Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. This week we talk a bit about how you can’t trust anything on the internet and how to make money playing the ponies.
Using statistical models to win almost $1B in horse-race gambling
The next time someone tells you that data science isn’t a real thing, show them this article about Bill Benter. He built a predictive model that allowed him to maximize his winnings at the horse track, amassing almost one billion dollars.
Amazon’s Fake Review Problem
I’m starting to think I can’t trust anything I find on the internet. Amazon is almost worth a trillion dollars now, and with millions of product reviews, it’s easy to understand that a percentage of them may not be legit.
Tidal accused of deliberately faking Kanye West and Beyonce streaming numbers
As I was just saying, it’s getting hard to trust anything I find on the internet. In the “Likes” economy, we are going to start discovering more occurrences of where people are manipulating the system to be seen as more successful or popular than they really are. To some people, this is just called marketing. To the rest of us, it’s dishonest.
GM plans to spend $1 billion to develop self-driving cars
With projections of a $285 billion dollar market by 2030, it makes sense that companies such as GM are investing heavily in autonomous vehicles. Waymo is still the leader, though. Which means humanity may have driverless cars because two kids from Stanford wanted a better way to search the internet.
Airlines earn $4.6 billion from baggage fees last year
Which means we can expect baggage fees to increase because airlines enjoy making money.
Microsoft’s new IntelliCode is a smarter IntelliSense
One of the announcements at Build this week was IntelliCode, which is the next generation of IntelliSense. Using machine learning, developers can now get more insight into the code they are writing. Here’s hoping InetlliCode makes its way into T-SQL tools at some point.
See you next week!
