randy

Some similar resources coming from Berkeley are:

[CS 188] Artificial Intelligence - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/sp08/lectures.html

[CS 294] Practical Machine Learning - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pliang/cs294-spring08/#administr...

[CS 281A] Statistical Learning Theory - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/courses/281A-fall07/

[CS 281B] More Statistical Learning Theory - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bartlett/courses/281b-sp06/

There may be more that I don't know of, but I know these courses are fairly well regarded (I'm planning to take 188 and 281A next semester).

Is it just me, or does anyone else find 14 interviews (11 on site, 3 phone; one more if you count the fair) a bit ridiculous? I mean I know people are the most important thing and you have to make smart choices but damn!

I've been sitting here trying to think of an insightful comment I can add to this post, but I've come to the conclusion that you can't improve on perfection. It's unfortunate that this post won't be read by nearly as many people as it needs to be.

In other news: Sensationalism Sells?

Limited Understanding and Stupid Advice: Will It Work?

This semantic inquiry is pretty trivial. They mean different things and carry different degrees of importance to different people. Who cares if they're the same or not? When reading advice, you shouldn't take the words literally, but rather come up with your own interpretation. My interpretation of this type of advice boils down to: 'When faced with a decision, think about it [your emotions and instincts come into play here] and do what you feel is right.'

P.S. As an aside: My personal interpretation paints them as fairly distinct, though related, things: Instinct tells you what you should do, Emotion tells you how you feel. They sometimes feed one another (i.e. You see a pretty girl and emotionally fall head over heels which makes your instinct tells you to do something before this angel walks out of your life forever) and sometimes are in conflict with one another (i.e. Your instinct tells you to sell your company because you've subconsciously crunched the numbers and outcomes and decided it's for the best, but you can't emotionally bear the thought of living another day without the baby you've worked so hard on).

Perhaps. Though for me, trying on a pair of shoes in the store and putting them back on the shelf is a much different experience then ordering them online, waiting a few days, trying them on, and then re-packing them up and going to the post office to ship them back. When I buy stuff online, I usually want to keep it.

I think you're missing my point.

> I seriously question the economics of Zappos... I really feel like any day their prices are going to go up to MSRP and they're going straight out of business.

>> It's not a hassle at all with Zappos, it's trivial. I'm the kind of guy who would just eat the $50-$100 if it required more than 10 minutes of my time.

They probably did eat a bit on that, however:

1) Most customer's don't return stuff anywhere close to the rate you do (they usually get it right the first time. It's also a hassle to return stuff, even if it's free).

2) I can imagine with your atrocious rate ratio of returns, you'd be far more inclined to pay a few more dollars to make that experience better via Zappos then stinge out and deal with paying for the return shipping and poor customer service issues elsewhere. (i.e. if they raise their prices, who cares? Everyone knows Zappos was built on their excellent customer service and selection, not their prices)

(Note: I personally haven't used Zappos myself, but I've heard Tony talk about his customer service oriented culture in person and they sure seem to be doing just fine with it).

Just out of curiosity, what did you do while you were there? I've always fantasized about taking off to some distant Asian country to hack away on code while learning the language and experiencing the culture (while also enjoying the minimal living expenses), but I'd love to hear experiences from someone who's actually been there and done that.

NSFW Title + Hot Girl Thumbnail + Rickroll.

Works every time.

jobs@startup_you_want_to_work_for.com

In my experience, pretty much every start up is hiring provided you're qualified and passionate enough. By their very nature, start ups can't possibly list things like expected salary or equity because those heavily dependent on what you yourself bring to the table. If you'd like a place to start when looking for start ups you'd be interested in, http://www.crunchbase.com/companies might be a good place to start.

In the words of Paul Bucheit (from his talk at Startup School 08), "I've never really had any problems figuring out what to do with more really great people... because they can usually just take care of themselves."

Although this is what should happen, it doesn't quite seem to be the case. Pretty much every other ruby implementation destroys Rubinius in terms of performance. It's also worthwhile to note that 1.9/YARV, which is bytecoded, destroys every other ruby implementation and should actually be a major boost to Rails once the compatibility issues are worked out (Matz released 1.9 during Christmas of 2007, but it's just the developer version). You can see benchmarks here:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/02/19/ruby-implementations-s...

You can also see how 1.9 fares against 1.86 directly in the code shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...

Rubinius seems to offer some nice support in terms of running reliable ruby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius), but in terms of performance and actual usability, it has a long way to go.

"There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself." - Henry David Thoreau