bgraves

True enough. I had the speak-out-loud in natural language demo in my mind, I guess! :)

The closest I've gotten to something useful is NLTK. It's really great and really powerful and there is plenty of documentation and how-to guides.

Hmm - I hadn't thought about the dashboard / data viz creation side of this. Not sure that I'd want to be sitting in my cube creating dashboards "out loud".

"Okay, let's bring in 'Sales' to the rows card.

"Nah, I don't like that. Move 'Sales' to the columns card.

"Hmm, that doesn't work either. Put 'Sales' back to the rows card but add 'Profitability Indicator" to the details section.

"Crap. Still not working. Let's start over."

Imagine 10 analysts in a room all talking like this :)

Saw a pretty sweet demo of Tableau's home-grown prototype at their annual conference last November. It was surprisingly useful to be able to just speak "show me all of the 3-bedroom homes in the downtown Seattle area less than $400,000".

It was slow, but effective. I kept feeling myself wanting to click around for the first few minutes but quickly realized I didn't need to.

I did have to speak in away that the NLP engine could understand (i.e. "four-hundred thousand dollars" instead of "four-hundred k") so it still feels like I'm building a SQL query with my voice instead of just speaking an idea and the software figures out what I mean (hard problem to solve, I know!)

Thank you Amy! I've followed you for some time and know that you've been public about your health issues. Really sad that the "Grand Old Party" has decided this is the way they want to run the country.

This post prompted me to the 5Calls.org website and I called both of my Senators. Both are Democrats and were already strongly opposed to the BCRA but it took less than 5 minutes to vocalize my support. They asked for my zipcode to ensure I was one of their constituents, which was nice.

5Calls has an impact section [1], but man, would it be nice to snag the raw data to see more info on those 1.5 million phone calls (by date, by geography, by call status, etc.)

[1] https://5calls.org/impact

I've been using peach for a few days (@bgraves, add me!)

I'm liking it.

1. It's different and disconnected. I have FB/IG for personal/family stuff, LinkedIN/Twitter for biz stuff. Peach is more fun and more 'creative'.

2. The magic words are a gimmick for sure. But it's a _fun_ gimmick.

3. Kinda related to #1 it's a smaller 'community' now and folks are just trying stuff out.

Overall I've found my self posting a quick update on Peach over the past 48 hours more than I have on "traditional" social media (can we call Twitter, et al. traditional now?) over the past 2 weeks.

Yes, there's a novelty factor. And maybe that's it and it will die on the Vine.

Just added a "5 minute walk from South Station" neighborhood.

A few notes/observations:

1. I didn't realize that there were already several other maps for the area I wanted to map (South Station). It would have been cool to see a message like "Looks like you are mapping a previously mapped section of the town. Want to review that map?" I would have commented/loved that map instead of creating a new one and adding to the noise.

2. I don't see any way to link to my neighborhood map. So, how can I share this with other and get more love?

3. How is this different from Google's "My Maps" feature[1]? Not being snarky, but the only thing I can think of is the 'discoverability' of bostonography maps.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/

Hmm, is this built on top of url2png by any chance? :)

Nice! I spoke to 50-60 middle schoolers last month. We built a Flappy Bird clone based on the Code.org tutorials and a few of them really caught the spark. This is why I recommend JS, CSS, & HTML for entry level programming courses!

I spoke last week to 50-60 middle school students (ages 12-14) during a day long S.T.E.M demo day. There were 4 sessions with 10-15 kids in each hour-long session. My theme was "Learn to Program" and why everyone should learn to read and write code.

For the first 20 minutes, I reviewed some slides (the "who", "what", "why" of programming). For the rest of the time, we built a Flappy Bird game using the tutorials on code.org. This made everything "click" for them, since it was hands on and practical. Suddenly, abstractions like variables and events make sense when you think of them like "background scene" and "click".

After they loaded their personalized Flappy Bird game to their iPhone, we spent the rest of the time going through CodeCombat. Lots of kids really liked this because it was a game you play with code.

I wish I had a bit more time to do something purely creative (there's a "Frozen" movie art tutorial on code.org, but it's slower paced and would've taken up too much of my time)

---

A few takeaways:

1. You HAVE to make it interesting. Kids today need to go from zero to awesome in 2 minutes or less. I don't see this as a bad thing. When I learned to program, I wanted the same thing. Being able to write some stuff in Notepad and see a webpage in Internet Explorer in 1995 is what got me interested in programming in the first place. I wanted them to get that same feeling.

2. Focus on them. How is computer science going to help them? Basically, these kids (or their parents or teachers) are your customer and you have to make the benefits obvious. I talked about the creative aspects ("stretching your mind"), the career path aspects ("Bill Gates and Mark Z started when they were in middle school"), and the long term impact on the world ("Bill and Mark are two of the most generous people on the planet"). Again, this is aimed at middle schoolers so I'm not going to get into the politics of anti-trust lawsuits or over-reaching privacy concerns.

3. Only about 10% of the kids in a classroom are going to be really enthusiastic about learning this stuff. You'll have 80% that are indifferent and 10% that are bored/lost. That's okay. Not everyone is going to be interested in computer science just like not everyone is into music.

4. I didn't get too deep to quick, just focused on helping them seeing results. I didn't get into any nitty gritty like is JavaScript better than Python or anything too technical at all. Keep it as high-level as you possible can.

5. I also let them work things out. "Oh, your Flappy Bird isn't flapping when you click your mouse? Hmmm, which piece of code do you think handles when you click your mouse? Do you see any actions that you could attach to that event that might make your bird flap?"

