Homunculiheaded

One of the leading villains of Breaking Bad is most definitely the US healthcare system. There is no doubt that in either show stellar acting and writing are what make the show, but part of stellar writing is touching on the anxieties of your audience.

The biggest thing that R has is just an incredible amount of really well documented packages, that are quite frequently cutting edge (unless you want to do any deep learning work). Not to mention that the base R has just a tremendous amount of useful stuff baked in.

I've kept an eye on Julia and would love to use it in my everyday work, but also know that for now that's just not possible because of how many built-in functions and packages I rely on.

However solving this is just a function of time and community (Julia just needs their Hadley Wickham). I remember when people scoffed at Python because it has nowhere near the ecosystem that Perl did.

I'm pretty confident that in 55 more years we'll be at the point where the state of the art in programming language will be to simply rediscover Common Lisp.

I sometimes think that progress in the 21st century will be summed up as: "The realization that the normal distribution is not the only way to model data".

Taleb's favorite topic is the "black swan event" which is something that the normal distribution, and the idea of standard deviation, don't model that well. In a normal distribution very extreme events should only happen once in the lifetime of several universes. Of course assuming variation inline with a Gaussian process is at the heart of how the Black-Sholes model calculates risk/volatility/etc.

Benoit Mandelbrot argued that financial markets follow a distribution much more similar to the Cauchy distribution (specifically the Levy distribution) rather than a Gaussian. The problem of course is that the Cauchy distribution is pathological in that it doesn't have a mean or variance, you can calculate similar properties for it (location and scale), but it doesn't obey the central limit theorem so in practice it can be very strange to work with.

The normal distribution is fantastic in that it does appear frequently in nature, is very well behaved, and has been extensively studied. However a great amount of future progress is going to come from wrestling with more challenging distributions, and paying more attention to when assumptions of normality need to be questioned. Of course one of the challenges of this is that the normal distribution is baked into a very large number of our existing statistical tools.

Without "modern philosophy" the idea of falsifiability would not be a major component of the modern science. Much of what is now considered to be standard scientific practice is the product of Karl Popper's philosophical work.

Far from being excluded, philosophers have defined a large chunk of what modern science is.

From the Investopedia: "In the year 1999, there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading."[0]

We're not seeing this type of investor behavior at all right now (please correct me if I'm wrong). I personally am not really sure that FB and Twitter will ever find a way to make huge profits and become sustainable large businesses but looking at the market it's clear that investors share this uncertainty.

And since anecdote is so popular when discussing bubbles, I still don't see "normal" people talking about how they're going to "make it rich!". I had people in 2007 telling me I was missing huge opportunities to get rich in not purchasing a home, house flipping shows were all over tv. In the late 90s I knew HS students that were trading stocks on the school library's computers during lunch.

Don't get me wrong, especially when everyone I know in the non-tech sector is still struggling, I have anxieties that the party won't last. However looking around I see nowhere near the insanity I remember in 1999 and 2007.

[0.]http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes8.asp

One of the functions of the prior in Bayesian analysis is to incorporate this "gut feel" into your calculations. Given that you have a strong prior belief and weak data (ie not much data) your belief will strongly influence the posterior. As you collect more data your belief will be increasingly overridden by the reality.

About a year ago I repeated this experiment (well a very simplified version) with MegaMan sprites, including a quick write up of the process for anyone interested: http://willkurt.github.io/EigenMan/

I live in an area with pretty much 0 worthwhile tech jobs. I've been working remote for a while now and done so with 3 very different organizations doing very different types of work (plain old software dev to machine learning research), and I've personally found this not to be a "very rare privilege" at all. Currently about 9% of the jobs on Stack overflow careers are remote, and if you look carefully you can find a very wide range of work.

I find the remote space is rapidly advancing and expanding. The tools are getting much better, and the diversity of companies offering remote work is as well. It's definitely sustainable to choose to work only remotely, and even if I were to move to a city with better tech jobs I would have a hard time going back to full-time working in an office.

The biggest difference I see is that while I know many non-developers wanting to get into software, only those that actually become strong developers make it.

In the 90s it wasn't just that HTML was new, anyone that was "good with computers" was able to land jobs that paid stupid amounts of money for the skill set. There's good money and a demand for developers now, but companies are still looking for good developers, not just bodies with the right buzzwords on a resume.

