skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So if I publish a study (with backing data) that says that 38 year old males are likely to commit adultery, I've "violated the privacy" of all 38 year old males?

Yes. The difference between 'John Elks of 7 Arborview is a rapist' and 'there is a 0.5 correlation between living in Pleasantville and being a rapist' or '38 year old males commit 10% more rapes than average' etc. is solely one of degree and not kind.

Suppose I have a set of datapoints like that. And let's say each datapoint applies to only half the population. How many datapoints before I have broken your privacy and linked you to the furry porn you like to rent? Well, I'm guessing you're an American male. The US population is ~300 million, and roughly half of that is male, so 150 million. The first datapoint pins you down to within 75 million. The second, down to 33 million. The third, down to 16 million, the fourth, 8 million, the fifth 4 million, the sixth 2 million, the seventh 1 million, the eighth 500,000 (starting to feel nervous yet?), the ninth 250,000, the tenth 125,000, the eleventh 75,000, the twelfth 30k, etc. until the 25th or 26th specifies just 1 - you.

Now, tell me: Where in this slippery slope did it suddenly flip from not being a privacy violation of some degree, to being a privacy violation?

Was it at the 5th bit of information? Are you damaged at the 12th bit of information? Or did it take until the 24th or 25th bit of information before it magically flips from being good science to bad privacy violation?

Is it fine just so long as it might also be your neighbor down the street, even though most people would shun you based on far less than a 50-50 chance of things like being a child rapist? (An employer on the bench might regard a 10% chance of you being objectionable as being too much; that only requires, what, 18 bits of information?)

Predictions embody a great deal of information. That's how Bayesian statistics and statistics in general work, after all.
This leaves me with the suspicion that you chose to take the easy way out instead of weighting the actual costs and benefits of what you were doing.

You're shooting the messenger here. If a dataset can be de-anonymized, it's better to know that and be able to make informed decisions.
Invest in green tech - but I'm not speaking stocks. Install solar panels on your home, or maybe a vertical wind turbine. Insulate your home better, research if it's financially worth it. After doing that, you can even reuse your experience for others - for charity or profit, as you like.
Registered just to say congrats. We love Redis and wish you all the best.
Cooking as Coding: How Hackers Can Change Culinary Culture
Those market actors also only have limited rationality (and not perfect foresight), and skewed incentives (-> principal agent problems).

That needn't hinder one from constructing a conspiracy theory, though.
What does DDG do better than Google?

SSL connection. Nothing logged. When I don't care about results personalization, and if I get results I am looking for, DDG has the superior service.

Today, if an employee working for Big Evil uses google to do a search for "Software Developer open positions near Cambridge, MA", that search will likely be logged by websense and the internet firewall. That information might be found and used against you by a political enemy (when you work for Big Evil, political enemies emerge from the woodwork).

A search made over an ssl connection won't log the details.
Actually, HTC G1 runs Android 2.1 just fine. A little bit on the sluggish side, but fine.
I use this all the time in my chemistry class when I don't feel like exerting the effort to open my book. It's superbly helpful.
Ah yes, Appeal to Motive, that'll do it, now I'm not going to accept anything they said because of my interpretation of their motives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive
Etude sheet music app coming to iPhone, iPad
True... However it seems to me that singling out a specific type of transaction (such as derivatives) because it faces this kind of risk (the risk of the instrument * the risk of the counter-party) is a bit silly.

Much of what we finance is based on a mental model the future that might not be true. Consider a mortgage. If your house burns down then you still owe the payment.

So the financial industry invented "fire insurance" for the counter-party risk of derivatives, called CDOs. But they too are blamed for the crisis.

