Quick links

What caught my attention lately:

• 12% of Harvard is enrolled in CS 50: "In pretty much every area of study, computational methods and computational thinking are going to be important to the future" ([1])
  
  
• Excellent "What If?" nicely shows the value of back-of-the-envelope calculations and re-thinking what exactly it is you want to do ([1])
  
  
• The US has almost no competition, only local monopolies, for high speed internet ([1] [2])
  
  
• You can't take two large, dysfunctional, underperforming organizations, mash them together, and somehow make diamonds. When you take two big messes and put them together, you just get a bigger mess. ([1])
  
  
• "Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites ... At the end of 2014, we will retire the Yahoo Directory." ([1] [2])
  
  
• Investors think that Yahoo is essentially worthless ([1])
  
  
• "At a moment when excitement about the future of robotics seems to have reached an all-time high (just ask Google and Amazon), Microsoft has given up on robots" ([1])
  
  
• "Firing a bunch of tremendously smart and creative people seems misguided. But hey—at least they own Minecraft!" ([1])
  
  
• "Macs still work basically the same way they did a decade ago, but iPhones and iPads have an interface that's specifically designed for multi-touch screens" ([1] [2])
  
  
• On the difficulty of doing startups ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Be glad some other sucker is fueling the venture capital fire" ([1])
  
  
• "Just how antiquated the U.S. payments system has become" ([1])
  
  
• Is everyone grabbing money from online donations to charities? Visa's charge fee on charities is only 1.35%, but the lowest online payment system for charities charges 2.2% and most charge much more than that. ([1])
  
  
• "For most people, the risk of data loss is greater than the risk of data theft" ([1])
  
  
• Password recovery "security questions should go away altogether. They're so dangerous that many security experts recommend filling in random gibberish instead of real answers" ([1])
  
  
• Brilliantly done, free, open source, web-based puzzle game with wonderfully dark humor about ubiquitous surveillance ([1])
  
  
• How Udacity does those cool transparent hands in its videos ([1])
  
  
• There's just a bit of interference when you move your hand above the phone, just enough interference to detect gestures without using any additional power or sensors ([1] [2])
  
  
• Small, low power wireless devices powered by very small fluctuations in temperature ([1] [2])
  
  
• Cute intuitive interface for transferring data between PC and mobile ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Federal funding for biomedical research [down 20%] ... forcing some people out of science altogether" ([1])
  
  
• Another fun example of virtual tourism ([1])
  
  
• Ig Nobel Prizes: "Dogs prefer to align themselves to the Earth's north-south magnetic field while urinating and defecating" ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd: "In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Dilbert: "That process sounds like a steaming pile of stupidity that will beat itself to death in a few years" ([1])
  
  
• Dilbert on one way to do job interviews ([1])
  
  
• The Onion: "Startup Very Casual About Dress Code, Benefits" ([1])
  
  
• Hilarious South Park episode, "Go Fund Yourself", makes fun of startups ([1])