what i've been reading (45)
payroll, youtube, replying to email, xmas.c
Reverse engineering YouTube statistics by random sampling - aggregated stats here - over 13 billion videos.
Perhaps the most important thing we did with our set of random videos is to demonstrate a vastly better way of studying YouTube than drunk dialing... By comparing our results to other ways of generating lists of YouTube videos, we can declare them “plausibly random” if they generate similar results. Fortunately, one method does – it was discovered by Jia Zhou et. al. in 2011, and it’s far more efficient than our naïve method. (You generate a five character string where one character is a dash – YouTube will autocomplete those URLs and spit out a matching video if one exists.)
Payroll Providers - more analysis from patio11
Payroll providers are the original financial technology company, and were some of the first scaled adopters of computers generally.
Neal Stephenson: Why I am a bad correspondent
If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
SMTP Smuggling - Also some drama - Postfix wasn’t told about the attack until it was published.
Since the outbound Outlook SMTP server is not only used for e-mails by outlook.com, but for the entirety of Exchange Online, we can now send e-mails from every domain which uses Exchange Online to send e-mails!
Politics… 10 Downing Street.
Our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts.
A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamin
While N-methylamphetamine itself is a powerful decongestant, it is less desirable in a medical setting because of its severe side effects and addictive properties. Such side effects may include insomnia, agitation, irritability, dry mouth, sweating, and heart palpitations. Other side effects may include violent urges or, similarly, the urge to be successful in business or finance.
Coat hangers: Even low-hanging ideas are a dime-a-dozen
Adding to my overflowing “there is absolutely loads of low-hanging fruit innovation still” file
Looking back on an investment in Nintendo - This author thinks Nintendo will try competing head to head with Playstation/Xbox via the Switch 2. I’m not so sure.
Cross-shareholding in Japan is common. A company takes a small stake in their suppliers and customers as a gesture of goodwill.
The judges thought that this program looked like what you would get by pounding on the keys of an old typewriter at random.
