Duckie: Rubber Ducking as a service

http://duckie.me/

by fesuffolk • 12 years ago

56 24 12 years ago

duckie.me

fesuffolk5• 12 years ago

Source at https://github.com/atleastimtrying/rubber_duck

drtse42• 12 years ago

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

undecisive4• 12 years ago

Do you think it would be rude of us to add duckie.me to the list of external links? :)

drtse42• 12 years ago

There is a link to http://www.rubberduckdebugging.com/, i don't see why duckie shouldn't be there too.

splitbrain• 12 years ago

It provided me with a really good solution to my problems:

Can you describe the problem in a paragraph? Please use small sentences, I'm only a duck.

My colleagues are dumb!
> Is your colleagues the thing that has the problem?
yes
> Can you explain what your colleagues does?
They do very very dumb things.
> Do you fully understand how it does what it does? Could you split your colleagues into smaller chunks?
split them into chunks? Cheers duck, I think I have it now! grabs axe

mkesper• 12 years ago

Yes, the awaited context is totally missing. Seems to be about programs only.

fesuffolk5• 12 years ago

unfortunately so, we're looking into other contexts some some more specific programming ones.

goldenkey3• 12 years ago

There's not that much humor on HN so thank you for making me laugh out loud. On a serious note, to actually infer the type of object, would we need Natural Language Processing or something deeper like an actual AI. Would machine learning suffice (clearly would take a lot of memory). Whats the best approach to the simple task of inferring the object type granular enough to appropriate the situation?

undecisive4• 12 years ago

One of the constraints we gave ourselves was that we wanted a fully in-browser solution, and transparently secure - no server-side backend, therefore no data protection issues.

With that in mind, any training we did would have to be done by us. This limits our rubber ducking to exploits within our areas of expertise, but does mean that any memory / cpu consumption occurs on the client machine. It is potentially limited, but it is not a drain on our resources.

Secondly, this was very much a toy made for the fun of it, so our "brain" is entirely hard coded. The language processing is very static, and very simple - so it converts "my problem" into "your problem" so that it can ask suitable questions while faking some intelligence, and there is a state machine that would allow us to make the wizard more flexible based on certain inputs.

So to answer your question specifically, if following the previous conventions, I would have tried to find some kind of word mapping to find categories from words in the sentence. For example, the question "I can't seem to get my stitching to look neat" or "my crochet hook keeps getting stuck" - it would notice the words "stitching" and "crochet" and decide the questions are related to haberdashery, so ask general questions from that domain (e.g. "can you unpick a little way and try again?", "are you keeping a consistent pressure on your thread / wool?")

Of course, this isn't perfect. A couple of people have noted that the duck can encourage you to hack people up (we discourage this course of action and offer no warrantee for any advice the duck appears to present, especially to anyone psychotically inclined). But inter-personal issues are one realm in which this dumb regex-matching falls down frequently - it's very hard to work out that the problem is actually a person, without asking the user directly. That said, this is something that the state machine allows.

Sorry if this isn't a very good answer. I've seen tools like https://github.com/harthur/brain or https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural and would love to attempt something with that in the future, but yes - my guess is that it would be slow to train, hard for us to cover all bases, and may not fit into the memory of the client's computer. Alternatively, one thing that we considered and ultimately rejected (mostly on UX grounds) was allowing users to send us their conversations so that we could improve them - again, a manual process, but one that possibly could be automated with a proper AI library and a pre-generated 'brain'!

What can I say? That's what v2 is for :)

5l• 12 years ago

This definitely has applications beyond coding: http://imgur.com/62335fX

goldenkey3• 12 years ago

And I wonder why photons like to entangle. It must be depressing to be apart from parent wave

mmahemoff• 12 years ago

An open, and subsequently abandoned, textarea on StackOverflow has rubber ducked me on more than one occasion.

fesuffolk5• 12 years ago

It was inspired by a mixture of turning it off and on again and that sharp intake of breath before 'nevermind'.

billytrend• 12 years ago

Tried to make something like this a while ago[1] but the Eliza idea is a good one. Must be our agricultural East Anglian sense of humour. Wonder how many other farmyard animals could be turned into software as a service?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720153

fesuffolk5• 12 years ago

Nice! we started with a random response but decided to try and get some object recognition. it's a little like the thing small children do 'Why?' over and over.

undecisive4• 12 years ago

Well, if we're doing farmyard animals, fesuffolk can I suggest "Gets my goat!"... which, obviously, bleats out programming antipatterns? I'm sure we can modulate the JS text-to-speech appropriately...

yincrash• 12 years ago

My attempt at ducking the inability to eat a pizza.[1]

[1]https://mediacru.sh/9MluzWBYV3f3

undecisive4• 12 years ago

I'm gonna call that a success! Did you ever get to the bottom of your pizza-eating trauma?

qeorge• 12 years ago

This is great! Would you prefer to have the domain RubberDuckers.com for this project?

My biz partner and I had a similar idea but never launched it! We still have the domain though, and you are welcome to it. I'm so glad that you made this!

bitJericho• 12 years ago

I felt like I was getting so close...

--- >Can you describe the problem in a paragraph? Please use small sentences, I'm only a duck.

I must know the meaning of life

Is your meaning of life the thing that has the problem?

Yes

Can you explain what your meaning of life does?

It provides a reason for one's existence.

So does it do just one thing? Any chance that your meaning of life, or parts of it, can be isolated and test seperately?

Perhaps if we knew all of or part of the answer, each part could be tested.

What parts of your meaning of life are you certain work, and where are your 'unknowns'?

Well many people find meaning in their relationships, work, or education. None of these are universal though.

Is your meaning of life being compiled? Can you restart the compiler?

The universe cannot be restarted or recompiled.

Is something similar to your meaning of life being used elsewhere? Could common elements be shared?

Well we know of many physical laws. Perhaps those laws can be adapted in some way.

How is your meaning of life modified?

We do not know if it is constant or ephemeral because we do not know the answer.

Could your meaning of life, or variables within it, be somehow overwritten or overridden?

Perhaps they could by a supreme being.

Is everything in your meaning of life your code? Could you replace uncertainties with debugging statements?

We do not know how to overwrite the code of the universe.

Why do you need your meaning of life?

To give life direction

Do you fully understand how it does what it does? Could you split your meaning of life into smaller chunks?

It doesn't appear to solve the problem.

Sorry, my super-duck-powers have failed. Have you tried google or stack overflow?

jbert• 12 years ago

I have a pet theory as to why rubberducking works. Basically I think it uses some additional brain machinery to check the metadata on our facts - i.e. how reliable are each of the 'facts' we are using in our reasoning.

I tried to go into it in more detail here: http://www.berthels.co.uk/2013/03/29/how-do-you-know-what-yo...

duckieman• 12 years ago

It really seemed like I was getting somewhere, but then it failed. Oh well.

http://i.imgur.com/TJiUdWT.png

fesuffolk5• 12 years ago

http://www.fesuffolk.co.uk/talks/40

Duckie: Rubber Ducking as a service

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