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

SEARCH KEYWORD -- Reason

  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

  The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success

“So, what do you do?”Ugh. I hated that question.The truth was that we were trying to start a new venture but we hadn’t really made any progress.But, instead of just muttering something, I would force myself to enthusiastically pitch our current struggling idea. They would nod along but the skepticism on their face was hard to ignore.And, when I was done, they would sometimes hit me with: “So, is that your full-time thing?” Ugh. What that really meant was: youâ€...

   Startup,process,Waiting,Hardtime,Working     2011-09-29 10:42:54

  Getting started with C++ TR1 regular expressions

Overview This article is written for the benefit of someone familiar with regular expressions but not with the use of regular expressions in C++ via the TR1 (C++ Standards Committee Technical Report 1) extensions. Comparisons will be made with Perl for those familiar with Perl, though no knowledge of Perl is required. The focus is not on the syntax of regular expressions per se but rather how to use regular expressions to search for patterns and make replacements. Support for TR1 ext...

   Regular expression,Replace,TR1,Extension     2011-08-14 07:25:20

  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21

  PHP advisory file lock : flock

When we process a file in PHP, we may often need to acquire a lock so that other scripts cannot edit the same file at the same time. There is a flock() function in PHP which can help us lock the file we want to process. But there is one issue we should take care. Recently, ffb encountered one issue while he was trying to lock a file handle. The codes are below: $filename = "/tmp/lock.txt";      $fp = fopen($filename, "r+");   if (!$fp...

   flock(),advisory locking,PHP     2013-04-23 11:42:48

  Hey kids, just say NO to programming !

Cory Doctorow's latest talk 'The Coming War on General Purpose Computing' really puts things in perspective about life in the 21st century. This got me thinking more about functional programming languages and how they are related to the intentional limitation/crippling of turing machines by industry and government. What if Stallman is right about the intentional efforts to limit freedom of information ? What if it's even worse than we all think it is ? In relation to functional languages ...

   Programming,Factor,View,Kids,No     2012-01-16 10:16:19

  The Failure of Passive Recruiting: Recruiters

This is an actual conversation I had with a recruiter:Phone rings and I pick it upHim: Hi, is Paul there?Aaron: May I ask who is calling?Him: I have a technical question. Aaron: Ok, what is it?Him: Are you technical?Aaron: Yes. Who is this?Him: Who are you?Aaron: Are you a recruiter?Him: Yes and…Aaron: Great, send us your resumes, if we like what you send over, we’ll let you know if we want to meet with the candidates, other tha...

   Recruiter,HR,Recruitment,Failure,Hire     2011-10-26 06:59:33

  Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?

The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you're connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure. In the year since I wrote that, a number of major websites have "solved" the WiFi eavesdropping problem by either making encrypted HTTPS web traffic an accou...

   Web traffic,Security,HTTPS.Encryption,Wifi     2012-02-24 05:02:58

  A Different Kind of Technical Interview

Everyone who's been programming professionally for a while knows the standard format of the technical interview. You go in, there's a whiteboard in the room, and you write code on it to answer questions.Everyone also has the same basic complaints about these interviews. In a normal work environment, you have access to an API or search engine, but at a whiteboard you don't. Whiteboard questions generally don't include much in the way of overall design, and they're typically limited to simple algo...

   Interview,Programming,Methods,Pairing     2011-06-04 07:56:21

  There are no free lunches on the internet

Hot data: An IT technician checks the network servers at a data farm. Alamy Photograph: Juice Images/AlamyPhysics has Newton's first law ("Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed"). The equivalent forinternet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.The strange thing is that most use...

   Free lunch,Facebook,Google,Privacy information     2011-11-21 03:03:31

RECENT