proofofstake

Facebook collects on you when you interact with their systems

I do not think this is true. What happens with my e-mail address when someone else signs up to Facebook and shares their contact list (with my e-mail address in it)?

How did Facebook know who my friends are the very moment I signed in, without sharing my address list?

They already have collected information on my social graph, without my own explicit permission, but with implicit permission from less tech-savy friends.

And that's nothing to say about people tagging me in Facebook pictures to train their giant DeepFace algorithm.

In both scenario's I am not accessing or interacting with a Facebook system, while my information is still being abused.

I am in this Kafka-esque situation where I try to get an account deleted that is not even mine. I don't have and want a Facebook account, but Facebook does not agree.

I few years back I started receiving mail for an account that I never created. The name is not close to mine, but a silly sexual pun.

I have mailed security and account support multiple times, asking for the account to be deleted, or decoupled from my email address, because I keep getting login attempt notifications and even friend suggestions.

Just checking, and coincidentally the very last email is one for the Facebook account. "Hey, it seems you are having trouble logging in! Click here to sign in.". Yes, Facebook, someone, for whatever reason, is trying to log in to a Facebook account for 4 years now, and won't take no for an answer... "If this wasn't you, please let us know by clicking here". Ok, Facebook, this is not me, and it was not me the last 10 times I clicked that button.

(I now assume, that this account is somehow being used to mine my social connections. Something like a public ghost account.)

Timeline:

2013: Hi Fuck, you got more friends on Facebook than you realize! List of 6 people I know IRL.

2013: Hi Fuck, you have 1 friendship request. Log in to accept.

2013: Do you know [3 people I know]?

2013: Hi Fuck, Fuck placed something on your timeline and is waiting to see it.

2013: Do you know [9 people I know]?

2014: We've updated our Terms of Service

2015: Someone asked a new password for your account.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems someone tried logging into your account from a new location.

2017: Hey Fuck, we received your request to reset your account password. XXXXX is your reset code.

2017: Fuck, go back to Facebook in just one click.

2017: Hey Fuck, it seems you are having trouble logging in.

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v67/li17a.html is pretty good.

Scientists from fields that rely on data, like physics, often do well as data scientists.

I myself like Information Science more than Data Science, but I do not care that much for semantics. There was a need to specify a role of someone who makes sense out of data, gathers insights, using the tools from mathematics, computer science, statistics, and information theory. It's also a different type of science, data-driven science, as opposed to theoretical/metaphysical, empirical, or computational science.

There was an old joke that AI stood for Advanced Informatics. I think the commercialization of the term "AI" is a bit harmful and obfuscating. Companies tumble over one another to market their professionals as Applied AI or their products as AI. AI is the automation of human thought. It includes philosophy and cognitive science, both fields seem completely missing for applied AI.

I know many AI researchers already switched to calling themselves ML researchers a few years back. This, because the field of AI became muddied with futurist adherents of the Singularity. Did not help that the public perception of AI is somewhere between "Skynet is coming!" and "AI will take my job". Nowadays, ML is also heavily saturated and hyped beyond repair. Meanwhile the field of AI has not even solved the common sense problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonsense_knowledge_(artific...

But that's putting the cart before the horse. You need the ICO to get enough investment to build out your platform, when you have a fully functioning platform, who still needs investment?

And if a platform is a prerequisite: Just build the barest possible platform MVP, much like a pre-launch landing page.

See also this 1996 NSA paper "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash", predating both Hashcash and Bit gold.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...

(and OP seems factually correct: Satoshi was the inventor of Bitcoin).

Nice quip. To stick with analogy: Some people in this thread are in the 70s, telling record companies to ignore the disco genre entirely, because it is a fad that can't last more than a decade. Instead, telling them to stick with what they know: 50s rock and roll.

A slot machine is known to give a 200% ROI and allow a single pull each day. You play this slot machine every day for 500 days, until you notice it stops rewarding you.

Then someone says: "Look I told you so, I've been telling everyone for 2000 days now: This slot machine will crash one day!". And you say: "Ok. You were right. Guess the party couldn't last forever. Thanks for the warning!". Out of habit you play for 30 more days, but the rewards stay gone, so you exit with some nice profit.

Meanwhile, the other person knew of the existence of a highly profitable slot machine, while it was still profitable, but never actually played it, because they feared that one day it may not be profitable anymore.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/stratis/

Agreed, and there probably will be a year where nearly all coins tank. It would be foolish to invest all your profits back into the market, year after year.

But should this stop you (or any investment firm) to seriously look at the profit potential here? What do you get for correctly calling the bubble in 3 years? Nothing.

