dweinus

From the original article: "If you exclude children from the numbers..., then 36% of poor people work at least 27 weeks/year" The argument that the poor don't want to work hinges on this number. This number does not take into account the disabled, retired, or otherwise unable to work who disproportionately fall into poverty.

As someone formerly below the poverty line, I take great issue with the statement that the poor do not want to work.

To put this back in terms of the updated graph from the CBO: even a menial job offers the potential to possibly move out of the poverty range with time. Between $20k and $30k the Disposable Income line tracks very closely to the Real Earnings line, meaning that the incentive is high. In a more practical sense, the difference between having $20k in disposable income and $28k is actually very palpable. Living in poverty is a hardship that defies the rationality he suggests.

I don't disagree with your points at all, but for what it is worth, they say they will be opening the source "Soon"[1] and have started populating a Github account[2].

1. https://getsyme.com/faq

2. https://github.com/symeapp

They should try using tf-idf to create the initial representation of the keywords per post...also, I find there are many cases where applying machine learning/statistics correctly is harder than it looks, this single case not withstanding.

There's another reference when Bender meets Flexo: they get excited because they both have serial numbers that can be expressed as the sum of 2 cubes.

Thank you, I stand corrected! Thanks to the other commenter with the study link too.

From the LA Times article: "Using information posted to genealogy websites and other publicly available Internet resources, the Whitehead Institute researchers were able to ferret out the names of nearly 50 people"

They don't link the study, so it is hard to tell, but it appears that what actually happened is they used self-reported identifying information linked to DNA entries.

It's not apparent that they did any genetic analysis whatsoever.

That is still certainly a privacy attack vector, but one on par with getting your email hacked because you always use your birthday as you password.

...or do people use Facebook more when slipping into a more depressed state? Their method is crafted to find the reverse relationship, but I don't think that they properly defended against confusing the two.

The linked study goes into much greater detail: http://jonahberger.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ViralityB....

If the NSA has the logs of ISPs that carry one third of the world's traffic, couldn't they execute the attack without running any Tor nodes? Or am I misunderstanding the onion protocol?

Right on, I get that, but truthy(NaN) and truthy(5) both return true, so you still don't know if the calculation isNaN.

Btw, I should have said first: I love the article in general and it's great to see these techniques becoming more mainstream in javascript. Thank you!

Sorry to nitpick, but I got hung up right at the beginning with his "truthy" function.

It returns true on values such as NaN, zero, or an empty string. I don't think I'm alone in considering those to be "falsy" values, for example:

http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-truthy-falsy/

I would just like to say, as someone who has gone through a similar probation program, that dopamean is absolutely correct.

This may be better than a conviction, but Kiera is not out of the woods and this moment of hijinks at age 14 may follow her for life. At least she has popular support and the attention of the media, many young Americans face these laws without that benefit and it is a scary road to walk.

I love the idea and it's a beautiful site...which quickly brings my browser (chrome) to a grinding halt.

Hopefully I'm just an edge case while the project is young?

They may both be accepted, but as your link notes, the singular is avoided by most publications, and I think for good reason. The singular is not logical. In the case of "information", the word is already in singular form and describes a group, much like the word "flock" is a singular group of birds. On the other hand, "data" is a plural form of "datum". It follows that describing a group of data using a singular construction should require a different word or phrase, such as "data set".

Most data AREN'T big.