The Hanselminutes Podcast: Fresh Air for Developers by Scott Hanselman.
I went looking for Felienne’s podcast on code smells and discovered along with it, The Hanselminutes Podcast: Fresh Air for Developers!
Felienne’s podcast is #542 so there is a lot of content to enjoy! (I checked the archive. Yes, there really are 542 episodes as of today.)
Exploring Code Smells in code written by Children (podcast) by Dr. Felienne
From the description:
Felienne is always learning. In exploring her PhD dissertation and her public speaking experience it’s clear that she has no intent on stopping! Most recently she’s been exploring a large corpus of Scratch programs looking for Code Smells. How do children learn how to code, and when they do, does their code “smell?” Is there something we can do when teaching to promote cleaner, more maintainable code?
Felienne discusses a paper due to appear in September on analysis of 250K Scratch programs for code smells.
Thoughts on teaching programmers to detect bug smells?
Julia Evans tweeted:
It’s been two days without another suggestion.
Considering Brendan D. Gregg’s homepage, do you have another suggestion?
Too rich of a resource to not write down.
Besides, for some subjects and their relationships, you need specialized tooling to see them.
Not to mention that if you can spot patterns in subjects, detecting an unknown 0-day may be easier.
Of course, you can leave USB sticks at popular eateries near Fort Meade, MD 20755-6248, but some people prefer to work for their 0-day exploits.
😉
Eloquent JavaScript by by Marijn Haverbeke.
From the webpage:
This is a book about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital. You can read it online here, or get your own paperback copy of the book.
Embarrassing that authors post free content for the betterment of others, but wealthy governments play access games.
This book is also available in Български (Bulgarian), Português (Portuguese), and Русский (Russian).
Enjoy!
A Whirlwind Tour of Python by Jake VanderPlas.
From the webpage:
To tap into the power of Python’s open data science stack—including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-learn, and other tools—you first need to understand the syntax, semantics, and patterns of the Python language. This report provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to Python for engineers, researchers, and data scientists who are already familiar with another programming language.
Author Jake VanderPlas, an interdisciplinary research director at the University of Washington, explains Python’s essential syntax and semantics, built-in data types and structures, function definitions, control flow statements, and more, using Python 3 syntax.
You’ll explore:
- Python syntax basics and running Python code
- Basic semantics of Python variables, objects, and operators
- Built-in simple types and data structures
- Control flow statements for executing code blocks conditionally
- Methods for creating and using reusable functions
- Iterators, list comprehensions, and generators
- String manipulation and regular expressions
- Python’s standard library and third-party modules
- Python’s core data science tools
- Recommended resources to help you learn more
Jake VanderPlas is a long-time user and developer of the Python scientific stack. He currently works as an interdisciplinary research director at the University of Washington, conducts his own astronomy research, and spends time advising and consulting with local scientists from a wide range of fields.
A Whirlwind Tour of Python, can be recommended without reservation.
In addition to the book, the Jupyter notebooks behind the book have been posted.
Enjoy!
29 common beginner Python errors on one page
From the webpage:
A few times a year, I have the job of teaching a bunch of people who have never written code before how to program from scratch. The nature of programming being what it is, the same error crop up every time in a very predictable pattern. I usually encourage my students to go through a step-by-step troubleshooting process when trying to fix misbehaving code, in which we go through these common errors one by one and see if they could be causing the problem. Today, I decided to finally write this troubleshooting process down and turn it into a flowchart in non-threatening colours.
Behold, the “my code isn’t working” step-by-step troubleshooting guide! Follow the arrows to find the likely cause of your problem – if the first thing you reach doesn’t work, then back up and try again.
Click the image for full-size, and click here for a printable PDF. Colour scheme from Luna Rosa.
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Useful for Python beginner’s and should be inspirational for other languages.
Thoughts on something similar for XQuery Errors? Suggestions for collecting the “most common” XQuery errors?
Contributing to StackOverflow: How Not to be Intimidated by Ksenia Coulter.
