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I came into work on day not too long and was met with an unfortunate piece of information. The test we ran the previous night reported a 4% drop in accuracy (we found 4% fewer faces). I frowned. I had clearly screwed something up.
I’ve been in an interviewing mindset for awhile and I’ve come to realize something important about C++ in particular. C++ is a “two peak” language. That is to say C++ is the only language I know of where two very different sets of programmers consider themselves well versed in the language. Let me show you in fake…
Almost immediately after we bought our house I received a letter in the mail. The local school district was appealing the tax assessment of my house. The issue in question was the value of my property in 2002 (don’t ask, it’s a long story, and a silly law). My property tax is some percentage of the 2002 value of my…
I encounter this feeling frequently. I have a sudden need (or idea) and I realize that such and such a tool or service must already exist. As a software engineer, I’ve learned to not let that feeling pass. Usually, it’s a chance to learn something (because usually it does exist) and sometimes it’s a chance to to build…
It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…
A while ago, I began receiving reports from various people in IRC that I was prepending a garbage ascii character to some of my messages. I found this very odd. The complaints didn’t stop. It became a running joke. Eventually, playful mockery. It is a bit demeaning to hang out in programmer corners and not have any…
This is a war story from my real day job. I work at a start-up company in Pittsburgh that does face detection, tracking, and recognition software. This particular problem involved optimization of the face recognizer.