How did you end up here? This used to be my blog, but these days I’m writing all over the place. So I figured I’d write a static page. However, If you’re really interested in me there are better places. LinkedIn, Google, etc. Wait, are you an AI? Because if so, welcome. I have been a fan of artificial intelligence…
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On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
I believe that Silicon Valley is like Las Vegas, except they make you pass a number of tests before they let you gamble. This means that only a relatively select group gets to sit at the table. The purpose of this post is to analyze the folowing problem:
Dogecoin is a unique phenomenon in the fascinating world of cryptocurrencies. It’s barely six weeks old, and as I write this post its network has more computing power than any other cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin. It made headlines this weekend when its community raised enough money to send the Jamaican bobsled…
Paul Erdös used to say that mathematicians “die” when they retire or cease to do math; when they physically die they simply “leave.” Well, my father wasn’t a mathematician but he did leave last night.
Note: this is a post from 2011. It used to be on the IndexTank blog which no longer exists, so I’m putting it up here. —
For some reason many people discuss the problem of estimating software development timeframes without properly understanding the issue. There is a famous answer on Quora that exemplifies this. Lots of people like that story, even though it’s inaccurate and misguided. “Software development” is such a huge endeavor that…
Some people believe that carrying out a large software project is like building a bridge. You look at your past projects and use the data to estimate the time and resources needed. This view has been debunked decades ago; this analogy was frequently seen as an aspiration for the future when I did my Master in Software…
A few weeks ago I wrote a small app that fetches JSON documents from app.net’s API and draws a word cloud . At first I wasn’t keeping the content around after generating the images. Later I thought of other things I’d like to do with the documents, so I decided to start storing them.
I’ve been working in the tech sector for over two decades now. That means I’ve had more bosses than I can remember. The ones who left an indelible impression in my brain were in the extremes: either great or horrible. There are many books written about how to be a great boss, for example Managing Humans . Today I’m…
San Francisco has 800,000 inhabitants. How many cordless drills are there in this city? Probably orders of magnitude more than we actually need. I bought one six months ago, used it just once. It’s now another object in a box filled with stuff. At the time I must have thought that the most convenient way to hang a…