AdamSC1

While I love the detailed growth article, I've been disappointed by Grammarly recently.

It used to do a really good job fixing my notes, but I feel like it's detection ability dropped off a cliff recently. I've had some pieces with pretty obvious mistakes that it has previously caught not get highlighted on a regular basis.

I saw the same thing happen with FoxType's V1 product, and then they pivoted away from it and eventually closed.

I wonder if there is some issue in aggregating people's writing mistakes into AI that lowers its value over time?

Yeah, looking at the stackoverflow model would be good.

It's also worth noting that the anonymous nature of this will probably drive down engagement. Look at Quora, people use it solely to build their personal brand.

Right now people would answer on cent solely for the money.

Let them do both so you can appeal to a broader market.

One of the most fun theories I've heard came from a friend of mine. He believes Satoshi hasn't been found because there isn't a Satoshi, but rather that it was a code name for a major research project.

Creating, designing and building the first version of Bitcoin is complicated and spans a number of fields of expertise.

Most of these fields of expertise only have a few truly exceptional practitioners who would be capable of the original thought.

You then have to factor in the peculiar nature of:

1) Not touching his new wealth of initial Bitcoins.

2) Disappearing into obscurity.

3) Being able to avoid being discovered (or nobody actually trying that hard to find him).

Occam's Razor principle would suggest all of that is less likely to have some altruistic single brilliant individual create Bitcoin and then leave. It's more likely a team of individuals would create it under a pseudonym, dissolve after completion of the project and then no longer have access to the accounts/keys.

Large government agencies would have the ability to bring top minds together, and less interest in liquidating the initial Satoshi Bitcoins.

Why would they want it? There are plenty of reasons governments would want a public ledger system. Unlike some of Bitcoin's spin-offs, Bitcoin isn't actually really private at all. It would be great for tracking and stopping crime.

Of course this is all a theory that sounds like it's out of a spy novel, but I think it's good fun.

The other likely possibilities is that Satoshi could have been older and passed away, or he truly is some brilliant mind who is well hidden.

The reason some people are complaining about this chart is that the weighting of the sources they use seems to bias towards new technologies.

They aren't listing this based on a single metric such as 'jobs in this programming language' or 'sites run on this programming language', but more a level of how trendy it is.

They have 12 sources scored out of 100, the defaults are:

-100 "IEEE Xplore" (Publication): This will bias new popular and emerging languages as a journal is more likely to cover topical interests.

-50 "Google Trends" (Trend Tool): Google trends will also bias as the results from the trends tool are relative and not absolute. If "Arduino" leaped up in searches while "PHP" stayed the same, Google Trends would overweight Arduino.

-50 "GitHub Active" (Code Repo): This one I'm ok with, but it depends on the definition of active and how much weight is given to the size of the project. Does two projects having at least one commit in 30 days mean that WordPress' PHP repo is just as active as my_fist_Haskell repo?

-50 Google (Search): It's unclear what's being measured here, volume of searches? Volume of results? Quality of results? The other consideration is if you know a language well or have sources you trust in that language you might not be searching at all.

-30 GitHub Created (Code Repo): I think this is overweighted unless it filters out inactive repos or those with only a readme file?

-30 Stack Overflow Views (Q/A Site): This seems like it should be much higher.

-30 Stack Overflow Questions (Q/A Site): Unclear if this is questions this year, or questions total. If it is new questions this year that will heavily bias the results to emerging languages. It's also unclear if this counts specialty stack exchanges.

-20 Reddit (Social): Seems like a bias sample to include as some projects choose this as their homebase for communication and others don't.

-20 HackerNews (Social): We're also realistically a bias sample as we're more likely to talk about trendy languages even if it doesn't have a large following.

-20 Twitter (Social): I don't use Twitter enough to comment on this, but I think it is important to define what is being measured here. Raw tweet count? Reach? Engagement?

-5 Career Builder (Job Site): ...Why?

-5 Dice (Job Site): ...Never heard of it.

What's missing?

I would have liked to see jobs from LinkedIn, AngelList, Stack Overflow Careers etc included, as well as volumes of subscribers for educational sites like Udacity, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp etc.

This is just one man's opinion but you may want to revisit the approach.

I don't think this article is as strong as the interviews you've done in the past. When you are interviewing you help remove some of the bias and really get to all the details, it makes it real and raw, where as users writing their own article tend do pick their positioning more carefully.

I think it is that 'realness' that makes IH different than all the noise out their on entrepreneurship blogs.

