StackOverflow :: Strangest language feature
JavaScript: I love you, but what the hell? Just... why?
A lot of the oddities listed here are aggressively, in-your-face strange or so quirky you'd never know they're there unless you seek them out. The JavaScript ones would make good examples if Hannah Arendt were to re-write Banality of Evil but make it about 21st century coding: strange enough to be dangerous, but normal enough to be insidious. (Via JamulBlog)
HBR Blog Network :: David Court :: The Case for Crafting a Big Data Plan
The Endeavor :: John D Cook :: How loud is the evidence?
New career goal — get a paper published in which I report my results in decibels.
Marginal Revolution :: Alex Tabarrok :: A Brilliant New Method of Price Discrimination: Flip to Fly
Brilliant indeed. Sign me up.
Would this be better or worse, for both consumers and airlines, if you could list <i>n</i> potential destinations instead of just two?
Turing's Invisible Hand :: Ariel Procaccia :: The economic Turing test
Over a recent lunch, Boris Bukh suggested the following variant of the Turing test: a human and a computer play a game (in the game-theoretic sense). A judge who is observing only their moves must decide with confidence who is the human and who is the computer. The premise is that the human would play irrationally (he’s just a random person off the street), and the computer’s goal is to also play irrationally to avoid detection.
A couple of years ago I worked on an IARPA-funded project which was trying to model cognitive biases of intelligence analysts. They were sinking a lot of money into what Procaccia cleverly calls "Artificial Stupidity."
The Economist: Babbage :: G.F. :: Stick a pin on it
When Charlie Loyd wanted a job at a mapping firm, he did not send out resumés or make calls. Instead, he posted a message on Twitter that linked to a side-by-side comparison of satellite imagery of Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland's northernmost tip. On the left was a lacklustre image with no real detail captured by a NASA satellite and widely used by Mr Loyd's prospective employers; on the right, his own version.
This is inspiring. Literally, it gives me inspiration for ways to up my chances of getting hired.
JamulBlog :: Fidelity.com Password Fail
Wow. That is amateurishly bad. I really hope Fidelity is better at managing money than they are at managing crypto.
I'm routinely surprised (is such a thing possible?) at how lax security is on banking websites. As an example, of the seven different financial institutions I log into weekly, BofA is the only one that bothers to authenticate itself to me. It's 2013. Is two-way auth really that much to ask?
How did I not know writeLaTeX existed? This is useful stuff.
(Sidenote: check out this foldable dodecahedron calendar someone created with just a few lines of TikZ.)