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Summer Reading List
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] “I thought Greenspan was bad but this book paints a positive image. Seb Mallaby is an awesome author so makes for an easy read.”…
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McDonald's Real Estate: How They Really Make Their Money (2015)
McDonald’s is one of the biggest real estate companies in the world. It owns $28.4 billion worth of land and buildings (before depreciation).
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What happens when you swipe a credit card
Ninety percent of Americans have used a credit card, but far fewer understand the underlying systems enabling their payments. So let’s dive…
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Facebook is terrifying
Facebook is terrifying Remember that last time you posted a picture on Facebook and it automatically suggested to tag other people on the photo? Nothing unusual. You’ve tagged these people before …
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Chrome Won
Disclaimer: I worked for 7 years at Mozilla and was Mozilla’s Chief Technology Officer before leaving 2 years ago to found an embedded AI startup. Mozilla published a blog post two days ago h…
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WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant
Just over a year ago we presented WaveNet, a new deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms that is capable of producing better and more realistic-sounding speech than existing techniques. At that time, the model was a research prototype and was too computationally intensive to work in consumer products.
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What I Heard from Trump Supporters
After the election, I decided to talk to 100 Trump voters from around the country. I went to the middle of the country, the middle of the state, and talked to many online. This was a...
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You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy
I recently read a story here titled “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.”
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iPhone Performance Degrades as Battery Ages
A Reddit post from last week has sparked a discussion regarding iPhone performance as a function of battery age. While we expect battery capacity to decrease as batteries age, we expect processor performance to stay the same. However, users with older iPhones with lower-than-expected Geekbench 4 scores have reported…
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Voice Calls: Secure, Crystal-Clear, AI-Powered
Introducing super-fast and secure AI-powered calls, and a nifty setting for video compression quality.
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Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
We're building something special. Stay tuned for the launch.
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Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
A July 2017 milestone, with 34 organizations joining the alliance.
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Video Pros Moving from Mac to Windows for High-End GPUs
But as good as that juiced up Mac Pro Tower is today, I know at some point, the time will have to come to an end, simply because Apple hasn’t built a PCIe-based system in many years now. As my article described, the alternative Mac Pro trashcan is simply not a solution for our needs, imposing too many limitations…
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MS Paint is here to stay
MS Paint fans rejoice: The original art app isn’t going anywhere – except to the Windows Store for free!
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Uber Driver Tip-Hustling Schemes
Uber drivers increasingly resort to aggressive tactics for tips, leading to uncomfortable experiences for riders.
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Analysis of the United Airlines passenger removal incident
The Practical Nomad: Edward Hasbrouck's blog
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The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”
I was reading yet another blog post titled "Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y> (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Jeff Dean’s Lecture for YC AI [video]
Jeff Dean is a Google Senior Fellow in the Research Group, where he leads the Google Brain project. He spoke to the YC AI [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-ai/] group this summer. Here are his slides:
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Google signs agreement with HTC
Creating beautiful hardware products that people rely on every single day is a journey, and we are investing for the long run.
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LA Times and ads
The LA Times is a good newspaper and is currently doing the best political coverage in California. They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker …
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Apple does right by users and advertisers are displeased
With the new Safari 11 update, Apple takes an important step to protect your privacy, specifically how your browsing habits are tracked and shared with parties other than the sites you visit. In response, Apple is getting criticized by the advertising industry for "destroying the Internet's...
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New Thunderbird Releases and New Thunderbird Staff
Thunderbird is going strong at version 52 (ESR) and 57, 58 beta In April 2017 Thunderbird released its successful Extended Service Release (ESR) version 52. This release has just seen it’s fifth “dot update” 52.5.0, where fixes, stability and minor functionality improvements were shipped. Thunderbird 57 beta was also…