I hope if you go this route you provide more guidance to the writers to help make it more real.

(Also, it's less interesting when the IH venture already had an established market and following, I want to hear about the journey!)

Oh I hadn't considered the statistical advantage here.

You do lose out on a lot of human bias in the research process, but you also create blind errors that are hard to validate.

I know in my work there is plenty of times I run analysis and go back and manually check some entries as a sanity check - pros and cons here!

You're right these systems are currently flawed, and may remained flawed. But, the same is true for all systems.

Don't get me wrong I agree in theory that every company should not retain any customer information - I work for one of a few companies that does that, but, I also know that many company's will not make that switch (example a bank, or a medical record) and in such cases that data should be as secure as possible.

To counter the irresponsible promises you are talking about it'd be ideal to see compliance and security regulation like we see with HIPPA applied to all customer data, but until we evolve proper trust-less identification models and ways for users to self-secure and trustlessly validate their information then some businesses will always collect data.

To be clear, I think you're right that no tracking is better than trying to protect data.

However, it's important to understand that 'anonymization' is very different than the practice of "Differential Privacy."

I'm no expert but here is how I understand it as a simplified example:

Imagine your information is stored in a spreadsheet. It is storing your weight, height, zipcode, age and name.

The 'anonymization' spreadsheet would still have a unique row dedicated to you (similar to a spreadsheet) and it may replace your name with an ID# or an encrypted string. Now, just like in the AOL dataleak that information being stored as a single line item is still easy to backtrack as there is likely no one else with your weight, height and age combination in your zipcode. So a hacker can identify a single person.

Differential Privacy would store information differently, perhaps in separate spreadsheets, one that is list of heights, one that is a list of weights, etc, etc. No two spreadsheets would store the information in the same order (#3 on the height list would not be #3 on the weight list) and it may even contain some incorrect dummy information.

There would be some sort of algorithmic relation however that allows a system to create outputs in which the data has meaningful information (trends, means, standard deviations etc) but it can not be back-tracked to identify any single unique row.

Differential Privacy allows us to see the trend "Males age 45 are taller on average than Females age 45" but not say "User #155083 is age 45, weighs 195lbs, and lives in zipcode 10001"

That's a big difference in privacy, and while it isn't perfect it is a step in the right direction. While I wish more companies would adopt a no-data policy, it is at least better that they are responsible as can be with the data they have.

I'm unclear - how is this different than an eCommerce system (say Shopify or WooCommerce) that had a plugin to accept Eth?

Is it just that the registrations are handled in contracts too?

I'd have said not a chance.

I dealt with him a great deal in a previous business, he is an individual who is absolutely reputable. The kind of person where had he asked to borrow a decent sum of money, I'd have probably wired it to him without much of a second thought.

Further more, I know how much he loved this business and the Dogecoin community. From what I had heard, of his talks with investors and even the bank he used for the business, his top priority was always his users.

That's why, while it is shocking that he did this, I know it wasn't from malice.

I was a part of the Dogecoin community early on, and was a moderator of their sub-Reddit. I've helped organize with the fundraisers for sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to Sochi, and sponsoring a NASCAR driver, I even hosted a ridiculous art contest for the community. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin wasn't about being a financial investment, it was a community. It was about being part of something bigger than yourself, and doing something positive in a world that is sometimes pretty shitty.

When you consider that Mohland dedicated his life to that community and his work on the DogeTipBot, I have no doubt that it became a part of his identity. He didn't want to let people down, and that's not surprising. People make these mistakes all the time. Ask any father who tries to buy nice things for his kids while he is barely making ends meat. He'll stack on credit card debt, while forcing a smile to his wife and kids at dinner time because he doesn't want to let anyone down.

It sounds like Mohland was in the same boat. He thought he could pull through with something risky, but it didn't work, and when you are deep in on a gamble like there is this part of you that snaps and just keeps doubling-up because you are so afraid of what happens if it all comes crashing down.

It's probably been 2-3 years since I was last in touch with Mohland, but even after this I'd stand by the statement he IS a reputable man, he just made a mistake trying to save something he loved. I think this sentiment is echo'd most clearly in the messages of support, and not anger, that he received from the Dogecoin community. The same people who lost their money were posting requests to try and help keep DogeTipBot financially a float, and Mohland has outlined a payment plan to pay off everyone's debts over time and is allowing that process to be mediated by Dogecoin's creator.

In life we make mistakes, but that doesn't define the character of a man; their character is what is defined in the moments after.