I agree with:

The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.

so I do not see how my post was wrong. These are the numbers. With such numbers, it would be foolish to discard the crypto market as "too volatile" and stick with stocks.

There are crypto coins that did way better than Strat, but there was not enough volume to make a decent profit. Even Doge did 260%. The only "loser" is STEEM with a 80% ROI.

ROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today:

- All Bitcoin: ~500%

- Mix of top market: ~2800%

- All Strat: ~13500%

Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.

why it took them this long

There is no direct business value in banning users from your platform. In fact, doing so is a short-term net negative.

This is also why Twitter was so slow to ban bots: you gain a fraction of satisfaction for your users that interact with annoying bots, at the cost of dwindling user numbers.

suspending accounts that are politically opposing to their worldview

Because highly visible users of their platform (verified celebrities) started DMing the CEO and threatened to leave if bullies were not dealt with. Creating a safe space for the social elite is very much adding business value to Twitter and makes investors happy.

I think Twitter just awaited the US government reaction, and took as long as the law / future business prospects allowed them. That Twitter propaganda has become a major problem for the intelligence agencies and anti-terrorism units is evident. It takes a long time to properly deal with these problems, just like Twitter will probably take years to combat astro-turfing bots meddling with a foreign election (which seems to me, the logical next step in the evolution of mass automatic banning of problematic accounts).

While not quite planning, announcements do occur. Found a large number of accounts connected to the attackers from:

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

when it was ongoing.

Minutes before the attack:

#texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."

Minutes after:

Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.

Also saw Salafists retweet an old cartoon by Charlie Hebdo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hours before the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred.

I'm divided about this issue. One the one hand, I've seen accounts that glorify the Paris attacks and link to bomb making materials, on the other hand, I've seen lots of video's from Syria and Palestine which does indeed radicalize youth, but is also not directly terrorist propaganda (a lot of this is newsworthy, but does not end up in the news, so it is valuable to share on social media). Should linking to an Anwar al-Awlaki video be grounds for a ban? Remember, these videos are on Youtube.

I like to think back 10-15 years when people had to self-host their websites. Stuff that, back then, would surely get you a knock on the door, slips through daily on social networks. I say: If you can't host it yourself, you can't rely on a third party to host it for you and protect your anonymity.

So yes, chase them underground, and apply more serious tracking to those that are acting more seriously (someone on Telegram writing about terrorism is way more serious than someone on Twitter writing about terrorism). Try to keep social media free of war propaganda. And be careful to not overdo it. America is a country where writing a Facebook post about Apple interspersed with quotes from Fight Club can get you SWATted [1].

[1] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/06/ny-man-uses-fight-club-quot...

An example of what I was aiming at is to use ML methods like deep nets to detect early-onset diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness and at least 90% of new cases could be reduced with early detection and proper treatment. [1]

Especially in third world countries where there is no eye doctor in sight, these cheap automated methods can be deployed on a mobile phone and achieve near-human expert level accuracy. [2]

Then organizations like Watsi can use data science and predictive modeling to reduce fraud and get both detection and treatments to those most in need. [3]

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

[2] http://blog.kaggle.com/2015/09/09/diabetic-retinopathy-winne...

[3] https://dssg.uchicago.edu/

About IBM Watson, the entire thing is unfortunate, I completely agree. Their marketing department upsold IBM Watson for cancer treatment. But I know that a lot of great research scientists worked at IBM on Watson. What they were doing was legit advancing machine learning too. That's the thing about marketing: if IBM were to deploy 10.000 phones with a neural net to improve early detection of disease in a third world country, I probably won't even hear about it, and I work with ML. But for IBM Watson, everybody and their grandmother goes: That's the AI that beat Jeopardy. It's a thin line between being majorly successful in marketing and crossing the line into damaging your reputation and goodwill (or in this case: the entire ML industry).

Sure there is! ML helps with medical diagnosis, cures, and treatment, ML helps automate services that are unavailable to third world countries, ML helps catch criminals, money laundering, and fraudsters, ML saves wasteful energy consumption, ML improves customer support, ML helps optimize resources to focus on those in immediate need, ML supports science like high-energy physics, ML creates a new generation of digital artists.

All good uses of ML, but maybe not so sexy.

I bet the majority of ML is used neutrally: to add business value to a company. Depending on your view of capitalism of course.

Please, make it possible to directly report or ban automated DM messages from bots/apps.

There is probabilistic vs. deterministic cross-device tracking.

Deterministic assigns a unique device identifier to each device and then uses more data to connect device IDs to an individual.

