skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've read a couple articles and haven't seen any details about how they're going to apply DP (differential privacy).

It's important to clearly distinguish what DP can and cannot do. DP is just a technique for taking a database and outputting some statistic or fact about it. The output has some noise added to it.

The guarantee of DP is (roughly) that anyone looking at the output alone won't learn much about anyone in the database. This also holds for anything you do with that statistic.

Think about this carefully when thinking about what DP does and doesn't promise. Also think about the difference between "privacy" and "security".

Example of what DP does protect against: If Apple is recommending products to people based on others' download habits, and this recommendation is based on differentially private statistics, then no other user or group of users can infer anything about my downloads. In fact, even engineers at Apple, if they can only see the statistics and not the original database, cannot infer anything about my downloads.

Example of what DP does not protect against: government accessing the data. The database still has to exist on Apple's servers. The government can get to it just as easily as before via warrants or so on. DP is not cryptography.

My assessment: On one hand it is awesome that Apple is taking a lead in using differential privacy and thinking about mathematical approaches to privacy. On the other, there are many facets of privacy and right now I think people are more concerned about security of their data and privacy from the government, or else privacy from companies like Apple itself. DP doesn't address these; it only addresses the case where Apple has a bunch of data and wants the algorithms it runs not to leak much info about that data to the world at large.
Thanks, not sure how I missed it.
People still want cubic zirconia. Diamonds are technically superior in several ways; at the same price you'd see at least as much demand.
I think the thing is that the problems people are still using C to solve for are a different than the ones where people are using C++, Java, C#. Meaning if C++ was a better option then people would have switched to using C++ two decades ago. Yet C has historical deficiencies that could be fixed by smallish mostly painless extensions to the language.
Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.

Some guidelines:

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.

3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.

Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.
Sorry my background is in engineering not stats so I probably confused my terms a little. I think I mixed up 'variable' with 'parameter'.

As an example of what I meant, at the plant where I work we are often concerned about yield (the ratio of input mass to output mass). We measure a number of different "terms" during our process which we have control of to varying degrees (As an engineer I call these terms parameters I guess a statistician calls them 'independent variables').

So the term I'm trying to model is yield and my input variables are the various 'terms'.

I will read up on cross validation now (hadn't heard of it before). My work uses SAS - a quick google search suggest SAS supports this test.

Thanks for answering my question.
It was the only messenger available for MOST platforms, including the then-dominant BlackBerry. It provided feature parity with BBM, including guaranteed delivery of prompt failure notices, which was a bigger deal then. It's why my friends and I started using it years ago.
I noticed that too. Besides the Elite-like premise it has a similar pastel, day-glow aesthetic.
One question: does it support inline as well as mime?
No probs!
Job-Seeking Ph.D. Holders Look to Life Outside School
Brings to mind this graphic:

http://apps.npr.org/dailygraphics/graphics/hist-job-map-90/c...

Truck driver is an extremely common occupation across much of the country.
I find the obsession with "jobs" to be one of the most sour elements of the corportocratic dialogue of the political and economic systems.

Many people, including most professional drivers, will be happy not to have to do the chore anymore. They don't want or need jobs, they want and need fulfillment of their wants and needs.

Stood next to the monumental task of actually automating the matter around us to please us (which, if our purpose in doing so is good, is a mitzvah), the creation of a system which fulfills these wants and needs without regard to any connection to a "job" seems straightforward and doable.
It's time for an Open Communications initiative. Time for companies to stop owning the platform. Time for all of us to stand up for our right to communicate with who we want, when we want, without being monitored, inspected, blamed, or advertised to. Enough is enough. It's time for a change.
This assumes you can work 24h a day. It could be extended to every free hour: What must your your hourly wage be, that it's worth watching TV.