Had no moral right. Did he have a legal right? That's more complicated.

(Still don't think he should have)

No. If a company let you store world of warcraft cold and took some of that gold they'd go out of business, but it wouldn't likely have straight forward legal ramifications unless their terms of service had very clear expectations of what "holding" your gold meant.

Further, in many digital assets like world of warcraft technically the creating company (Blizzard) still owns the asset regardless of what you do with it or where it goes.

If you are storing currency, that is legally defined as currency by your legal jurisdiction (usually the state level) then there are very specific rules for money transmission and money service business licensed businesses. And your accounts are insured upto the legal required amount of $100,000 by the FDIC.

However, many states have NOT classified cryptocurrency as a currency nor required exchanges and services operating solely in cryptocurrency to get a license as a financial service (different if it allows exchanging of crypto and traditional currency). Because of this it is unclear what the legal doctrine is that would apply to it.

Now if I had as you said "a jesus shaped collectable potato chip" in storage that belonged to you, can I sell it? That depends. For example, for a storage facility if your payments are late I certainly can. For plenty of digital assets accounts your funds are taken by the company after X days of inactivity. Then you have services like PayPal which terms of service allows them to freeze your accounts and keep the funds for anything that violates their terms of service (rules designed by them, which you agree to on sign up).

So was Dogetipbot in the legal clear for doing this? Probably not. There is some level of negligence, some level of consumer loss and can probably be a tort case. But was it flat out illegal? No. It was at worst a civil case, but that depends on their terms of service and the legal standing of cryptocurrency in various jurisdictions.

Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, not legal advice.

Terrible move, yes.

As for legality, that depends on jurisdiction. Cryptocurrencies are not recognized as a legal tender currency in many areas. In some areas they are, in other areas they are considered an asset like a stock, in others a collectable and in some places have no more legal rights than the gold you earn in World of Warcraft.

I agree he had no moral right to spend that money, but legal becomes highly debatable. It will be interesting to see if there are any small claims cases that rise out of it as it could actually push forward legislation on crypto.

I knew Mohland and the DogeTipbot project pretty well. He did have a few employees mostly working in customer support.

He was a stand-up guy and a strong advocate for the Dogecoin community. People are talking about the fact that he liquidated the assets from user wallets as a malicious action, and while I agree it was a terrible choice, I see it more as a bad decision.

Backed into a corner he tried to leverage a businesses asset holdings to keep it a float in time to recover. Depending on your jurisdiction this is something banks do all the time as part of your balance is not liquid and invested elsewhere.

The issue here is his business didn't recover and wasn't ever going to.

Last I heard Josh's plan was to keep the main part of the bot free and charge for websites and streamers to accept tips from the Dogecoin community. He wasn't an idiot like this article tries to portray. There was a reason he was keeping the consumer end of things free. But, the micropayment landscape had more competitive options than a niche currency.

All in all its sad to see the business fail but this was poor business choices, not maliciousness nor stupidity like the article tries to claim.

To be fair "Executive" means "A person or group having administrative or managerial authority in an organization."

Seniority of the product manager role depends on a number of factors. Sure, most FB product managers are not considered execs these days, but he was their first Product Manager responsible for ad targeting and then their advertising exchange all the way back in 2011. That probably brought with it a team, a good salary and a lot of sway.

Unlike the cookie-cutter 9-5 corporations of yesteryear, startups have been pretty loose with standard job naming convention. You can be fresh out of a BA and get called "CMO" or you can be a 20-year veteran leading a team making executive decisions and just be a "Product Specialist."

The responsibilities and compensation define executives far more than titles.

Considering how much institutes pay for journal licenses or the $20 - $50 I pay for a single article, I don't have much of an issue with $8 a month to find the right article.

Not to mention, you can still find articles for free if the keyword is in the title or keyword abstract so the $8 a month isn't necessary.

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. With a growing amount of works coming from poorly paid adjuncts, while journals, publishers and institutions continue to rake in huge money, it'd be good to see some of this flowing back to the researchers who work to support the open access of knowledge.

And employees complain today if they don't have a fridge stocked with free Jamba Juice!

More that half the browsers I experience crash or freeze on a constant basis, and yet Chrome seems to handle it in significantly more cases.

I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings.

I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes.

I think the Servo project is the biggest chance that Mozilla has to make an impact in its "Internet for the people mantra."

As a non-dev I will do my part by guinea pigging nightly builds and submitting issues!

