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dataewanon Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data?

Differential privacy is an area that makes some guarantees about not letting personal information about individuals escape. Might be a useful technique as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

Agree that strong guarantees about privacy aren't achievable.

dataewanon Syberia – Make R a production-ready language for deployable machine learning

We've tried using docker to put R applications into production. I'm no docker expert, and I found it pretty easy to do.

A couple of pointers: - If you have a dependency on a library like blast that takes a long time to compile, you can make a base docker image that already has that library installed. That makes iteration quicker, as you'll only need to build that base image once.

- If you put a web interface on the image using shiny, then it is straightforward to deploy it for your users to interact with.

dataewanon We ditched Google Analytics

http://snowplowanalytics.com/ is worth considering if you have larger volumes of traffic

dataewanon Maps that illustrate the global economy

That is exactly the method they use. Calculate the centre of economic gravity, then project it onto the closest point on the surface of the globe.

Here is a nice analysis that does the same process in a more intuitive way. It calculates the centre of economic gravity in 2D map coordinates. This gives results that are easier to understand, because everyone's used to looking at 2D maps.

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/djv/world_economic_center...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034394

dataewanon Show HN: Spotify International Pricing Index

Nice.

It might be better for the upper map to select a colour scale that has a zero point on it - this would represent countries that have the same price as the dollar.

A diverging colour scale would make it easier to distinguish which countries are cheaper and which are more expensive. For example:

http://colorbrewer2.org/?type=diverging&scheme=BrBG&n=7

dataewanon MLB.com is using my Google Analytics code

You can apply a filter to your view.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en-GB

Note that this doesn't apply retrospectively to your data, so it will only apply to data collected after you make a change. You might want to create an advanced segment which filters out these domains, or only includes the ones that you want.

https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/analytics/features/advanced...

dataewanon Nfu: Command-line Numeric Fu

Very interesting toolset. A similar toolset cropped up a wee while ago [0], might be good to integrate the two?

Using unix tools for data processing seems to work well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412190

dataewanon United Kingdom: The Anomaly In Google's Revenue

I'm not sure I understand that point correctly. The Republic of Ireland isn't part of the United Kingdom.