Four short links: 25 January 2018
Young Developers Coding Later, Algorithmic Fairness, Google Goss, and Deep Learned Folk Music
- 2018 Developer Report — Almost half of all developers (47%) between the ages of 45 and 54 started coding before they were 16 years old. Meanwhile, developers between 18 and 24 today are the least likely to have started coding before 16 (only 20%). That’s right: today’s kids learn to code later than 80s kids. (via The Next Web)
- Algorithmic Decision-making and the Cost of Fairness — Maximizing public safety requires detaining all individuals deemed sufficiently likely to commit a violent crime, regardless of race. However, to satisfy common metrics of fairness, one must set multiple, race-specific thresholds. There is thus an inherent tension between minimizing expected violent crime and satisfying common notions of fairness. This tension is real: by analyzing data from Broward County, we find that optimizing for public safety yields stark racial disparities; conversely, satisfying past fairness definitions means releasing more high-risk defendants, adversely affecting public safety.
- Why I Left Google to Join Grab (Steve Yegge) — finally, he’s blogging again, and dishes both dirt on Google and analysis on the food delivery market. Google has become 100% competitor focused rather than customer focused. […] The problem is that their incentive structure isn’t aligned for focusing on their customers, so they wind up being too busy, and it always gets deprioritized. A slogan isn’t good enough. It takes real effort to set aside time regularly for every employee to interact with your customers. Instead, they play the dangerous but easier game of using competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really need. and The entire food truck industry is about to go tango uniform, disrupted by food delivery just as it was getting off the ground. and Unlike in the U.S., ride-hailing transport is a game-changer for the entire social and economic infrastructure of Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. tl;dr: he’s hiring and gives great rhetoric.
- folk-rnn — folk music modeling with LSTM. Applying deep learning to folk music: it’s basically my happy place. I love the millenial whoop Irish tunes.
