ghgr

A way to sell in an imperfect market is with branding. You, as the seller (or manufacturer), won't risk your hard earned reputation by selling a couple of lemons. Something like in the kitchen appliances market. You can't try a dishwasher nor a washing machine at the shop, but you know that you cannot go wrong with Bosch (no affiliation, I'm just satisfied with them).

The interesting part in my opinion is that in the mattress market this branding system seems not to work.

> I would no longer be checking work e-mail and instant messages on my mobile device unless the company chose to pay for a company-owned device

Interestingly enough, where I work is unthinkable to check your work email in your personal smartphone, both because workers won't accept working in their free time and because it goes against the company security policy (writing your password in a personal, spyware ridden device? _shrugs_). Maybe we should start outright refusing to perform work activities during personal time.

> This of course is the Spanish word for "and",

I'm confused. The Spanish word for "and" is "y". Maybe you meant that hams use "es" instead of "is"?

Science seems to support this view. From https://tedsummaries.com/2014/09/05/paul-piff-does-money-mak... :

> Paul shows us footage of a psychological experiment – a rigged 2 player monopoly game where they randomly pick one player to be more wealthy. The wealthy player starts with more money, gets double the income for passing GO, and moves more often. [...] After the game they were asked why they won – and they’d talk about their own actions & strategy, rather than reflecting on the advantages given at the start.

The dynamics of trust in large communities is indeed interesting. I found an interactive explanation about how fragile it can be. http://ncase.me/trust/

I've been reading its reviews and I can't honestly say if they are machine generated or not. They are so generic that they'd work for any app. Examples:

> This chrome extension saves my time. Just love it. Very very useful thing I have ever got.

> It's a awesome app and work effectively. I try to use in my all work. It's truly a great extension

> Highly recommended extension. I am so much impressed with it. In one word it’s great.

> This extension has improved my work efficiently. I am very much comfort in every time for this extension. In one word it's best.

> Its relax to run. Totally a WOW app. Looking forward for more updates. Thanks.

> This is one awesome app that I have come across so far. The functions and features available are outstanding. I love it ..!

And now some with basic context awareness (the word "Read" from "Readlax - Speed Reading"). Examples:

> Speed reading apps is a very enjoyable to run. Its simple instructions will make you comfortable to use it. Just loved it.

> Its a awesome app that makes reading speedy easier and interesting. Highly recommend.

> I am very much happy to get it. I faced difficulties when I used other apps. But after getting this it makes my reading so simple and flexible.

> This app makes my reading very speedy. I highly recommend it. Best app ever.

I'm inclined to believe that they are spam. But surely Google won't allow that, right?

Even worse. I went to a horrible, horrible hotel in Prague (which at the time was the #1 result, don't know if still is). My (obviously) bad review, while polite and with pictures attached, was ignored after 3 weeks in limbo. Not explicitly refused, no explanation. Just poof, never happened. And support is also ignoring my questions. All that being a "Genius" user. Unfortunately I don't have Twitter so no public-shaming-user-support.

Be careful with reviews. They might not be fake but certainly arbitrarily filtered.

I often find myself going to Wikipedia to find out what the company is supposed to do.

> [...] where a Tesla crashed into a concrete barrier[1] [...]

Of course it should never have happened. Still, I'm impressed by how gracefully it handled the accident; emergency lights, keeping the lane and slowly braking the vehicle to a halt (again, such frontal collision was still unacceptable).

Backdoors in software is one of those nightmarish scenarios that disturbs you until you just think about something else and kind of temporarily forget it (like nuclear war, killer bees, climate change or asteroid impact). Open Source just raises the bar but in no way solves these problems (for example OpenSSH's roaming feature/bug, OpenSSL and Heartbleed). In computing one can quickly become paranoid: software buttons for switching smartphones off (are they 'really' off?), always-on microphones, webcams (granted, you can cover it), blobs in your smartphone and home router, downloads from http://download.cnet.com (note the lack of https), winscp, putty from www.putty.org (again, no https, which is not even the actual site, but nevertheless the first result from Google). In Linux the landscape is slightly better, but do you really trust all those packagers? Do you really understand each line of code when you "git clone foo; cd foo; ./configure; make; sudo make install"?, and in X11 you can easily make a key-logger without even being root! [1]. And not even full disk encryption can protect us (Evil Maid [2]).

That's one of the reasons I'm skeptical of the Ethereum smart-contract concept. In theory it works, but in practice I'm not sure at all. The DAO heist was one early example of security bugs in smart contracts, but I fear they will become more common when malware developers turn to "contract-engineering".

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/301646/linux-keylogger-witho...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/evil_maid_att...

Indeed, here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY

> It's always easier to write 1000 words to say something than 100 to say it well.

As (probably) Pascal said: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter".

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

I found that confusing, too. I guess that's the best you can expect if you train your model in such an unrealistically balanced dataset. Put it differently. If I had 100% accuracy at detecting depression in a dataset of depressed people, how well will run this "detector" at detecting depression in the real world? Well, being 'd' the incidence of depression:

P(being depressed | trivial detector said so) = d * 1.0 / 1.0 = d

Line 210: > "Gay and heterosexual people were represented in equal numbers."

