A Different Box of Tools, by Richard Feynman. There are two great things about this article. One is the "Feynman" method of debunking a theory - come up with simple examples that satisfy the theory yet are obviously false (typically look in mental areas different from the person cooking up the theory). The other is the friendly but adversarial scientific culture - "Although I gave the mathematicians a lot of trouble, they were always very kind to me." It's something that tech used to have, but is rapidly losing.
The Matroid - when greedy algorithms are best.
Most machine learning is approximating the identity.
Reactive in Reverse - about Scalaz streams.
Presentation on Scalaz Futures and Tasks. Well worth reading, nice to see a counterpoint to the Akka side of life.
Does Diversity Trump Ability? A great mathematical takedown of some silly social science research.
A relational model of data for large shared data banks. This is how it all got started.
Inferring Causal Impact using Bayesian Structural Time-Series Models - an interesting way to estimate whether an intervention actually worked. It's also peripherally related to this blog post of mine. I also strongly believe that folks interested in stuff like this should learn a bit more PDEs, particularly Ito's Lemma.
Ozys Anti-Heartiste FAQ. Well worth reading for two distinct groups. If you are open to rational arguments and are generally familiar with the PUA crowd, this is a very good counterargument against parts of it. If you are a typical coastal white knight sort, the sort persuaded by John Stewart, Valleywag or Jezebel, it's also worth reading - it illustrates rational disagreement as opposed to argument by snark.
Interestingly, Ozy's one major screwup in this post is her snarkiest: the bit about leg hair. I don't dispute that nearly all white and Indian women have leg hair. A quote from a non-white non-Indian woman: "White people shave their legs too? I thought that was just an Indian thing." (I've been told that it's possible that extremely fine and nearly undetectible hairs may still be present on such women - for the purposes of Heartiste, they may as well be absent.)
Global Production: Firms, Contracts and Trade Structure. This is a very interesting manuscript. One very notable conclusion it presents is that a large chunk of international trade is intra-firm - i.e., Guinness USA is trading with Guinness Ireland, or Microsoft is writing software in India and selling it in Portugal.
About those struggling middle class Americans. Key point is this image displaying the result of a high savings rate:
I'm shocked to discover that there is a price delta between abstract aluminum and deliverable aluminum ingots.
I like these paintings a lot though I imagine I'm missing the point. This one is also kind of cool.
Steven Pinker's The Trouble with Harvard and Steven Pinkers inflammatory proposal.