NodeJS is easy, just ask her out

NodeJS is the hot new girl on the block. You’ve flirted a few times at meetups, and you think you could probably get a date with her if you asked. However, you still have doubts. She’s smart, but sometimes it feels like her Inception-esque nested callback conversation is out of your league. Maybe you’d be better off getting back together with Rails. You find yourself missing her concise, imperative style during tedious stretches of smalltalk on dates with other programming languages. She was nice, and she loved you.

June 10th 2011 | more »

Arguing for Immortality

I want to live forever. I’ve always thought that not dying was a pretty obvious thing to want. To my surprise, I’ve found that a lot of people whom I usually agree with on most topics strongly disagree with me on this one. Rather than write yet another piece extolling the virtues of a far-future post-scarcity post-singularity world, I thought I’d just document some of the objections to immortality I get and my counterarguments.

April 30th 2011 | more »

Facebook Puzzle: sophie

This week: Facebook’s sophie puzzle. This one is “buffet” difficulty, which translates roughly to “the underlying problem is NP-complete,” which explains why I have such a hard time choosing food at sushi buffets. In any case, the problem is to find your cat in your apartment, where you know where the cat is likely to be, as well as the transit times between the various locations in your home.

I’ll document here the various bad solutions I came up with on my way to a decent one, and as a bonus: an optimized-ish version in C++!

March 5th 2011 | more »

Facebook Puzzle: peaktraffic

Last week I was working on Facebook’s peak traffic puzzle, which was a pretty entertaining and informative exercise. The idea is basically to parse a log file and generate an undirected graph that represents mutual friendships between Facebook users. Then you are to find every group of friends where each friend in the group is friends with every other person in the group.

February 28th 2011 | more »