Recent content on Pasha Bitz
I’ve long believed that “coding” is the new literacy. 
 I always intended to teach my son programming at a relatively early age.
Now, as computer programming is being upended by AI, I wonder whether I should. 
 My son and I are currently building a simple game together. As I watch him watch me type queries into the coding assistant window, the irony doesn’t escape me. 
 
…
While we’re debating how AI is transforming software engineering in general, there is a field within it that got completely flipped on its head: the technical interview. 
 The classic coding problem used in interviews, one that is self contained, tests some logic, data structures and algorithms, and can be reasonably solved in 30-45 minutes, is the exact thing that coding assistants are…
Some recent books, because I never remember when asked for recommendations. 
 These are all very good. 
 Mostly in reverse chronological order, I think. 
 
 Disgrace , J.M. Coetzee 
 The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry , Gabrielle Zevin 
 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow , Gabrielle Zevin 
 In the Garden of Beasts , Erik Larson 
 The Demon of Unrest , Erik Larson…
Leo Messi in America has reached peak hype, and for a good reason. 36 year old forward started his North American career on the rightest of feet, scoring in every game of the Leagues Cup (for a total of 11 goals in 7 games) and taking Inter Miami (last place in the MLS Eastern conference prior to his arrival) to the title. 
 As is the case every twenty years or so, many believe this is the…
As universities are switching to 100% remote teaching in the coming semester , many undergraduate students should strongly consider getting a “DIY” CS degree: take the same courses you would at your own school, but on any one of the online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, like Coursera or edX . 
 Advantages 
 Cost : this one is a no-brainer. According to US News one…
It’s been a while. Running my blog off of a WordPress on EC2 was just very… undelightful :)
It was a pain to maintain, it cost a lot to run (in relative terms), it was ugly and slow. 
 I kept wanting to write but the experience was so cringy I never did. 
 So I decided it was time for a change. 
 I came up with what I think a blog should be like in 2020:
As a hiring manager, I’m probably looking at a hundred candidate profiles a week, at least. Here are some common mistakes you can fix and improvements you can make right now as a candidate / job seeker, to increase your chances to find a job. This is biased for software engineering roles, but many things apply to any role. 
 Profile picture 
 The recruiter will be looking at your…

 There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. 
 Benjamin Disraeli 
 With the elections less than two weeks away, many have already proclaimed Hillary Clinton as the winner. This is based on Clinton’s overwhelming dominance in the polls and election forecasts. I’d like to show that the race, based on what we know now, is much closer than what most of us…
We live in a glorious time: information is more accessible to us than at any time in the past, by far. A middle schooler in a small town has access to more information using her phone today than a Nobel Prize winning researcher did in 1900 using the greatest library of the time. Unfortunately, our mental capacity as humans did not progress as much, on average. This led to a situation where we are…
Disclaimer : this is a highly speculative, controversial-on-purpose post. Historic events and data is mostly fact. Predictions and forward-looking analysis are mine, based on gut feelings and what-if thinking, not based on fact. This is just a friendly reminder that in September 1999, a few months before the presidential election that brought him to power, Putin staged “terrorist…
Twitter is rolling out their polls feature . How many normal Twitter users care about polls? That’s obviously not going to be a big deal in terms of solving “Twitter’s problems” of not growing fast enough and not generating a ton of revenue. Twitter Polls is an ideal example of something that should just be a third party app. In a world where you can build apps on top of…
Beyond the usual hoopla over the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR hides a truly spectacular feat of individual Making (capital M) and a huge milestone in the history of (crowd)funding and selling a business. In my mind, it even eclipses the acquisition of WhatsApp just a month ago, as well as the acquisition of Instagram (all by the same acquirer, more on that in a bit). 
 Palmer Luckey, the…
As more and more sad details surface about Apple’s legal crusade, I keep thinking why I’m using the iPhone and don’t just switch to an Android. 
 Yeah, it’s not as good still, and I always told myself I’ll get an Android phone eventually, when they’re good enough. 
 But then it hit me: 
 It doesn’t matter. Apple is not going to lose only…
All booze has an “Alcohol by Volume” measure specified. It’s denoted as a percentage which is supposed to tell you “how much alcohol” there’s in the specific drink, or, alternatively “how fucked up are you going to be and how fast”. Beer is typically between 4%-10%, wine 12%-14%, vodka and whiskey 40% and so on. 
 But how do they measure this…
The program can’t start because LIBPQ.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem. 
 If you’re getting the above error when starting Apache after installing Apache and PHP on your Windows machine, go to your PHP install directory (e.g. c:Program Files (x86)PHP) and copy the file libpq.dll into the bin directory under the Apache install…
A thought provoking article in the Atlantic about the education superpower Finland: 
 
 The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known – if it was known for anything at all – as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life – Newsweek ranked it number one last year – and…
.code{font-family:Lucida Console, Courier New;background:#ffdf73;} 
 I’m a big fan of good naming in code, here’s a recent example: 
 Suppose you have a unique index in a database table and you’re trusting that index to enforce no more than one record with the key. 
 So you’re using an insert ignore into…on duplicate key update statement. 
 So you end…
If you have annoying scrollbars around your Facebook app’s canvas, here’s what you need to do: 
 First, go to your app’s settings, click “Edit App” and then “Advanced” on the right. 
 Scroll all the way down to “Canvas Settings” and change “Canvas Height” to “Settable”. 
 Second, add a call to…
If you’re using the PayPal Adaptive Payments API in sandbox mode, redirecting the user to https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr and getting the following error: 
 
 This transaction has already been approved 
 The problem may be that you’re using an incorrect sandbox user as the “sender” in the transaction. 
 You need to go to the sandbox (…

 “When we would become friendly with an office,” he explained, “and they were important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, ‘You know, when you’re done working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work for us.’ Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to ‘em, that was…

 The Fjordruta is a great multi-day hike in the west of Norway. It has a little bit of everything: fjords, forests, mountains. The whole trail can take about two weeks but you can do as little as a couple of days. 
 The best time is summer. I did 3 days in late September: the conditions weren’t perfect but not too bad either. I had two overcast days with some rain and one sunny day. The…
A little less than three months ago I started working on my new project, Cohaico , and today I’m launching the public beta of the website. From the announcement post on the Cohaico blog : 
 
 Let us fix that for you. 
 Guess what - your friends are already sharing everything they know about stuff. They do it on social networks like Twitter. 
 But if you get on Twitter -…
People are zombies 
 Everybody’s on their iPhone, all the time. I find it kind of troubling. We’re soooo headed at The Matrix. And when it happens, 5-10 years from now, it won’t be all violent skynet-style-war-with-the-machines-kind-of-thing. When Steve Jobs comes up with the iThing that plugs via USB directly into your brain - people will just line up to get that $499 piece…
Over on the Cohaico blog, I wrote about some things I learned during the first months of working on a new startup: 
 
 Products that succeed? They are the ones that got the crazy distribution by getting people to use their service, other companies to partner with them etc. On the outside, this often looks like “destiny” or “force majore”. You built such a kick-ass…
Google Chrome (and now also Firefox 4) have the useless little feature of allowing the user to resize any on a page. 
I’ve found the perfect use case for it: 
 1. Go to a page in your website that contains a , like my Delver profile page : 
 
 2. Drag the corner of the until reaching a particularly obnoxious appearance:
.code {background-color: rgb(205, 205, 205); font-family: lucida console;} Here’s a c# example of consuming the Twitter Streaming API . 
Suppose you want to take all Tweets mentioning a country and save it to a database. 
I will be using the Twitterizer c# library . Let’s first look at the complete code and then walk through it: 
 private static bool streamEnded = false;…
Here are some tips for creating more useful software specs that I gathered from my experience working on Delver . 
Note: these are mostly relevant for specs that deal with user-facing features, but some apply in general. 
 Tell a story 
 Try to structure your document as a story that describes what the user does in the same sequence users are going to do it in the eventual system.…
Out of the few Twitter API libraries for .net out there, the ones that seem most complete are: Twitterizer and TweetSharp . 
I’ve been developing with both in the past couple of weeks and both are generally stable, complete and provide a clean one-per-one wrapper for the Twitter API methods. Which is great news (tm). 
TweetSharp currently does not support the Streaming API, which is…
I hate saying “I told you so”… ;) 
 5 months ago I tweeted : 
 
 And yesterday it was announced that Google is buying fflick .
Well, this is just too lame. This little window was just hanging around my desktop: 
 
 “Peculiar” I thought. But you can’t fool me. I dragged the edge of the window to *resize* the window (yes, just like they taught us): 
 
 An “Invisible Window”?! Oh, the lords of secrecy and the gods of international espionage: this is the shit! 
Whoever coded…
Reading http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate-limiting , here are the major points: 
 REST API 
 
 
 Anonymous calls (things like users/show - get a user’s info) are limited to 150/hour, that’s 3,600/day. This limit is IP-based. 
 
 
 Authenticated calls (like a user’s home timeline) - 300/hour. Limit based on your app key. 
 
