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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Thought



  How to Seem (and Be) Deep

I recently attended a discussion group whose topic, at that session, was Death.  It brought out deep emotions.  I think that of all the Silicon Valley lunches I've ever attended, this one was the most honest; people talked about the death of family, the death of friends, what they thought about their own deaths.  People really listened to each other.  I wish I knew how to reproduce those conditions reliably.I was the only transhumanist present, and I was extremely careful not...

   Deep,Work,Smart,Work style,Study     2011-10-23 11:46:11

  Surprising applications of math

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the ...

   Math,Number theory,Algorithms,Differential euqation     2011-11-18 09:24:19

  Yahoo to change name to Altaba and becomes Alibaba's father

Yahoo, one of the most successful Internet giants in later 1990s, is now becoming a company living with selling assets(offices, domain names) and holding the stocks from Alibaba. Its core business which it was proud of has been sold to Verison with $4.8 billion as disclosed in some document submitted to SEC. Now it's starting the process of changing its name to Altaba. After the acquisition, the current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will resign from the board. But the company will still keep some val...

   YAHOO,FATHER,ALIBABA,ALTABA,CHINA,NEWS     2017-01-15 04:07:24

  Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

I realized that, paradoxically enough, good programmers need to be both lazy and dumb. Lazy, because only lazy programmers will want to write the kind of tools that might replace them in the end. Lazy, because only a lazy programmer will avoid writing monotonous, repetitive code – thus avoiding redundancy, the enemy of software maintenance and flexible refactoring. Mostly, the tools and processes that come out of this endeavor fired by laziness will speed up the production. This ma...

   Good programmer,Lazy,Reason,Dumb     2012-04-18 07:15:23

  Fab CEO: Why we choose Tencent in China?

Today one important news is that Fab completes its D round fund raising with 150 million US dollars. Regarding this round of fund raising, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg explained : "If Fab wants to do business in US only, then it's not necessary to raise so much money.". Also from the investment of Tencent and Itochu from Japan, China and Japan will be Fab's new market of expansion. Why does Fab choose to cooperate with Tencent to expand Chinese market?(There was news that Alibaba was also contacting F...

   Fab,Tencent,Alibaba     2013-06-19 03:05:03

  Carriage return and line feed

In programming and document editing, we may frequently encounter carriage return and line feed, i.e the well known CRLF.  But do you know about the history and difference of carriage return and line feed? Before computer came out, there was a type of teleprinter called Teletype Model 33. It can print 10 characters each second. But there is one problem with this, after finishing printing each line, it will take 0.2 second to move to next line, which is time of printing 2 characters. If a new...

   CR,CARRIAGE RETURN,LINE FEED,LF,NEW LINE,CRLF     2017-02-19 08:29:23

  C++, Ruby and CoffeeScript complexity comparison

There are many programming languages around the world, they all designed to help programmer solve some problems, finish some tasks. These languages are often divided into different types, there are structural, object-oriented, functional, scripting languages etc. Some are easy to pick up such as Java, while some are thought to be difficult to learn such as C++. So how do we understand complexities of different programming languages?Many people agree that C++ is very complex languages, it has poi...

   Complexity, languages, C++,Ruby,CoffeeScript     2012-06-12 04:46:01

  Origin of Windows blue screen

Many of you from old ages might see the classical blue Windows blue screen before.Do you still remember the most famous Windows blue screen incident during a presentation of a Windows 98 beta by Bill Gates at COMDEX on April 20 1998. But do you know the history of blue screen? John Vert, an ex-Windoes NT kernel guy, shared the story on Quora.  Back in 1991 John Vert wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (a...

   Windows blue screen,History     2013-07-24 09:25:16

  Thoughts on Running an Open Source Project

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important. Community I love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open...

   Open source,Management,Readme,Community     2012-03-06 05:25:27

  Guest Post from a CodeBoy: The Five Stages of Debugging

Being confronted with a serious and difficult-to-diagnose bug can be one of the most traumatic and stressful experiences of a professional programmer's career. Those who have been through such an ordeal rate the stress as on a par with that accompanying serious injury, divorce, or the death of a family member. Researchers who have studied the psychology of computer programming have lately constructed a framework to understand the stages through which the programmer's mind progresses as she...

   Debug,Steps,Stages     2012-05-01 06:39:38