From the post:
StackOverflow is an essential resource for programmers. Whether you run into a bizarre and scary error message or you’re blanking on something you should know, StackOverflow comes to the rescue. Its popularity with coders spurred many jokes and memes. (Programming to be Officially Renamed “Googling Stackoverflow,” a satirical headline reads).
(image omitted)
While all of us are users of StackOverflow, contributing to this knowledge base can be very intimidating, especially to beginners or to non-traditional coders who many already feel like they don’t belong. The fact that an invisible barrier exists is a bummer because being an active contributor not only can help with your job search and raise your profile, but also make you a better programmer. Explaining technical concepts in an accessible way is difficult. It is also well-established that teaching something solidifies your knowledge of the subject. Answering StackOverflow questions is great practice.
All of the benefits of being an active member of StackOverflow were apparent to me for a while, but I registered an account only this week. Let me walk you t[h]rough thoughts that hindered me. (Chances are, you’ve had them too!)
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I plead guilty to using StackOverFlow but not contributing back to it.
Another “intimidation” to avoid is thinking you must have the complete and killer answer to any question.
That can and does happen, but don’t wait for a question where you can supply such an answer.
Jump in! (Advice to myself as well as any readers.)
strace’ing a Clojure process under lein by Tim McCormack.
From the post:
Today I wanted to strace a JVM process to see if it was making network calls, and I discovered a minor roadblock: It was a Clojure program being run using the Leiningen build tool. lein run spawns a JVM subprocess and then exits, and I only wanted to trace that subprocess.
The solution is simple, but worth a post: Tell lein to run a different “java” command that actually wraps a call to java with strace. Here’s how I did it:
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For the “…you never do know file…” and because it’s better to know than to assume.
ARGUS by Christopher Meiklejohn.
From the post:
This is one post in a series about programming models and languages for distributed computing that I’m writing as part of my history of distributed programming techniques.
Relevant Reading
- Abstraction Mechanisms in CLU, Liskov, Barbara and Snyder, Alan and Atkinson, Russell and Schaffert, Craig, CACM 1977 (Liskov et al. 1977).
- Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs, Liskov, Barbara and Scheifler, Robert, TOPLAS 1982 (Liskov and Scheifler 1983).
- Orphan Detection in the Argus System, Walker, Edward Franklin, DTIC 1984 (Walker 1984).
- Implementation of Argus, Liskov, Barbara and Curtis, Dorothy and Johnson, Paul and Scheifer, Robert, SIGOPS 1987 (Liskov et al. 1987).
- Distributed Programming in Argus, Liskov, Barbara CACM 1988 (Liskov 1988).
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I’m thinking about how to fix an XFCE trackpad problem and while I think about that, wanted to touch up the references from Christopher’s post.
Apologies but I was unable to find a public version of: Implementation of Argus, Liskov, Barbara and Curtis, Dorothy and Johnson, Paul and Scheifer, Robert, SIGOPS 1987 (Liskov et al. 1987).
Hoping that easier access to most of the relevant reading will increase your enjoyment of Christopher’s post.
Enjoy!
Functional TypeScript by Victor Savkin.
From the post:
When discussing functional programming we often talk about the machinery, and not the core principles. Functional programming is not about monads, monoids, or zippers, even though those are useful to know. It is primarily about writing programs by composing generic reusable functions. This article is about applying functional thinking when refactoring TypeScript code.
And to do that we will use the following three techniques:
- Use Functions Instead of Simple Values
- Model Data Transformations as a Pipeline
- Extract Generic Functions
Let’s get started!
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Parallel processing has been cited as a driver for functional programming for many years. It’s Time to Get Good at Functional Programming
The movement of the United States government towards being a “franchise” is another important driver for functional programming.
Code that has no-side effects can be more easily repurposed, depending on the needs of a particular buyer.
The NSA wants terabytes of telephone metadata to maintain its “data mining as useful activity” fiction, China wants telephone metadata on its financial investments, other groups are spying on themselves and/or others.
