- A Nature Neuroscience paper claiming “post-study caffeine enhances memory consolidation” was mocked as obvious and emblematic of low-value neuroscience publishing.  
- Discussion of hardware-accelerated numerical ODE solving: a 2009 Xilinx FPGA at 300 MHz achieved 25 GFLOPS versus 2.5 GFLOPS on contemporary x86, with open questions about inter-equation communication overhead when moving ODE solvers into custom silicon.  
- Scott Alexander’s essay “Meditations on Moloch” (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) was shared; participants debated whether its long examples obscure the core “multipolar trap” concept that competitive systems inevitably sacrifice all other values for marginal gains in the optimized metric.  
- Overstock’s decision to use Counterparty for cryptocurrency-based stock issuance prompted skepticism about the value of distributed consensus for equities, given that shareholders must still trust the underlying company to honor dividends and governance.  
- Security flaw in the open-source stenography tool Plover: keystroke logs are written world-readable (644) by default, exposing all typed content to any local user.  
- Android frustration thread: inability to share Wi-Fi over Bluetooth, flashlight disabled when battery is “too low” even in no-signal caves, and occasional flashlight failure requiring a full reboot—cited as examples of systemic corner-cutting in consumer software.  
- Detailed praise for Solaris SMF (Service Management Facility) as superior to systemd: fine-grained dependency tracking, clear “svcs -xv” diagnostics, XML-as-code configuration with import/export, and built-in flapping protection; lament that systemd’s author dismissed SMF without study.  
- Samsung reference design for a new fitness-tracking bracelet was linked (http://www.blogcal.com/samsung-introduced-a-reference-design-for-fitness-bracelet/).