Also if you are poor and have no money, and no opportunity to earn more, and perhaps already have a second job, then $3 saved a day makes a huge difference. Though I'd say savings for 3 meals (lunch and breakfast and dinner) should be around $10 not $3 (at least from my experience comparing prices for cooking and going to McDonalds)
In what way does changing the software license impede user experience? No other company would have the proverbial balls to straight up copy their software either.
No police, courts, legal system? Where does the money come from when there are no taxes?
1905 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein
Fuck Apple. The only thing they are programmed to care about is the bottom line and getting more users. That programming is complicated and unlikely to change to suit the consumer's needs, or desires.
From a technical standpoint, this was crystal clear for years now: the first point where automation will happen is long distance trucking on highways. A human drives a truck out of town where (s)he gets out -- and perhaps into a truck just arrived -- and the robot drives it to the destination city. Many hard technical and regulatory problems in automated driving do not even appear in this scenario. There are no pedestrians to hit, traffic lights to navigate etc. Just drive. And this will be quick to be accepted, everyone knows the dangers of truck drives dozing off. The robot never dozes off. And yes, a real large amount of jobs will disappear within the next 15 years if not the next ten due to this.
The taxes owed after exercise are actually under AMT. It is an AMT credit that carries forward equal to the tax paid that can be used in the next year where your conventional tax liability exceeds your amt liability. Any unused portion carries forward.

But it wasn't always this way. After the bust in 2000 lots of people owed real tax liabilities despite no real financial gain and had to pay them off. The credit came later.
Haha yeah. You might say that your choice of ECMAScript was prescient :)
That would be a conservative's dream government. The reason UBI is supported on both sides of the aisle is because it touches on the priorities of the left and right. As far as I can tell, some conservatives advocate for UBI and removing all other social safety nets. I don't think this is exactly what everyone has in mind when they consider the program.
Honestly, given the fact that a significant number of people already think their vote "doesn't count" (given on average ~40% of people don't even bother) I doubt they would be more concerned with vote tampering than with potential identity/bank theft.
I have a cup of coffee, if I drink a little I don't think a new cup of coffee with less coffee has been created, just that the old one is different. There are some times where imperative thinking seems more natural.
Because DRAM is (relatively) so slow, avoiding the _reads_ is a big gain. If you zero a large range of memory the naive way, the first write to each cache line _reads_ a cache line of data that likely will be overwritten by zeroes.

Problem is: how does the CPU know it doesn't have to do that read? REP STOSB may, but it isn't trivial to implement, as neither start nor end of the range to be processed need to lie on a cache line boundary.

PowerPC has the dcbz and dcbzl instructions which zero a cache line without reading the to-be-zeroed data (dcbzl was invented because real-world code assumed dcbz always zeroed 32 bytes. See http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-drivers/2005/Apr/msg0...)
Yeah, it's a hard thing to think through. (I shudder to suggest, but posit for theoretical consideration), a currency whose blockchain has UBI built-in?
The Most Important Article on Psychiatry You Will Ever Read (2007)
> The database still has to exist on Apple's servers.

It doesn't, which is part of the reason Apple wants to do this. You can still do differential privacy without collecting all the data, you just get less accurate results. See page 232 in [1], re "The Local Model".

[1]: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~aaroth/Papers/privacybook.pdf

Edit: the article even says this down when it talks about RAPPOR.
While I would identify as Wikipedia inclusionist [1], I find this article quite problematic.
It is (quite) impossible for a reader to verify any of the claims made in the article.
Five years ago, someone (probably Ken Dakin) wrote this article and no other person on the whole planet earth has apparently been able or willing to add information or support the claims of the article.
For all that we know, the WRS might just be an elaborate hoax [2] or part of a plot by someone who hates VisiCalc.
(A quick Google search turned up some further sources that suggest that at least someone calling himself Ken Dakin actually exists and claims to have worked on WRS [3].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXA_kwrkxA0
Well, unless your life plan is to start a Hard Tech business that will require 5 years of funding before anyone takes it seriously.

Then this is is kinda like telling a soldier about to deploy to Afghanistan that they don't need Kevlar because it's never been a better time to bring democracy to the middle-east.
You are confusing algorithms (Operational Semantics) with definitions (Denotational Semantics). One of the key difference between mathematics and computing is that mathematics is far less concerned with constructing results, and far more concerned with reasoning about the properties of objects. Mathematics sits at a level of abstraction unsuited to physical hardware.