Wasteful, not to mention expensive, to maintain side-effect ridden code bases for each customer.
Prepare for universal parallel processing and governments as franchises, start thinking functionally today!
From the post:
Fed up with a ton of tutorials but no easy way to find exercises I decided to create a repo just with exercises to practice pandas. Don’t get me wrong, tutorials are great resources, but to learn is to do. So unless you practice you won’t learn.
There will be three different types of files:
- Exercise instructions
- Solutions without code
- Solutions with code and comments
My suggestion is that you learn a topic in a tutorial or video and then do exercises. Learn one more topic and do exercises. If you got the answer wrong, don’t go to the solution with code, follow this advice instead.
Suggestions and collaborations are more than welcome. 🙂
I’m sure you will find this useful but when I search for pandas exercise python, I get 298,000 “hits.”
Adding exercises here isn’t going to improve the findability of pandas for particular subject areas or domains.
Perhaps as exercises are added here, links to exercises by subject area can be added as well.
With nearly 300K potential sources, there is no shortage of exercises to go around!
An analysis of Pokémon Go types, created with R by David Smith.
From the post:
As anyone who has tried Pokémon Go recently is probably aware, Pokémon come in different types. A Pokémon’s type affects where and when it appears, and the types of attacks it is vulnerable to. Some types, like Normal, Water and Grass are common; others, like Fairy and Dragon are rare. Many Pokémon have two or more types.
To get a sense of the distribution of Pokémon types, Joshua Kunst used R to download data from the Pokémon API and created a treemap of all the Pokémon types (and for those with more than 1 type, the secondary type). Johnathon’s original used the 800+ Pokémon from the modern universe, but I used his R code to recreate the map for the 151 original Pokémon used in Pokémon Go.
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If you or your dog:
need a break from Pokémon Go, check out this post!
You will get some much needed rest, polish up your R skills and perhaps learn something about the Pokémon API.
The Pokémon Go craze brings to mind the potential for the creation of alternative location-based games. Accessing locations which require steady nerves and social engineering skills. That definitely has potential.
Say a spy-vs-spy character at a location near a “secret” military base? 😉
Tersely by Nat Torkington as:
— an open source in-browser terminal emulator.
That’s fair, but the project goals read:
The goal of the project is to create a beautiful and extensible experience for command-line interface users, built on open web standards.
In the beginning, our focus will be primarily around speed, stability and the development of the correct API for extension authors.
In the future, we anticipate the community will come up with innovative additions to enhance what could be the simplest, most powerful and well-tested interface for productivity.
JS/HTML/CSS Terminal. Visit HyperTerm for a rocking demo!
Scroll down after the demo to see more.
Looking forward to a Linux package being released!
Donald Knuth: Literate Programming on Channel 9.
Description:
The speaker will discuss what he considers to be the most important outcome of his work developing TeX in the 1980s, namely the accidental discovery of a new approach to programming — which caused a radical change in his own coding style. Ever since then, he has aimed to write programs for human beings (not computers) to read. The result is that the programs have fewer mistakes, they are easier to modify and maintain, and they can indeed be understood by human beings. This facilitates reproducible research, among other things.
Presentation at the R User Conference 2016.
Increase your book budget before watching this video!
Free Programming Books by Victor Felder.
From the webpage:
This list initially was a clone of stackoverflow – List of Freely Available Programming Books by George Stocker. Now updated, with dead links gone and new content.
Moved to GitHub for collaborative updating.
Great listing of resources!
But each resource stands alone as its own silo. It can (and many do) refer to other materials, even with hyperlinks, but if you want to explore any of them, you must explore them separately. That’s what being in a silo means. You have to start over at the beginning. Every time.
That is complicated by the existence of thousands of slideshows and videos on programming topics not listed here. Search for your favorite programming language at Slideshare and Youtube. There are other repositories of slideshows and videos, those are just examples.
Each one of those slideshows and/or videos is also a silo. Not to mention that with video you need a time marker if you aren’t going to watch every second of it to find relevant material.