And also mentioned in the parent comment: there's nowhere near the zeal from the general public. I don't know anyone in the non-tech world that thought groupon or zynga was a good deal, and almost everyone is curious how exactly fb plans to make money in the long run. Compare this to the dotcom bubble or the real-estae bubble and it is very different (I remember many people telling me in 2007 that I was foolish not to buy a house).

The Sokal affair is a lot less shocking when you realize Social Text was not peer-reviewed at the time and the article was for a special science issue of the journal.

If you've ever had misfortune of having to review submission for non-major CS conferences you would know that there is an amazing amount of bullshit even in technical fields.

The only thing I've found shocking about the Sokal affair, or this article (and the many others like it) is the obsession with 'proving' the humanities to be bullshit. It is an incredible and intellectually lazy pursuit of the idea that: If I don't know it, it's not worth knowing.

Please let's not mindlessly post this comic and act that because rubber hose crypt-analysis exists we shouldn't even bother.

One huge point I keep trying to bring up to friends when I talk about security is: yes if you are the specific target of the state or any asymmetrically powerful adversary you are in a lot of trouble.

But with large scale surveillance the bigger concern is not becoming a target in the first place. Properly securing sensitive communications is a good first step in ensuring that you aren't picked up in sweep through the data.

Sure encryption in the first place may flag you, but at least in the current situation it isn't going to be enough to invoke any rubber hose techniques.

"This is despite the fact that science, alone, can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance."

Why do people ever expect reason to be a part of this? This quote shows exactly the point of surveillance (and torture for that matter). In a reasonable world, science and reason hold the greatest possible power. To perform surveillance despite the fact that it doesn't make sense is to exert one's power over reason itself. You cannot argue with an entity wielding such power, they have empirically shown that they are more powerful than reason. Follow this line and the only reasoning you are left with as an individual is submit or...

I've pasted this a million times but I strongly believe this is the absolutely most important quote from 1984 (from O'Brien torturing Winston Part 3, Chapter 3):

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' "

We could easily add to that 'the object of surveillance is surveillance'. There is no end game in any of these assertions of power other than expression and confirmation of power: not security, not prosperity, not even the welfare of the nation.

I wish this article had any actual data to back up it's claims. Rather what I see is a bunch of moral anecdotes (not even anecdotes about economic/social effects of these actions).

The author claims that it is morally wrong to spend more flying to give charity then you spend on the charity itself.

Then claims it is morally wrong to give handouts (which somewhat complicates the pervious moral belief, since you shouldn't give handouts what does it matter if potential handouts are wasted flying?)

Then claims it is morally wrong to make a profit attempting to do good.

And finally that it is morally wrong to have consumerism masking as charity (despite the fact that the author claims that may forms of charity are morally bankrupt anyway).

I am absolutely aware that there are many cases of 'charity' that have very negative consequences. But I don't actually care about 'morality' at all, what I care about is measuring positive or negative consequences. I'll even take a qualitative anecdote (ie "here's a story of how this person's life became worse because of Tom's shoes"). After all not all experiences fit nicely into a spreadsheet.

Reasoning through moral appeal only makes any sense at all if everyone shares your same moral system as a basis. For example it is legitimate to make moral arguments to members of a religious group you belong to that all share the same moral beliefs and assumptions, that's in part what theology is.

There is absolutely no substance to this piece other than the author espousing their moral system, which, at least from the information presented, don't sound any more founded on reality that moral beliefs of purchases of Tom's shoes.

I've had similar experiences about many things I used to think were paranoid becoming provable fact. However the other day the news about the google search for back packs and pressure cookers I thought was completely false and it was.

What I've realized is that the things I thought were paranoid and came true are things that I thought were paranoid because I had "trust" in various organizations not to abuse power, not because the actions seemed out right implausible.

With the backpacks and pressure cookers story, I was skeptical not because I trusted the fbi, but because it seemed implausible given the way the fbi typically acts and strongly against their interests.

So my updated rule is that 'trust' is no longer a valid reason to rule something out as paranoid. This is an ethos that the security world has long held as obvious, that many technical people formerly not particularly interested in security are waking up to.

It’s not simply apathy, and personally I think one of the most dangerous things is for American’s to blame ourselves for lack of change when the system is pretty much designed to minimize civil unrest.