In Haskell, this is evident in the complex and difficult to reason about graph-reduction engine that lays hidden in the runtime. Denotional semantics => Haskell Math yay. Operational Semantics => Haskell's downfall in real-world programmers.
Yeah it's not hard to imagine it becoming a really dystopian scenario. It's more difficult, but not impossible, to imagine it being great.
None in particular since you still have to connect to a traditional HTTP or WebSocket (although WebRTC is coming soon) servers. So if you connect to a malicious peer they can get your IP can get leaked. But the messaging algorithm is very ad-hoc mesh-networky and UDP-ish. At its core, messages only contain a message ID and a body, these are then daisy chained throughout the servers and clients (they're all peers). Meaning that just because a peer sent you something does not mean they are the originator. However, nothing stops peers from broadcasting their session ID or IP or X-Forwarded-For header. But the counter is also true, the messaging system still works even without that information - which if there are enough peers preserves anonymity. I of course should say the usual disclaimers that small peer groups can be attacked, and larger networks if you have enough intelligently placed peers you can probably calculate triangulation and stuff like that. When you get down to the actual "physics" of stuff, there are lots of tricks/hacks to break any network based on timing and patterns alone.
Worry is not as premature as you think, because replacement of truck drivers does not have to happen all at once. It can start with just replacing the drivers on long haul routes on the interstate highways. So when, say, a container ship arrives in Long Beach from China with goods to be trucked to a Walmart distribution center in Florida instead of needing to dedicate a driver to that truck for something like 80 hours you only need a driver for a few hours at the start and a few hours at the end. That would greatly reduce the number of drivers the long haul trucking industry needs.

When the problem is restricted to self-driving on the interstate highways on fixed routes it is a lot simpler than the problem of general self-driving so we'll get that solved a lot sooner.

Furthermore, there is an even simpler intermediate step, which is to have self-driving trucks that just know how to follow another truck. You then have one leader truck driven by a human, with a line of self-driving trucks follower trucks. This simplifies the problem dramatically, getting rid of almost everything that is hard about self-driving vehicle technology. The limiting factor on when truck trains will be commercially available will be regulatory, not technological.
I appreciate your explanation. Let's go with your numbers, and say 90% of likes are bots, while 10% are real. You're getting much less value from your ad spend than you would if 100% of the likes were real, but so is everyone else who's running ads.

Meanwhile, the 10% real people have friends who could potentially like your brand organically as they see it in their feed. These second-degree-of-separation people, who have not seen your ad, will first be exposed to your brand through their friends' likes. You're building mindshare, however minor. In the small chance they decide to check out your page, having a believable number of likes already on your page is beneficial in winning their attention -- and interaction. The post that talks about 'bootstrapping' your likes with SE Asian users who are more like-prone to entice the Japanese/Korean likes is making the same point.

There is no doubt that bot-likes are much less useful than real-person likes, but they're not useless.
> Yeah, forgive me if I'm too cynical, but Hanlon's razor fails when this sort of thing involves criminal investigations of government employees.

I've had this thought before. Can you think of a general, defensible clause to add to Hanlon's razor to account for this?
I have no problem for cooking for two people. But perhaps this is specific to Germany.

"throwing away 1/2 a loaf of bread"

I buy 1/2 not a whole bread then.

About the milk: Not sure if you buy fresh milk from the farm, otherwise milk in the fridge does not go bad for days.

Today we had a delicious lentil salad with feta and rucola and a vinaigrette of lemon and tomatoes. The base salad can easily be used 2 days in a row with different toppings with capers and olives and a different dressing. Should be around $3 per meal, whereas McDonalds is >$6 in Germany (the only way to eat cheap at McDonalds is having 3 hamburgers for $1 each).
Thanks, I somehow missed it first pass.
The Long-Term Stock Exchange
I don't know the answer to your question, but I do want to point out that there's something a little jarring about positing that its valuation is nonsense and wondering why its users find it valuable in the same thread. I don't get Snapchat either, but maybe that means I shouldn't poopoo it?
Noticed that too. So classically german.
Actually the heart rate during arrhythmias (abnormal rhythms), is actually a less complex signal in the information theoretic sense. This was noticed about 30 years ago and has been widely studied in the heart rate variability literature. Healthy heart rate signals are complex in the sense that it has structural richness and correlations across multiple time scales. However arrhythmias appear as either random patterns in heart rate, such as in the case of atrial fibrillation; or as repeating, somewhat deterministic patterns, such as in common ventricular arrhythmias like bigeminy or trigemeny or in congestive heart failure where the heart rate become abnormally regular.
You say that despite this privacy push being a direct response to consumer sentiments. Apple knows well that as tech becomes wearables and the Internet of things, privacy concerns skyrocket. My grandparents won't buy things online. Soon my generation will be those old and anxious curmudgeons unless our concerns are eased.

