Posts

Alistair Croll’s post about Big Data and civil rights is important, but I don’t think he has it exactly right. The article does a good job of explaining how Big Data differs from data warehousing as it was traditionally done. It also illustrates how Big Data can be misused as a vector of discrimination, violating people’s civil rights. While Big Data may enable people to discriminate in innovative new ways, or to make better guesses about who to discriminate against. However, I don’t think this is necessarily a new civil rights challenge. Discrimination against protected groups is already illegal, at least in the United States. In fact, at least when it comes to employment law and housing, the doctrine of disparate impact also applies. It holds that you can be liable for discrimination even if your practices are not intentionally discriminatory, if those practices have a disproportionately adverse effect on members of a protected group. ...

Bud Caddell’s Venn Diagram - Happiness in Business.

Mat Honan: Yes, I was hacked. Hard. Hopefully he’ll post a thorough post-mortem when he gets back on his feet. Did the attackers really brute force his iCloud password? How did they get his Twitter password? Would using Google’s two-factor authentication have prevented them from resetting his Google password? Scary stuff.

How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago? Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code. Unix pioneer Rob Pike explains how dot files originated from a mistake. Most interesting thing I read today.

Source Sans Pro is Adobe’s first open source type family The font looks great. I’m somewhat amused that Adobe has chosen to host the project on Sourceforge rather than Github. I’m pretty sad that the monospace version isn’t available yet.

dablooms - an open source, scalable, counting bloom filter library A good introduction to probabilistic data structures and how they can be put to practical use.

Twitter’s Landscaping Problem MG Siegler talks about the risks of Twitter’s recent hostility toward the community of users and developers that made the service what it is.

I had been thinking about using Disqus for comments for awhile, and after a nudge from a commenter, I’ve decided to give it another whirl. We’ll see whether it sticks …

Quora: What are the biggest scandals in Olympic history? Linking to this one purely for the entertainment value.

But we now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit of truth, where clever answers take precedence over profound questions. We have no patience for mystery. We want the deciphering of gods. We want oracles. And we want them right now. Ta-Nehisi Coates on the conditions that created Jonah Lehrer. I’ve certainly been guilty of fetishizing the counter-intuitive over the years. ...