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Deploying an ASP.net MVC project

So, I was looking around for a simple way to emulate the “Publish” function of Visual Studio for my first ASP.net MVC project. ..

Scale means reversing your thinking on the database

There are only a small number of sites in the world that require truly tremendous scale. Usually, this is referred to as “web scale”, and describes a site where the data is user-generated and highly dynamic. Among the first that come to mind are Facebook, Digg, MySpace and the like. ..

The “var” thing

I’ve come to really enjoy using the “var” keyword in C#. Although it’s been written about many times, I want to clarify what it is. ..

What’s the word…?

Oh right…bollocks. This report seems to be circulating that “Braidwood”, Intel’s inexpensive flash-memory-disk-cache-helper-outer, will somehow negate demand for full-blown SSDs (solid-state drives). ..

Why I heart jQuery

I am one of the many people who have fallen in love with jQuery over the past year or two. I haven’t seen it articulated why this might be, so here’s my stab at it. ..

Quickie geek quiz #3

Alright, today’s geek question relates to branding: Which company trademarked the brand name “Heroin”? ..

It’s the data, not the algorithm

Chris Dixon points out that the challenge in “artificial intelligence” — which in a mainstream definition would be “making computers learn like humans” — is not so much the cleverness of the algorithm but in finding useful data. He cites the Google example where the breakthrough was realizing that links are a good (and previously untapped) source of data on what people think is a relevant web page. Modern AI algorithms are very powerful, but the reality is there are thousands of programmers/researchers who can implement them with about the same level of success. The Netflix Challenge demonstrated that a massive, world-wide effort only improves on an in-house algorithm by approximately 10%. […] It’s relatively easy to build systems that are right 80% of the time, but very hard to go beyond that. ..