7 ms·
Rise4fun - from Microsoft Research
- gee_totes 15y agoThe regex thing is amazing: http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/ http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/
- mturmon 15y agoIt sort-of does something I've wanted: given a regex R generating a language L, produce a few strings from L in a helpful way. Of course, L is usually infinite, so it's easy to generate strings in an unhelpful way. For instance, the phone number one: http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/phone http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/phone and the URL one: http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/weburl http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/weburl You can modify the given regex, click "ask rex", and wait a while, and it will return two patterns from the regex. Just two...
- _delirium 15y agoThere was a discussion of that on HN a few years ago, but the site that was linked seems broken now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725447 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725447
- mturmon 15y agoThanks for that, which was new to me. It seemed to do what I had in mind. I raised this a few months ago, but commenters thought I wanted to solve a different problem, such as a tool to check a regex against a group of strings that I would supply myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297788 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297788
- sauravc 15y agoTotally agree.
- zobzu 15y agoAll these are actually pretty cool!
- bjacobso 15y agoI hate to criticize a clearly awesome effort on MSFT's part but: why are those links not <a> tags? The result being a user is now unable to right click and open the examples in new tabs...
- manojlds 15y agoIt's been fixed now, as far as I can see!
- gcb 15y agohttp://www.touchdevelop.com/ http://www.touchdevelop.com/ nice, incentive to write code on mobiles finally. I guess the mobile revolution will came from microsoft after all. oh the irony.
- freehunter 15y agoTouchDevelop is nice, but it still uses its own marketplace for applications. Hopefully with Windows 8 they'll extend it, add in a few more libraries, and allow code to be published to the official Marketplace. What's nice is that the TouchDevelop code on the unofficial marketplace is open source, you can fork the code and push your own variant back.
- contextfree 15y agoTouchDevelop scripts can be submitted to the "real" WP Marketplace, see http://www.touchdevelop.com/help/wp7app http://www.touchdevelop.com/help/wp7app . IIRC this is a new-ish feature, it may not have been there when last you looked.
- tluyben2 15y agoI have touchdev on my lumia for quite a while as i'm interested in programming with touch devices and although it's nice, it's very unimpressive in the evolution of programming. It's still just really annoying to code on touch devices and unless someone makes something really revolutionary where you don't have to type and try to position the cursor so much, I don't see this is at all as a 'revolution'.
- jibbist 15y agoMore of this, less Sharepoint MS
- mkramlich 15y agoWanted to quickly "open in background tab" through each of them but couldn't it. Leave it to Microsoft research to not deliver web links that work right. "When you're so advanced, you can't even do the basic things!"
- gfodor 15y agoMan tough crowd. Can Microsoft do anything right around these parts? Sheesh.
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- rdw 15y agoCome on, the site is horribly broken in multiple obvious ways. No one gets a break for that. I have to report that I tried to mess around with the AGL example and got a perpetual loading screen. The concept seems good; the execution, lacking. Maybe this is not supposed to be public?
- latch 15y agoI think it's constructive to tell them their site is broken (which I also agree that it is[1]). However, you are also right that your parent was unnecessarily condescending. [1] There are billions of links which are just plain <a href="X"></a>, so the fraction of the ones that do something weird (like this, or target="_blank") really break the browsing experience for people.
- sauravc 15y agoDisclaimer: I used to work in a incubation group that was under MSR. Although there's plenty to gripe about at Microsoft, MSR is not one of them. It's a shining example of an awesome research group. (It probably employs more computer science researchers than any other company and was a great place to bounce ideas off of your peers, who are some of the smartest people in the field.) But one thing you should know, researchers aren't great web developers. Just look at any top computer science professor's personal websites. Judging a project's worthiness by its website is exactly like judging a book by its cover. It's pointlessly idiotic. At least balance it out with a comment about the projects on the page.
- muyuu 15y agoMostly closed source, sadly.
- geuis 15y agoSorry for the link to twitter but it's the only way I could attach a screenshot from my phone. http://t.co/Belra6Lw http://t.co/Belra6Lw I literally have no idea what this page is supposed to be, given how absolutely horrendous it renders.
- sauravc 15y agoRise4Fail? Really? So basically since the book's cover is ugly the story must be a fail? Obviously that's the case. Brilliant researchers always have great looking websites, right? http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/
- geuis 15y agoI commented on the unusability of the site that was linked to. Mr. Knuth's site is perfectly readable because he's using regular html which renders just fine on a modern mobile browser. Meanwhile I have no idea what is going on on the parent page, except that it's unreadable. Another person shared a similar screenshot in another comment. You may dislike my snarky little hashtag on Twitter and that's fine. I was not being snarky here on HN in my comment. I was making a perfectly valid criticism about usability.
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- _delirium 15y agoNote that the projects are at wildly different levels of availability/maintenance, so if you see something interesting, google [edit: or bing :-] to find its MSR project page (not sure why those weren't linked). At one end of the spectrum, the graph layout engine (AGL) costs $279, and its last release was Automatic Graph Layout 2007. At the other end, the Z3 theorem prover, while closed-source, has a free binary download, three MSR employees developing it, active maintenance and support, and good documentation/examples.
- gosub 15y agoI guess it could be very uncomfortable to use a theorem prover that is not open-source, especially if your work is at stake. Closed-sourceness abruptly cuts the chain of trust at Microsoft.
- ot 15y agoYou don't have to trust a theorem prover, it gives you either a proof or a counter-example. You can use another tool to verify them.
- mahmud 15y agoMSR is fun. Love their work very much.
- sanxiyn 15y agoZ3 is great. It pretty much destroys all other solvers in both proof power and performance. http://www.smtcomp.org/2011/ http://www.smtcomp.org/2011/
- qznc 15y agoTheorem prover seems to misleading. It seems to be an SMT solver, not a competitor to Isabelle, Coq, etc.
- sanxiyn 15y agoWell, SMT solvers do prove theorems, just not kind of theorems that mathematicians care about. Wikipedia thinks the usage is OK. "Theorem prover may refer to: Automated theorem prover, or Proof assistant, an interactive theorem prover." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem_prover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem_prover
- mdonahoe 15y ago"all tutorial automata concurrency design infrastructure languages security testing verification" I attempted to parse that as a sentence before realizing it was a navigation bar
- rayhano 15y agoMicrosoft Research should be the core focus of the consumer facing parts of the company! What I would do if I wore Steve Ballmer's shoes for a day: http://www.rayhano.com/post/11818893068/microsoft-research-stores http://www.rayhano.com/post/11818893068/microsoft-research-s...
- rbanffy 15y agoI'm always impressed by the number of domains Microsoft registers. What's wrong with microsoft.com?