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  Fear of Ignorance

This past week, I was interviewing a candidate for a VP role along with two of our engineering leads. Everyone in the room excluding myself was classically “technical” – they could write code, had experience solving hard software problems and a background in computer science. I wrote my last line of PHP in 2004, and it had to be rewritten by a real programmer within 6 months.During the interview, we had the following exchange (due to an imperfect memory, I’ll ...

   Leader,Team,Technical,Leadership,Ignorence     2011-11-21 10:03:03

  What are some popular myths in software development?

This article is summarized from a question on Quora .The question is         What are some popular myths in software development?Here is the answer which received most votes given by a guy named Lee Semel,. Some of the most prevalent myths are:The Waterfall Method of design, the idea that it is both possible, efficient and good practice to completely specify a system before building it, and to execute the steps of a software project sequentially rather than iter...

   Software design,Myths,Waterfall model     2012-05-02 04:52:01

  The Wasteful Legacy of Programming as Language

A few years ago I visited a friend who is a graduate student in linguistics. After some time he asked me if I was aware of the work by Chomsky on formal languages. I told him that yes, Chomsky work was a basis for much of the developments in theoretical computer science. More than that, I was glad to learn that there was something technical that I could share and discuss with other people in linguistics. At the time I found this was just a great coincidence. It was only recently, though, t...

   Programming language,Human language,Chomsky     2011-11-28 10:36:34

  SOME LESSONS LEARNED

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.Today, I wanted...

   Investor,Startup,Lesson,Experience,Investment     2011-10-12 11:47:02

  JavaScript as a First Language

At Khan Academy we've been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we're likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language. We're in a very unique position as we're primarily aiming to teach students who've been through our previous math and science-centric curriculum. Because of this we can create some rather compelling exercises and projects that never would've been feasible other...

   JavaScript,Learning,First language,Inheritence,Prototype     2011-12-23 07:53:45

  Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days. Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile program...

   Lisp,Java,Comparison,Common Lisp     2012-01-30 05:48:16

  Why to opt for Hadoop?

Hadoop is a open source that stores and processes big data. The framework is written in Java for distributed processing and distributed storage of very large data. Hadoop is Scalable. It is a scalable platform because it stores and distributed large amount of data sets to hundreds and thousands of servers that operate in parallel. Traditional database systems cannot process large amount of data. But, hadoop enable business to run applications involving thousands of Terabyte data. Hadoop is ...

       2015-09-22 10:17:43

  How NOT to teach a computer language

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also ad...

   Programming,Teach,Book,Grade,Method,Computer     2011-11-06 14:52:13

  The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site

Many sites on the web are good. They are well-designed, clear, have great information architecture and are easy to navigate. Often, web designers emphasize the “design” part too much, and neglect the other equally important things. However, there are sites which aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, but still are the best sites in the world. They may look like a big, sad bag of wrestling underwear on the outside, but their underlying user experience is really, really refine...

   Website,web design,Anatomy,Interaction,Feature     2011-11-08 09:00:34

  Google has done more for the world with ngrams

Data is valuable asset for a company in the Internet world. With data of users, a company can gain lots of benefits. They can push specified ads to users by analyzing user behaviors, they can even sell the data to third parties. Data is very important for a company's success, so some companies will keep their data secret in order to gain advantages over competitors. However, Google seems do it in another way. Google shared their ngrams text corpus publicly, which basically contains valuable info...

   Ngram,NLP,Data     2013-12-12 07:56:02