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by hyperpape 2311 days ago
I'm sure Norvig is exceptional in many ways, quite possibly 10x, but the tricky thing about examples is that some things that look hard from the outside aren't. They're just about familiarity.

I saw that you mentioned a spell-checker, and thought "I'd use levenshtein distance. That wouldn't be hard to implement on a flight. I wonder what he did that's better." Turns out, he used levenshtein distance, and tuned the results with frequency estimates. I don't know if I'd have thought of that, but it's also not a mysterious technique--I'm confident a lot of people who work more in related areas than I do would think of it.
2 comments
perl4ever 2311 days ago
“Four thousand dollars!” gasped the CEO. “All you did was walk over and push a little button on the side of that machine. Can you give us a breakdown?” The consultant jotted on a piece of paper and handed it to the CEO.

“Pushing button: $1 Knowing which button to push: $3999″

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jimbokun 2311 days ago
"...but the tricky thing about examples is that some things that look hard from the outside aren't. They're just about familiarity."

And that's how you become a 10x developer.

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