 
 Those rates…
UsabilityHub is a great tool to quickly test your application UI and flows before writing a single line of code. Here are some tips from my own experience using this tool: 
 1 Use variations 
 When you’re testing various versions of the same design - use the “add variation” feature on an existing test instead of creating a new test. This will ensure that users who did the…
Yesterday I met with Omer Perchik who told me about his new startup Any.Do . 
Honesty, I amazed with what he and his partner are doing. I am usually a critical person and I dismiss ideas very easily but I have to take my hat off for these guys. What is awesome about it is the combination of: 
 
 
 Great product idea 
 
 
 How smooth execution looks 
 
 
…
In the previous post I talked about clearly defining a product and communicating the definition to the whole team . 
 Once you have your product definition in place, there are two things that you control that can increase your chances to succeed: 
 
 Quality of the team 
 How well the work is aligned with the goals 
 
 We’re into product management, so now I’ll…
This is the first in a series of posts on product management. 
 Two Kinds of Focus 
 In a startup project, the ability to focus is an absolute prerequisite of success. There are two kinds of focus here, I’ll call them “Macro” and “Micro”. Macro Focus means what is it exactly that your team is going to build. Micro Focus is making sure that every action and…
Ben Pieratt writes about doing creative work in a letter to a friend: 
 
 Creation is entirely dependent on ownership. 
 Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes…
The story behind the Stuxnet worm that infected computers in Iran is pretty fascinating. From the Wikipedia article : 
 
 The complexity of the software is very unusual for malware. The attack requires knowledge of industrial processes and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure.[1][3] The number of used zero-day Windows exploits is also unusual, as zero-day Windows exploits are…
Over on the new Delver Blog : 
 
 In addition to chatting with your friend, you can share your browsing with them by clicking the “start sharing” link at the bottom of the chat room. This means that your friend will see what products, catalogs and profiles you’re browsing on Delver. You can use this to show your friends things you like and talk about them at the same time. It’s like going…
Jonah Lehrer on Old Writers and the connection between age and work in other areas of creativity: 
 
 For instance, Simonton has found that poets and physicists tend to produce their finest work in their late 20s, while geologists, biologists and novelists tend to peak much later, often not until they reach late middle age. Simonton argues that those disciplines with an “intricate,…
Search Patterns and Misconceptions 
 Earlier today, in the first half of the opening game of World Cup 2010 between South Africa and Mexico, a Mexican forward scored a goal. The referee from Uzbekistan disallowed the goal because it was scored from an offside position. 
It was immediately clear to me that the referee made a very big and obvious mistake, as at the time the ball was passed…
Google steals a page from Bing’s book and puts custom backgrounds on Google.com: 

This isn’t terribly new, but just somewhat new - Facebook doing some basic CF-based interest suggestions: 
 
 Works okay :)
I’ve been in love with Ernest Hemingway’s books since I was about 19 years old. The gripping, powerful and terse style was much better than anything I’ve ever read. Hemingway often cited his first job in journalism, still as a teenager, at the Kansas City Star, and the Star’s Style Guide, as the roots of his short and to-the-point style: 
 
 _Use short sentences.…
If you’re opening a new restaurant and want to spread the word but don’t have a big marketing budget - what do you do? 
When I got back home tonight, I found this envelope in my mailbox: 
 
 It is a hand written envelope reading: 
 
 Some neighbors steal your paper and some invite you to lunch 
 Now, it’s not a printed envelope using a handwriting-like…
Check out my new blog at http://www.onsocialgames.com 
 I will post there about everything related to social games - development, design, marketing, monetization etc. 
 Help spread the word. 
 p.s. 
Being silly will still continue right here, on pashabitz.com
Got a lot done today: 
Domain - check. 
Server up and running - check. 
First Facebook app created and running on server - check. 
FB API calls working - check. 
MySQL running on the server - check. 
App connects to DB - check. 
 Bunch of new technology. Feels good to open VS after a long break.
http://wow-amazing-3d-and-cg-and-Michelle-Rodriguez-o-w.ow/ 
 http://cool-we-live-in-a-compter-program-i-can-do-whatever-i-wa.nt/?plus=awesome-cinematography 
 http://holy-shit-bruce-willis-was-dead-all-along-i-have-to-watch-it-from-the-beginning-but-shit-i-am-in-a-movie-theat.er/ 
 http://kill-bi.ll/ 
 (Domains available, contact for price)
I present to you, my newest startup: 
** 
The URL Shortener URL Shortener** 
 http://1 -> http://bit.ly 
http://2 -> http://goo.gl 
http://3 -> http://youtu.be 
http://4 -> http://su.pr 
 So much joy for so little URL typing.