RadioShack Learns of New Job at Amazon

Teaser medium

A goodbye and honoring of RadioShack, DRM/EME/W3C and trusting black boxes on all your computers (from your car to your phone),
how Machine Learning works, a bit about Natural Language Processing to get a job, Amazon opens a book store, and more GeekNews.

And Command/Ctrl + K brings up the link dialog!

RadioShack declares bankruptcy

Nearly a century after it opened its first store and sent out its first catalog, RadioShack (RSHC) declared bankruptcy on Thursday.
It has struck a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its approximately 4,000 stores and wireless company Sprint (S) will create a “store within a store” in up to 1,750 of those.
RadioShack said that its remaining stores are expected to close.

Steve Wozniak on Radio Shack

Raspberry Pi 2 on sale now at $35

And Lyle mentioned getting great things at:

Machine Learning: The Algorithm That Sees Beauty in Photographic Portraits

Scientists at Yahoo Labs have developed a machine learning algorithm that distinguishes beautiful portraits from the not-so

Linear Digressions

A Podcast About Data Science and Machine Learning Hosted by Ben Jaffe and Katie Malone.

DRM, EME, Open Software, Flash and the W3C

Corry Doctorow at the EFF wrote Youtube Ditches Flash, and it Hardly Matters: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Here are some quotes:

Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash.

Today, it’s a bitter reminder of how the three big commercial browser vendors—Apple, Microsoft and Google—Netflix, the BBC, and the World Wide Web Consortium sold the whole Internet out.

Disclosure: Lyle Troxell works for Netflix

Ben and Lyle chat a bit about DRM, the above mentioned W3C “sell out” refers to the EME specification.

Some concepts covered in this discussion :

Find a Better Job With Artificial Intelligence

The Boston startup is rolling out a new site today for software engineers looking for jobs. The idea is you sign up, tell the site what kinds of positions and companies you’re interested in and how actively you’re looking, and turn things over to Beansprock. The company then sends you e-mails with the best job matches it can find over the course of days and weeks.

To do this, Beansprock “uses natural language processing to go out to the universe and find your best job out there,”

Twitter Reaches Deal to Show Tweets in Google Search Results

In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results as soon as they’re posted, thanks to a deal giving the Web company access to Twitter’s firehose, the stream of data generated by the microblogging service’s 284 million users, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday.

Twitter Lost Four Million Users Because of Apple’s iOS 8

Well, one million of those users were people who downloaded iOS 8 and either never reopened Twitter, or forgot their password and couldn’t log back in. The other three million were lost due to Safari’s Reader section, which no longer pings Twitter automatically for content like it did in iOS 7. Users who were counted as active because of this automatic pinging on iOS 7 were then lost when they updated to iOS 8.

Verizon Cuts Rates For Data Plans, But Not Automatically For Existing Customers

Verizon MORE Everything customers who currently have monthly data allotments of 1GB, 2GB, 3GB, or 4GB will have an option on how they want to save.
They can either get more data for their money by getting 1GB of additional data per month for no extra charge OR they can have their bill reduced by $10/month.

US health insurer Anthem suffers massive data breach

Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the United States, has suffered a data breach that may turn out to be the largest health care breach to date, as the compromised database holds records of some 80 million individuals.

Staples to Buy Office Depot

Staples Inc. plans to buy Office Depot Inc. for about $6.3 billion, forging a deal that will reduce the U.S. office-supply industry to a single major chain and test the limits of antitrust regulators.

Amazon’s First Staffed College Campus Store Should Have Retailers Worried

Amazon is setting down roots in U.S. college campuses, and today it is celebrating the grand opening of its first ever staffed location at one of those schools.

Wikipedia Editor Spotlight

Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling addressed a packed room as they answered a question that has likely popped into the minds of even the most casual users of Wikipedia: who the hell edits the site, and why do they do it?