The fact is, any set of financial products/buyers/sellers will converge upon a non-worst-case view of the future, and the price of risk will adjust accordingly. Any line you draw in the sand (such as for capital adequacy requirements) is simply an estimate about how risky the future is... and notably it's still a gamble that the future will occur at or above some point in a probability distribution.
If Netflix had attached credit card info and social security numbers to the info would you be singing the same tune? You're basically saying that you don't like the outcome due to your perceived utility of the data. Thanks I don't see you talking about:

- Do you view this as a breach of privacy?
- What do you consider private?
- Do you view this as a breach of privacy, but just
don't care?
- Do you feel that the utility of the data out-weighs
the privacy concerns?
- What about the people that view this as an invasion
of privacy and have their Netflix user data in that
set? Should they be thrown under the bus in the pursuit
of progress because *you* feel that the data has more
utility than the privacy concerns do?

I see a lot of people arguing that this is 'stifling innovation,' but innovation is not an end unto itself. Banning using human test subjects against their will in the pursuit of scientific knowledge 'stifles innovation' too, but I think you would be hard-pressed to find many people to see that as a bad thing. "Stifling innovation" in the pursuit of privacy concerns should be a noble cause. It benefits the public. This is hardly the argument against intellectual property rights and I really find it annoying that people seem to be lumping it into the same ballpark with these boilerplate "stifling innovation" comments.
New CU-Boulder hand bacteria study holds promise for forensics identification
Yes I have. It seems you have much better googling skills than myself. If you wish you can try yourself and post your findings.
EventMachine: scalable non-blocking i/o in ruby
> work the same on my laptop and my server

I agree, which is why I use VMWare on my Mac with netatalk for access.
The important point is that just renting out the movies isn't enough to reveal your identity, you also have to review them (anonymously) on IMDB or some such site. So the solution is simple: If you rent a movie that you would object to being listed in, e.g. your public Facebook profile just don't review it. Is this so hard?
Great comment.

I think there are probably 3 levels of users: 1) People like yourself. For those guys probably just a button and a place to put a link for the source should be enough, 2) People who want to vote. For those guys some kind of sign-up is required, and 3) People who want to post their own stuff.

You are right on with the anonymous coward thing. Right now you either get nothing or have to sign-up and then you can do everything. That's too big of a hurdle for casual users like yourself (and easily fixed). I'm also finding out that simply because you vote and comment doesn't mean you have the energy to tag and source new material. So there's probably a gradual engagement model that needs to be created.
What about a US company having a offshore office in some poor Asian country and having some of the employees as contractors. Is there any accountability for these companies? Can those employees do anything?
Why I Hate Scheme
Now I go looking for a job and someone in HR decides that
my political views are too risky, so I don't even get an
interview.

It's not ideal, but basing hiring decisions on real information (even if 'private') strikes me as better than using uninformed prejudice. In the example you give, is it better or worse to have the HR person say "Homoiconic? Sounds gay to me!"? I don't see much increased risk in offering a deeper pool of inherently unverifiable information, even if this information might be used badly.

The author's views are that Netflix can provide the
benefits you desire without compromising the privacy I
desire. I think the debate should be around whether the
authors are correct.

This is a good debate, but for me it's a secondary one. Even if a privacy-safe solution is theoretically possible, I fear the only likely outcome will be that Netflix buries a 'release authorization' somewhere deep within their terms of service and is dissuaded from offering similar data sets in the future.

I also think that for my needs 'anonymize and release' is the only feasible solution. While online systems might be better than nothing, the approaches I'm interested in (kNN on GPU's, massively parallel cross-validations) really require local data and full control over data layout. But perhaps there is indeed a solution that works for everyone.
Yeah, I know. He was really brave to go against the people who say you should burn out before you're 40, and live consumed with guilt, regret, and envy.
I should have used another word besides hardware. I mean everything from the industrial design, the support, the service, and full apple experience.
Descent into Darkness: Understanding your system’s ABI is the only way out
There's a glut of lawyers on the job market, though. It's not as lucrative as it seems.
That's incorrect. His public Star Wars reviews linked him to the Michael Moore's rentals he wished to remain private.
It's nice to see an article about developer-centric test automation that's isn't obvious trolling.

