Top all-time · #10579
Corey Chivers
Personal blog · bayesianbiologist.comdatascience
Corey Chivers writes bayesianbiologist, a personal blog at bayesianbiologist.com about data and science. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist? ”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on surveillance effectiveness and base-rate reasoning. One commenter cites a post questioning how likely NSA surveillance is to catch terrorists, and others explain base-rate problems in face recognition.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Corey Chivers on P(A|B) ∝P(B|A)P(A)
Most-linked posts?
- /2013/06/06/how-likely-is-the-nsa-prism-program-to-catch-a-terrorist/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-21
- How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist? 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-07
What Hacker News says?
With each passing successful terrorist attack the effectiveness of this surveillance system will be questioned. It's already considered highly ineffective... http://bayesianbiologist.com/2013/06/06/how-likely-is-the-ns... In the meantime keep protesting (to be seen and heard) and use technology to thwart said surveillance. Don't listen to the "if you use encryption they'll definitely watch you" logic. Your messages…
Comment linking /2013/06/06/how-likely-is-the-nsa-prism-program-to-catch-a-terrorist/
on “Restore the Fourth Organizes Protests Against Unconstitutional Surveillance”Submitted How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist? as a story · 181 points
HN discussionEven if you get the false positive rate low, the low prevalence of criminals versus innocents will lead to a large number of false positives. Let's say one person in 1000 has an outstanding warrant. Let's say that when the camera sees this person, it has a 99% chance of recognising them correctly. Let's also say that it has only a 1% chance of recognising an innocent person as a suspect. Under these generous conditi…
Comment linking /2013/06/06/how-likely-is-the-nsa-prism-program-to-catch-a-terrorist/
on “Face recognition police tools 'staggeringly inaccurate'”Submitted Visualizing Generative Adversarial Networks as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI also wrote a little blog post about that very thing back in 2011. In addition to using a Markov chain approach, also took a look at it from an information entropy perspective. And the code is also in R, to boot! http://bayesianbiologist.com/2011/12/31/uncertainty-in-marko...
Comment linking /2011/12/31/uncertainty-in-markov-chains-fun-with-snakes-and-ladders/
on “Hacking “Chutes and Ladders” using R”Submitted A gentle introduction to Bayesian Statistics as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIndeed. It's not a transcript of the talk, but here are the accompanying materials that we worked with during the class. http://bayesianbiologist.com/2012/10/19/introduction-to-baye...
Comment linking /2012/10/19/introduction-to-bayesian-lecture-accompanying-handouts-and-demos/
on “Introduction to Bayesian Methods”Submitted What’s Warren Buffett’s $1 Billion Basketball Bet Worth? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think you may be going into precog territory while looking for a needle in a haystack. Some of the common patterns seem fairly well documented: disaffected male, mental issues, history of abuse, affiliation with radical islam. But most experts seem to believe finding a key indicator before hand is really impossible since you will also label so many people who will actually resist the urge to violence. The Orlando…
Comment linking /2013/06/06/how-likely-is-the-nsa-prism-program-to-catch-a-terrorist/
on “Ask HN: Is gun purchase data available?”Submitted Generative Adversarial Networks are the hotness at NIPS this year as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing Bayesian Updating as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Treachery of Models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing classifier thresholds as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Weapons of Math Destruction – A Data Scientist’s Guide to Disarmament as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing Bayesian Updating as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A probabilistic justification to carpe diem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A quick guide to non-transitive Grime Dice as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introduction to Simulation using R as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Gambling Machine Puzzle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Categorizing NIPS papers using LDA topic modeling as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Simudidactic as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Calculating AUC the Hard Way as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted IPython vs RStudio+knitr as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Heartbeat of a Bicycle City as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing the Metropolis Hastings Algorithm as a story · 1 points
HN discussion