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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Profile of Venezuela Hasta Los Tuétanos, a channel on the walkie-talkie like app Zello, that Venezuelans turn to in search for food, medical supplies, and truth — EVEN WHEN MARIA sleeps, she hears the voices. — One at a time, they speak of chaos, hunger, confusion.
Facebook announced today that it is adding a feature called “Why am I seeing this post?” to News Feeds. Similar to “Why am I seeing this ad?,” which has appeared next to advertisements since 2014, the new tool has a dropdown menu that gives users information about why that post appeared in their News Feed, along with links to personalization controls.
Meant to give users more transparency into how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works, the update comes as the company copes with several major events that have highlighted the platform’s shortcomings, including potentially harmful ones. These include its role in enabling the dissemination of a video taken during the shooting attacks on New Zealand mosques two weeks ago, which were originally broadcast using Facebook Live; a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that accuses Facebook’s ad-targeting tool of violating the Fair Housing Act and its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda (after years of complaints and criticism, Facebook recently announced plans to downrank anti-vaccination posts and ban white nationalist content.
Facebook’s announcement says this is the first time its “built information on how ranking works directly into the app.” Users will be able to access “Why am I seeing this post?” as a dropdown menu in the right hand corner of posts from friends, Pages and Groups in their News Feed that displays information about how its algorithm decided to rank the post, including:
The same menu will also include links to personalization options, including See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts. The company’s blog post said that “during our research on ‘Why am I seeing this post?,’ people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn’t enough without corresponding controls.”
“Why am I seeing this ad,” a similar feature that launched in 2014, will be updated with to include more information. For example, it will tell users if an ad appeared in their News Feed because a company uploaded their contact lists, like emails or phone numbers, or if they worked with a marketing partner to place the ad.
DappRadar: only 28% of active dapp users were on Ethereum blockchain as of January, losing major ground to Tron and EOS, which now leads with 40% of dapp users — - EOS, Tron surpass Ethereum in popularity with many developers — Some startups are now issuing tokens on competing networks
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says Fortnite's Creative mode, where players build together instead of battling, has attracted 100M players since its December launch — - Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says that the company has big plans for “Fortnite,” which it sees “evolving beyond being a game.”
Poland fines digital marketing firm Bisnode ~€220K for GDPR violations; Bisnode argues it may cost €8M+ to reach people it can only contact via physical mail — An interesting decision came out of Poland's data protection agency this week after the watchdog issued …
Facebook announces “Why am I seeing this post?”, a feature to help users better understand and control what is seen from friends, Pages, and Groups in News Feed — News Feed is always personalized to you — and starting today you'll have even more information and control over your experience.
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and I’ve been watching the rise of Lambda School — which I think is fantastic, incidentally — and the combination has me wondering two things:
Let’s step back and define some terms before we try to answer those. First, by “formal” education I generally mean a four-year accredited university, whereas people with eg Lambda School or boot camps behind them are “informally” educated, and in turn distinguished from autodidacts. This is not universal. Early Google didn’t seem to consider anyone with less than a masters “formally” educated.
Second, of course there’s no absolute need. Since the dawn of the first vacuum tube, and very much including hardcore grotty stuff like compilers and cryptography, software has been a field in which people with no formal training whatsoever have thrived and succeeded wildly. Obviously neither a formal nor an informal education is actually necessary. What we’re actually asking is: in general, is there reason to believe software engineers with formal educations are better hires?
Note that, speaking as an employer, I don’t actually care whether this is due to selection bias, i.e. whether it’s because capable people are more likely to be formally educated or because they actually learned from it. I’m happy to accept that the entire university system in any country, especially yours, is deeply and increasingly pathological, unfairly and jealously hierarchical, terrifyingly high-priced, and deeply flawed at credentialing and capability signaling.
That’s a big deal to me personally … but when wearing my hiring hat, I don’t care about how that credentialing sausage is made. All I’m interested in, when I’m interviewing, is: are those signals meaningful? Are those people more or less likely to succeed, or make a mess I will subsequently have to clean up?
It’s awfully hard to find applicable statistics here, let alone any whose compilers didn’t have some implicit axe to grind. And of course I have my own biases: I have a four-year degree, from a (Canadian) school outside the hierarchy of the (American) nation in which I live, but with a strong international reputation (Waterloo), in a field (electrical engineering) only somewhat associated with software development.
I used to ask an interview question or few about theory. One of my go-to questions used to be: “Do you have a favorite algorithm, and why?” I’ve stopped asking it, because the answer is almost always some variant of “no.” Even those who have formally studied algorithms rarely care about them. Sometimes I get some variant of “I know what an algorithm is, but I’ve never actually written one.”
That’s not surprising. A whole lot of modern software engineering consists of connecting pre-existing components in slightly new ways. “Algorithms,” as we usually understand them, come baked into our tools and libraries. Does a formal education in big-O notation and Turing machines help at all? Short answer: no. Is prior experience with matrix multiplication and eigenvectors useful? Actually yes, in the rarefied case that you want to understand modern machine learning … but, as the tooling improves, not so much if you just want to use it.
Modern software engineering often — but not always — has much more in common with plumbing or carpentry than with hacking art, architecture, or computer science. It’s more like cranking out aggregative blog posts, or writing business nonfiction, than it is like crafting a novel, much less writing poetry.
