Seems like that would be a waste of time, given you've already arrived at your own immutable conclusions.

markalexander··on Machu Picchu was purposely built on intersecting fault lines: research (2019)
Hardly. We don't often use Chinese words in English regardless of the context, presumably because English speakers find the terms difficult to remember or hard to pronounce.

Chinese does exactly the same thing. I mean, is 盲文 [1] 'yellow' (euch--your terminology) washing? It meets the same standard.

And how about China claiming to have invented high-speed rail, mobile payments and ecommerce? [2] No cries of racism for that one? Strange.

There are many parallel examples.

Edit:

[1] 盲文 lit. blind language aka Braille in English, after its creator.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_new_inventions

markalexander··on Machu Picchu was purposely built on intersecting fault lines: research (2019)
I'm convinced; the author is clearly a racist because the people in this thread have a poor grasp of the English language. When is his execution?
markalexander··on Machu Picchu was purposely built on intersecting fault lines: research (2019)
I think you're misparsing the sentence. It just means that this is when it first became known to "western science".
markalexander··on Why OKRs might not work at your company
An educated guess: reCAPTCHA has become (partly) passive, using whatever tracking data Google has about your behaviour. So, if your browser blocks the tracking, it causes issues. I assume that's what the DDG browser is about.