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  Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms?

Editor’s note: This is Part III of a guest post written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities In Part II, he discussed how software and mobile technologies can augment and even replace doctors. Now, in Part III, he talks about how technology will sweep through education. In my last post, I ...

   Teacher,Algorithm,Development     2012-01-16 10:17:45

  Battlelog: Modern Web Applications are Here

It's the shooter season of the year and this fall was all about Modern Warfare 3 versus Battlefield 3. And being the kind of game they are they also try to keep their audience playing by introducing some additional level of engagement. Both Call of Duty and Battlefield introduced their own online community websites and statistic platforms. Call of Duty has Elite, Battlefield has Battelog.But just because these services are sitting in the same spot it does not mean they are in any way similar. An...

   Game,Call of duty,Elite,Battlelog,Web platform     2011-11-15 08:11:40

  The Story of W&L: China’s Great Internet Divide

Here’s an introductory quote from The Story of W&L, a tale of China’s great internet divide: China does not have one so-called “national internet,” instead there’s a great divide. It encompasses the elite with ThinkPad laptops and also the grassroots with MTK Shanzhai mobile phones. Our elites are on par with America, while our grassroots are on par with Vietnam. This is the story of W&L, two representatives of China’s great internet divide. T...

   China,Internet divide,Elite,Grassroot,Laptop,Mobile phone     2011-12-05 12:23:56

  Taking C Seriously

Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s pre...

   C,Efficiency,Memorization,Dennis Ritchie     2011-11-03 13:42:14

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

  Write Scalable, Server-side JavaScript Applications with Node.js

If you live in the Silicon Valley area, you have already heard the buzz: Node.js is being hailed as the next big thing. It’s the silver bullet that offers scale, eases development, and can be leveraged by the vast pool of client-side JavaScript developers. So, what exactly is Node.js?Node.js is a server-side JavaScript environment that uses an asynchronous event-driven model. It is based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine plus several built-in libraries. The excitement around Node.js is tha...

   Node.js,Server side,Scalable,JavaScript app     2012-03-29 13:50:50

  The Problem With Client-Side Analytics

Client-side analytics is broken. The numbers produced by it are trivially spoofable by competitors and nefarious characters. Most websites use client-side analytics of one type or another and the only way to get numbers you can trust is to compare numbers from multiple providers and to take an average of the closest two.This post highlights the problem and proposes a partial solution that substantially mitigates the issues with minimal effort. Our proposed solution is simply to include a digital...

   Client side,Analysis,Problem,Tricks,ASP.NET,spoof     2011-10-22 12:58:51

  Cracks in the Foundation

PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better. In the Beginning, There Was Apache and CGI And there was much rejoicing. In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf created the “Personal Home Page Tools,” a set of CGI binaries wri...

   PHP,History,Foundation design,Compatibility     2011-12-18 01:03:54

  Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  ...

   Career,Programmer,Advice,Low level,Development     2011-10-29 07:09:23

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