Of course, this comes with the important caveat that the analogy only stands if every few years the tools which plumbers and carpenters used changed completely, along with the occasional rise of whole new approaches to their fields. But still, the need for constant re-education is probably an argument against formal training; why spend four years learning how to use tools which will probably be obsolete two years after you graduate?
So it seems reasonable to argue that if — if — you strip out theory and history, then the pedagogical content of “formal” education, vs. “informal” education plus a year or two of experience, is roughly equivalent. Autodidacts? …They’re a difficult edge case. They tend to be highly intelligent, and both hard and fast workers, but they haven’t spent as much time implicitly learning from others’ mistakes, so if still anywhere near their larval stage, they’re more likely to make them anew. An autodidact with an extensive history / portfolio, though, has no strikes against them.
What about the credentialing and selection bias of smarter people being drawn to universities? I concede there’s something to that. If it’s a university I’ve heard of (again, I didn’t grow up here) then that biases me in favor of a candidate. But at the same time, America’s education system is so screwed up, giving such advantages to the already privileged, and the existence of “legacy” students (who don’t really happen in Canada), that at the same time I’m extra wary.
You might conclude that ultimately I don’t distinguish between formally and informally trained students. But you’d be wrong. Most of the time they actually are surprisingly equivalent. But software engineering isn’t always like plumbing — and because of that, I find myself pretty unwilling to strip out theory and history from the analysis after all.
Formal education, whether it be engineering or the liberal arts, is supposed to teach you how to think critically, how to analyze systematically and strategically, and how to educate yourself efficiently, more than it’s supposed to import any particular body of knowledge. It doesn’t always succeed at this. And most of the time you don’t need any of those skills (except the last, which you need forever.)
But on the occasions that you do need those other meta-skills, you need them badly — and it seems to me that you’re noticeably less likely to gain them from informal training or autodidacticism. You’re probably right to be suspicious of this view. I’m suspicious of it myself. It’s probably essentially impossible to measure and test.
It still seems to me, though, that what you gain from formal education is not so much an expansion of your mind as a specific and (somewhat) controlled expansion of your worldview, one which hasn’t yet been replicated elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. But there’s more to it than just intensive training in technical skills … and maybe that kind of meta-skilling is the next step in nontraditional education.
Facebook announces “Why am I seeing this post?”, a feature to help users better understand and control what is seen from friends, Pages, and Groups in News Feed — Facebook will finally begin telling its users why posts appear in their news feeds as it seeks to assuage public concerns …
A profile of payment card services startup Marqeta, which according to a source has doubled its revenue every year since 2016, reaching close to $150M in 2018 — n the spring of 2015, Jason Gardner, the founder of Marqeta, a payments processor, left a grim board meeting and went for a walk …
How’s your weekend going? Good, good. Now, here, have a billionaire’s super autotuned rap track about a famous deceased gorilla:
Tesla/Space X/Boring Company guy, Elon Musk has apparently uploaded a SoundCloud track titled “RIP Harambe,” about the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was shot to death at a Cincinnati zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old boy climb into his enclosure. No word yet on precisely what role Musk played in the creation of the track, beyond releasing it on his “failed […] record label.”
“This might be my finest work,” the billionaire tweeted about the track, uploaded to his Emo G (emoji) Records SoundCloud account. The song, which includes lines like “RIP Harambe / Smoking on some strong hay” appears to be more meme-centric that serious musical pursuit. But as James Dolan can happily attest, you should never let a little thing like being an ultra-wealthy executive get in the way of your dreams.
So, happy early April Fool’s Day, I guess. Honestly, I don’t really know anymore. Now back to your regularly scheduled weekend plans.
Proxy, a startup that is building a mobile identity layer on top of Bluetooth LE for keyless entry and more, raises $13.6M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins — You know how kings used to have trumpeters heralding their arrival wherever they went? Proxy wants to do that with Bluetooth.
Care.com, the largest site in the US for finding caregivers, scrubbed ~46,594 or ~72% of day-care centers claiming to have a state license, after a WSJ inquiry — A prior investigation found providers without proper licensing and criminal histories — On March 8th, The Wall Street Journal published …
Equifax and FICO launch Data Decision Cloud, combining data behind their consumer credit scores for a new offering for financial companies and marketers — By combining data pools and platforms, the companies hope to find more insights, build better predictive models and manage customer experiences better.
Care.com, the largest site in the US for finding caregivers, scrubbed ~46,594 or ~72% of day-care centers claiming to have a state license, after a WSJ inquiry — Online child-care marketplace Care.com removed from its site tens of thousands of unverified day-care center listings just before a WSJ investigation was published.
Zuckerberg's op-ed on regulations rings somewhat hollow because Facebook can already make plenty of improvements in the areas mentioned without government help — It's been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site's silence around the Christchurch massacre …
Rakuten's stake in Lyft is now worth $2.46B, GM's $1.46B, Fidelity's $1.45B, a16z's $1.18B, Alphabet's $924M, Logan Green's $655M, and John Zimmer's $452M — Lyft might not be making any money, but its investors and executives certainly are. — Shares of Lyft Inc. gained 8.7% on their first-ever …
How Instagram became the default way some connect with new friends: it's more casual than LinkedIn, while offering more info and less risk than phone numbers — The app has become the default way to connect with new friends, dates, or business contacts. — When Chris Rackliffe …
