bgurupra

Here is a detailed crowdsourced answer to the interview question ""What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?""

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

I think it is time to move on with the critique of Jobs' bio and life.I read the whole bio and the net net I got out of it is that

1)Awesome design not just has aesthetic value but also a lot of practical business value

2)Focus Focus Focus on a few things to make them as perfect as possible - may be expensive in the short run but generally pays off in the long run

In a way I owe my job @ IBM which I got right out of college to that book.Of the many many C books at that time , K&R was obviously the one that was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of explaining C and how to write C programs in a very lucid/concise/Beautiful way and the guys interviewing me were particularly impressed that I almost had memorized K&R and gave me the job which I have to this day

The same thing can be said for pretty much every invention/innovation ever made even if it was a huge leap from the prior art - but then he was the one who did it and I guess that is what matters at the end

easy to say that in hindsight - IBM hired Lou Gerstner when it was at the brink of sinking and his previous experience did not have much overlap on what IBM did - he still managed to turn things around

The reason in my mind leadership is so valued is that there are problems worth solving that are too big for any one person to solve- anything from building companies to conquering vast swathes of land (which was considered a good thing a long time ago) - so being able to lead people in a cohesive fashion to solve these problems is a de facto requirement of leadership!

Having said that certain cases of "Thought leadership" which is one kind of leadership probably agrees with her blog.For example all leading scientists who make fundamental contributions to our understanding don't really need people following them but they do set the direction of future research so people do indirectly follow their leadsership

I have seen several such posts on why working in a start-up type environment is great and I do agree with the points in such posts but what is missing is any appreciation of the challenges of running a large company vis a vis running a start up.Comparing a startup to a big company is like comparing a bullet to a freight train and wondering why the freight train can't go supersonic like the bullet.

can anybody explain how is Google able to do this or point to an explanation of it?

Interestingly India has so many people in qualifiers but none in the finals, now I don't know what that says about India!

Unrelated to the content of the article but by the UI - is it just me or does have pitch black background with white text is a bad design for the eye?

The whole idea that we try so hard to believe in "Everybody is born equal and we are the masters of our destiny" maybe be evolutionary in nature .I was reading a book introducing evolution (and I forget the name but can dig it up if somebody wants the source) that individuals of a species sometimes start working together in such cohesion that they no longer are really individuals but are combined into one "social organism" if you will.

For example Bees ,though they are made up of individual bees they don't cross compete but actually work together to protect the whole group and it makes sense to look at the group as one entity instead of a bunch of individual bees.

The author of the book argued that human beings also have crossed that line from being individual members of a species to being a "social organism" that functions as one and in this scenario it really hurts to have a few select individuals born "better" than the rest.This is because we no longer are cross competing but are trying to optimize as a whole and it doesn't makes sense when you are doing that to have some people have better chances of survival etc as it will ruin the cohesion

Now I highly doubt if we are really born equal but that is just my opinion, from what I have seen around some people clearly were better than the rest in certain things even with other factors being more or less alike

Sometimes I wonder , what if there is no free will ( Its not like we know Free Will exists for sure yet) - This whole charade of using your drive and determination or the lack there of to do things may be just the way nature always wanted it to be.You are just the puppet playing out your part

Edit: Considering the amount of blogs/books that are written around "Self Help" type of topics which might all be a waste of time if there were nothing like free will - do you guys think about this at all? If so how do you deal with it?

No great thing was ever accomplished without being passionate.Even the research field which is all about intellectualism needs you to be passionate about your ideas and ploughing away at them even though they are just untested hypotheses till it gets proved

Einstein is an extreme example of such a case - when I read his biography the thing that caught me as very interesting is that he was able to immerse himself in physics irrespective of all the problems in terms of not finding a job, his mothers bitter opposition to marrying his first wife etc.You can hardly trick yourself into such concentration.He must be the lucky few who find such deep interesting topics that life is a pleasure even with all the hardships around!

Einstein's sister, Maja, recalled "...even when there was a lot of noise, he could lie down on the sofa, pick up a pen and paper, precariously balance an inkwell on the backrest and engross himself in a problem so much that the background noise stimulated rather than disturbed him."

Source;http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/23...

I have had several instances in my life where I dived into what were difficult things for me with gusto - for example when I was in school and was trying to write a program in C to calculate all the anagrams , I did not even have a computer but was up almost all night writing it on a piece of paper and rushed in the morning to a place with access to a computer to test my program on paper.That was just an example - I have had several such experiences.Almost makes me think maybe you just can't "trick' yourself into anything but just have to find something genuinely fun for you to do!As long as it is fun - it doesn't matter if it is hard or not!

I just don't see what the experiment was about really considering the audience entirely consisted of people who can afford coffee - I just don't get it! The only explanation is a viral marketing scheme in my mind

actually I can see how this will get down voted - but if a person has a smart phone what are the chances he can't really pay for this coffee? (not a rhetorical question but a purely probabilistic one) - so maybe this experiment may not test the true altruistic nature of people but more the curiosity of participating in an experiment like this?

Einstien was born on 14 March 1879 - so the date there must be his birth date

Edit: the second date there is 1896 which makes him 17 years but that marks sheet seems to indicate 3 or 4th grade - so not sure exactly which grade the marks sheet was for?

I think condescending feedback = insecurity is a bit of a generalization.Maybe sometimes it is true but not all the time - for example Linus' "feedback" on CVS was pretty condescending but I doubt that was because he was insecure

here is a link to the actual report http://plf666.limewebs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18

The only reason I posted this was this line seemed pretty amazing a way to even look at it - It is pretty scary a thought that all the free will decisions are made by the sub conscious and consciousness is just aware of it and thinks it did them!!

"It may be possible, then, that our intuitions about the role of our conscious "intentions" have led us astray; it may be the case that we have confused correlation with causation by believing that conscious awareness necessarily causes the body's movement."

plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and regulating all of that at the same time

Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!

that is actually my bad , this URL works too http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ - basically this sends a request to the main front end proxy and because IBM hosts like a billion URLs the front end proxy redirects to the appropriate cluster

A classic use of watson that IBM is saying is in the field of medical science - Imagine if we can feed the entire set of medical books into watson (somebody estimated that would just take about a week for watson to process and make the connections) and then you have the watson physician's assistant which can listen into the symptoms and spit out the first five most probably causes - that would be so damn amazing!

I have absolutely no expertise in this but I have a feeling that for machines to better us , they need to be engineered at least better than the human brain.And considering Watson is bleeding edge computer and needs a computer as big as a room and lots of power whereas the Human brain fits in a shoe box and can run on a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich - there is a quite a bit of ground to cover before we hit singularity!

and seriously screw you guys downvoting me (sorry for being douchy) - but it is really irritating to get downvoted without being told why

hahahahaha this is frickin unbelievable, I get downvoted but the guy who says not to talk about the fight club is upvoted like crazy - so THIS is the FIGHT CLUB!

if I may ask why the downvote?