Top all-time · #2985
Damien Desfontaines
Personal blog · desfontain.es/blogsecuritydata
Damien Desfontaines writes Ted is writing things, a personal blog at desfontain.es about security and data. Since 2017, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 65 times, most often “Why differential privacy is awesome (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Damien Desfontaines' blog for its non-technical introduction to differential privacy and its explanation of how census data can be reconstructed to identify individuals. Commenters cite the six-part series and related posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why differential privacy is awesome (2018)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-08-01
- Five things privacy experts know about AI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-14
- K-map, the weird cousin of k-anonymity (2017)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-05-02
- Friendly Introduction to Differential Privacy2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-08
- US bans differential privacy in Census data2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-06-13
- Demystifying the US Census Bureau's reconstruction attack2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-26
- Differential privacy in (a bit) more detail2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-16
- Local vs. Global Differential Privacy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-10
- Part-time PhD while working at Google: how does it work?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-03
- Converting my PhD thesis into HTML2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-24
What Hacker News says?
My friend Damien's homepage [1] should really go on this list. It embeds a Nethack game on the home page. [1] Check it out: https://desfontain.es/
Comment linking /
on “The Whimsical Website Club”Submitted K-map, the weird cousin of k-anonymity (2017) as a story · 94 points
HN discussionHi, I'm one of the authors of the scientific paper¹ linked in this blog post. Incidentally, I wrote a series of blog posts explaining differential privacy in layman's terms. The first post might be "not-technical-enough" for HackerNews, but maybe the next in the series make up for it. Feedback welcome =) - https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-awesomene... - https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-pr…
Comment linking /privacy/local-global-differential-privacy.html
on “Enabling developers and organizations to use differential privacy”Submitted δ-presence, for when being in the dataset is sensitive as a story · 84 points
HN discussionIn the same vein, try out https://desfontain.es/ it's the personal website of a friend and you can navigate it like if you were playing nethack.
Comment linking /
on “My personal site is a terminal”Submitted K-map, the weird cousin of k-anonymity (2017) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI found the 6-part series at https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-awesomene... a very good introduction as well.
Comment linking /privacy/differential-privacy-awesomeness.html
on “Google's differential privacy library”Submitted Demystifying the US Census Bureau's reconstruction attack as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://desfontain.es/privacy/us-census-reconstruction-attac... is a pretty good explanation on those concepts.
Comment linking /privacy/us-census-reconstruction-attack.html
on “Ask HN: How much is Google collecting and keeping on Android if not signed in?”Submitted K-anonymity, the parent of all privacy definitions as a story · 5 points
HN discussionA friend is writing a good series of blogposts about formal privacy definitions. The first one was about k-anonymity: https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-anonymity.html Follow-ups: - k-map: https://desfontain.es/privacy/k-map.html - l-diversity: https://desfontain.es/privacy/l-diversity.html - δ-presence: https://desfontain.es/privacy/delta-presence.html - differential privacy: https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential…
Comment linking /privacy/differential-privacy-awesomeness.html
on “K-anonymity”Submitted Answering the BfDI's questions on personal data in LLMs as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(I wrote the article.) Excellent point! That's one of the reasons why people understood that syntactic definitions (which try and tell you "how anonymous data is" by looking at the data) were not the right approach, and that you had to look at the mechanism to determine whether the process was sufficiently private. This line of thinking led to the definition of differential privacy, which completely changed the pers…
Comment linking /privacy/differential-privacy-in-more-detail.html
on “K-map, the weird cousin of k-anonymity (2017)”Submitted The Magic of Gaussian Noise as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFor those wondering how this compares to differential privacy, the author of this post has also written a short nontechnical post about that: https://desfontain.es/privacy/differential-privacy-awesomene... The theoretical guarantees of differential privacy (e.g. resilience to postprocessing or outside data, which removes the need for most threat modeling) make it the one to beat from a privacy standpoint, IMO.
Comment linking /privacy/differential-privacy-awesomeness.html
on “δ-presence, for when being in the dataset is sensitive”Submitted Why differential privacy is awesome (2018) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPeople interested in this will probably also like reading this friendly introduction to differential privacy: https://desfontain.es/blog/friendly-intro-to-differential-pr... , which is friendly yet goes into a lot of details and techniques in a long series of blog posts.
Comment linking /blog/friendly-intro-to-differential-privacy.html
on “Understanding privacy risk with k-anonymity and l-diversity”Submitted Differential privacy in practice (easy version) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFrom the second linked article, this could be a motive: > People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts. https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html
Comment linking /blog/banning-noise.html
on “An American Privacy Emergency”Submitted Observations on LLMs for Privacy Work as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFrom https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377 / https://desfontain.es/blog/banning-noise.html > People who were using Census data to actually reconstruct records could no longer do so. Demographers admitted that this was common practice. It's also an open secret that this was done by political operatives as part of gerrymandering efforts.
Comment linking /blog/banning-noise.html
on “An American Privacy Emergency”Submitted K-anonymity, the parent of all privacy definitions as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAn earlier article on the same blog had some very useful information on how easily the aggregated census data from 2010 (before differential privacy) could be used to reconstruct real data for individuals: https://desfontain.es/blog/us-census-reconstruction-attack.h... I am personally convinced that the reason noise infusion was banned was because powerful people were already reconstructing individual data from cens…
Comment linking /blog/us-census-reconstruction-attack.html
on “US bans differential privacy in Census data”Submitted A list of real-world uses of differential privacy as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Five things privacy experts know about AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Five things privacy experts know about AI as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lowering the Cost of Anonymization (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Converting my PhD thesis into HTML as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Local vs. Global Differential Privacy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Personal open access policy – Ted is writing things as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