The distinction he makes between statist and mockist tests is an important one (although I tend to use the terms "state-based" and "interaction-based" when I make that distinction myself). Knowing what your strategy is for confirming that the code under test actually works is too often overlooked by testing newbies.
You should visit http://colorlovers.com :)
FCC unveils National Broadband Plan
As I understand it, your idea is that the user will discover some new interesting quotes and then the community can vote them up.

I like the idea, but in a general sense, quote is something shorter (usually just one sentence), and aiming at some basic "truths", like there are quotes about love, relationships, inspiration, etc. But if you mix that with quotes that require some specific knowledge, I am not sure if that will work.

For example, I tried to read some quote form your side, only discovering that it is related to U.S. politics. But I don't watch this topic closely, so after reading the paragraph, I just didn't understand what is it about. So the quotes which requires some specific knowledge (like politics of certain country, etc.), will need to have their own subdomain...if you mix it into one place, you will just get a snippets of text understood by only certain people.
How to Lose Weight and Be In The Best Shape of Your Life
Great presentation! Some exciting new stuff in Eventmachine.
"If you want to get your word out and communicate, you can do that as long as you can type. Having someone to fix your computer for you so that you can blog isn't illiteracy, nor learning to sign up to Gmail isn't comparable to learning to read and write."

Likewise, you could have very good ideas to share with the world, and it shouldn't be impediment to have to dictate all of them to a scribe.
Anyone know if there could be legal repercussions for a US citizen reading this, should they have a way to track the IPs of the readers?

(I'm absolutely clueless when it comes to anything related to security clearances, but considering some of the stuff that is illegal in various parts of the USA, I wouldn't be surprised if simply reading a classified document is considered illegal.)
It's a telling sign that the questions 3 years ago were "is Linux ready for the desktop" and today the questions are "is Linux better than Mac".

Linux as a product is obviously top notch now; from here on out it's just a matter of marketing.
Netflix has a lot of subscribers, but it doesn't have that many, and in particular, in your neighborhood, does it have that many who are 38 year old males who like action movies and Michael Moore? It's a question partly of scale. It's big, but not that big that we can't get dangerous results with demographics & statistical analysis.

It comes back to the contemporary problem of statistics: We, programmers included as evidenced by many discussions of the sort, have a hard time getting it. We are only at the cusp of understanding what statistics can do with large data sets.

Now, we can either work with researchers and organizations to deal with the very real concerns, or we can simply refuse to believe that giraffes don't exist because we never saw an animal with such a long neck before. It's the basic problem of progress.
and the marketing materials, commercials, advertisements, distribution deals, etc. etc.
This is the approach that Netflix took with the initial data. The paper referred to shows that this is insufficient, and does little to ease privacy concerns. The general problem is that if you 'fuzz' up the data enough to make identification impossible, it's no longer useful as a dataset.
I believe that you are referring to monetary policy in NZ. This is not the same thing. Essentially I am suggesting that banks have about the same amount of financial privacy that you and I do. They do a lot more transactions, so there is much more for them to tell.
I don't think shared hosting has the "home-run" type upside that he's looking for.
This is great feedback, but I'm not sure how to handle.

The idea, for registered users, is that you downvote the first U.S. Politics quote you see. Then the system starts sorting those lower. Over time, if you keep training the system, you'll never see a U.S. politics quote.

But for new users, how to handle? Right now for anonymous users I have a basic HN sorting algorithm.What you are saying is that this might not be enough. Should I leave it as is? Should I add some kind of heading or sorting on the page so that people can easily see the topics (topics appear as you mouse over the quote). Not sure.
Http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/diamond_tv_wonder_750/
You're right. How about no public reviews on IMDB then? Or create another different users? I rent many movies from Netflix that people would find "objectionable", this is one reason I don't create any public reviews.
Sad but not surprising. What did you think a huge company does, which always sold software as its core business?

Sad, because one would have thought that, since MS has to catch up in the mobile market, tries to offer an environment as developer friendly as possible. What's the reason to develop for WinMob now?

To me it translates to the following: If i want the biggest userbase and a good amount of money i choose the iPhone. If i want to be sure not to be rejected and have some freedom in general i choose android.
Now, if i develop for WinMob, what do i get? From the few sales i make i give 30% away (plus invest into development) and my app will probably be rejected because whatever reason some MS manager think there is. (note that those points are the same as for the iPhone, except that the iPhone has a huge userbase).

I just hope this business model will fail in the end, because it's awful, imho.
> [...] and the whitest breads.

Not in Germany. I so which they had more real bread here in the UK.
Agreed. I see a lot of tweets from people trying to decide on the best editor or IDE for Clojure. Personally, I use Clojure (in all honesty I am just dabbling in it and haven't used it on a full-blown project) but IMO to a large extent - it does not matter.

Use whatever editor you are comfortable with. Learning a new language with an editor getting in your way is pretty hard.

Outside emacs, I agree with swannodette. Enclojure (NetBeans) has the most complete support for Clojure.
Wow so much bullshit it's overflowing. Bland, boring "advice". I'd much rather hear some of his REAL life stories.

How exactly do you manage to amass such a humongous amount of money from one of the poorest, most corrupt countries on Earth?

How do you stay alive instead of falling pray to the crime families running half of the said country.

How do you grow in under a corrupt government and corrosive business climate?

That's what I would REALLY like to hear. I bet they'd be some pretty interesting teachings...
But Windows is open, and that virus .exe runs with no "authorization" from Microsoft. Your argument of insecure by default is a red-herring in the current discussion.

So you have to be defensive in your use of more open systems, because anybody could have written malicious code for you, and you're lacking the walls of the walled garden to protect you.

As I've been stating through the thread, I am taking this stance because I want to be lazy and safe when using my phone. I don't need or want another full-blown computer to take care of, update, and defend. The trick will be getting the right "jailbreak" switch that's easy for technical people to flip, but very difficult for lay-people to get tricked into.
Will the SSL hide a post/get? The SERP still have the terms in the querystring. You can get SSL on other Google apps. Maybe not on search.
Excellent preso. If you are interested in eventmachine or just getting into it read this.
F5 Announces Flexible New Management Solutions
Congrats antirez!
To really enjoy it, click the Properties tab, then choose Boiling point or Discovered, and _then_ operate the slider. Provides a good light show in modern browsers. Clicking on elements in the Isotopes tab is good, too. Also the Wide checkbox at top left. Hell, just click Demo at the bottom and take in the show. No Flash, either.
F5 Week in Review March 8th – 12th, 2010
I wonder what the SpringSource/Grails/CloudFoundry division of VMWare will do with Redis.
Except the Netflix data didn't contain your age or your sex or your neighborhood.
If you buy a cheap phone ($50 is just enough to buy a garbage cell phone in the states) then you shouldn't be upset that the carrier isn't supporting incremental updates to the phone's operating system. It might not be cost effective. Most people I know that look for cell phones on the super-cheap do not know the difference between Android 1.6 and 2.0. They probably couldn't tell you the difference between 98 and XP.

Edit: In short, I'm saying that if you cannot tell the difference and are a low-end cell phone consumer, then you can just as well do without voice search on your $50 phone. Beyond that, the good phones update themselves.
Twitter Announces @Anywhere
Could you explain how you see it as ghastly?

As long as customers understand that their low-end phone won't be able to run the sexiest games out there, I don't see too much of a problem.
The developers just need to figure out how many people have the highest-end phones (and what they'll pay for games that utilize them).
I see it as a breach of privacy people might have prevented had they known about the dangers of their reviews getting linked to their accounts. Many companies have their large credit card databases stolen or hacked into through sheer incompetence. Netflix is not in the same boat with these.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your strength (as of now) is the app (for iPad, Kindle, iPhone, etc), and the best quotes of the day (trough the learning system). Is this right? (I think I see a piece of your vision, am I the only one who sees this as a solution to one of the YC RFS?)