The biggest issue is simply comfort. Most HNers work for pretty cool companies, but even then how many would face repercussions if they took the day off to burn tires in the street? Also this type of serious protest you discuss does happen for just a day, but maybe weeks (or longer). Many HNers would definitely face employment concerns if they took weeks off to protest, and most people outside the tech community would be fired/seriously repremanded as the employer/employee balance of power is extremely imbalanced right now.

The surveillance state is, imho, one of the greatest existential threats to individual freedom in the history of the US, but for anyone looking at the risk calculus it’s still a future threat: today you have tons of food, entertainment, a place to live and most people don’t actually feel the affects of the shrinking limitations on freedom (in fact the only people who do are those who are fighting against this changes, another point in favor of not protesting from the pov of risk).

So the calculus of pleasure means for most people protest is more painful than the current state of things. But there’s also the pain factor. Most Americans are aware of the incarceration rate of the US. We’re also aware of the terrible conditions in US prisons. We know the fate that became Manning, can only imagine what will happen to Snowden and under the current administration US citizens have even been targeted for assassination (no due process involved). Not only is there a threat of reduced pleasure to consider, you really, really don’t want to face punishment at the hands of the US government.

Finally there’s the completely uninteresting but real problem of geolocation: The US is a huge country, where are we going to meet? Even in DC today most protester are actually hired to protest, they aren’t concerned citizens but paid by a group of concerned citizens to protest in a formulaic and safe way.

Assaults on American freedoms are being extracted in such a brilliant way that pleasure/pain calculus won’t sway in favor of massive protest and unrest until the government has such power that such protests can be squashed before their inception (this is exactly why the surveillance state is so dangerous).

But please don’t turn your anger inward or towards other Americans: learn about tools that can fight the surveillance state (legal and technical), start small community discussion about these topics, and continue to fund organizations that are fighting for your rights in these domain. And yes keep being angry on HN, everyone who up or down votes your comment at least has to think about what is being said.

History has shown that given power people abuse it, the set up of mass, warrantless, surveillance is itself evidence of this, a feared consequence of the Patriot Act. It is a completely rational fear that given increasing powers government will increasingly abuse them. Also there has been nothing in recent policy that at all demonstrates that the federal government will ever relinquish power once given it. The more power that the government takes without challenge or checks and balances, the more it can easily take in the future. It's a positive feedback system.

"Terrorism" on the other hand does not scale, especially with an adversary so technologically limited oceans away from US borders. Terrorism isn't even meant to scale, it's entire purpose to create a maximal psychological impact because the adversary does not have the resources to achieve any significant damage through force. Even if you look at Isreal's total deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks you'll see that the numbers are small [0,1]. Also, unlike increasing government powers, there is no evidence that terrorists acts on US soil are increasing.

[0] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisraelsum.html [1] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/osloterr.h...

Regarding your final point, here's a lovely quote that I've found particularly useful recently:

"'National Security' is the root password to the Constitution." -- Phil Karn

"if a nation-state decides that somebody should not have privacy, then it will use whatever means available to prevent that privacy."

One thing a lot of these discussions miss is that the entire point of doing privacy and anonymity correctly is that you are never on a list of people that any particular nation state wants to deny privacy to. That your True Name (to borrow the idea from Vinge’s story of the same name) is never the target, is never even interesting.

I personally don't advocate a world where everything I do is encrypted and anonymized, I think that that is as unachievable and sacrificing as living an entirely private life. Use gmail, skype, facebook, twitter, send non-encrypted messages about christmas to your friends and family, etc.

But what we do need is an online equivalent of a private life as well. And people need to be educated in the tools and techniques that can make this possible when necessary. Use tor, hidden services, pgp, i2p etc Use completely different online identities, ways of speaking and never login to a HN account associated with your real identity from that private space. Create and participate in hidden online communities, but don’t center those communities around your real life family and friends (ie facebook-esque hidden service would be a very bad idea).

The idea is not to challenge, fight or oppose nation states with surveillance capabilities, that's a losing proposition; the idea is to create a space away from them.

Thanks! i2p is on my list of 'privacy stuff to learn' but your comment may have bumped it up a bit in priority.

What about hidden services? In my opinion that's the real heart of Tor. I think the value of exit nodes will start to wane as Tor gains a larger and larger user base and becomes it's own truly viable darknet. As it stands the majority of security related discussions I've come across regarding Tor strongly discourage spending any large amount of time on clearnet services anyway as this create many potential security/privacy risks.