What if you could traverse each of those silos, books, posts, slideshows, videos, documentation, source code, seamlessly?
Making that possible for C/C++ now, given the backlog of material, would have a large upfront cost before it could be useful.
Making that possible for languages with shorter histories, well, how useful would it need to be to justify its cost?
And how would you make it possible for others to easily contribute gems that they find?
Something to think about as you wander about in each of these separate silos.
Enjoy!
Shaun Nichols reports in Mozilla emits nightly builds of heir-to-Firefox browser engine Servo:
Mozilla has started publishing nightly in-development builds of its experimental Servo browser engine so anyone can track the project’s progress.
Executables for macOS and GNU/Linux are available right here to download and test drive even if you’re not a developer. If you are, the open-source engine’s code is here if you want to build it from scratch, fix bugs, or contribute to the effort.
Right now, the software is very much in a work-in-progress state, with a very simple user interface built out of HTML. It’s more of a technology demonstration than a viable web browser, although Mozilla has pitched Servo as a potential successor to Firefox’s Gecko engine.
Crucially, Servo is written using Rust – Mozilla’s more-secure C-like systems programming language. If Google has the language of Go, Moz has the language of No: Rust. It works hard to stop coders making common mistakes that lead to exploitable security bugs, and we literally mean stop: the compiler won’t build the application if it thinks dangerous code is present.
Rust focuses on safety and speed: its security measures do not impact it at run-time as the safety mechanisms are in the language by design. For example, variables in Rust have an owner and a lifetime; they can be borrowed by another owner. When a variable is being used by one owner, it cannot be used by another. This is supposed to help enforce memory safety and stop data races between threads.
It also forces the programmer to stop and think about their software’s design – Rust is not something for novices to pick up and quickly bash out code on.
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Even though pre-release and rough, I was fairly excited until I read:
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One little problem is that Servo relies on Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, which is written in C/C++. So while the HTML-rendering engine will run secured Rust code, fingers crossed nothing terrible happens within the JS engine.
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Really?
But then I checked Mozilla JavaScript-C Engine – SpiderMonkey at BlackDuck | Security, which shows zero (0) vulnerabilities over the last 10 versions.
Other than SpiderMonkey vulnerabilities known to the NSA, any others you care to mention?
Support, participate, submit bug reports on the new rendering engine but don’t forget about the JavaScript engine.
Computerworld’s advanced beginner’s guide to R by David Smith.
From the post:
Many newcomers to R got their start learning the language with Computerworld’s Beginner’s Guide to R, a 6-part introduction to the basics of the language. Now, budding R users who want to take their skills to the next level have a new guide to help them: Computerword’s Advanced Beginner’s Guide to R. Written by Sharon Machlis, author of the prior Beginner’s guide and regular reporter of R news at Computerworld, this new 72-page guide dives into some trickier topics related to R: extracting data via API, data wrangling, and data visualization.
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Well, what are you waiting for?
Either read it or pass it along!
Enjoy!
Integrated R labs for high school students by Amelia McNamara.
From the webpage:
Amelia McNamara, James Molyneux, Terri Johnson
- Project website: http://www.mobilizingcs.org/
- Curriculum page: http://www.mobilizingcs.org/curriculum
- GitHub organization: https://github.com/mobilizingcs
- mobilizr package: https://github.com/mobilizingcs/mobilizr
- Lab code: https://github.com/mobilizingcs/ids_labs
- Wiki: https://wiki.mobilizingcs.org/
- Video of teachers and students: http://stemforall2016.videohall.com/presentations/790
This looks like a very promising approach for capturing the interests of high school students in statistics and R.
From the larger project, Mobilize, curriculum page:
Mobilize centers its curricula around participatory sensing campaigns in which students use their mobile devices to collect and share data about their communities and their lives, and to analyze these data to gain a greater understanding about their world.Mobilize breaks barriers by teaching students to apply concepts and practices from computer science and statistics in order to learn science and mathematics. Mobilize is dynamic: each class collects its own data, and each class has the opportunity to make unique discoveries. We use mobile devices not as gimmicks to capture students’ attention, but as legitimate tools that bring scientific enquiry into our everyday lives.