Probabilistic cross-device tracking uses machine learning algorithms to match up devices and identities. For this they can use basically any data that you happen to give them, including behavioral data (you check a website both at home and during transit on your mobile phone, you use the mouse to select text during reading an article, you accidentally gave an application access to your location data and they have resold this, etc.). Probabilistic cross-device tracking can work with and without cookies. Of course ad companies employing these techniques for their customers claim very optimistic accuracy, but know that the accuracy is at least accurate enough to provide them with useful tracking data on individuals. This accuracy will go up if you push ad companies in a corner and confront them with a 10% (or whatever marketshare Apple browsers have) non-cookie-able surfers (as opposed to a fringe small sample of users that block cookies and did so for years).

When cookies got banned/required permission in Europe, European websites just started buggering everyone to accept cookies before you were able to read what you were coming for. While everyone already had the option to only allow cookies from trusted domains, now everybody gets pestered with giant pop-ups. Companies also switched to server-side analytics/tracking, or started requiring log-in to track you.

If cookies were accepted, one could just join a cookie swap program to mess with the advertisers. Probabilistic cross-device tracking is very hard to avoid, as not using javascript and a general browser like TorBrowser is also an informative fingerprint. And you can't realistically change your browsing habits, which exposes you to gender and age identification (they need this to identify individuals in a household using a single IP).

The end result for the customer is that the ad industry will switch to cross-device tracking for everyone.

Right now, you had an option to opt-out, by setting cookies to block. You were relatively safe.

Now the default will become a net of machine learning algorithms which can track you cross-device without requiring cookies. It is not possible to safeguard against that, unless you completely randomize your online browsing behavior.

Maybe in the short term, longer term it is no trouble. ICOs are far from the main use case for Ethereum. Speculation is driven by the price not close to matching the price if/when the technology matures. If anything, most ICOs pull money from Ethereum, they don't make the price go up.

Being interested in tokens for their "features" not the price is very archaic. This also does not happen with stocks anymore: People hold for a few months/days/minutes, then sell, they don't sit on stock for many years like we used to.

My guess: China will allow ICOs after drafting up proper legislation and regulation. It would not benefit China's economy to blanket ban a new emerging technology. They just want to prevent crypto as a way to move money out of China, take a cut of the profit.

Another guess: Regulation will be good for established players (like Ethereum and 2016/2017 ICOs), but bad for speculators and newcomers. It will thus shoot past its intended goal of protecting investors: Those who like to gamble with money they can't afford to lose will find other get-rich-quick schemes unrelated to crypto. In Las Vegas you are actually sure to eventually lose all your money.

From the article:

The incentive for holding OMGs, is to take part in the network validation process. We also see a long term value/appreciation in the OMG price as more and more transactions take place on the network.

So you can stake your tokens for a cut of the transaction fees (much like miners do).

HackerNews used to be all about cryptocurrencies. I think the original Satoshi paper was posted here soon after it was released. But about your cynicism-remark, this never changed. People that jumped on the opportunity were too busy to post on HN. People that did not, well... this is the first ever comment on HN about Bitcoin, 3037 days ago:

Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. [1]

Why can't we just have an intelligent conversation about this new technology?

It is quite the same with HN and SEO: Because there are a few scumbags in the SEO space that are very obvious for HN readers, every thread about optimizing websites for search engines has a negative sentiment.

This technology has a lot of obvious scumbags too. Now the companies in the article did not get to a billion market cap by being scumware. Speculators just assume the value of the coin will rise (again) with increased adoption of the technology.

Then I think a lot of early HN posters moved elsewhere or just stick to read-only mode. Also, maybe, "me too hates this!" is more popular on HN than "I like this".

I agree it is a shame that there isn't a single comment about the technology of the two ICO unicorns in the article. About successfully skipping VC and crowdfunding your next startup by issuing a token.

Instead we get a thread that is pushed off the front page, due to more comments than upvotes, most of the comments talking about unrelated scams or conflating value of distributed tokens with business evaluation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

No, don't worry, this isn't a bubble.

Crypto is definitely a bubble. Perhaps one of the biggest bubbles to burst when this happens four to five years from now.

I need to start thinking of a few product roadmaps

I know you are being facetious, but it really is not as simple as putting out a roadmap. Think about it: If you could pull this off, but are not doing it, you'll have us believe you are willingly turning down millions. If you can't pull it of, your comment becomes a cheap meaningless jab at things bigger than you. Both options are quite unbefitting of HackerNews.

You also have to write a whitepaper.

http://plasma.io/ Pay attention to mentions of "micropayments".

What maths must be understood to enable pursuit of either of the above fields?

None.