Clearly you have never faced the wrath of a small town town-council member who has the ability to ratify by-laws and knows everyone in town by their first name!

I pity the high-priced lawyer who thinks he can battle small towns. It'd be easier to battle a big city regulator any day.

Right? This is an odd choice. Google just built their massive new campus in Waterloo, and University of Waterloo is one of the best engineer schools and computer science schools in the world, but they build this an hour away in a market that is much more expensive? An odd choice for sure.

So there is the version of "anonymized" that most companies currently use which is as you say 'depersonalized' - they remove your personal information and think it is safe, but data is still tied together in unique records. (i.e. your name is replaced with an ID number)

Then there is actually 'anonymized' data which would be the release of data in which you cannot in anyway identify a user. An example that comes to mind for me is the census releasing aggregate stats such as "14% of American's speak language X."

If the census instead had records of each American line by line, listing which language they speak and other associated factors about them then this data is likely to paint a unique picture of the individual even if their personal information like name and address were removed.

I think most data is very hard, if not impossible, to truly anonymize. Even if the search history that gets sold wasn't broken out into history per tuple/record, then you could still identify at least a few trends in it.

Does that make more sense? But yes, I agree that these companies are more attempting to 'de-personalize' data for the sake of research, but, that is far from anonymous and naming it as such is misleading to the public.

Wow only 30 links, that is both impressive and horrifying.

I have very few tweets < 200, but I think you can find 30 outbound links in my first 50 posts since most of my use for it was sharing interesting articles.

Can you imagine combining that with something else as simple as which Oauth apps someone has approved in Twitter? You'd reach near 100% accuracy in no time.

The zip code was intentionally not anonymized because it was seen as acceptable to release, and that is part of the issue of anonymized data.

US Zip codes serve around 7,500 per code on average (US Census 2010) which is different than common wealth postal codes like in Canada where they serve an average of 19 households (25 - 75 people).

But, zip data can be interchanged with plenty of other unique identifiers on the web. Maybe it is browser language setting, or version of java etc.

Think of it like an Excel spread sheet, if in column A you can have options "1" or "2" then in a list of 100 people there will be at least 50 who share the same data footprint. If you keep adding columns from B onward with the same logic eventually you'll have pretty unique strings.

Things like searching history or web history are even worse. Ever done a search for a pizza place near your address, or Google map directions from your home to another location? That identifies you pretty easily. So does connecting to your works website, and the school your kid attends. Web browsing data is nearly impossible to anonymize by its nature unless it was compiled to something like "XX% of users in Zip XXXXXX visited website.com"

As for differential privacy, it is a nice emerging theory, but there are challenges with it as there is a significant trade off right now in terms of data accuracy when applying differential privacy. It is primarily effective at casting doubt on if variable "A" about user "B" in a data set is true or not, but if you don't have a specific target or specific metric then enough of the data is true that it could still in theory be deanonymized, and since most of the anonymity is based on incorrect variables in a data-set, all it would take to reverse engineer it is a large enough data-set and a few known variables.

I hope people like Apple continue to champion the advancement of differential privacy though - it is a major step in the right direction. But, being able to buy browsing history, even in aggregate does not protect individuals.

This article fails to take into account that time and time again we've seen that 'anonyimized aggregate data' is never truly anonymous.

In the AOL anonimized data leak there were plenty of individuals identified:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html

MIT researchers also showed that four anonymous purchases are enough metadata to identify 90% of individuals:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/536501/data-sets-not-so-a...

And, a personal favorite of mine where researchers from Standford and Princeton are reporting at the World Wide Web Conference this April: "Researchers found that they could identify the person behind an 'anonymized' data set 70% of the time just by comparing their browsing data to [often public] social media activities"

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170123/08125136548/one-m...

It would not be hard to buy a zipcode worth of data and compare it to known facts about a person until you de-anonymized it.

You're asking a question about how your company should continue on in its legacy when you haven't even started it yet.

Just get started. Over the span of your working lifetime the approaches to this are going to change a great deal, and you can always change your approach later on.

But, at the end of the day start a private company so you eliminate the concern of being pushed towards maximizing profit. If later you need to take on investment, take on small minority investments from groups that truly believe in the same goals you do.

If the company is mostly kept in your control, then when you decide to retire you can appoint a replacement who truly holds the same values you do and allow it to continue in that vein.

