Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Hard

  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

  Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections. In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that â...

   HTTP,Concurrent connection limit,Solution,AJAX     2011-12-14 13:01:02

  Coder or Clown?

That’s the challenge. Sit down with someone you’ve never met and try to work out if they are a coder or a clown. I don’t mean to insult anyone, of course, and I’m the first to acknowledge the years of training and effort that goes into being a professional clown. But some coders, oh boy. Like the time I interviewed a recent graduate. I’ll call her Ada. Full of sympathy for the novice programmer I started with a gentle warm-up, a soft-ball question to break the ...

   Coder,Clown,State,Profile,Category     2011-08-28 23:04:46

  A Clash of Titans Between Elon Musk and Larry Page over AGI's Future

Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) has long been a topic of fascination and concern for technology leaders, with some seeing it as humanity's ultimate tool, while others view it as an existential threat. This clash of perspectives was on full display during the acquisition of DeepMind by Google in 2014, as two tech titans, Elon Musk and Larry Page, found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. While Page saw AGI as a necessary and desirable step in humanity's evolution, Musk was more wary ...

   AI,LARRY PAGE,ELON MUSK,AGI     2023-04-30 11:13:53

  Live in Beijing and Thinking about Starting a Tech Company? Read. This. Post. Now.

The Disrupt Beijing Hackathon starts in a little more than 24 hours, and we’ve been working hard over the last few days to make it even more of a no-brainer for local Beijing developers to attend.In addition to the chance to be the next GroupMeor win valuable prizes, we have decided to give all Hackathon attendees who complete a hack and present in the 24-hour period free tickets to the Disrupt conference Monday and Tuesday. That’s a $1,000-plus value for s...

   Startup,Beijing,TechCrunch,Disrupt,2011     2011-10-28 12:41:43

  In praise of impractical programming

Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was that other book with the spells, but the “Wizard Book” sincerely claimed to teach magic. For the past few years, I’ve been ...

   Impractical Programming,Structure,Scheme,Practical     2011-12-05 12:28:58

  7 ways to start learning how to code right now for free

Learning to code is one of the most powerful and satisfying things you can ever do. If you’re a designer, learning to code can help you understand what you’re creating for, and if you’re looking to build a startup from scratch, being a technical founder can make things exponentially easier for you. No matter why you want learn, the only thing you really need is curiosity. But if you’re just starting out as a novice and don’t know where to begin,...

   Learn programming,Efficient way,Experiment,iPad     2012-02-03 08:11:21

  How To Build A Site That Looks Great On Every Screen

The responsive design revolution is upon us. With tablet and smartphone use soaring and changing our media habits, Web publishers no longer have a choice but to build designs that work properly on any device or screen size.The hard-working Silicon Valley design firm ZURB has recently released version 2.0 of its responsive design boilerplate kit called Foundation, which is a fundamental framework for a one-size-fits all Web project.Foundation is a CSS and Javascript framework that comes with...

   Website,Design,Device,Screen,Adaptable,Mobile     2011-10-31 10:46:32

  Database Testing – Practical Tips and Insight on How to Test Database

Database is one of the inevitable parts of a software application these days. It does not matter at all whether it is web or desktop, client server or peer to peer, enterprise or individual business, database is working at backend. Similarly, whether it is healthcare of finance, leasing or retail, mailing application or controlling spaceship, behind the scene a database is always in action. Moreover, as the complexity of application increases the need of stronger and secure database emerge...

   Database,Tips,Practice     2011-06-29 08:47:40

  Why Dynamic Programming Languages Are Slow

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that. In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it. The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance. T...

   Dynamic language,Slow,Analysis     2012-03-26 15:33:11

RECENT