Mobilize comprises four key curricula: Introduction to Data Science (IDS), Algebra I, Biology, and Mobilize Prime, all focused on preparing students to live in a data-driven world. The Mobilize curricula are a unique blend of computational and statistical thinking subject matter content that teaches students to think critically about and with data. The Mobilize curricula utilize innovative mobile technology to enhance math and science classroom learning. Mobilize brings “Big Data” into the classroom in the form of participatory sensing, a hands-on method in which students use mobile devices to collect data about their lives and community, then use Mobilize Visualization tools to analyze and interpret the data.
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I like the approach of having the student collect their own and process their own data. If they learn to question their own data and processes, hopefully they will ask questions about data processing results presented as “facts.” (Since 2016 is a presidential election year in the United States, questioning claimed data results is especially important.)
Enjoy!
Clojure Gazette by Eric Normand.
From the end of this essay:
Hi! The Clojure Gazette has recently changed from a list of curated links to an essay-style newsletter. I’ve gotten nothing but good comments about the change, but I’ve also noticed the first negative growth of readership since I started. I know these essays aren’t for everyone, but I’m sure there are people out there who would like the new format who don’t know about it. Would you do me a favor? Please share the Gazette with your friends!
The Biggest Waste in Our Industry is the title of the essay I link to above.
From the post:
I would like to talk about two nasty habits I have been party to working in software. Those two habits are 1) protecting programmer time and 2) measuring programmer productivity. I’m talking from my experience as a programmer to all the managers out there, or any programmer interested in process.
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You can think of Eric’s essay as an update to Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.
Peopleware was first published in 1987, second edition in 1999 (8 new chapters), third edition in 2013 (5 more pages than 1999 edition?).
Twenty-nine (29) years after the publication of Peopleware, managers still don’t “get” how to manage programmers (or other creative workers).
Disappointing, but not surprising.
It’s not uncommon to read position ads that describe going to lunch en masse, group activities, etc.
You would think they were hiring lemmings rather than technical staff.
If your startup founder is that lonely, check the local mission. Hire people for social activities, lunch, etc. Cheaper than hiring salaried staff. Greater variety as well. Ditto for managers with the need to “manage” someone.
Formal Methods for Secure Software Construction by Ben Goodspeed.
Abstract:
The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the state of the art in formal methods usage in secure computing. From this evaluation, we analyze the common components and search for weaknesses within the common workflows of secure software construction. An improved workflow is proposed and appropriate system requirements are discussed. The systems are evaluated and further tools in the form of libraries of functions, data types and proofs are provided to simplify work in the selected system. Future directions include improved program and proof guidance via compiler error messages, and targeted proof steps.
George chose Idris for this project saying:
The criteria for selecting a language for this work were expressive power, theorem proving ability (sufficient to perform universal quantification), extraction/compilation, and performance. Idris has sufficient expressive power to be used as a general purpose language (by design) and has library support for many common tasks (including web development). It supports machine verified proof and universal quantification over its datatypes and can be directly compiled to produce efficiently sized executables with reasonable performance (see section 10.1 for details). Because of these characteristics, we have chosen Idris as the basis for our further work. (at page 57)
The other contenders were Coq, Agda, Haskell, and Isabelle.
Ben provides examples of using Idris and his Proof Driven Development (PDD), but stops well short of solving the problem of secure software construction.
While waiting upon the arrival of viable methods for secure software construction, shouldn’t formal methods be useful in uncovering and documenting failures in current software?
Reasoning the greater specificity and exactness of formal methods will draw attention to gaps and failures concealed by custom and practice.
Akin to the human eye eliding over mistakes such as “When the the cat runs.”
The average reader “auto-corrects” for the presence of the second “the” in that sentence, even knowing there are two occurrences of the word “the.”
Perhaps that is a better way to say it: Formal methods avoid the human tendency to auto-correct or elide over unknown outcomes in code.
