We ran a study to measure if using the Talk Hiring mock interviewing tool improves interviewing skills, and we have proven that it does! Here’s a link to our study setup and results. Running this study was much harder than I thought it would be. Here are my learnings for others who might want to run their own study!
Why did we run a study?
Our product...
First blog post on the x.ai blog about Activation Functions in Neural Networks. You can read it here on Medium or here on the x.ai blog.
Prioritization is one of the most complicated, contentious, and crucial aspects of building a startup. There’s always an order of magnitude more tasks that your team can take on. Making sure that your team is working on the highest value work items is vital. HBR (Harvard Business Review) just released a phenomenal article on prioritization. I’ll highlight the key points here and analyze them by pulling from my startup experience.
The 3 Interdependent Variables in...
At the start of junior year at Duke, I was working on a startup called MailBadger with my friend, Kirill Klimuk. Essentially, MailBadger was a two-fold enterprise software solution. It helped companies automatically follow-up with their clients, and it displayed these results in a simple, user-friendly interface organized by client or by reminder. MailBadger was going to solve the problem of requiring employees to remind themselves to follow-up with their clients. Instead of reminding...
One of my personal goals is to better understand deep learning. Word2vec, an algorithm developed by Google, is one of the simplest (but still not simple!) forms of deep learning. Deep Learning is a type of machine learning when there is at least one hidden layer. Word2vec is an algorithm that develops vectors for words based purely on the assumption that similar words are often used in similar ways. By running words through this...
I share my bathroom with a roommate. Nobody likes to wake up and find your roommate in the shower. To solve this problem, I built an Alarm Clock app that shares my wake up time with my roommate. That way, I can know when my roommate is planning on waking up, and I can set my wake up time accordingly.
I use UILocalNotifications to do the wake up. These notifications work great because an internet...
Disclaimer: NSNotifications are not iOS push notifications
NSNotifications are signals that can be passed globally between classes in an iOS project. Classes can send (or post) notifications to classes that listen for the notification. For more information, check out the documentation here 
Extensive use of notifications are bad for a number of reasons:
Notifications lead to poor software architecture When building an iOS app, it’s very tempting to use NSNotifications...
During the summer after my freshman year at Duke, my friend and I started our first business. I built my first website. It was a taxi sharing and taxi booking website called KoalaCab (I know Uber now does this, but it was pre-Uber). We ended up booking 450 cabs during our first year of operation. 
Colleges are great places for taxi sharing because:
I really enjoyed the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, and I came upon many interesting statements about randomness in markets, the most interesting one being the scaling property of randomness.
In the stock market, the general direction that stocks move in are for a reason, but the second or millisecond deviations that stocks have can be mostly attributed to noise or randomness. As Taleb did in his book, let’s take a stock that...
Path is a mobile-only social network for your closest friends. It provides the basics of a social network (messaging, news feed, picture/video posting, location check-ins, status updates, and “friending” of people). But, because it is more intimate than a larger social network (ex. Facebook), it has become a much richer and detailed way to document my life.
Things I Love Path is known for its design. Path’s best design elements are...