Tangentially related: Does anyone remember the name of this startup/service that was on HN (I believe), that enables you to infer actions from plaintext.
Eg: "Switch on the lights" becomes
{"action": "switch_on",
"thing" : "lights"
}
etc.. I'm trying really hard to remember the name but it escapes me.
Speech recognition and <above service> will go very well together.
This looks really great. I just wanted to point out that the "Write a Post" feature doesn't seem to work. I wrote a test entry and clicked save, it says:
I apologize if it sounded that way, but I wasn't insinuating that I'm going to get into trouble.
I'm just saying that it could get someone into trouble.
As far as the "logging" goes, it had more to do with the word porn in the title of the page, because many content-filters just parse the title for blacklisted words.
This looks really awesome. Also, you should check out Republia Times, one of the author's other games - you're the editor of the major newspaper in some country, and the pieces you put on the front page determine the mood of the people etc. It's a really cool game : http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt
This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi-thought-experiments I came up with:
1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users - This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at https://twitter.com/verified/following . We could iterate over this list, and find the minimum.
2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter handles?
Hi pattle - I know exactly what/how you're feeling - I stutter as well, and am currently interviewing.
The biggest problem of stuttering during interviews is not the stuttering itself, but rather the break in the train of thought while brainstorming answers to interview questions.
First off - phone interviews are a nightmare for me - and I almost always fail to make an impression - because of the several ticks I produce while trying not to stammer.
I used to think I would do better at face-to-face interviews, since I can at least write on the whiteboard. Every piece of interview advice I've read says that one should keep speaking while thinking during an interview, and not just be silent and think - which is how I work best, because my brain is freed from the burden of speaking correctly.
When I 'speak while thinking of solutions', my brain automatically starts focusing on being careful about not stammering, and that really hurts my ability to focus on solving the questions - which are quite difficult in the first place.
One solution that's partially helped: I know that many stutterers are much better off when saying something semi-rehearsed, whether it be a phrase like, "So the brute force solution is _____ " or whatever. My brain goes into mechanical mode while saying this phrase, giving it more time to actually think.
I've never revealed to interviewers that I have a stutter (even though they would probably suspect that by the end of the interview), but I guess you should consider what edw519 says in the top comment.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions.
This is aside the point of your blog post, but IMO it is entirely unreasonable to assume that you'll receive a digital download when you've bought a software on DVD.
I'm a huge proponent of DRM-free and open software. But think about this: It just happened to be that you were dealing with Adobe, who have the resources to make huge digital downloads available. What if the software on your DVD was made by a small company who can't afford to host multi-gigabyte downloads? When you bought the DVD, it was with an explicit assumption that you could use the DVD in a DVD drive.
Finally, yes, customer-service chats suck (except for Amazon - I continue to be amazed by how awesome their service is), and calling a company up is almost always more effective.
"There's also a search command. It's like grep, but with replace's syntax, and slower!" Wow - I'm sold!
If it was not clear, I was just kidding - and I apologize if my tweet and caused her any sort of distress. I'm just a novice in the open-source world, and I really respect harthur for her contributions to open-source. I was just "smiling" about Javascript's use to replicate grep. In fact, it is my Github everyone should be laughing at - it is filled with small useless scripts, and really terrible code.
Nick - Congrats on finishing a game - that's the biggest hurdle most developers face. It's great that you have such an awesome headstart. Keep at it and you should be a pretty good programmer by the time you get into college.
EDIT: Obviously, not to say you're not good right now.
I knew it was an ad. But, I wouldn't be surprised if a professional soccer player could pull that off. Also, could you tell me why you think it is "obviously fake"?
I'm more of a soccer fan, and there's this video of a famous soccer player Ronaldinho doing the "crossbar challenge" - from about 30-40 yards out, he repeatedly hits the crossbar with a soccer ball, only to have it come back to him. The precision required to pull of such a feat is just mind boggling. http://youtu.be/KNwLn85I75Y?t=1m25s