News

Gmail Is Catching More Malicious Attachments With Deep Learning

Users of Gmail get 300 billion attachments each week. To separate legitimate documents from harmful ones, Google turned to AI—and it’s working. Distributing malware by attaching tainted documents to emails is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Reflections on software performance

At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on my other blog, Accidentally Quadratic. In this post, I want to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned while writing performant software, and working with rather a lot more not-so-performant software.

How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders

Seven years ago, Allstate Corporation told Maryland regulators it was time to update its auto insurance rates. The insurer said its new, sophisticated risk analysis showed it was charging nearly all of its 93,000 Maryland customers outdated premiums. Some of the old rates were off by miles.

Driver stranded after connected rental car can’t call home

Over the weekend, a trip to the Californian boonies by Guardian journalist Kari Paul turned into a cautionary tale about the perils of the connected car and the Internet of Things. Paul had rented a car through a local car-sharing service called GIG Car Share, which offers a fleet of hybrid Toyota Priuses and electric Chevrolet Bolt EVs in the Bay Area and Sacramento, with plans to spend the weekend in a more rural part of the state about three hours north of Oakland. But on Sunday, she was left stranded on an unpaved road when the car’s telematics system lost its cell signal.

MIT CSAIL TextFooler Framework Tricks Leading NLP Systems

A team of researchers at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) recently released a framework called TextFooler which successfully tricked state-of-the-art NLP models (such as BERT) into making incorrect predictions.

Multi-Runtime Microservices Architecture

Best practices have emerged around “microservice” architecture and “12-factor app” design. As cloud, containers, and container orchestrators (.g. Kubernetes) have become popular, new solutions to address common integration principles have emerged.

How We Improved Data Discovery for Data Scientists at Spotify

The pitch deck that got Smartcar $2 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz

How to ignore files in Git without .gitignore

Git has a handy feature when it comes to preventing accidental file check-ins when the files are meant to stay local. The obvious candidates are compiled binaries when you only want to check in the source code. Other candidates are files with local configurations.

Scaling Driver Compliance across Lyft

A passenger opens the app, requests a ride, and just a few minutes later there is a car with a friendly driver in front of them. They may know this driver went through a background check and other vetting; however, many might not realize all the complexity in the on-boarding process. Driver and vehicle requirements vary substantially across markets (and even at very proximate locations) due to varying market dynamics and government regulations.