Quick links

What caught my attention recently:

• "Big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs .... As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act .... the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough" ([1])
  
  
• Lots of details on recommendations, personalization, and experimentation at Netflix in a new ACM paper ([1])
  
  
• Fun and interesting Slate article on how Facebook selects posts for the news feed ([1])
  
  
• New paper claims the filter bubble for news is much stronger in what people self-select and on social media than in search and recommendations ([1])
  
  
• "Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• NIPS 2015 paper on problems that accumulate in machine learning systems, such as dependencies between features, dependencies between models that build off each other, and complicated and fragile data preprocessing ([1])
  
  
• "Should they teach [self-driving] cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" ([1])
  
  
• Wal-mart is doing poorly against Amazon, which is surprising, I think ([1])
  
  
• Good article on product management. I particularly like the points that most products fail (so you should expect to experiment, adapt, and iterate) and that a good product is about experiences not features ([1])
  
  
• "People keep mentioning how different things are to the period just before the AI winter" ([1])
  
  
• "Smartwatches still have a long way to go in terms of proving their usefulness, necessity, and style" ([1])
  
  
• "CYA security: given the choice between overreacting to a threat and wasting everyone's time, and underreacting and potentially losing your job, it's easy to overreact." ([1])
  
  
• A new $7M XPrize for autonomous undersea drones ([1] [2])
  
  
• Simulating the World in Emoji is a very fun educational simulation, similar to the Artificial Life work a while back, great for kids ([1])
  
  
• From the Exploratorium Museum, a demo of how wave motion arises from swirling smaller movements in water ([1])
  
  
• Dilbert comic on tech jargon ([1])
  
  
• Pearls Before Swine comic on clickthrough agreements ([1])
  
  
• SMBC comic: "Update 9.1.2.001.241 has been a test of your loyalty." ([1])