
Ask HN: Do you know who this person is? - dxtr
Hi!
Quite a while ago I saw a tech talk by someone.<p>I&#x27;d like to see this talk again.<p>The problem is that I can&#x27;t remember <i>anything</i> about the person in question and I can&#x27;t remember the title of the video.<p>All I remember is that the talk was about being quite cautious about using technology we don&#x27;t understand (Quite a lot of emphasis was on machine learning) and the speaker was actually quite funny.<p>The talk was on one of these coding conferences. Don&#x27;t remember which one, obviously.<p>The speaker in question has a homepage on a university website (I think it was a university in the US north-east but I&#x27;m not sure) and was actually really funny.
He also had other talks he had made.<p>I&#x27;ve been tearing my hair out here - even spending a few hours scrolling through my Youtube history.<p>Do you know who I&#x27;m talking about?
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Tomte
James Mickens, probably:
[https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens)

Many, many people found that funny. I don't, but I seem to be in a small
minority.

His Mossad article is great, though!

~~~
dxtr
Yes. That's him! Awesome! Thanks!

~~~
sunyataishere
Wow... this was worth the watch - thank you!

awesome lol at
[https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?t=1540](https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k?t=1540)
(tldr - feeding gratuitously racist input to ML twitter bot 'TayTweets'

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andyidsinga
hmmm - what happened here is very interesting outside of the specific question
: HN as human based search with complex criteria. Looks like OP got his answer
in ~1 hour.

I wish I knew how many people viewed this question during that hour.

~~~
shoo
> I wish I knew how many people viewed this question during that hour.

here's my naive attempt to crudely estimate this:

[http://www.siteworthtraffic.com/report/ycombinator.com](http://www.siteworthtraffic.com/report/ycombinator.com)

    
    
      > [daily] Unique Visitors 	257,211
      > [daily] Unique Pageviews 	439,687
    

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com)

    
    
      > Total Visits 15.88M  [per month]
      > Pages per Visit 2.51
    

[https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-traffic/](https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-
traffic/)

    
    
      > SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors for 91.67% of the websites.
      > SimilarWeb overestimated total unique visitors by 308.81% on average;
      > SimilarWeb overestimated total pageviews by 210.58% on average.
    

SimilarWeb estimates 1.3 million total daily pageviews . Lets blindly correct
trusting the ahrefs comment about overestimation, that gives us 1.3 / (1 +
2.106) = 0.42 million total daily pageviews. That roughly agrees with the
siteworthtraffic 0.4 million unique daily pageviews number. So, let's
arbitrarily trust siteworthtraffics 1/4 million unique daily visitors
estimate.

Let's assume that traffic is uniformly distributed over each 24 hour period
(wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits the first page of links under /news, /ask
and /show (wrong) and that 50% of traffic hits other links. Of the former 50%
of traffic, lets assume that 50% of people who click the link also scan the
comments (wrong), and that views are proportional to the number of votes each
link has (wrong), and that the current selection of links and votes is the
same as during the 1 hour period between the question being asked and answered
(wrong).

the sum of votes over links on the first three pages of /news, /ask and /show
is roughly 4200 votes, and this ask topic has 19 votes, giving it a weight of
0.0044 .

multiplication gives 250,000 unique visitors / day * 1/24 * 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.0044
= 11 unique visitors during the 1 hour period before the question was
answered.

it wouldn't be surprising if this estimate is off by 1 or 2 orders of
magnitude -- underestimating, not overestimating, obviously -- if you can
propose a more plausible estimate, propose away!

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matt_the_bass
Nice analysis. No idea if it’s correct but it seems logical.

Ps this would be a great question for an interview (if you believe in those
“how does this person think” type questions).

