Holy shit Akismet sucks

I was just looking through the comments on this blog after neglecting it for a while and I had no idea Akismet let through so much spam. What a piece of shit.

On the inadequacy of “human search” or “X is the new search”

It seems one of the new retarded valley startups brands itself as human-powered search. ma.gnol.ia or however you spell it claims/claimed that “found is the new search.”

The hubris and ignorance at work here is mind-boggling.

Suppose I am interested in how well a popular machine learning architecture has done on an important handwriting recognition dataset. I Google for “mnist svm“. Those letters are probably meaningless to you; mnist refers to a benchmark handwriting recognition data set based on data created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology; svm refers to support vector machines, an important, robust machine learning architecture that has recently been applied to a variety of computer vision tasks.

Do you know how fucking sparse the del.icio.us bookmarks are for things like this?

How are you going to pay/coerce a human to think up good results for important but obscure queries like this? Mahalo doesn’t even have any results for “support vector machine” when it’s one of the most important things to develop in the last 10 years in one of the hottest fields in computer science/electrical engineering/applied math – it just matches on “machine” and gives me shit about digital cameras and voting machines! This is worse than AltaVista in 1995! Jesus fucking christ!

If you aren’t a moron who queries for nothing but your own name and Apple products, you’re stuck with fancy information retrieval algorithms, at least until the Silicon Valley echo chamber thinks of something better. I’m sure when they do it will be simple to implement and scalable up to Internet scale. After all, when you’ve never written a line of code, even notoriously intractable problems like collaborative filtering are easily solved with a little bit of hand-waving and vague language.

“Oh,” they say, “but you have obscure interests. The vast majority of people searching just want to find pictures of Jessica Alba to masturbate to.” Yeah, but you add up all the obscure searches from people who actually use the Internet as a legitimate tool instead of just a TV substitute and you get quite a lot, some of it quite important — hey, isn’t that called the long tail or something?

Google handles most of these obscure queries pretty well, most of the time, as well as handling your searches for Dragon Ball Z episode torrents and poop videos. So, where the fuck is Mahalo or some other braindead thing adding value?

How to ace a tech interview

In this article, I’m going to help you whiz through those dastardly technical interview questions. Ever wonder why manholes are round? Read on.

Let’s start with an easy one. This one is called “The Rope Bridge“.

Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time.

Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

Solution: Who gives a shit? Who asks retarded questions like this?

This one is called “Wanna Play?” (hint: No!):

i offer to play a card game with you using a normal deck of 52 cards. the rules of the game are some fucking arbitrary bullshit that make this bullshit mental masturbation way harder than it needs to be. if you can’t figure it out in 45 seconds, i’ll assume you can’t produce code and work on a team, regardless of any free software projects you may have participated in (in fact i couldn’t look at open source code you’ve written if i wanted to, i’d get fired), regardless of any nice code samples you have to show me, regardless of how quickly you can pick up new things, and so on.

Solution: Are you getting the point? Jesus christ, no fucking wonder companies who use these kind of questions can’t ship anything.

Examples of paralyzing choice in programming systems

As people like 37Signals have pointed out, excessive choice can be quite paralyzing. Here are a few I’ve come across in the last few years.

• Version control systems. Choosing to be centralized or distributed narrows things down a lot, and if you go centralized you’re probably settling on Subversion or a good commercial one like Perforce. But what happens when you hear about distributed version control systems: Monotone? GNU arch? Git? Mercurial? Darcs? Bazaar? What are the benefits and tradeoffs of each? Does it really matter?
• Scheme implementations. Do you want to choose PLT Scheme, which has good libraries and a good modular code-sharing system à la Python eggs and Ruby gems? How about SISC, which claims to be efficient, have excellent R5RS support, and runs on the JVM? How about scsh/Scheme48, which some awesome hackers use and has neat Unix systems programming stuff? And that’s just some of the more popular ones.
• Functional programming languages for mind-expanding after-work/after-school tinkering. Haskell? Standard ML? Scala? F#? OCaml? Lisp? Scheme? Erlang? Oz? Prolog? You don’t have time to master more than one or two of them. Blub programmers have it so much easier: all the languages they come across are so devoid of innovation that you can pick them up in a few days to a week and the vast majority of the learning curve is in over-engineered frameworks and toolchains. No brain, no pain.

Advocation of violence against record companies and record company employees

There has recently been buzz about the fact that the music industry as it exists today is fucked.

I say, good riddance. I hope record executive dickheads and their retarded exploitative business models die. I hope ClearChannel goes bankrupt.

We face the possibility of a future with no Britney Spears? No P. Diddys polluting our lives with retarded bullshit? I hope so. I look forward to a brave new world free of Maroon 5 and Fallout Boy.

Music is older than recorded history and probably as old if not older than spoken language. Even the most primitive, backward bush tribes express their cultural heritage through song and dance. Music cannot be killed, not by scumbag capitalist dickheads at Viacom or anyone else.

If music returns to what it has been for all of time, a local phenomenon that expresses the beliefs, values, hopes, and interests of the local community, I will be overjoyed. I eagerly await the death of all major record labels.