Doing good and making money are not mutually exclusive. The problem becomes when companies aggressively try to maximize their returns by sacrificing their product or their users. A modern corporation is kind of pushed this way especially after IPOs or in situations of minority control - but, if the individual at the helm and those invested in the product truly believe in the mission then it is easy to meet the standards of fiduciary duty (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty) whilst remaining true to a social good mission.

I'm fortunate to work at a company where members of our team strongly believe in our mission, and so does our CEO and investors. I think if that runs through the veins of your company it will be fine long term. You just need to ask yourself, would this person I am hiring sell out value X for $Y - as long as the answer is no then you're good to go.

So:

Step 1: Actually start your business. Stop worrying and dive in.

Step 2: Do social good, start to make some money.

Step 3: Hire people with as much belief in the mission as you have.

Step 4: Retain as much private control of the company as possible, or seek investors who believe deeply in your mission.

Step 5: Do more social good - because we need more of that in the world!

Disclaimer: I work at DuckDuckGo and this is on our company blog at spreadprivacy.com

At DuckDuckGo our overall goal is to raise the standard of trust online. To do that we've focused heavily on search, but try and support organizations that push privacy forward in other ways.

For the 7th year in a row, we've announced our donations to organizations and FOSS projects that help keep everyone a little safer in our digital world.

Donation Recipients:

$100,000 - Freedom of the Press Foundation

$75,000 - World Privacy Forum

$29,000 - Whisper Systems

$25,000 - Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

$25,000 - Tor

$25,000 - Electronic Frontier Foundation

$5000 - American Civil Liberties Union

$5000 - Access Now

$2500 - The Calyx Institute

$2500 - Center for Democracy & Technology

$1000 - Restore the Fourth

$1000 - Patient Privacy Rights

$1000 - Online Trust Alliance

$1000 - Tech Freedom

$1000 - Demand Progress

This is an interesting project. As someone who has struggled up and down with weight at different times in my life I know having structure has been a huge benefit. Having plans that fit my needs is the most challenging and offloading that would be a huge time saver. I'd be an ideal target customer for you, but, based on the MVP today I'm not ready to buy.

Here are a few pieces of feedback/considerations:

1) 'Automated Accountability' is very unclear. Many consumers look at your pricing table first and may not read into more details. Consider A|B testing clear language around this or letting people hover over for a description?

2) I'm not 100% about the legal situation in various US states, but, in Canada for example meal plans and exercise plans should come from registered professionals (Personal Trainers, and Registered Dietitians or Registered Nutritionists). You may reduce your legal liabilities and increase consumer confidence if you have these people involved in your project even as advisers. If that is the case currently, consider making it more clear.

3) Some level of "About Us" seems crucial. In the health industry a lot of people by into the "why". What is your expertise or story that makes you the right choice for them.

For Geek Fitness (http://www.geekfitness.net/) it was personal weight loss stories.

For Jenny Craig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Craig,_Inc.) it was Monika Lewinsky [et al] whose stories put them on the map.

For Janet Jacks (http://discoverthepoweroffood.ca/) it was helping combat her husbands diabetes.

For Joe Cross (http://www.rebootwithjoe.com/) it was reclaiming his health from weight challenges and skin issues (and making it into a great documentary).

What's your story that will connect personally with the struggles of these individuals? They need something to say "Hey, that's where I am at. If it works for them it could work for me!"

4) $6 seems low for personalized meal plans. In fact, it seems too low. Personalization is a premium product. As a consumer I'd be skeptical that anyone is spending any time validating meal plans at that price point. For $6 introduce generic meal plans for weight loss. Charge me a premium price for personalization. You make more money and I have more faith.

5) Do you account for allergies or health issues? If I am diabetic would there be too many carbs or sugars for me? It's worth thinking about. I would estimate that those who pay a premium for personalization are those under-served by automated solutions currently. Having one customer who pays $45 a month for a well personalized plan is much easier to manage than 45 $1 a month customers!

Best of luck!

In a lot of cases their clients are businesses who bulk buy the keys, brand them and provide them to their customers either for free or at a discounted price.

Those companies are usually financial services, online games with monthly subscriptions, and corporate IT/Security services. So they have a high customer LTV and the investment is worth it for them.

Yubico was smart to go after that market. It is costly to design, mould, manufacture, sell and support a hardware product, even something as small as this. Since you don't want your 2FA company to go out of business there is good value in knowing they have a stable business model that can actually support a company rather than just burning capital.

Does anyone have insights on how to refine this to only monitor specific elements of the page rather than the entire page?

I may not care if they change a template but would care if they change a price or a warrant canary etc?