Do they care about their bottom line? Of course. It's for that very reason they are investing the time now to secure the trust of generations of consumers.
How do colors and materials that lend themselves well to photography make the suit more safe?
We should build dedicated roads for these automated convoys.
Among those listed, Slack is the biggest existential threat (or complementary partner). The others can't even speak the language Dropbox's customers speak.

> their main strength seems to be that they have the best cross-platform UI/UX right now

and they will continue until Apple treats Android as a first-class platform, or Google treats Windows as one, or Microsoft figures out who they are anymore.
Horror films are far scarier than in the past
What isn't necessarily considered here is that (In Switzerland, at least) many people don't actually have a loaded gun - Some places will offer to keep your gun, ammunition or both in another location, which saves you having to secure them &c. On top of that, everybody is necessarily trained to use said guns and by extension trained to be responsible with them.

That said, I agree completely that the problem is not necessarily the presence of guns.
It's true. Imagine if Sam had written the opposite in his post, if he had said "No guys really, we're in a bubble."

Listening investors stop investing in startups, making the bubble burst faster?
We do not even have driverless cargo trains. The only automated trains I know of are local metro trains. I'm quite sure we will need a person sitting in a truck for a very long time. Sure, that person might not be actually driving the truck, but the job will be still there.
They already took money from their investors, with a promise to give it back one day, with interest.
All I want to do is design robots for sustainable small and medium scale agriculture. I've been working on robotics my whole life, and am very interested in 3D printed robotics. I've designed a proof of concept 3D printed remote control car [1] and I think it could be possible to design a good robot for agricultural applications that people can build and repair themselves. I design open source electronics for robotics and think we'd all be better off if we owned shares in a community farm, and I want to make that kind of thing possible.

3.5 billion people on this Earth are poor farmers. If we can design functional open source agricultural robots that can be built by anyone with access to a $300 3D printer (and I think we can) we could have a bigger impact on the world than every new Silicon Valley startup from 2016.

There is a serious issue with the fact that capitalists don't make things for poor people, because they can't afford to buy the solutions. [2] I don't want that to stop me though, so I'm working hard to figure out ways of funding this project that are functional even in our capitalist world. I think I spend more time thinking about economics and social systems than I do about robotics, since the technical solutions are trivial compared to the problem of getting people to fund valuable non-profitable work. But I think that is possible too.

Right now I am working at a robotics startup and solving problems like 3D perception, behavior, team management, handling my own bullshit, etc. My 10 year plan is to have a functioning system for homesteading with robots.

I'm really trying to make this happen.

[1] http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/
[2] http://tlalexander.com/restless/
This is anecdotal but half of the time I've sent one it was never received by the other party. And, it didn't tell me it wasn't received, the other person just didn't receive it. I'm not sure if this is because it's going across carriers, across OSes (android to ios), or some other factors I'm not aware of. Snapchat just works.
Does it mean that Apple will randomly insert turds in my messages so that it looks like the average user ?
Yes, you could give them rails to make them more efficient.
"...it's really hard to learn object-oriented programming (well)."

You have no idea how desperately I wish more people understood that. I could swear that every introductory programming book produced in the last years was either written by someone who either completely forgot how hard this material was to originally master, or who was just some freak of nature who just intuitively grasped it.

Please, please, please, give your students a solid grounding in procedural (or even functional!) programming before teaching OOP. You can teach them about objects and how to use them, but please stop making people write entire classes before they have at minimum a month of coding exercises behind them! (Universities that teach CS101 in Java, I'm looking at you.)

Anyway, I strongly agree with you and reached for the upvote button, and ended up downvoting you instead. Stupid touchscreens.
Not really. It's not a secret that Windows Phone is now rather a joke, and nobody is buying it. It used to be very popular in Europe around 2 years ago.
I actually wrote a blog post on regularization a few months ago. I think it covers some of the issues, like overfitting, glossed over in this post:

http://acompa.net/on-regularization.html
One thing I just wondered about: If you automate away a job, you have to pay this persons UBI, as such you need to tax more. (Lets assume 100% at the point where you automated.) Where is the profit for the company now ? It will now have to pay both the automation and the UBI. The only thing we gained (and that's a good thing) is a human with a lot of spare time. That should be enough motivation, but not for this €€€ obsessed world.
Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.

Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.
Crayons?
not quite what you're talking about since it's centrally managed, but check out the Gresham Dollar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441696
As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk production.
You could just run them on narrow strips of metal rather than bother with a wide stretch of tarmac that the wheels wouldn't be touching most of.