thestephen

> The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders [...] The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets.

This is pretty much everything I was afraid of when it comes to this field - big data "prediction" being used to predispose people into crime, and by extension, algorithmic racism.

What? As much as I'd like for the Excel dominance to end, I can't see how anyone would ever work quicker in Numbers over Excel for any work that takes more than an hour a month. The ribbon interface offers shortcuts to pretty much every single function through the keyboard in an interactive way. I can't say the same about Numbers.

Note that the iPad with a keyboard handles non-English languages relatively bad. There are shortcuts in some applications that simply do not work using a non-US layout.

> All of this is too bad, because R syntax is just plain rotten icky stuff. (but I may be seeing things with some of the examples looking like awful R syntax... maybe I need sleep)

If you can get over the way assignments are made, I find R's syntax, quite nice – especially with the pipe paradigm á tidyverse that is getting increasingly common. I personally find that the (from a software engineering perspective) awful syntax instead comes from many R users having a different background than those of other languages. I guess very few R users write unit tests, for example.

Of course, this is fine in most cases – messy, unengineered code is completely fine if few people will use it.

This is a great tool!

I noted, though, that the Linkedin import didn't seem to work flawlessly – after uploading, I was redirected to the resume list and I have no clue of what actually happened.

Would you like more feedback?

Almost right! Imagine if Chrome also trimmed away all the AMP mess when sharing a link.

Why would you want that? When it comes to working immigrants, the Swedish unions generally have the power to say no [1], which they use – several high-skilled immigrants have been thrown out of Sweden the past two years.

[1] https://www.affarsvarlden.se/juridik_affarer/facken-stoppar-... (Swedish)

That is good to know, and I've considered switching to Things for a while. This makes it easier. Thank you!

What makes me sad about Siri on the iPhone is that it would be such a boon if I was able to use it with actually good apps and if I didn't feel like a second-class citizen for having an iPhone outside the US.

I'm forced to use the buggy Reminders app, because Siri only supports creating reminders with Reminders. Apple refuses to support anything else than Apple Music, which means I can't use Siri for music. (Yet, when the 4S was released, it only took weeks until I could control Spotify with Siri using jailbreak). I can't use Siri for navigation either in any form ("Hey Siri, when does the next train leave from here?"), because Apple has never provided public transit or good navigation in Sweden, nor announced a timeline on what year that might happen – and of course, Google Maps can't use Siri. And even if it could, Siri does not gracefully support foreign words such as addresses.

I could easily love Siri if Apple would stop gimping it by tying it to other subpar products.

Here's my suggested addition, law 00, that this website really needs to follow: Please don't make your websites into huge Vogue ads on desktop. I have a 27" monitor, I can fit more than 4 lines of text on my screen.

And on the flip side, every time I add a new device to my Apple ID, iCloud flips out totally, detects "suspicious" activity, and locks my account (and requires me to both verify it with one or more devices and changing my password).

So: Inconvenience where there should be convenience, convenience where there should be inconvenience.

We re-released the product to this group. It consisted of 10% of Rick’s original code which was pretty stable. It also had a few thousand lines of new code to replace about 150,000 lines of incomprehensible mess. The team had replaced five years of work in about six months. Over the next few months we expanded from pilot to full customer release.

Up next: Manager on Medium bragging that he or she would be able to type out all ~1 000 000 words in the Harry Potter series in a couple hundred hours.

"Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account)"

It's going to be interesting to see how Tinder tackles the 2018 EU General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 and how things will play out in courts and practice.

For example, are you allowed to store information that I have chosen to unlink? Will Tinder have an easy way to export the data without having to settle to long email conversations, as there is a right to data portability? If so, in what format will this data be presented?

While your sentiment probably holds correct in some places, it really is "that bad" in some places that aren't the US or the UK. Many countries still don't have transit, and my apartment (in Stockholm!) doesn't even exist in Apple Maps.

I've recently received several friend requests a day from spambots. This is annoying, but I can just ignore the "friend request" tab and go on with my life.

However, as if it wasn't a nuisance enough, Facebook now gives me plain notifications of these friend requests in my normal notification feed. "Spambot is new to Facebook and just sent you a friend request."

I'd switch to only Messenger, but Facebook seems to think that I don't have Messenger, so I keep receiving invites to install Messenger from my friends as it covers half their conversation with me with that notification.

Some countries have youth entrepreneurship programmes – in Sweden, at secondary school (15-18), some programmes have a youth entrepreneurship course where students get to run a business over the course of a year. These microcompanies generally have an "advisor", who generally have experience running a company. I have been an advisor for two groups of students over my course of time – and I must say that it has been a learning experience that feels as big for me as it was for them.

Further, one should not underestimate all micro-mentoring that occurs when helping young talents in ones field.

Very nice idea to use the tidyverse equivalents – thanks!

While I agree that it easily can be abused, I quickly got the hang of it and found it makes a lot of my code more readable. One could think of it as a "then".

  my_column %>% 
  gsub(" ","",.) %>% # Remove whitespace, then...
  gsub("[a-zA-Z]+","",.) %>% # Remove letters, then...
  strsplit("-") %>% # Split on dashes, then...
  lapply(as.numeric) %>% # Make each vector in the list numeric, then...
  lapply(mean) # calculate the mean for each list index

The alternatives here would be gigantic function calls that need to be read from the inside out, or multiple variable assignments.