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How to Love Coding

Advice for Coders starting out

I’ve been writing code for the past 36 years. That’s a lot of code. Started at 6 years old, writing BASIC on an Apple IIe that my dad brought home. Then graduated to PASCAL, Visual BASIC, MS-DOS Batch and then Borland C and Java, moved to C++, Objective-C some C# and JavaScript, Python obviously, recently TypeScript, all the while learning the secrets of Bash, ZSH and PowerShell and other more obscure languages like Go, Rust and even Elixir, LISP and Lua. I’m probably forgetting many languages and coding “situations” I went through like MSSQL/TSQL/PLSQL and HTML, CSS of their kind and several other task-specific code-ish things. This is just to explain and show to you, junior coder, that coding (for real) is a lifetime pursuit. Just like my journey, you will hear similar things from just about any other lifetime programmer that you know.

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How to be an Employee

Advice for People Joining the Workforce

Working in the service of something bigger than yourself is a pillar of humanity. It enabled all riches and privileges we have in our world. It is how people have built society for eons. There’s no doubt today that being employed keeps you balanced, satiated and healthy (in a way). It’s the best tool to support yourself and others. But at the same time, it takes away many of your freedoms. Before we dive in, let’s set a few things straight.

At the core of employment stands a simple principle: An employer is hiring you for value you bring to the business which is less than the compensation they pay you. Get it? At the core of employment, the principle is that someone is getting bigger value from your work than what they pay you. No business ever, if it’s a well-functioning business driven by real metrics, will pay you more than the value you bring – otherwise they will either hire someone else for less or not hire at all. If you ever own a small business, you will learn this simple principle very quickly. No business is charity.

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How to Succeed

Advice for young graduates

Lots of bright young folks ask me “How do I get a good job?”, “How do I achieve success in this domain?”, “What should I do next?”, usually in the applied computer science or machine learning field. So, I thought I’d dispense some advice for all future advice seekers, and I may refer some people here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all that much. Although, feel free to come up and ask a question.

Graduating, from anywhere, is daunting. Going from a well understood environment where your achievements are precisely measured, into the world where, frankly, no one cares. You have to make up your own metrics, measure yourself up to them, set goals for yourself and have a roadmap and a timeline. There’s no “graduation” from life. You may think it’s retirement, but that would not only be wrong (since there’s life after retirement) it is also immensely subjective and domain specific. So, what metric would you choose? Money in the bank? Sq. ft of your home? Number of dependents? Assets? Papers published? Books read? Miles traveled? BMI? Social subscribers? See? It’s impossible to pick. It is foolish to pick. Don’t pick. Not right now at least.

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OBS Plugin for Portrait Background Removal with ONNX SINet Model

Hi,

I’ve seen people request a plugin for OBS to remove background (aka Matting) from their camera input. It’s a standard in all video conferencing software today! I also was recording some screencasts with OBS with my video in the corner, and it became instantly obvious how much I need this feature in OBS… So I set out to create one.

Demo of working plugin
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מאגר שמות ישראליים בעברית – Israeli hebrew names dataset

זהו פוסט ראשון בבלוג בעברית, מאחר והוא דן בנושא שמות ישראליים בעברית. לאחרונה יצא לי להתעסק בכריית שמות מדפי אינטרנט ומהר הבנתי שלא אתקדם הרבה אם לא תהיה לי רשימת מילים שהן למעשה שמות, כדי להפריד בקלות את הטקסט מהשמות.
לא מצאתי רשימה כזו פשוטה, למרות שבאתר מ.י.ל.ה של הטכניון יש לקסיקון די נרחב של מילים בעברים עם טיוג גם לשמות. למרות שאפשר בקלות לדלות משם את השמות עם JAXB על הסכמה של הXML, לא עשיתי זאת מפאת חוסר זמן וקוצר רוח.
אז עשיתי רשימה בעצמי. התחלתי ממאגר שמות שקיים אצלי ופירקתי לשם פרטי ומשפחה באמצעות רווחים, ולאחר מכן התחלתי במלאכת הכרייה שהוסיפה הרבה מאוד שמות למאגר.
לאחר מכן חזרתי למאגר שלי ומניתי את המופעים של כל שם כשם פרטי ושם משפחה, כדי לעזור בכרייה עתידית. כך אפשר למצוא עוד שמות למשל אם לוקחים את המילה שבאה לפני שם משפחה מובהק מאוד.
עם זאת ישנם שמות מאוד מבלבלים מבחינת שיוך לשם פרטי או משפחה, למשל “גל”, “שלום”, או “ברק”. לעומתם שמות מובהקים לכאן או לכאן כמו “אהוד” או “לוי”
בכל מקרה, הנה הרשימה לשימושכם החופשי.
נא לקחת בחשבון שזו רשימה חלקית ביותר, וכן המנייה של השמות חלקית ביותר גם היא.
hebrew_names
This is the first hebrew speaking post on the MTT blog, since it speaks of names in Hebrew. This is also not a translation of the above text, just a preamble to it. I’ve collected a list of Hebrew first and last names and counted the number of times a name appears as first and last on a private database of names. The result may be useful for someone extracting Hebrew names from the web.
Enjoy!
Roy.

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New Year, New Look

Hi Everybody
Another look at our blog, made us think: Why do we still look so 90’s?
This is when we decided to do some cosmetic and functional changes:
We changed the theme (We though about buying a wordpress theme, but for some reason, they’re way too expensive),
We installed a new commend system called “Disqus”
We have a new logo,
And we generally want to make your stay more comfortable.
We hope you like it.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Roy and Arnon

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Trying out my mashup skills

This is not proper technical thingy, but I took some time to try out some audio skills by doing somewhat obvious mashup
Came out pretty good, in my opinion
Sara Baraeilles’s “Brave” and Katy Perry’s “Roar” sound very similar. So I took two acapellas and instrumental and mixed them together.
Enjoy (or.. not)
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/127472720″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

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Speak friend and enter

Screen Shot 2013-12-21 at 12.58.00 PM

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Trying out a new theme

Hi Guys,
After a while we are trying to “lighten” things up. Let us know what you think
Roy & Arnon

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Tree nom

tree_nom