Recent content by mercurial

The algos are not black magic. Based on the properties of the dataset, it's likely nothing more than a massive implementation of logistic regression on a dataset of millions of rows, and likely hundreds of thousands of dimensions/columns. In order to train the algorithm, the engineers input a...

I live in the surrounding area, not SF proper. And yea, you're right, the political posturing by various interest groups in SF proper is also obnoxious. That being said, being upset and adversarial about broader matters of public policy is a little different than getting your panties all twisted...

I'm close to finishing my PPL, and this thread is one of the things I find completely obnoxious about the aviation community. The community is just completely infested with cranks that think they have a god-given right to get up in anyone else's face whenever they are doing something wrong...

Do you realize how expensive Palo Alto is? You can buy 5 houses in Naples for the cost of one, in Palo Alto.

There's alot of people around there that are pretty hard up. Not much of an economy left after timber disappeared, now it's just weed. Find a local, any local, that is willing to trade a couple hours of their time, or loan you their beater car, for $100. I'm sure you'll find a taker.

Get paid in cash, do the flight. Do it as a favor for your friend, do it on principle against government overreach, and do it because you're not a complete drone even though your flight training drilled into your head that the rules must always be followed to the T.

Timwinters, I think that exact sort of scenario is the one where the ignorant owner is most likely to get screwed. If you have a regular A&P, the A&P will usually know that to maintain your loyalty, he'll need to moderate his charges. So he moderates short-term gain for the sake of the long-term...

Although in this case, I think the crowd managed to lift the plane and rescue the dude.

Yes, I see it now. That view works much better and should be default.

Hey Josh, My club just starting using flight circle. The main feedback was the mobile web interface needs a little improving. You need to turn the horizontal scroll for the daily reservations into a vertical scroll, and IMO the buttons need to be spaced better. Other than that I didn't...

If the seller is promising the plane is in ok condition, and if the guy is making payments not payment in full, that seems less risky. If the plane ends up being a POS, the guy can just walk.

I built an RC plane with my father about 20 years ago (took 10 years to finish the damn thing and we never flew it, but that's another story.) The "field" we would routinely visit was just a street in an area which had never been developed, and I seriously doubt any of the guys out there knew...

How exactly do you figure that? I'm having a hard time believing that someone with a $1000 toy is going to have more knowledge about airspace than someone who has tens of thousands of investment in certification, a potentially 6 figure aircraft, and their own life on the line.

"Unreported non-event engine failures on a twin" does not categorically change the reported risk profile of a twin vs. single, based on flight hours. You are merely describing an aspect that explains why twins have a different distribution of accident types as compared to a single. There is...

On trends: the volume and granularity of data is too small. Relevant data points would fit on a single spreadsheet with 50,000 rows. I don't see what trends this might ever show except where rich people like to vacation or the location and seasonality of business hubs. Thanks, but no thanks, if...