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Pitching to VCs (comic)
Posted 15 years ago
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STARTUP INK

May contain characters from
xkcd, used under
license. However, for this work, all rights are reserved. Coyright © 2009 Steve Hanov
Keeping Abreast of Pornographic Research in Computer Science

Burgeoning numbers of Ph.D's and grad students are choosing to study pornography. Techniques for the analysis of "objectionable images" are gaining increased attention (and grant money) from governments and research institutions around the world, as well as Google. But what, exactly, does computer science have to do with porn? In the name of academic persuit, let's roll up our sleeves and plunge deeply into this often hidden area that lies between the covers of top-shelf research journals.
Why are all my lines fuzzy in cairo?

Make sure your lines are sharp using this simple trick.
Why Perforce is more scalable than Git
Branching on Perforce is kind of like performing open heart surgery. But here's why git can't hope to compete with it.
Compressing dictionaries with a DAWG

A practical, memory efficient way to store and search large sets of words.
Automatically remove wordiness from your writing
Shorten your writing with this tool, made well before AI was popular.
How QBASIC almost got me killed

The day arrived when my project was ready to be unleashed upon the world. I waited until the teacher was hovering nearby and then I started my application, running the FORMAT command on the network drive. Some classmates were watching the screen and she hurried over to see what all the fuss was about.
Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie

If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In this article, I'll compare two ways of finding the closest matching word in a large dictionary. I'll describe how I use it on rhymebrain.com
Finding awesome developers in programming interviews
In a job interview, I once asked a very experienced embedded software developer to write a program that reverses a string and prints it on the screen. He struggled with this basic task. This man was awesome. Give him a bucket of spare parts, and he could build a robot and program it to navigate around the room. He had worked on satellites that are now in actual orbit. He could have coded circles around me. But the one thing that he had never, ever needed to do was: display something on the screen.