Viewing profile — georgefox

This is a fascinating discussion, to which I have little to add, except this. Quoting the article (including the footnote): > [I]f you carefully craft random data so that it does n…

I'm probably nitpicking your language, but L1 regularization is precisely that: regularization. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(mathematics)#R... .) In your typi…

Releasing any data or statistic based on sensitive data--even once--bears a privacy risk. The primary purpose of differential privacy is to quantify that risk, both for a single re…

One of the interesting insights in differential privacy is that to provide privacy protections that can't be reverse-engineered, the process has to be random rather than determinis…

16 in 10 is a startling overrepresentation.

Hmm, yeah. The linked video from the Globe and Mail says to avoid surfing the web during the procedure, but avoiding explicitly going to Facebook and Twitter (their examples, IIRC)…

A few of these articles are suggesting that uploads be performed from public places (e.g., Starbucks) for the sake of anonymity/deniability. But it would seem that performing these…

Talk to a typical owner of an old house, and you'll likely hear something about how they love its quirks. But would they build a house the same way today? Some probably would, but …

Just to be clear, I didn't mean my comment as a broad defense of zoning laws. Rather, I think it's only fair to consider that there's a very large difference between the relevance …

This comment likely also misses the point, but the zoning laws are not really intended to cover situations where the entire city is destroyed and rebuilt. Realistically, if the cit…

I wouldn't mind a pause button.

http://www.odni.gov/index.php/carousel-items/916-the-intelli...

It appears the answer to the first question is yes: http://www.odni.gov/index.php/carousel-items/916-the-intelli... As for the second question, yes, it does seem strange.

I don't want to disagree with you, but I suspect there's more to this than just idle time. For example, there are plenty of retirement communities where idle time is the norm, and …

Are there any government services you see as valuable?

> First of all the comment he was replying to was talking about services like housing, transportation, and healthcare, which already are provided by the market and aren't really th…

Monopolies are really hard to avoid, which makes your statement seem a bit logically inconsistent. Combine that with the impossibility of avoiding services like military protection…

It was never stated that the each of the men at the urinals was overtly taking photos of the next. The author has no way of knowing whether or not the men wearing the glasses and b…

> For the sake of argument, let's assume that the super-rich spend the same or a similar proportion of their income on necessities as everyone else (meaning that they buy more food…

That's a good point and seemingly common reasoning (at least around here), but it does raise some chicken–egg questions.

Welcome to a very individualistic and, by consequence, antisocial society. As an American that's never stepped foot in California, this sounds surprisingly familiar, albeit with th…

I get your point, but it may be a bit of a stretch to label governments providing things like roads socialist.

You can test it online at pex4fun.com. Here are two tests, one using a function that takes built-in types as parameters and instantiates a Thing to operate on, and a second that ta…

Sensible, perhaps, but I may not have figured that out if it weren't pointed out to me.