traveldotto1

Totally agreed. Compete on products or results, not on legal process

Some of these system designs interview and algorithm interviews are just overrated. You are literally testing how much "alike"" this candidate is thinking like you do, which sometimes is not the right way to conduct an interview.

How many people remember the pseudo-code for quick sort right away? A true engineering test or interview should be done in coding tests and his/her ability to QA his/her own code, and explain it in a clear fashion.

There are some cloud providers where you can allocate dedicated servers with virtualization on top. That way you can manage exactly what runs on each instance, while still have the flexibility to allocate more server instances quickly for handle growth.

The problems with economic model or most modeling are not the methods. It's usually dealing with the quality of the features or parameters. Even in a much simpler problem, no matter how good the methods, if you don't have the right params, your model will suck. And with economic models, it's dealing with a open world system with ever changing params, the challenge is not on the methods, but how to discover quality parameters/features. And that require not just the skills of modelers but many other disciplines.

yes.. but for less adopted or emerging platforms, you have to be more conscious of the source of the library, and should look at the source to verify its functionalities

it's all depending on use cases.. that is why I don't think an API should be secured through SSL from day one.. here is an example how SSL can be unnecessary, if i am processing billions of ad request daily with a response time of less than few milliseconds, and operates in a secured environment, why would i need to add a layer of SSL on all the requests..

Use cases drive requirements, not buzz words drive requirements, and that's my whole point

love R.. but have to say because it's open source, you do have to watch for the quality of libraries

Not sure why would you recommend SSL from day one. If the API needs to entertain high throughput and low response time, adding SSL means adding overhead.

I am curious where is the Group in Groupon these days. Groupon is more like a coupon company now than the group buying phenomena that made it successful.

There is no reason to love or hate a language. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses. C/C++ has its performance advantage but may require more skills and training. Php and Python is simple and fun, but you can't really use Php to write a search index. Java is somewhere in between, but the beauty of Java is its proclaimed "write once, at least test everywhere", which allows it to build up a large developer community very quickly. But that is also the downside of Java for its portability, and that is why many platform has to customize Java for speed such as IBM.

Google captures your intent, Facebook captures your social graph. It's not Google and Facebook does it wrong, they just represent part of us. A service that tries to generalize the whole embodiment of human interaction where they only capture a piece of what we do is not going to work. I think it's human tendency to have multiple identities on the web based on context.

Funny to see how iPhone SDK has already forced on us how smart phone apps should look, just like what MS did to us with Visual Studio. I know the SDK developers want to make programming on their respective platform easier with these built in look and feel, but as a mobile developer, do I want my app just look like everyone else's?

The challenge Google faces on how to improve the way users retrieve information from the web is actually limited by its own search interface. Google's simple search box interface has successfully trained most users to abstract complex queries into few keywords, and as result, much context are lost as we are searching. In some way, Google Instant is a way to mitigate this problem by previewing results per keywords, but the search experience is still limited to a keyword index, regardless the interface Google wraps around with.

What's interesting moving forward how AI can help search is about how NOT to discard the constraints of human language. In ML, constraints are good, and for search, it can help the indexer to more intelligently quantify the n-grams. End of day, human being still converse in sentences, not keywords.