Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Most programming candidates can't actually program?

Over at CodingHorror Jeff Atwood is astonished at the sheer number of programming candidates who cannot do the simplest , basic , programming tasks - like a for loop or fizzbuzz.

"I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs."
Why can't programmers ... program?
Using fizzbuzz to find developers who grok coding
Don't overthink Fizzbuzz

Friday, February 23, 2007

post altered because of dmca

this post has been edited because of a DMCA take down notice.

For further reference here is the take down notice posted on ChillingEffects.

Snap Preview Hatred

Is Snap Preview the most hated Web 2.0 function ever?
Wordpress.com - please stop using Snap preview
Say no to Snap preview

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Google building an AI system?

Via Google blogoscoped

Larry Page talked about AI (video) at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he said


My prediction is that when AI happens, it’s going to be a lot of computation, and not so much clever blackboard/ whiteboard kind of stuff, clever algorithms. But just a lot of computation.

My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed... so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess.

We have some people at Google who really try to build artificial intelligence, and to do it in a large scale. (...) You know, to do a perfect job of search, you can ask any query, and we’d give you the perfect answer, and that would be artificial intelligence, right. Based on everything being on the web, which is a pretty close approximation. (...)

Monday, February 19, 2007

Interstellar Ark

Interstellar Ark

Quote:
The concept of star travel, from planetary system to planetary system, is at the same time completely familiar and completely uncharted. Familiar, as we have certainly all heard of science fiction stories set on a far galaxy, where planets are nations or provinces of an empire. The characters usually move from one planet to another during intervals of time consistent with the story. The actual travel appears just like a formality, which the future advancements of a Triumphant Physics will put within reach. Read it all here

Friday, February 16, 2007

Wikipedia and NoFollow

Wikipedia and NoFollow

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Google Research favourite videos

Google Research video picks

Performance tunning best practices for MySQL