Get into Clojure with ClojureBridge
Welcome to ClojureBridge CommunityDocs, the central location for material supporting and extending the core ClojureBridge curriculum (https://github.com/ClojureBridge/curriculum). Our goal is to provide additional labs and explanations from coaches to address the needs of attendees from a wide range of cultural and technical backgrounds.
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Arne Brasseur tweeted earlier today:
Little known fact, the ClojureBridge community docs are a beginner friendly alternative to the official Clojure docs
Pass this along and contribute to the “beginner friendly alternative” so this becomes a well known fact.
Enjoy!
APIs.guru Joins Growing List of API Indexes by Benjamin Young.
From the post:
APIs.guru is the latest entry into the API definition indexing, curation, and discovery space.
The open source (MIT-licensed) community curated index currently includes 236 API descriptions which cover 6,271 endpoints. APIs.guru is focused on becoming the "Wikipedia for REST APIs."
APIs.guru is entering an increasingly crowded market with other API indexing sites including The API Stack, API Commons, APIs.io, AnyAPI, and older indexes such as ProgrammableWeb's API Directory. These API indexes share a common goal says APIEvangelist.com blogger Kin Lane:
Developers around the world are using these definitions in their work, and modern API tooling and service providers are using them to define the value they bring to the table. To help the API sector reach the next level, we need you to step up and share the API definitions you have with API Stack, APIs.io, or APIs.guru, and if you have the time and skills, we could use your help crafting other new API definitions for popular services available today.
The APIs.guru content is curated primarily by its creator, Ivan Goncharov. According to a DataFire Blog entry, the initial content was populated "using a combination of automated scraping and human curation to crawl the web for machine-readable API definitions."
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The empirical evidence from Spain indicates that the more places that link to you, the more traffic you enjoy. Even for news sites.
From that perspective, a multitude of over-lapping, duplicative API indexes is a good thing.
From my perspective, that is a one-stop shop for APIs, it’s a nightmare.
Which one you see depend on your use case.
Enjoy!
From the post:
Software Carpentry is having a Bug BBQ on June 13th
Software Carpentry is aiming to ship a new version (5.4) of the Software Carpentry lessons by the end of June. To help get us over the finish line we are having a Bug BBQ on June 13th to squash as many bugs as we can before we publish the lessons. The June 13th Bug BBQ is also an opportunity for you to engage with our world-wide community. For more info about the event, read-on and visit our Bug BBQ website.
How can you participate? We’re asking you, members of the Software Carpentry community, to spend a few hours on June 13th to wrap up outstanding tasks to improve the lessons. Ahead of the event, the lesson maintainers will be creating milestones to identify all the issues and pull requests that need to be resolved we wrap up version 5.4. In addition to specific fixes laid out in the milestones, we also need help to proofread and bugtest the
lessons.Where will this be? Join in from where you are: No need to go anywhere – if you’d like to participate remotely, start by having a look at the milestones on the website to see what tasks are still open, and send a pull request with your ideas to the corresponding repo. If you’d like to get together with other people working on these lessons live, we have created this map for live sites that are being organized. And if there’s no site listed near you, organize one yourself and let us know you are doing that here so that we can add your site to the map!
The Bug BBQ is going to be a great chance to get the community together, get our latest lessons over the finish line, and wrap up a product that gives you and all our contributors credit for your hard work with a citable object – we will be minting a DOI for this on publication.
A community BBQ that is open to everyone, dietary restrictions or not!
And the organizers have removed distance as a consideration for “attending.”
For those of us on non-BBQ diets, a unique opportunity to participate with others in the community for a worthy cause.
Mark your calendars today!
Learning to like design documents by Julia Evans.
From the post:
Hi everyone! Today we’re going to talk about software engineering and process!
A design document is where, before starting to implement a system, you write up a thing explaining what the system is supposed to do first and how you’re planning to accomplish that. I think there are basically two goals:
- tell people what you’re doing
- figure out design problems with the system before you’ve been coding for 2 months
I understand that it’s super important to think ahead a lot before huge projects, but a little bit of thinking can be helpful even for smaller projects. I asked some people recently if they write design docs for small projects and some of them said “yeah totally! small ones! it helps! :D”.