According to Gallup Polling, around 4% of the American population is homosexual. So, let's be generous and say that their classifier has a 80% accuracy given balanced inputs while humans have 60%.

Let's sample 100 people of the dataset, 50 of which are homosexual (and the rest heterosexual). If the classifier has 80% accuracy (let's assume false_positive_rate = false_negative_balance since I didn't find information about that), it means that 80 people were correctly classified, 10 heterosexuals were misclassified as homosexuals and 10 homosexuals as heterosexuals.

According to the Bayes theorem, "Given a random person, probability of being homosexual assuming that the classifier said so" = "Probability of being homosexual of a random person (the so-called prior)" <times> "Probability of classifier saying it's homosexual, assuming it's indeed homosexual <divided by> "Given a random person, probability of saying it's homosexual".

Substituting, we get: P = 0.04 * 0.8 / 0.5 = 0.064

If instead of the classifier we use human "feeling", we get: P=0.04 * 0.6 / 0.5 = 0.048

In summary, 4% of the people are homosexual. If a human thinks someone is homosexual, the probability "increases" to 4.8%. If on the contrary their algorithm believes it's homosexual, the probability of actually being homosexual increases to 6.4%.

Not very groundbreaking...

> Because dapps are publicly audit-able [...]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that auditing a Dapp is far from trivial. Only the bytecode is stored in the blockchain, and even if the source code is published, it's hard to see if it corresponds to the published bytecode (and even then, FOSS still have bugs, remember OpenSSH and its latest security bugs). From [1]:

> Q: How can I verify that a contract on the blockchain matches the source code?

> A: AFAIK the best way to do this at the moment is to compile the source code again with the exact same compiler version the author used (so this is something that needs to be disclosed) and to compare the bytecode. (Thomas Bertani @ StackExchange)

In addition, in the source code itself a contract programmer could implement "contractual" backdoors... ahem.. loopholes. And you'll have no recourse.

[1] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/195/how-can-i-v...

Directly from Wikipedia [1]:

> In July 2013, it was reported that Panther Energy Trading LLC was ordered to pay $4.5 million to U.S. and U.K. regulators on charges that the firm's high-frequency trading activities manipulated commodity markets. Panther's computer algorithms placed and quickly canceled bids and offers in futures contracts including oil, metals, interest rates and foreign currencies, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said.[109] In October 2014, Panther's sole owner Michael Coscia was charged with six counts of commodities fraud and six counts of "spoofing". The indictment stated that Coscia devised a high-frequency trading strategy to create a false impression of the available liquidity in the market, "and to fraudulently induce other market participants to react to the deceptive market information he created".[110]

I guess it's HFT if it's executed fast enough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading#Strateg...

I use the Python library WebSocketClient. Here is the code: https://github.com/ghgr/HFT_Bitcoin/blob/master/download_boo...

sure! I just updated my profile

It's great how readily available financial data is with cryptocurrencies! As a complement to this post, I've been recently working with Jupyter notebooks to analyze high-frequency trading activity in Bitcoin markets [1]. I've been listening to the GDAX socket since end July, so I have almost a month's worth of tick data (~ 7GB+ gzip compressed JSON data, it surely explodes to ~100 GB after extracting). If somebody is interested to carry out further analysis I can give you a link to download it.

[1] https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/ghgr/HFT_Bitcoin/blob/ma...

Not necessarily a miner collusion in China, just one of the authorized miners spinning 1,000 EC2 instances to make a 51% attack.

The "Where" filter doesn't seem to work:

Where: Germany "We couldn't find any results. Select other filters, or let us know if we miss a conference."

Where: Cologne, Germany "Pirate Summit - Cologne, GermanySep 6 - 7"

> What is needed is a joint common language

Great! I propose Spanish, being the second most spoken language by number of native speakers (behind Chinese), and given the relevance of Spain through history in Europe.

(this comment was only half joking. It's easy to impose a global language when it's yours, but you see, it's a different story when you need to learn a different one).

What you describe is very similar to the concept of Differentiable Neural Computer, from DeepMind [1]. While still experimental they already have nice results.

[1] https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-computers/

I hear you. I guess long form journalism has its place, but for me it's in the library next to the novels. When reading news I want to go straight to the point. In fact, I'd pay for an API that returns an array of news, and for each one the Five Ws (and 1H) [1] in a machine readable format, at most two sentences long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

Adult neural networks cannot understand that.

Do you know GapMinder[1]? I think that's what you are looking for.

[1] https://www.gapminder.org/

Choose two:

    Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.

    Secure: Any entity in the system can act maliciously, including the majority of the entities or the available computational power.

    Decentralized: There is still only one, unique and specific entity to which a name resolves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

"1 nautical mile = one minute of Earth's longitude"

... along the Equator

As an engineer and son of a doctor, I trust the human surgeon more.

Surely you'll find interesting Stockfighter [1], a trading game developed by three members of this community; Erin Ptacek (elptacek), Thomas Ptacek (tptacek) and Patrick McKenzie (patio11).

[1] https://www.stockfighter.io