We start with an excellent post from Valeria Maltoni on what makes people different than machines. Amazon goes after Google and Micrsoft by announcing WorkMail. Google fights back, posting about cloud pricing, how nobody understands how to compare offerings, and oh yeah “we are cheaper”.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Top Stories

• What Makes People Different than Machines | Conversation Agent – Valeria Maltoni
• Amazon WorkMail – Managed Email and Calendaring in the AWS Cloud | AWS Official Blog

Career and Process

• Avoiding the Perfect Design | DaedTech
• Very Short Blog Posts (23) – No Certification? No Problem! | Developsense Blog
• The Way We Hire Is All Wrong | Backchannel
• The answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a technical cofounder?” | Hail Pixel

Development

• Isomorphic Javascript is not the Answer | Neutron Drive Blog
• A New Try-with-resources Improvement in JDK 9 | Javalobby
• 12-Factor App-Style Backing Services with Spring and Cloud Foundry | Javalobby
• Why I will Always Try And Find A Ready-Built Library | Javalobby
• Netflix Likes React | The Netflix Tech Blog
• Web App Architecture – the Spring MVC – AngularJs stack | Java Code Geeks
• A Gentle Primer on Reverse Engineering | Emily St.

Concurrency, Performance and Scalability

• Excerpts from the RavenDB Performance report: Optimizing Memory Comparisons, Digging into the IL | Ayende @ Rahien
• Instagram Strategy to Radically Reduce Traffic: Kill all the spambots! | High Scalability

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• Introducing streaming k-means in Spark 1.2 | Databricks

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• Questionable fumble statistics for Deflate-Gate | Flowing Data
• Avoiding a Common Mistake with Time Series | Silicon Valley Data Science

Infrastructure, Operations and DevOps

• TOSCA and YANG for Application and Network Orchestration | Javalobby
• Deploying tor relays | Mozilla IT

Security, Encryption and Cryptography

• Nasty Blackphone vulnerability allowed decryption and worse | GigaOm
• Required Reading: Iron Clad Java | Building Real Software

IaaS, PaaS and Saas

• Understanding Cloud Pricing | Google Cloud Platform Blog

Other stuff

• Crawling and indexing of locale-adaptive pages | Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Milestones for SaaS Companies | Peter Reinhardt

Link Collections

• Dew Drop – January 28, 2015 (#1942) | Morning Dew
• Probability approximations | John D. Cook