Companies' ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy. This is not because online companies are worse than their offline counterparts, but rather because what they can do is so, so different.
Not only are these (numerous) companies getting better at tracking us, a lot of times we're unsure of what the privacy expectations should be around that tracking. But Madrigal anticipates where the uncertainty leads if we don't set cultural expectations on online privacy:
The current levels of machine intelligence insulate us from privacy catastrophe, so we let data be collected about us. But we know that this data is not going away and yet machine intelligence is growing rapidly. The results of this process are ineluctable. Left to their own devices, ad tracking firms will eventually be able to connect your various data selves. And then they will break down the name wall, if they are allowed to.
Another fantastic article from The Atlantic.
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
— Martin Golding
In America we have a motivation problem: money. I'm not a communist. I love capitalism (I even love money), but here's a simple fact we've known since 1962: using money as a motivator makes us less capable at problem-solving. It actually makes us dumber.
I think the best CEOs take a $1 salary because they are invested in the company for the right reasons. Graham Morehead argues that that same independence from financial motivation allows these CEOs to think more creatively and agilely than their peers.
In a political climate in which all sides do not share a basic trust in science, scientific evidence no longer is viewed as a politically neutral factor in judging whether a public policy is good or bad.
— MSNBC - Study tracks how conservatives lost their faith in science
California's high cost of living also is driving people away. ... The exodus is likely to accelerate. California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home — all in the name of saving the planet.
Because housing prices are so ridiculously inflated, we should build more apartments and prevent contractors from building suburbs. Government interference in the marketplace is sure to fix the problem, right? Right?
Introducing the BOOK. Or re-introducing it, I suppose, for those of us who will have grown up with the originals. (By leerestademoda).
The hotel's Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page's creator.
Disgusting practice.
A program manager, a software engineer, and a software tester were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?
"I know," said the program manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no," said the software engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well," said the software tester, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
997 design comps in a shared folder, 9,695 git commits, a bundle of notebooks full of sketches, and dozens of photographs from launch night.
What does that weigh?
At 276 pages long and 1 foot by 1 foot square, it weighs nearly 8lbs.
Flipboard for iPhone chronicles their digital development journey in a physical book. That's a pretty awesome idea.
I spent the weekend working on implementing a few string comparison algorithms for mailcheck and decided to share one of the easiest ones to implement, the Levenshtein distance algorithm.
The Levenshtein distance is calculated as the fewest number of deletions, insertions, or substitutions required to transform one string into another (If you add the transposition operation, you get the Damerau–Levenshtein distance, and if you allow only substitution you get the Hammng distance.) Turns out implementation is a simple dynamic programming exercise because the Levenshtein distance can easily be calculated for various length substrings of each of the two strings being compared.
Take a look at the data structure containing the substring edit distance in action with strings of your choosing here.
The javascript implementation I came up with is as follows for your your perusing pleasure: