Techmeme
October 26, 2019, 5:30 PM

Top News

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Pentagon awards $10B JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft over Amazon  —  Microsoft has emerged victorious in a dramatic competition for public cloud resources for the U.S. Defense Department, beating out market leader Amazon Web Services, the Pentagon said on Friday.
Ben Dreyfuss / Mother Jones:
An upcoming book by a one-time aide to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis alleges that Trump directed Mattis to “screw Amazon” out of winning the JEDI contract  —  Editorial Director for Growth and Strategy  —  On Friday, the Pentagon awarded a massive cloud computing contract to Microsoft.
Greg Bensinger / Washington Post:
In leaked video, Sundar Pichai admits at an all-hands that Google is “genuinely struggling” with employee trust as it defends the hiring of former DHS official  —  At company's weekly town hall with employees, executives assail leaks and defend hiring DHS official
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Zuckerberg struggles to explain why Facebook News' “trusted” sources includes Breitbart News, says Facebook wants to “to include a breadth of content in there”  —  On Friday morning, Facebook announced its plan to spend millions of dollars on high-quality journalism …
Facebook:
Facebook begins testing Facebook News with a subset of people in the US across four categories of select publishers: general, topical, diverse, and local news  —  Testing a dedicated place for news in the US  —  Journalism plays a critical role in our democracy.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE:
Study: researchers say an algorithm widely used in the US healthcare system to assess medical needs for millions of people is biased against black patients  —  A series of studies argue that by focusing on costs as a proxy for health, risk algorithms are ignoring the racial inequalities in healthcare access.
Sequoia Capital:
Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital, dies at 87  —  Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital and one of the generation of leaders who forged Silicon Valley, died today aged 87 at his home in Woodside, California.  He shaped Sequoia and left his imprint not just on his family and friends …
Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
Google says it's improving 10% of English searches in the US by using NLP techniques to better understand query context and words' relationship with each other  —  For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for.
Meredith Broussard / Slate:
A look at how most database schemas from the 1950s through the 1990s were designed to encode gender as a binary, reinforcing the social norms from that period  —  College student Manahil Bandukwala recently tweeted a complaint about her computer science class.

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More News

Don Clark / New York Times:
Sean O'Kane / The Verge:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Jay Peters / The Verge: