There are four stories that top our news for today. First, VentureBeat reports on Toshiba’s plans to fire 7000 employees. That is a big number and hopefully those people can find work quickly. VentureBeat also gives us an excellent post from Steve Blank on how 1/3 of your team needs to be crazy. Crazy isn’t quite the right word, but the idea is to get a few people that can really think outside of the box so that you can really innovate. On AVC, Fred Wilson gives us his take on the 16 mobile theses post from Benedict Evans. You should read Evans’ post first just so you get an idea of where the concept of “contextual runtimes” comes from. Both posts are very interesting.

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

Top Stories

• Toshiba plans to fire 7,000 employees in wake of $1.3 billion accounting scandal | VentureBeat
• Contextual Runtimes | AVC
• 16 mobile theses | Benedict Evans

Startups, Career and Process

• ‘Blank’s Rule’: To predict the future, 1/3 of your team needs to be crazy | VentureBeat
• Don’t Take a Mentor for Granted | DZone Agile
• Why Are Projects Always Behind Schedule? | Priceonomics
• Does Job Hopping Pay Off? | DZone Agile

Design and Development

• Python: Squashing ‘duplicate’ pairs together | Mark Needham
• Bringing Objectivity to Clean Code | DaedTech
• Is REST Best in a Microservices Architecture? | Capgemini
• The Dangers of Super Smart Compilers | The Hacks of Life
• REST or SMPP for SMS API Integration? | DZone Integration
• Connecting Apache Camel and Apache Spark | DZone Integration
• Kotlin for Android Developers | Java Advent

Concurrency, Performance and Scalability

• The importance of tuning your thread pools | Java Code Geeks

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• Fundamental frequency estimation and supervised learning | Olafur Bogason
• Progress on Gradual Typing | Lambda the Ultimate
• Real time sentiment analysis example with Apache Storm | Java Code Geeks

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• International Institute of Analytics (IIA) 5 Predictions and 5 Priorities for 2016 | KD Nuggets
• All known planets outside our solar system | Flowing Data

Link Collections

• Programming Digest #138 for December 21, 2015 | Weekly Programming Newsletter
• Dew Drop – December 21, 2015 (#2156) | Morning Dew
• Data Science Roundup #13: Star Wars Charts, Scaling Data Ingestion, & the Data Scientist Crib Sheet | The Data Point
• Double Shot #1609 | A Fresh Cup