Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• Dilbert on A/B testing: "Bend to my will and choose the orange button, you mindless click-puppets!" ([1])
  
  
• Major performance increases on smartphones are disappearing, which will slow sales and reduce revenues ([1] [2])
  
  
• Price war in cloud services ([1])
  
  
• On Facebook buying Oculus: "The dominant reaction to the move could be summed up in three letters: WTF" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Remember this? "Companies could cause their stock prices to increase by simply adding an 'e-' prefix to their name or a '.com' to the end, which one author called 'prefix investing'" ([1] [2])
  
  
• VCs favor pitches from attractive men ([1] [2])
  
  
• "We've known for a while that email providers could look into your inbox, but the assumption was that they wouldn't" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Bad new trend: Apps that covertly mine Bitcoins for someone else ([1] [2])
  
  
• More companies should do this: Run large scale surveys of employees to discover what makes people happy and productive ([1])
  
  
• Combining dissimilar fields is hard, but can also lead to discovering lots of low hanging fruit (at least from where you are standing) that no one else has picked ([1])
  
  
• Good idea from a recent Google paper: Mine the web to build up knowledge of objects that are likely and unlikely to co-occur, then use that to accept or reject candidates during object recognition ([1] [2])
  
  
• Cool throwback idea from a recent MSR paper: Old school circuit-switched networks in the data center using cheap commodity FPGAs ([1] [2])
  
  
• “There doesn't need to be a protective shell around our researchers where they think great thoughts" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Surprisingly compelling results: Generate likely 3D models of facial appearance solely from DNA ([1] [2])
  
  
• Stem cells used to grow strong muscles that repair themselves when damaged ([1])
  
  
• The ancient Greeks and Persians had to occasionally fight off lions ([1] [2])
  
  
• Great visualization of conditional probability ([1])
  
  
• Galleries of hilariously useless items ([1] [2])