---

Overall, it was well received and there were a few kids that used their "Genius Hour" (a set time where they could further explore the STEM topics they learned about on their own) to go through more CodeCombat lessons.

I would definitely do it again, but really needed a nap afterwards. Teaching is HARD!! :)

Give me Publish to Wordpress and I'm in.

Many example videos of this Lightboard in use by its creator.

http://peshkin.mech.northwestern.edu/233/

What are the chances! I am from Whitinsville!

Thanks for the reply!

I'm curious, what is the revenue model for babylist?

The Apple Supplier Responsibility 2012 Progress Report [1] is worth a read.

[1] http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_...

Amazon launched a new ereader Thursday, the Kindle Paperweight.

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/amazo...

One of the most powerful "About" pages I've seen:

>>The instant she opened the folder everything came together. There was a full-sized photograph paper clipped to the inside left cover and a document stapled to the right. The photograph showed a young boy with an incision across the width of his iodine-stained chest. The document to the right outlined the patient’s medical condition. The young boy was her son.

From the article...

The company’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss told me in an interview that any dosage received by a human from these backscatter vans would be "exceedingly small," far smaller than a medical x-ray. He says that the vans’ dosage falls well within the health standards set by American National Standards Institute, and AS&E’s marketing materials say that the scan’s x-ray levels are equivalent to the dosage received in fifteen minutes inside a typical airplane.

Top 10 by Number of Applicants:

  APP	   13
  INC	   11
  HOME	   11
  ART	   10
  SHOP	   9
  BOOK	   9
  BLOG	   9
  LLC	   9
  DESIGN   8
  MOVIE	   8
  MUSIC	   8

Robert Hayes designed the icon for notepad++[1] Looks like FogCreek had explicit permission to use the icon [2]

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/forums/forum/33...

[2] https://github.com/FogCreek/WebPutty/

More information on the background of webputty [1] and why it was open-sourced [2]

[1] http://tghw.com/blog/lean-development-zero-to-launch-in-six-...

[2] http://blog.fogcreek.com/whats-up-with-webputty/?fccmp=webpu...

kottke.org is one of the most popular daily-updated blogs and was recently redesigned. Today, Jason posted some stats (highlighted below). I think the stats on Tumblr and Twitter engagement was interesting, too.

- Overall traffic to kottke.org was up 14%. And February was a pretty good month itself so that's a nice bump.

- Mobile traffic now accounts for 19% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 25% over the past 30 days.

- Referral traffic now accounts for 45% of kottke.org's traffic and increased by 28% over the past 30 days.

- I also removed the links to the tag pages (like this and this) from the front page. I had a hunch that very few people were using those links compared to the real estate they took up and the traffic numbers bear that out...traffic to tag pages decreased only 3%.

What are you using to power your site?

I have a background in IT and am not a teacher, but I am deeply interested in learning more about educational technology. I think it's important to understand the history of "education reform" and what has succeeded and what has failed in the past.

It seems to me that there is no "magic bullet" for applying technology to education. There's no app, no device, no specific technology that will really revolutionize our educational system.

There are at least two essential things that I've noticed in my brief time thinking about this subject.

1. The focus should be on "better education" not "more technology".

2. Engaging early adopters is critical to get anything done in a relatively short amount of time.

80% of teachers are too busy teaching with their existing, "tried and true" methods and aren't interested in whatever new technology is being presented this school year.

I really like the ideas that seem to be coming from Khan Academy where they are testing the best ways of learning, not just running with assumptions.

Very interesting post. I've been getting more into educational technology (I have school aged children and recently became co-chair of the tech committee at their school).

I've been thinking of a "Hacker News for Education" for some time, so I signed up for academicrecess -- let me in! :)

http://academicrecess.com/?lrRef=4EVtr

I use paper + pencil to track my Simple Fit workouts now and have never used a voice-controlled app for fitness.

A few questions:

1. Have you considered adding a demo video? Although your screen shots are well done, I'd love to see the app in action.

2. Can you do more than track reps & sets? I find that most fitness apps are not flexible enough for Simple Fit or interval type training.

3. Can you talk about the app development process? How was the original idea formulated, validated, etc? Did you outsource the development? Any other interesting insights?

Interesting recap and I was glad that you mentioned Mixpanel since I didn't think Google Analytics was capable of capture stats like Avg. Searches per User.

Feedback:

* The green on black is very harsh to my eyes. Have you considered alternate color schemes?

* Add social network profile availability to the results. This isn't something that other domain name search services offer, and could attract people wanting to know if their startup name is available on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

* Add search traffic from the Google Adwords API for my favorited search terms.

Two comments.

1. Get rid of the "mystery meat" navigation. Save the experimental features (fade in/out, huge text, high contrast colors, etc) for an experimental site -- not your professional resume.

2. Convert your resume to HTML. If someone is looking for an "electrical engineer specializing in wired and wireless networking and security" in the Atlanta GA area, they won't find you in Google's index.

I really like this quote:

Bingo Card Creator is not terribly complicated software when compared to most applications, but it sits on top of other pieces of code (Rails, the web server the browser, the TCP/IP stack, the underlying OS, the hardware on both ends, etc) which _collectively_ are orders of magnitude more complicated than any physical artifact ever created by the human race.

You can insert any number of one-off business applications, reports, queries, etc in place of "Bingo Card Creator" but the concept remains true.