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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Webkit

  How To Find a Great Start-Up Idea

Most people believe that the first step to starting a new company is to have a great idea. Back in business school, there were countless “idea brainstorming” sessions where groups of students would try to come up with the next billion dollar idea. None of them ever turned into anything.Great businesses are not built on ideas for marginal improvements or incremental features, they solve real problems and require a deep understanding of what those problems are. So the absolute worst th...

   Startup idea,Implement,Quickness     2012-03-18 00:26:22

  LEFT OUTER JOIN with ON condition or WHERE condition?

The difference is subtle, but it is a big difference. The ON condition stipulates which rows will be returned in the join, while the WHERE condition acts as a filter on the rows that actually were returned.Simple example: Consider a student table, consisting of one row per student, with student id and student name. In a second table, a list of grades that students have received, with student_id, subject, and grade. Give me a list of all students, and show their grade in Math. This requires a LEF...

   SQL,Outer jo0in,On,Where,On vs where,where vs on     2011-11-01 02:04:29

  The worst program I ever worked on

Most contract jobs fade pretty quickly in memory after the work is done, but some you remember for the rest of your life. This is one of the latter variety. This happened long ago, at a (fair sized) company that shall remain nameless. The software was a chunk of code that had been maintained by a single guy that had been fired recently and was a core component of a commercial system. So far nothing unusual, companies tend to find out that they have a piece of critical knowledge in one head all ...

   Program,worst     2011-03-17 13:58:36

  Siri in Practice

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popul...

   Siri,Apple,Practice,Artificial Intelligence,AI     2011-10-15 15:01:13

  I hate cut-and-paste

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (o...

   IDE,Editor,Cut and paste,Shortcut,Blame     2011-10-24 11:33:46

  All Programming is Web Programming

Michael Braude decries the popularity of web programming:The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# struc...

   Programming,Web programming,Opposite,Views,Web app     2011-11-12 10:38:00

  Significance and use of do{...}while(0)

In some Linux kernel and other open source codes, we can see some codes like below: do{ ... }while(0) This code snippet is not a loop, it seems there is no significance of using do...while this way, then why should we use it? In fact, the significance of do{...}while(0) is better than optimizing your code. After some research, we summarize some benefits of it. 1. Help define complex macro to avoid error #define DOSOMETHING()\ foo1();\ foo2(); The me...

   do{...}while(0), optimization     2012-10-21 21:13:22

  How big is sizeof structure?

First let's see the codes of a structure: struct node{ int a; int b; }; Question : What's sizeof(node)? The answer is very simple, on a 32 bit machine, an int will take 4 bytes and two ints will take 8 bytes. So sizeof(node) is 8. The answer for the above codes is 8, then how about the following structure: struct node{ char a; int b; }; Question : Then what's sizeof(node) now? int takes 4 bytes, char takes 1 bytes, is the answer 5? Now the answer may not be 5, on some mac...

   Data structure alignment, pack     2012-10-29 12:13:37

  GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression

Consider this user interface for a car:The goal of these interfaces is to make you operate something, and operate it efficiently and safely. The grooves and clicks and limits constrain the range of motion and the number of choices. The visual look heavily hints at how to actively use it. They are usually not hard to learn. More importantly, the learning curve plateaus. Once you learn how to drive a car, there’s not much progression after that. Boundedness is ...

   GUI,CLI,Operation,Expression,Programmer,IDE     2011-10-25 10:31:26

  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

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