I used to get kind of grumpy when someone was like “hey julia can you write a design document for your system?” It would seem like a reasonable idea, though, so I’d try to do it! But the first couple of times I tried to write one I felt like it didn’t actually really help me! I liked the idea in principle, but I didn’t really know how to apply it and I felt like it was hard to get good feedback.
Last week I wrote a design doc and I thought it was sort of helpful. Here are some current thoughts.
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Be forewarned that Julia is a gifted writer and you will enjoy her posts more than your design documents. 😉
Still, Julia makes a great case for the use of design documents (a/k/a “documentation”).
Unless your job security is tied up in undocumented, spaghetti COBOL code (or its equivalent in another language), try putting Julia’s advice into action.
If you are looking for really broad but practical reading in programming, check out Julia’s list of all her posts. Pick one at random every week. You won’t be disappointed.
This ProPublica story by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, isn’t short but it is worth your time to not only read, but to download the data and test their analysis for yourself.
Especially if you have the mis-impression that algorithms can avoid bias. Or that clients will apply your analysis with the caution that it deserves.
Finding a bias in software, like finding a bug, is a good thing. But that’s just one, there is no estimate of how many others may exist.
And as you will find, clients may not remember your careful explanation of the limits to your work. Or apply it in ways you don’t anticipate.
Machine Bias – There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.
Here’s the first story to try to lure you deeper into this study:
ON A SPRING AFTERNOON IN 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid’s blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs.
Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances — which belonged to a 6-year-old boy — a woman came running after them saying, “That’s my kid’s stuff.” Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away.
But it was too late — a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of $80.
Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting $86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store.
Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.
Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden — who is black — was rated a high risk. Prater — who is white — was rated a low risk.
Two years later, we know the computer algorithm got it exactly backward. Borden has not been charged with any new crimes. Prater is serving an eight-year prison term for subsequently breaking into a warehouse and stealing thousands of dollars’ worth of electronics.
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This analysis demonstrates that malice isn’t required for bias to damage lives. Whether the biases are in software, in its application, in the interpretation of its results, the end result is the same, damaged lives.
I don’t think bias in software is avoidable but here, here no one was even looking.
What role do you think budget justification/profit making played in that blindness to bias?
Computer Programming for Lawyers: An Introduction by Paul Ohm and Jonathan Frankle.
From the syllabus:
This class provides an introduction to computer programming for law students. The programming language taught may vary from year-to-year, but it will likely be a language designed to be both easy to learn and powerful, such as Python or JavaScript. There are no prerequisites, and even students without training in computer science or engineering should be able successfully to complete the class.
The course is based on the premise that computer programming has become a vital skill for non-technical professionals generally and for future lawyers and policymakers specifically. Lawyers, irrespective of specialty or type of practice, organize, evaluate, and manipulate large sets of text-based data (e.g. cases, statutes, regulations, contracts, etc.) Increasingly, lawyers are asked to deal with quantitative data and complex databases. Very simple programming techniques can expedite and simplify these tasks, yet these programming techniques tend to be poorly understood in legal practice and nearly absent in legal education. In this class, students will gain proficiency in various programming-related skills.
A secondary goal for the class is to introduce students to computer programming and computer scientific concepts they might encounter in the substantive practice of law. Students might discuss, for example, how programming concepts illuminate and influence current debates in privacy, intellectual property, consumer protection, antidiscrimination, antitrust, and criminal procedure.
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The language for this year is Python. The course website, http://paulohm.com/classes/cpl16/ does not have any problem sets posted, yet. Be sure to check back for those.
Recommend this to any and all lawyers you encounter. It isn’t possible to predict who will or will not be a judge someday. Judges with a basic understanding of computing could improve the overall quality of decisions on computer technology.
Like discounting DOJ spun D&D tales about juvenile behavior.
