Natalie Meurer

Understanding the absurdity and promise of Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Since leaving Palantir and while gearing up for business school, I've spent a fair amount of time digging into the wonderfully intricate world of cryptocurrencies. I remain largely ambivalent on whether the world of crypto represents a promising new development for society or a pure waste of talent, energy, and

Cryptocurrency: A tale of three actors

My history with cryptocurrency started in 2012 and has been a long, meandering path of missteps, misunderstandings, and misplaced conviction. I've watched crypto grow up in some ways and calcify in others, but I've never seen such a wide swath of individuals getting involved in cryptocurrency as I do now.

Do we have a Political or Cultural Left?

Following Donald Trump's election in 2016, a collection of lectures written by Richard Rorty gained prominence. Of particular interest to the public was Rorty's prescient prediction that a demagogue would emerging in response to what he described as a "Cultural Left": a liberalism focused almost exclusively on issues of identity

Writing Redux-Aware, Functional React Components in Typescript

In the past few years, ReactJS has begun to dominate the landscape of client-side web frameworks, in part for its blazingly fast performance and ease of use. Redux is a helpful tool to deploy alongside React, as it allows web applications to manage state more effectively via a single set

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

Getting Started with Go: Understanding "Always Pass by Value"

My general take on Golang is that it's simple but safe. That said, Go is often confusing to newcomers in the way it handles passing variables to functions. In this post, I'm going to break down pass-by-value semantics and run through how they work for Go as compared to Java.

Personal Posts and Stories

Authenticity

The challenge of coming out and transitioning is one that gets to the core of how we as humans express ourselves authentically, but it's also one that I don't see as unique to the trans experience.

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

The Life of a Log

"That sounds...interesting" is a pretty common response when I explain to people that "I spend a lot of time working on logging, and no really, it's quite exciting." Yet I can never seem to drive home just _why_ I find logging so fascinating as an area of technical inquiry.

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

Introduction to Python Data Analytics: Basic Time Series Analysis

When I started at Palantir, I got a crash course in data analytics. In the process, I've realized that pure software engineering skills are just one piece of a broader set of tools needed to interact with data in sophisticated ways. For a software engineer that works with data regularly,

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Why Does it Matter if I'm Watched?

If surveillance helps us catch criminals, many naturally wonder why we would want to limit its use. After all, if an innocent man did not realize he was being watched, he could hardly be considered worse off as a result. If anything, he may be safer and proven to be

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Context: The Link between Privacy and Surveillance

When Warren and Brandeis published "The Right to Privacy" in 1890, they didn't get too hung up on definitions. Rather, they defined privacy as "the right to be let alone." This definition would include photographs taken of you without your consent and the right to not

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

Powerful Regexes for Date Processing

Today, I present some powerful regexes for use in date processing! To try these out, just head over to regexr.com. This regex will capture all dates in the formats MM/DD/YY, MM/DD/YYYY, MM-DD-YY, MM-D-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD and more! ([0,1]?\d{1})[\/|\-](([0-2]?\d{1})|([3]

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Hello Barbie Moves In

A scenario where dolls come alive and start talking back to children sounds like a scene from an upcoming horror movie, but the new “Hello Barbie” doll has made such a scene a reality. Even though these new models of Barbie dolls may not have plans to take over the

Tech Policy

Autonomy or Humanity: Robotic Interrogators, Weaponry, and Police Forces

Few games have inspired such devotion and careful study throughout history as chess. But chess has drastically changed in the past 20 years. The development of computers has enabled chess computer systems that can beat even the greatest grandmasters such as Garry Kasparov. The evolution of computers enabled a new

Business Strategy

Data Mining Discrimination: A Hypothetical Case Study

Since I wrote my last post on algorithmic discrimination, I've been asked how these discriminatory patterns actually appear in a computer system. The processes that underlie discrimination and technological exclusion are varied, but in the realm of data mining, some clear pathways exist. I'd like to introduce a hypothetical case

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Algorithmic Discrimination: The World as it is or as it Ought to be?

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are driven by numbers. Pure computation. Yet the emergence of artificial intelligence and deep learning approaches to machine learning have raised concerns about the embodied values of technical systems. As Helen Nissenbaum originally noted in a 2001 “Computer” article, engineers cannot avoid the fact that

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

Python Regex to Remove Tags

I'm starting a new series of posts on coding tricks that are simple in principle but often take someone new to a technology too long to find on Stack Overflow. This serves two purposes. First, I can find them again, which always makes things easier when I haven't used something

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Bioenhancements and Privacy

Cyborgs have been a staple in the science fiction genre for as long as I can remember. In the academic community, however, many have suggested that the idea of the cyborg, broadly defined as a hybrid of man and machine, is closer to a reality than we might believe. In

Tech Policy

Preparing for the Self-Driving Revolution

Cars drive themselves now. Strangely enough, this statement, which formerly would have seemed completely absurd, has already become a reality. If you don't believe me, just head to Mountain View, where Google tests their self-driving cars with regularity. Others are quickly following suit. In the market today, technology and automotive

Business Strategy

Delete: How Properly Deleting Data Can Protect Your Business

If you haven't heard about the Ashley Madison hack and data disclosure yet, check it out. A group of hackers calling themselves Impact Team breached Ashley Madison, a dating site geared toward people who wanted to cheat on their spouse. They demanded that Ashley Madison and partner site, Established Men,

Privacy and Civil Liberties

Encryption, the Latest Pew Survey, and the Privacy Paradox

I just finished "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" by Simon Singh, and I've been absolutely enthralled by his account of cryptographers and cryptanalysts throughout history. The progression of cryptography from basic substitution ciphers to today's complex computer-based encryption methods is

Tech Policy

Is Cyberspace a Space unto Itself?

I've been reading Julia Cohen's "Configuring the Networked Self," in the past few days, and it's raised some questions about the idea of cyberspace itself. In a trypical day, each of us will enter the "world of cyberspace" dozens of times, a world where we find

Technical Concepts and Tutorials

A Simple Guide to Entropy-Based Discretization

In the past two weeks, I've been completing a data mining project in Python. In the project, I implemented Naive Bayes in addition to a number of preprocessing algorithms. As this has been my first deep dive into data mining, I have found many of the math equations difficult to

Business Strategy

American Innovation and the Future Start Up

I've lately been considering how the innovation capabilities of America will develop in the next 15 years. Will Silicon Valley continue to be the center for tech activity, or will the very nature of a tech startup change entirely? Perhaps in 15 years, we will be looking instead toward another

A Primer for $http in AngularJS

While working on my latest application, Schedulize, I ran into the problem that many programmers working with Angular encounter: I had poorly written controllers. It's true. My controllers did not look great. They had become cluttered and unmanageable, and my tendency to put global logic in them made it difficult

A brief dive into UX on Germ Theory

This past day, I spent a huge amount of time working on a single page of our application, and I couldn't be more proud of the results. While nothing excites me quite as much as algorithms or extremely challenging code problems, there's something satisfying about building something beautiful (at least