Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I would like due to school obligations for the past couple months. However, now that school is over and a have a lot more free time, I will hopefully be posting more here. Stay tuned for a minor update to the blog’s theme as well.
I will be attending the Illinois Institute of Technology this fall, where I will be majoring in Information Technology and Management with a specialization in Web Design and Application Development. Thank you to everyone that has helped me get to this point. I’m stoked to continue my education in a city I’ve grown to love.
Link: INVALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS by Trevor Owens: Why Entrepreneurs Hate Working at Big Companies
My sentiments exactly. Great post.
trevorowens:
When compared to the stereotypical corporate persona, entrepreneurs are stoic individuals. They work out of basements and garages and hire their friends and family when no one else will work for them. Many go without pay for months, if not years, through ups-and-downs, for the chance at making…
August of 2012. I suddenly had a lot of work to do. Building a new web app for my school and senior year coming up, that’s usually a good thing. This time it was a little bit too much. As the sole developer for the website, I had to finish the project under a strict deadline. Alongside, a long overdue project was glaring at me, and more smaller projects came on while I was trying to finish the bigger ones.
Low productivity caused me to compensate by working longer hours, often 10-12 hours a day, sometimes on the weekends as well. Of course, this lowered productivity even further. With college applications coming up and project deadlines looming, I thought I could handle it “just a little bit longer”. I had a vacation in December, so I kept thinking I would finish the projects before then, and get some well deserved rest later.
It didn’t work.
After about two months of...
John Foobar is a 26 year old semi-technical analyst living in Austin who’s sick and tired of Yelp. His favorite Mexican restaurant “Mi pato esta en fuego” has only received 2.4 stars! John wants to find food that he specifically will like, not just restaurants that are rated well. As luck may have it, John happens to have access to a massive amount of perfect data. So far, so good.
John does some Google searches and finds that a “k-nearest-neighbors algorithm” might be what he’s looking for. He happens to have scored a free SQL Server license from an old barfly in exchange for listening to his tales about how wonderful life was when the mafia controlled New York, so naturally John searches for ways to implement kNN algorithms in SQL.
John finds out that kNN can be implemented efficiently using a spatial index, but that only works for two dimensions. That doesn’t work because John...
Heroes are everywhere. They are the teachers, doctors & nurses, first responders, soldiers, and many more. Today however, I want to recognize a less well-known hero and friend, Miles Austrevich. His resiliency and positive attitude toward his grave situation is an example to us all. Miles graduated from Northside College Prep, the school I now attend, in 2011. He had enrolled in Yale University, but was unable to attend due to his illness. After a valiant four-year battle, he passed on the afternoon of December 23rd, 2012.
I first met Miles over this summer, while working on the Jokes4Miles project. Jokes4Miles is a nonprofit that is dedicated to providing children facing cancer and other serious diseases with jokes and well-wishes. As they say, “Humor is the best medicine.” I joined Jokes4Miles as a volunteer in May 2012, starting with meeting Len, Miles’ dad, at a joke-a-thon hosted...
Interesting trend that I’m seeing: since Facebook’s IPO, it is becoming more and more a legitimate business than a social networking website. Users are now able to pay to get their posts more visibility, a pattern that seems to be continuing with this monetizing of messages.
I’m glad that they only allow individuals to utilize this new feature. But what about in the future? Only time will tell.
I wish I could switch to Google+ completely, but the network effect is preventing me. Guess I’ll have to stick with Facebook for now.
breakingnews:
Facebook said Thursday it has begun testing a system for users to send messages to people outside their circle of contacts for $1.
In a statement posted online, Facebook cited research showing that “imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are...
Almost three full days have passed since I learned of the horrific news from Newtown, Connecticut. Five days have passed since the Oregon mall shooting. The clock keeps on ticking, but will action be taken?
Since the news broke, the media coverage has become almost unavoidable. Turning the radio off was the only solution for me. Now I ask: Why must the media cover the story so intently? What is the purpose of interviewing heartbroken families and shocked children? Horror has become an obsession.
Roger Ebert of the Sun-Times calls the killings “just a repeat.” While this is extremely cynical, it is also depressingly accurate. News stations have promised “complete coverage” of the events unfolding. But I do not want 24/7 coverage of murder (I’m sure others can agree).
One story I found particularly horrifying was that of Ryan Lanza, brother of alleged gunman Adam Lanza...
Link: Why a Computer Science Degree Matters
<p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="http://blog.jaredshort.com/post/37952932982/why-a-computer-science-degree-matters">jaredlshort</a>:</p>&13;
I will be the first to admit that I absolutely despise the state of higher education. The concept is fundamentally flawed, and I am not thrilled to have spent 3 years (and only 3, thankfully) working towards a piece of paper that “proves my skills”. In my opinion, it does not do that in most cases. I can learn more material, more relevant material and learn it faster on my own. Services like Treehouse, Codecademy, even Googling and stack overflow are doing great things. Everything I use on a daily basis has been essentially self-taught, with the exceptional skill having been augmented by a university course.
While programming an embedded system the past couple of weeks for a competition, I have been...
Technology has revolutionized our world. Of course this means it has impacted our daily lives as well. For many people, books and reading in general are leisure activities that can be taken on at any time of day. In this digital age, computers and the Internet should only have made this easier. Right?
Not at all. During my years in grade school, when I was much less reliant on the computer, reading 400+ page books would be a fairly easy task. A lot has changed since then. Our lives have gotten much busier, and so as a result long-term activities became much more scarce.
I find myself reading much more short stories, blog posts, and other short forms of literature now. Technology has shortened our attention spans, while increasing the amount of content available. If you do the math, it appears that this relationship is expected.
Now I ask: what can be done to get a younger, more...