Hi, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Will take your questions into account for the next interview.
Regarding the UX/etc, is is that bad? Any suggestions to improve? I'm not sure if the ycombinator is that much better to be honest, but I might be missing something, and I'm open for improvements!
This comment totally sidetracked my day. I've been searching for a way to quickly do diagrams, but without the use of full-blown Visio-like flowchart software. I downloaded Paper back in the day and remember when it came out with its "Smart Shape" feature, but didn't ever think to use it for easily sketching charts.
pinboard.in is based around tags and does not let you layout your links in any particular order. It is mostly a tool for "saving" whereas curabase is more about curation / lists and returning to that content faster.
Not to be a debbie downer, looking at this chart hurts my head. I am sure there are many other ways to present this information in a much more elegant and clean way.
I would look on Indeed.com or some other job board for the jobs that fit what you think you would like to do and then look at the what languages and technologies they are asking for.
I've used C# for computer vision, visualization and even for embedded stuff but it really isn't popular for "fun" things and I think it will be even less so in the future.
OK, you probably know more than me. I just assumed that most of those libraries are then consumed from something like Python. If you want to develop high-performance libraries themselves, then C++ is probably the way to go. Unless you want to be on the cutting edge with something like Rust :).
I think you pointed out my only concern quite well.
The C# role is mainly developing application level software which would talk to the C/C++ drivers and such. This C# will be fitted into another framework which is the top level platform.
Can you please elaborate on this
"But really, it's pretty trivial to learn a language. C# is a fantastic language, but it seems that it is likely that your role will be taking you further away from your future plans, not nearer them."
As people have pointed out, learning a new language seems definitely like a good addition to the skill set, but I wouldn't want to do it at the expense of pigeon holing myself.
TL;DR: I am not sure if I should become better in C/C++ or pick up C#?
A couple more things I encountered when trying to sign-up:
1. I could not see New York, SFo on this list. Which are the current target cities?
2. Upload a JPEG only picture. Really?
For Watson, probably not "trivial", no, but also probably not a hugely expensive undertaking. It really depends on how the system works, though. Something like an artificial neural network would be impossible to manually prune like that; they'd have to retrain it and "teach" it that those things are bad. Without knowing much about Watson, though, my guess would be that its knowledge is largely stored in a structured database, which is more directly accessible.
Watson's 'memory' is just a big database of facts, rules, and statistical models. To 'forget' a source they'd just have to rebuild any models derived from it and purge any facts it had extracted.
I didn't mean to imply it was simple, just that there's nothing magic about how Watson's knowledge is stored. Obviously at this scale any change is unlikely to be trivial.
Given the wide range of unstructured sources Watson uses, and given that the linguistic rules they use to extract facts are likely to frequently change, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume they'll have a process to make building its knowledgebase and models from sources fairly straightforward.
they just overwrote every urban dictionary word instances with the string "rainbow".
So Watson still wants to call the query bullshit, but says rainbow instead.
- If you had to design a programming language, what would be some of the decisions you would make?
- (Since he lists things such woodworking, fiction writing, etc.) How has programming influenced your life?
- If you had to write another book, what would it be on?
- What do you think about the general state of interviews (programming related positions) in the industry?
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Other non-question comment:
- UX/Usability/Readability, layout, font selection of you website is really poor. Please make it easier for the readers (e.g. https://blog.ycombinator.com/chris-slowe-interview)