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  Don't write on the whiteboard

I recently interviewed at a major technology company. I won't mention the name because, honestly, I can't remember whether I signed an NDA, much less how strong it was.I did well. Mostly because of luck. I normally step over myself when I interview. I guess I've improved over the years. Here are a few tips to ace your own interview.1. Don't write on the whiteboardWhen I interviewed at Palantir around 5 years ago, I had a lot of trouble with this. Yes, I knew next to nothing about compu...

   Interview,Preparation,Whiteboard,Note,Python     2012-01-11 11:31:32

  The faster-than-fast Fourier transform

The Fourier transform is one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal — such as the voltage fluctuations in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a loudspeaker — as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, but it can also be used to compress image and audio files, solve differential equations and price stock options, among other things.The reason the Fourier...

   FFT,Fast fourier transform,MIT,Compression     2012-01-19 09:59:09

  Data Scientists and Their Harder Skills than Big Data

The field of data science is often confused with that of big data. Data science is an aid to decision makers in a company with a logical approach.  Who is a Data Scientist?  A Data Scientist reviews a huge collection of data(that may extend to a couple of terabytes of disk space or thousands of excel sheets). This humongous chunk of data is not feasible for being handled, sorted and analyzed by a single person. Here we require the help of data science, and most recently, the field of A...

   BIG DATA     2017-12-13 04:22:55

  Web programs written in C++ are no big deal

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it. Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird. I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppo...

   C++,Web design,Library,Web app     2012-01-11 11:57:26

  Tips on Writing for Tech Blogs

If you know your stuff when it comes to tech, you might be inspired to start contributing articles to tech blogs. A friend or colleague may suggest the idea to you, or you may see an invitation for submissions, much like the one on this website. Sounds like a great idea; but what do you know about writing articles, blog posts, or other types of content? Writing is a skill, and there are also practical aspects to writing that you need to be aware of before you start creating your own pieces. Gett...

   TIPS,TECH BLOG     2019-01-14 09:25:07

  CSS filter effects in action

CSS filter effects in action Ever since CSS filter effects landed in WebKit, I thought about theirs practical implementation. How will they fit with the current web design trends? At this time, my initial impressions are that the best way to showcase the power of CSS filters is something like an image gallery. With so many CSS filters to choose from, it will be fun to create image galleries in the future. Further in this article we’ll cre...

   CSS,filter effect     2012-05-02 05:57:11

  Fujitsu CTO: Flash is just a stopgap

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office. Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, ...

   Flash,Memory,Bottleneck,Limitation,Futur     2011-08-12 07:31:34

  It’s Not Too Late to Learn How to Code

Coding is sort of like a superpower; with it you can create things that millions of people see. You can change the way people behave, the way they think, and the way they interact with others. This is beyond awesome, but I’ve also met a lot of people that think that this ability is inaccessible to them. I’ve met a lot of “non-technical” people who seem to think that this superpower is only bestowed on those fortunate enough to have it come easily to them at a very early...

   Tips,Coding,Preparation,Interest     2011-10-17 11:26:38

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  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