Maxim Khailo's Writing (Page 2)

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Tools Were Made & Born Were Hands

If you haven’t read the famous old school rant Worse is Better from Richard Gabriel, you should. Richard never really decided if he was right or wrong, and even wrote a rebuttal under a pseudonym called Worse is Better is Worse. After over ten years of thinking about it,

Deep Latent Space Maps

As I watch my children grow up, I am always amazed at their pace of learning. It turns out by 18 the average person learns about 60,000 words which average about 9 words a day. Typically these new words are learned by as little as one example of the

We Must Become System-System Thinkers

Everyone building software must become a system-system thinker. A system-system thinker is someone who understands that the system they are building is part of a larger whole of other systems. The software we build is part of a more significant system that extends beyond the computer screen and network packets.

Bar Charts With Julia

I was writing a new article for Merit and I wanted to make some charts and graphs. I used to use gnu octave for my data analysis needs but recently saw a tweet from Grady Booch about trying Julia which has a matlab esque sytnax. However, it being like matlab

The Reality Making Machines

This short essay is for computer people like me. Meaning, people who make software. If you don’t make software, you are going to find this very boring. OK, now for the boring fun stuff. It is impossible to talk about what is really out there (I am talking about

My bet is on Chomsky

My bet is Chomsky is right in the Chomsky vs Norvig debate and Geoffrey Hinton just provided some amazing fuel on the fire. If you don’t know what the Chomsky vs Norvig debate is, it started with Chomsky deriding AI researchers about heavily relying on opaque probabilistic models for

Rejection Sampling with Perl 6

Perl 6 provides a way to create lazy lists using the gather/take keywords. What I wanted to do was create an infinite list of samples from a known distribution of values. A simple way to sample from a known distribution is to do Rejection Sampling and doing this in

Total Recall

I learned programming computers before I had the internet. While technically I am a Millennial, unlike most younger Millennial programmers I had a completely different experience than they did learning how to program computers. Programming became an obsession for me as a child when I accidentally pressed the wrong button

We are Not Children

I am not a woman/man child. I don’t need games and toys to be motivated to do my work. I don’t need sugar snacks and soda pop. I take my work seriously and find inherent joy in it. Companies often use hackathons to “motivate” employees. This only

The Fox in the Henhouse

Slogging I’m writing a new time series DB in C++ called Henhouse and this is a story about a bug and my heroic battle with it. Actually, it’s not really a story about a bug, but more of a way of finding bugs and preventing them. I hope