As a student, I’ve had a fair number of interviews and have discussed with others some of the ridiculous things companies do during the interview process. So I decided to put together a guide to concoct the most painful interview process based on things I’ve heard and experienced. Enjoy! Step 1: Email potential interviewee Start out [...]
Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student
Recently Stanford has started a new initiative to bring free classes to the public. From what I’ve seen from statistics, this venture has been extraordinarily successful with over 100,000 sign ups. Most likely only a fraction went through with the class, but that’s still a lot of people, especially for the first time. There has been quite [...]
God dammit, I bought a WordPress theme
I caved. I bought a WordPress theme. $45 I swore I would never spend, and what’s more, against the advice of my girlfriend (and she always gives good advice). I don’t know what overtook me, perhaps it was that ad that I have to look at everytime I log into WordPress, perhaps I was bored [...]
Becoming a pale, pasty programmer
Becoming a better programmer is not for the faint of heart. It’s easy to succumb to boredom, the sunny outdoors, and women (or men) but if you’re up for the challenge, the real deal, then this is for you. Why are all master programmers pale, pasty, and afraid of women? Because they did not succumb. Secret to [...]
Take a break
If you’re anything like me then pumping out 12-hour-a-day programming sessions are not out of the ordinary. It almost feels natural to sit for hours at a time staring into the terminal. This is actually quite an astonishing feat – it takes time to build up the endurance to pull this off 3,4,5,6 and 7 [...]
Introducing HNInstant
I recently launched my new site HNInstant, and these are the nuggets of knowledge that I picked up. What I learned All that I learned in this project is beyond the scope of this article cause it’s just way too much so I’ll hit the key non-technical points. Build something and show it to the [...]
Google, the Almighty
As I finish up my hack (largely based on searching and natural language processing), I wanted to step back and praise Google for their amazing search. Much of what they do is taken for granted, but over the course of the last two weeks I’ve really dived into the inner workings of Google’s search. I [...]
Web Scraping for your Mom
in a nutshell: This post will be a little different in nature as I’m still working on a couple hacks that will require a few more weeks of work. In the interim I’ll explain the very basics of web scraping/crawling. This is a great skill to have as it will open the doors to the limitless [...]
Markov Model for English Text (a.k.a automatic article/essay/blog writer)
in a nutshell: This experiment used the Markov model for analyzing text. Sounds complicated, but really isn’t. However it does have some pretty awesome results. Basically, this model analyzes the probability of a character following some fragment of characters and then uses these probabilities to create some text. penny scale: The penny scale denotes the difficulty [...]
