2001: Here’s why we’ve started cutting prices Starting in 2001, the company started lowering prices on goods. The “loop” he mentions below will be covered in MBA classes for decades: “Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford to lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it’s good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.”

Source: The smartest things Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said in the last 20 years – Business Insider

1998: Here’s how you hire right This year’s snippet is somewhat out of context from the rest, but it still offers insight into how the company hired some of the brightest minds available in the late 1990s: “During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:
Will you admire this person? …
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? …
Along what dimensions might this person be a superstar?”

Source: The smartest things Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said in the last 20 years – Business Insider

Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.

Source: The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point — Quartz

In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

Source: Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain – The Atlantic

project.”

I met with Kahneman at a Le Pain Quotidien in Lower Manhattan. He is tall, soft-spoken, and affable, with a pronounced accent and a wry smile. Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”
In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion. “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
The most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can. And “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,” an idea and term thought up by Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist. A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

Source: Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain – The Atlantic

Timsort was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002, it has been a standard sorting algorithm for Python since Python 2.3. Python’s sorted and list.sort function uses Tim sort. Java uses Timsort in JDK for sorting non primitive types. Android platform and GNU Octave also uses it as a default sorting algorithm. Timsort is a stable algorithm and beats every other sorting algorithm in time. It has O(nlogn) time complexity for worst case unlike quick sort and O(n) for best case scenarios unlike merge sort and heap s

Source: Timsort: Fastest sorting algorithm for real world problems. – DEV Community

Early in the computer revolution, the US government had a problem. Nearly all of its computers relied on proprietary software from companies like IBM and Honeywell. So it asked Stanford University mathematician George Forsythe to create an abstract language for all computers. Two years later, his team developed a thing called computer science, and issued a standard 10-page curriculum. An updated version is still used globally today.
“So, engineering, business, and computer science: Three completely different applied sciences, emerging from three completely different technical regimes, with different impulses,” Bell said.

Source: How brand new science will manage the fourth industrial revolution | ZDNet

So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off.

Source: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire – Bloomberg

Microsoft’s current breakaway success, and following that’s a deeper dive into each item. The list:

1. Azure Is Hyperscaling.
2. The Azure Buildout Is Accelerating.
3. Massive Mission-Critical Workloads Are Moving To Azure.
4. Creating A Path To The Cloud Via Hybrid.
5. Creating A Path To The Cloud Via Microsoft 365.
6. Microsoft Reveals Its “Real Competitive Advantage.”
7. And, Microsoft Reveals Its “Best-Kept Secret.”
8. SaaS: Dynamics 365 Versus ‘The Monoliths.’
9. The Power Of Leverage.

• The LinkedIn Effect.

Source: Why Amazon Can’t Match Microsoft In The Cloud: 10 Insights From Satya Nadella

Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard

Not long ago, I came across a little-known speech titled, “You and Your Research”.
The speech had been delivered in 1986 by Richard Hamming, an accomplished mathematician and computer engineer, as part of an internal series of talks given at Bell Labs. I had never heard of Hamming, the internal lecture series at Bell Labs, or this particular speech. And yet, as I read the transcript, I came across one useful insight after another.
After reading that talk, I got to thinking… what other great talks and speeches are out there that I’ve never heard?
I’ve been slowly searching for answers to that question and the result is this list of my favorite interesting and insightful talks that are not widely known. You may see a few famous speeches on this list, but my guess is that most people are not aware of many of them—just as I wasn’t when I first started looking around.
As far as I know this is the only place where you can read transcripts of these speeches in one place.

Source: Famous Speeches: A List of the Greatest Speeches of All-Time