Are there any seminal texts/courses/content which should be consumed before starting?

No.

You don't need to know binary to start being a programmer/developer either. Just start already. As long as you are not in charge of a medical diagnosis or financial model, you don't get any drawback in experimenting (and failing miserably).

Assuming applied ML, the most difficult part will be the human-political business element of it: People not understanding your model or using its output correctly, bias, feedback loops, acquiring enough resources, etc. The more you can explain to them, without resorting to heavy maths, the better communicator you are.

That said, it can't hurt to do Ng's Coursera course (a lot of top performers started out with this course). Learning from Data by Caltech's Abu-Mostafa goes very wide on machine learning. "Programming Collective Intelligence" is a, somewhat dated, good book.

As for seminal texts, the field is too wide for this. A better bet is: Find a professor in the field you are interested in. Say "Deep Learning", you could have a look at LeCun, Hinton, Schmidhuber, Bengio, ... Now look at their PhD-students, their papers, their courses, their conference talks, their software, their current research. Basically become a student under the most authoritative professor in the subfield you can find and resonate with, without ever paying any university tuition or them knowing you exist. This is very possible these days.

But by all means: Just start out. Machine learning is fun. Learning about dry 100 year old maths not so much. Make mistakes. Learn to detect and avoid overfit. Find out if you are passionate and curious about parts of the field, then the theory will come eventually. A lot of the time these questions seem to demand answers like: "You need a PhD-level understanding of mathematics" Just so your brain can go: "I am not good enough for this, so let's look at something easier". Don't use this as an excuse. Start making intelligent stuff. There are 16-year-olds on Kaggle routinely beating maths PhD's.

Also remember that, despite the current trend of calling everything "AI", that AI is a very wide field, of which mathematics is only a small part. There is philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, physics, neuroscience, psychology, computer science, robotics, logic, ... all these parts vary wildly in their prerequisite maths knowledge.

Just wondering: If you got so rich from crypto currency that you could retire, would you retire? Start your own company? Just do fun stuff? Or keep working?

I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep doing this, regardless of my wealth.

For a fair comparison we should look at "energy" in an abstract manner. Time and money is energy too. Every time gold exchanges hands, it also costs energy.

compare the cost of Bitcoin to U.S. dollars or gold

All-in sustaining costs for mining an ounce of gold (worth $1,293.70) is between $1,100 and $1,200.

GP: Maybe you are just crazy.

M2: Indeed! But do not reject these teaching as false because I am crazy. The reason that I am crazy is because they are true.

GP: Is Eris true?

M2: Everything is true.

GP: Even false things?

M2: Even false things are true.

GP: How can that be?

M2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.

And if I may be so bold to add a fourth reason, gossip has always been a form of social currency. It feels good to be privy to secrets and have information that other people do not have. Gossip on the internet is a supercharged version of this, the best gossip going viral. Couple this with an increased access to information and gossip by the middle and lower class: Old governments were much more able to keep their secrets from the middle and lower class. The media was much more controlled by those in power. Journalists in my country still refuse to write about certain secrets and conspiracies concerning politicians and royalty. But plenty of bloggers do. This reinforces the beliefs in conspiracies, especially if it later turns out to be validated by the old media.

In an interview RAW was asked what could be the cause of the popularity of the Illuminati conspiracy. His answer was three-fold:

There is too much information nowadays. Life's truths used to be simple: USA good, Russia bad. You adopted the political views of your parents. Men worked and women stayed at home. Your favorite news station was always right. Too much information and fast change leads to a cognitive overload. One protection mechanism to not lose touch with reality and filter the large amounts of information, is to create very simple truths. One of these truths is that there are rich powerful people behind the curtain controlling everything.

Second, with the rise of the internet and search engines, it means that if you have an idea of a conspiracy, no matter how far out, there is likely a website already documenting it. Everyone can feel like an expert after a few hours of internet research. The barriers to publish your views on a conspiracy have vanished: always resulting in a few websites out there that confirm your hunches. For instance, if you perform research on vaccines, and start out as biased against them, you will likely stumble on a lot of a websites that tell you exactly what you want to hear: vaccines are bad and used by the governments to control their people.

Finally, there simply are a lot of rich and powerful people conspiring behind the scenes to move society in a certain direction. Just one example was the P2 lodge [1] in Italy, also called a "state within a state". It is unlikely that the queens of this giant collection of ant hills we call humanity have stopped conspiring. It just happens under a different name than the Illuminati. Symbolically, the Illuminati stood for rebellion against the church and royalty, in favor of monetary power and reason. That's a role for capitalists and scientists now.

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