I actually agree that the "JavaScript is Scheme!" meme is over used today. My comment was more pointing out where I felt the meme's origins had come from. It really wasn't that long ago that mentioning dynamic programming languages would get scoffed at by "real" programmers. Today, with underscore.js being pretty standard, it's trite to say "Hey! JavaScript has lambdas, closures and first class functions!" But that was not always the case.

I learned JavaScript before "The Good Parts" was printed and more importantly after I had been writing a lot of Common Lisp. I remember being really shocked and excited when I realized how much JS had in common with lisp given that my expectation when learning it was that I was in for an awful time.

I think the origins of the "JavaScript is Scheme!" meme have more to do with the fact that you can pretty trivially re-implement all of the code from the Little Schemer (including the applicative order y-combinator) in JavaScript, than any of the reasons mentioned here. JavaScript still, imho, has nicer closures and lambdas than most mainstream programming languages.

Actually, thinking back on it, I remember having a conversation with Prof. Daniel Friedman about how similar the two language are and I believe his response was something along the lines of: if you have the lambda calculus, what else do you need?

Final nitpick: most of the "Y isn't really a lisp!" (another meme) articles I've read always miss what I think is the biggest thing missing from all languages compared to any lisp: symbolic expressions. To me this is the single most underrated feature of lisp that almost no other programming languages offer.

If you read the actual paper referenced [0] you'll see that they explicitly mention this. Since they assumed that users were interactively trying to change their foot print, the looked at uses who had changed their settings within 1-2 hours:

"We ran our algorithm over the set of users whose cookies indicated that they were returning to the site 1-2 hours or more after their first visit, and who now had a different fingerprint. Excluding users whose fingerprints changed because they disabled javascript (a common case in response to visiting panopticlick.eff.org, but perhaps not so common in the real world), our heuristic made a correct guess in 65% of cases, an incorrect guess in 0.56% of cases, and no guess in 35% of cases. 99.1% of guesses were correct, while the false positive rate was 0.86%. Our algorithm was clearly very crude, and no doubt could be significantly improved with effort." (any typos here are likely the result of copy/pasting from the pdf)

0. https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

At the same time the Lisp community is one of the fiercest in supporting the idea that nothing that can be a function should be a macro. Metaprogramming just because it is clever is more abhorred in the Lisp community than any other I've seen.

I'm starting to think people should begin to create "crypto-selves". I've seen a lot of talk saying essentially "get off facebook! get off gmail!" But that's a lot of persistent effort even for fairly technical people. Plus even in secure, anonymous environment interacting with your real life friends, purchasing your favorite books on amazon etc will reveal who you are anyway.

In non-web life we have private and public spaces and there's plenty of study on how these two play together and how important they are. Most people have erroneously thought that because your computer is in your private physical space that it's also 'private', but that's clearly not the case.

What people need is the education to create the technological equivalent of locking yourself in your bedroom for the afternoon to clear your head.

Gmail is like sending a postcard, facebook like chatting with friends at the mall or park. Tor/truecrypte/pgp etc for parts of your life you want private. Separate usernames, interests, tones of voice, etc in this private space.

Trying to hide your real (ie public) self is silly as should you become a target of the nsa & co. they'll find a way to dig up something even if you've been completely hidden from july 2013 on. What people need is a reasonably benign public self and a hidden crypto-self.

Also I'm all for fighting the surveillance state, but I'm extremely cynical of it's success. I see no feasible way to reduce the power and authority of the militarized aspects of our government(s). I can't think of a single example of where public knowledge and outcry has changed anything other than getting a few puppets punished anywhere except the non-militarized parts of government.

There's a nice article "Cryptography is a science, not engineering" [0] that gives an overview of cryptography that might help with your question as well.

The essence is that in modern cryptography you're creating a provably secure system. One of those proofs is that your prng outputs a uniform distribution.

[0] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-06-17-crypto-science-no...

For me it's had an almost opposite effect.

Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area.

I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself.

Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important.

I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.

There's also this first act from the "Right to Remain Silent" from This American Life [0] and this story [1] that pmorici posted. So that's 3 now without actually looking hard at all.

0. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/t...

1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/teen-jailed-for-ter...

In this specific case I think the analog to shouting fire in a a theater here would be to actually call in a bomb threat (or other threats). Which I believe the vast majority of HNers will agree should be a crime.

I'm honestly confused how people can see the situation described in the article as anything other than insane.