Efficient R programming by Colin Gillespie and Robin Lovelace.
From the present text of Chapter 2:
An efficient computer set-up is analogous to a well-tuned vehicle: its components work in harmony, it is well-serviced, and it is fast. This chapter describes the software decisions that will enable a productive workflow. Starting with the basics and moving to progressively more advanced topics, we explore how the operating system, R version, startup files and IDE can make your R work faster (though IDE could be seen as basic need for efficient programming). Ensuring correct configuration of these elements will have knock-on benefits in many aspects of your R workflow. That’s why we cover them at this early stage (hardware, the other fundamental consideration, is covered in the next chapter). By the end of this chapter you should understand how to set-up your computer and R installation (skip to section 2.3 if R is not already installed on your computer) for optimal computational and programmer efficiency. It covers the following topics:
- R and the operating systems: system monitoring on Linux, Mac and Windows
- R version: how to keep your base R installation and packages up-to-date
- R start-up: how and why to adjust your
.Rprofileand.Renvironfiles- RStudio: an integrated development environment (IDE) to boost your programming productivity
- BLAS and alternative R interpreters: looks at ways to make R faster
For lazy readers, and to provide a taster of what’s to come, we begin with our ‘top 5’ tips for an efficient R set-up. It is important to understand that efficient programming is not simply the result of following a recipe of tips: understanding is vital for knowing when to use a memorised solution to a problem and when to go back to first principles. Thinking about and understanding R in depth, e.g. by reading this chapter carefully, will make efficiency second nature in your R workflow.
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Nope, go see Chapter 2 if you want the top 5 tips for efficient R set-up.
The text and code are being developed at the website and the authors welcome “pull requests and general comments.”
Don’t be shy!
Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom by Evan Miller.
From the post:
I will attempt to convince you, in two lines of code, that Elixir is more interesting than any programming language you’ve ever used.
Are you ready? Don’t worry, the code doesn’t involve quicksort, or metaprogramming, or anything like that.
Here we go.
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Sorry, no spoilers, but I can say that use of strace or dtruss figure in explaining some amazing performance characteristics.
It reminds me of the sort of post I expect from Julia Evans. It’s that good.
If you are not interested in possibly slashing CPU and RAM usage, move onto another post. If you are, spend some time with Evan’s post.
I’m thinking the smaller the footprint the better. Yes?
Enjoy!
The New Normal, a series by Michael Nygard.
I encountered one of the more recent posts in this series and when looking for its beginning: The New Normal: Failure is a Good Thing.
From that starting post:
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Everything breaks. It’s just a question of when and how badly.What we need is a new approach where “continuous partial failure” is the normal state of affairs. Continuous partial failure opens the doors to making big changes happen because you’re already good at executing the small stuff.
In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about moving from the mentality of preventing problems to actually promoting them. I’ll look at the aging models for achieving resiliency and introduce microservices as an extension of the concept of antifragility into the design of IT infrastructure, applications, and organizations.
Along the way, I’ll share some stories about Netflix and their classic Chaos Monkey, how Amazon is becoming an increasingly terrifying competitor, the significance of maneuverability and the art of war, the unforeseen consequences of outsourcing and how Cognitect’s simple and sharp tools play a pivotal role in shaping the new IT blueprint.
Does anyone seriously doubt the the proposition: Everything breaks?
From a security perspective, I would not argue with Everything’s broken.
I’m starting at the beginning and working my way forward in this series. It promises to be seriously rewarding.
Enjoy!
The caption as reported at: Classic Programmer Paintings reads:
“Consultant shows Clojure code sample to VBA team”, Rembrandt, Oil on canvas, 1635
Whether shown by a consultant or being written on the wall by a disembodied hand, I suspect the impact would be the same. 😉
There is a Bosch triplet at Classic Programmer Paintings.
I was about to lament the lack of high-resolution Bosch images but then discovered Extraordinary Interactive Hi-Res Exhibit of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Christopher Jobson.
As Jobson comments:
This is the internet we were promised.
Enjoy!
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