Photo by Faraz

GrubHub’s Phasmid Websites – The latest evolution of websites that appear to be official, but are actually set up by a third-party to benefit from traffic. As the costs of hosting a site keeps dropping, there will be more and more of these competing for attention. Long-term this feels like just as much of a threat to the web model as mobile app stores, since we have to trust Google to win the arms race against fakers without down-ranking obscure-but-genuine sites.

Dizzying but invisible depth – In my lifetime we’ve gone from machines that I had a chance of understanding completely given decades to study them, to ones that no one person could ever hope to create a complete mental model of. Maybe this is the point at which CS truly needs to become a science, since we’re building increasingly blacker boxes we can only hope to comprehend by experimenting on?

Machine-learning on a board – Large neural networks are going to be showing up in your domain soon, I promise, so I’m keeping an eye out for interesting hardware approaches like this that may help accelerate them on otherwise-modest systems.

San Francisco Survival Guide – Short but packed with the essentials you need to know. A good reminder of some things it’s easy for me to get blasé about too, both good and bad – “The inequality will shock you and continue to shock you.”

Pointer magic for efficient dynamic value representations – Bit-twiddling fun.