Also if you need a designer, I have plenty of experience in UI/UX. Funny thing, I was going to contact you to join me in one of my projects.
If you want to brush op on some of your math:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
All Youtube video's clearly explaining different theories. Helped me relearn a few topics..
I'm very curious about what bits of information you think exist that so precisely bisect the population.
Or, are they opening the door for you to profit from selling access to a utility map reduce cluster focused on their data set?
Does Brawnier Make You Brainier?
Yes: Making a lot of money => Ability to change the world. The converse is not true. :)
Are you sure about that? I've been a Microsoft developer for quite a while and to be honest the support they _previously_ had for the mobile market was pretty shitty.

I'll take a look at Mobile 7 but they've more or less already lost me to Android. They have a lot of making up to do to get me back to WinMo.
This is what's frustrating about being a Tcl fan: Tcl had this something like 15 years ago, because it was necessary for Tk. "Tcl don't get no respect" :-/

That said, though, what separates the "men from the Erlangs" is that in Tcl, Ruby, Python, Javascript, and company, "never block the reactor" is the name of the game, you can't do a while { 1 } { something } in your event handler or it will wedge the whole thing.

In Erlang, thanks to its built in scheduler, you can.
They are already looking to hire a Javascript "guru" for this framework. Looks interesting but is it "too much"?

http://twitter.com/JoinTheFlock/status/10531561796
Man, I love hearing stories like this. Congratulations!
I am not sure how to say it, I meant variance of boldness. Non-native speaker here. :-)
Yes, it will hide them. TLS runs at a protocol layer below HTTP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
Congratulations! I guess that this will lead to huge improvements (e.g. focus on clustering) in Redis :)
Twitter’s New “At Anywhere” Platform Allows For Deeper Integration
Google Official SEO Guide For Your Blog
Upvoted for rainbow parentheses, which I just added to my .emacs =D
I agree. Just for the record: I also love short-sellers.
TL;DR: Slides from a talk describing how to rewrite the Ruby VM in memory while it is running in order to collect garbage which Ruby is not clever enough to collect for itself.

Yes, it sounds masochistic to me, too.
I'm a big fan of Bill... not as big a fan of the general lack of a way to show sarcasm on the Internet.
I don't know about the mobile division, but the rest have always been very dev friendly.
Sadly, we hapless programmers are the only ones who will ever read this blog post.
As part of trying to become better (through necessity) at web design, I've been discovering the best way to learn about design is to find pet-peeve rants by good designers.

This one is going to give me something to chew on.
"Can Linux compete with Apple" is a silly question as Matt pointed out. "Can Linux compete with OSX in the mobile/laptop/desktop market" is a better question. I believe that Linux is technically as strong as OSX (if not stronger) but on the Linux GUI side, there isn't the laser sharp focus on usability and good taste that Apple has put into their GUI. Maybe ChromeOS can change this, Ubuntu has made great strides in this area, but I believe that OSX is still pretty far ahead.
Nitpicky correction: It doesn't do any garbage collection; it helps you figure out where you are leaking references.
The proposed second contest would have contained some demographic info. Hence the concern.
> I actually like having Windows around.

Me too, but that's not a point for linux. You can install a windows partition on macs too.
Here's an idea: If people could wrap quotes in some tag like [qfeed]a good quote[/qfeed] in media outlets all over the internet, like Disqus comments for a particular blog or in reply to the quoted post on HN.

And then a spider came along and pulled the [qfeed] bit and submitted it to quote-feed.

It wouldn't work well for comment-less sites like wikipedia, but it would for "quick excerpts from the latest articles"
I imagine you can predict age, sex, and race from the selection of movies.