academia_hack

9 ms·

61.
by academia_hack 5y ago
Some years are fine, just subtract the earned income exemption and move on. Others are nightmares. Unlike in America, where there are accountants lurking around every corner, the tax code here is very "simple" (the vast majority o
62.
by academia_hack 5y ago
It's so irritating to be an American that has moved overseas. Basically the only country in the world that charges taxes on money you make and spend somewhere else, just because of where you were born. Thanks to IRS regulations, 90% of
63.
by academia_hack 5y ago
I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructur
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by academia_hack 5y ago
I agree crypto has no utility but I also really don't want to live in a world where governments ban me from buying and selling knowledge of numbers because of the particular algorithm which produced them. Or from using my computer to c
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by academia_hack 5y ago
The pertinent difference here appears to be a falsified bomb threat and the use of a fighter jet to implicitly threaten the lives of the pilot and crew if they didn't kowtow to the illegal instructions. Both of these factors seem like
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by academia_hack 5y ago
The + is also useful for knowing who sold your email address on or was responsible for a data breach. If I start getting spam to <my name>+hulu@gmail.com, then I know I could chase down Hulu on Twitter for an explanation.
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by academia_hack 5y ago
I bought a diet-aid box with a timer called "Kitchen Safe". Just dump my phone in it whenever I have the will power, set a timer for a few hours, and turn a moment of motivation into hours of phone-free bliss. The box is designed
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by academia_hack 6y ago
Check this repo out - didn't make it but I use it to teach my students about adversarial learning: https://github.com/jayelm/bad-flamingo
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by academia_hack 6y ago
The alternative to search snippets is a world where I have to be bombarded with cookie consent popups and advertisement and then scroll through paragraphs of nonsense to get the two word answer to a trivial question. Google adds enormous va
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by academia_hack 6y ago
Smartmusic.com does exactly this. It's not 100% accurate and is mostly sold to school band programs but they've got a pretty cheap annual hobbyist subscription.
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by academia_hack 6y ago
There's so much stuff about the world that we don't understand and want to and that even trivial machine learning techniques can help us figure out. Yet, at least in my field (computer security), it has become incredibly difficult
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by academia_hack 6y ago
Given the virus, travelling for celebration also seems like something that should be discouraged.
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by academia_hack 6y ago
I've really liked Gigabyte's gaming laptops (aero) for this reason. They've got premium build quality and excellent specs but don't look like a Mardi Gras float. They're also very light and have long battery life fo
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by academia_hack 6y ago
Even paying zero dollars you still have to file taxes, send in FBAR, invest in a FACTA compliant way, sort out redundant pensions, and deal with the IRS - all at comically inflated costs since software products (e.g. Turbotax) don't do
75.
by academia_hack 6y ago
I feel like this is trivially resolved by selling a subscription to those additional services (e.g. for product updates or support agreements). I'm just imagining a scenario where I build something with a subscription library and then
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by academia_hack 6y ago
Fair point. I'm personally not convinced that distinction is intrinsically meaningful rather than just legally and commercially convenient - especially in the case of libraries or programming languages. Qt is valueless as literature ab
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by academia_hack 6y ago
If I buy a frying pan and open up a restaurant with it I don't have to keep paying the frying pan company so long as I use my pan to create meals. Subscriptions for software libraries and components weird me out much more than subscrip
78.
by academia_hack 6y ago
It's an historical artifact from a time when people lived and worked on the nobility's land as literal serfs. The UK is just dreadful at progress, especially when it doesn't serve the elite. The whole concept of a 99 year lea
79.
by academia_hack 6y ago
The back channel theory sounds like a good point to me. Anonymous peer review is largely a charade, I'd be more surprised if Google didn't have fingers on the scales and flies on the wall at top ML venues than if they did. It&#x27
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by academia_hack 6y ago
One of the best predictors so far for UK COVID policy has been to assume anything Boris Johnson rules out will be the exact thing that happens.
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by academia_hack 6y ago
I'm no expert, but I'm stunned that it costs more than $10,000 a year to connect a single computer to a corporate network such that AWS Macs become cost competitive. I've never worked in a big enterprise organization but I ju
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by academia_hack 6y ago
I have always been curious about the concept of "digital nomadism" and remote working while traveling to many countries around the world. Most people I know living this lifestyle have a very lax viewpoint on the concept that remot
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by academia_hack 6y ago
I'm not convinced that scientific formalism is always necessary or valuable. "Computer Science" is an anachronism that arose due to the sort of people who built the first computers and the sort of reasoning they valued. It wo
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by academia_hack 6y ago
The coin toss example given here seems tautological. Why would my unfair coin have to abide by some norm of probability? If I were designing such a coin, it would obviously include a mechanism for tracking state such that if the last toss w