Machine-Translated Joke From My Spam Inbox

::: {#_mcePaste} A altogether inebriated people was stumbling down the passage with equal foot on the repress and an individual foot in the gutter. A cop pulled up and said, “I’ve got to take you in, pal. You’re doubtlessly drunk.” :::

::: {#_mcePaste} Our wasted friend asked, “Office-bearer, are ya absolutely …

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Whiteboard Coding During the Software Interview Process

Part of the interviewing process for a software development job is "coding on the whiteboard." Some simple-enough-to-understand problem (such as "FizzBuzz") that shows whether you grok coding or whether you're wasting everyone's time.

The first threshold is understanding that it's foolish to memorize specific "interview code problems," which is, pitifully …

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XKCD Comic Rings True

I have to admit that I think about this every time the subject of shark attacks and SCUBA diving comes up:

xkcd: Conditional Risk.

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Entropy always increases: Visualising sorting algorithms

Entropy always increases: Visualising sorting algorithms.

Lovely way of visualizing sorting. I especially like the visualization of the "divide and conquer" algorithm:

img img

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MS Concurrency Guru Speaks of "new operating system"

If you are interested in high-performance programming on Windows, you know the name Joe Duffy, whose book Concurrent Programming On Windows is absolutely top-notch.

Today he posted an intriguing notice on his blog "We are hiring." Check out some of the things he says:

My team's responsibility spans multiple aspects …

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The Traveling Astronomer Problem

Apropos of something I'm not quite ready to talk about, here is an interesting challenge:

How do you optimize your time at the telescope if you have a set of objects that you'd like to observe?

For instance, if you want to see as many Messier objects as you can …

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SAX: Symbolic Aggregate Approximation

I'm doing some exploration of "Big Data" and data mining (fun!) and came across this interesting presentation:

The following time series is converted to string "acdbbdca":

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Hawking/Mlodinow's "The Grand Design": Quick Reaction

I read the new book "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow yesterday (it's a short book and if you're comfortable with the differences between "the Universe," "the visible Universe," and "the Metaverse" it's easy-enough going). The book is getting a lot of press for its repeated assertion …

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