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willf

228 karma · joined September 13, 2010

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willf··on Show HN: Eigendrum - Draw any shape and hear what it sounds like as a drum
This is so dang cool. I’m sorry that all people can do is complain!
willf··on Giant Banana Pulled Over: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s of Times
Just want to say I’ve ridden in this car. It’s a hoot
willf··on Show HN: I built a word game. My mom thinks it's great. What do you think?
I so hate timers. I left immediately. Sure, have a count up timer for those who what it, but make sure to allow it to be turned off permanently
willf··on Wends of Texas
My wife is a Wend, and so we visited this area in Texas. One of the things I found interesting was that there was a local paper that printed articles in German, English, and Wendish (Sorbian) – there’s a link in the Wiki article. The church we visited was so beautiful.
willf··on Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using Postgres
Let’s normalize recursive CTEs.
willf··on TSV – Alternative to CSV
Because commas are much more common than tabs and so there is less escaping needed
willf··on Wordle in legal row with geography spinoff, Worldle
I had to take down my wordle10.com website (a 10 letter version of Wordle).
willf··on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened
Sounds like firing to me!
willf··on My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
> I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken.

That sounds like a community failure, not just One Bad Guy.

willf··on Rolling Dice as a Service
In fact, I don't think the max number ever rolls (e.g. http://roll.space/?dice=300d6 never produces a 6).
willf··on Rolling Dice as a Service
I think two-sided dice have the wrong behavior: they only roll ones.
willf··on The World Religions Tree (huge visualization)
The Anabaptist/Baptist branches are also pretty inaccurate.
willf··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)
Here is some more information:

Reverb is looking for a senior, hands-on developer capable of interfacing with the Amazon EC2 API and others, who would be responsible for building internal tools to manage our software infrastructure. This would include both back-end workflow as well as user-interface components.

Duties and Responsibilities

Experience with Cloud deployment tools/scripts for AWS Cloud Services Nuts-and-bolts understanding of RHEL, CentOS, performance tuning, monitoring Puppet or Chef automated deployment tools Nagios, Cacti, other monitoring and alerting systems Apache/Nginx support, configuration MySQL, Java application deployment Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, UDP Experience managing high-availability systems User interface development using javascript (Play-Scalate a bonus) Low-level operating system exposure for application and infrastructure deployment Experience with both performance and error monitoring & alerting systems Track record in a high-uptime, high traffic application infrastructure

willf··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)
Reverb Technologies, San Mateo, California: DevOps http://helloreverb.com

We're looking for a great DevOps engineer. You'd be a crucial part of our development team. If you're interested, or just want to know more, send me an email at will@helloreverb.com.

Reverb Technologies is the the company behind Wordnik.com; Reverb for Publishers; Swagger, Atmosphere and Scalatra; and other specialness soon to be revealed.

willf··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2013)
Reverb Technologies (aka Wordnik) has a number of good positions available including: iPad Visual Designer, iPad Interaction Designer, Full-Time Web and Mobile Designer, iOS Developer, Frontend Hacker, Server Engineer, Machine Learning Expert, Computational Linguist, and Analytics and Data-Mining Expert. Job descriptions are at http://www.helloreverb.com/jobs/ (where you'll also see a bit about what it's like to work here).

Feel free to contact me at will@helloreverb.com if you want to apply or have questions — and check out what we're building at http://helloreverb.com (as well as http://wordnik.com, which just got a bit of a refresh).

willf··on When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?
This is like asking when humans stopped being monkeys.
willf··on Tactful Trademark Defense: An Example
I'm not a lawyer, but I think you're just back at square one — or perhaps a little ahead, given the good will involved. Of course, you've lost a little time, too.
willf··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2012)
Wordnik (San Mateo, California) has lots of jobs available, as we build out [Related Content](http://wordpress.wordnik.com/) and other interesting new projects:

* Product Manager * Product Marketing Manager * Marketing Manager * iPad Visual Designer * iPad Interaction Designer * Full-Time Web and Mobile Designer * iOS Developer * Frontend Hacker * Server Engineer * Business Development Associate * Machine Learning Expert * Computational Linguist * Analytics and Data-Mining Expert

Check out the details at http://www.wordnik.com/jobs or feel free to contact me directly at will@wordnik.com

willf··on Putting Money In The Bank
I suggest a better lesson to learn is to not join competitions in which the difference between a winner and a loser is measured in ridiculously small numbers.
willf··on Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)
Wordnik.com (San Mateo, California)

We have lots of positions at Wordnik (wordnik.com) as we build out our new recommendation and discovery engine.

Check out the jobs page at http://www.wordnik.com/jobs or write me directly (will@wordnik.com)

Machine Learning Expert: At Wordnik, we work with text — lots of text. Wordnik uses empirical methods to build recommendation systems and to extend and improve our Word Graph. We employ statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning methods to exploit that prior knowledge for the modeling of text. We are a coding shop; developers in addition to researchers.

Computational Linguist: At Wordnik, we work with text — lots of text. Wordnik uses empirical methods to extend and improve our Word Graph, and we employ statistical, machine-learning, and deep-learning methods to exploit that prior knowledge for the modeling of text. We are a coding shop; developers in addition to researchers.

Full-Time Web and Mobile Designer: You are a talented designer that knows the web and mobile ecosystems inside and out. You're passionate about mobile and the web. You have ideas spilling out of your head for design simplifications, improvements, and additions to the user experiences affecting millions of people. Your design work is clean, focused, and inspiring to others.

Mobile Developer: You are an eager iOS developer who is a quick learner, with a passion for creating delightful and intuitive software. You want to help push the platform to its limits, with implementation approaches transcending even Apple’s first-party apps.

Frontend Hacker: We're looking for a Ruby/JS hacker with aesthetic sensibilities who can help us improve our existing ruby applications and build cool new things like our mobile site, games, browser extensions, etc.

Server Engineer: Wordnik is looking for a senior level engineer to help develop our public and private API system. You will help build our out Application cluster, which requires nuts-and-bolts knowledge of high-performance application stacks.

Cloud IT Architect: We're looking for a senior, hands-on developer capable of interfacing with the Amazon EC2 API and others, who would be responsible for building internal tools to manage our software infrastructure. This would include both back-end workflow as well as user-interface components.

willf··on How Prismatic deals with data storage and aggregation
Just a small typo: the 'associative' link links to the Wikipedia article on communitivity.
willf··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2012)
Wordnik is looking for a Machine Learning expert, especially those with an interest and with skills in large text processing, to join the team working on both acquisition of lexical information as well as classification and ranking problems. You can write me directly at will@wordnik.com.
willf··on Why Some Languages Sound Faster Than Others
Here's a regression graph of Information Density vs Syllable Speed based on data from the preprint. https://twitter.com/#!/willf/media/slideshow?url=pic.twitter...
willf··on Scala One Liners
A response: http://willwhim.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/fsharp-one-liners-t...
willf··on Functional Jobs
lispjobs.wordpress.com lists (for free) Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure jobs. Just FYI.
willf··on Build a better spell checker, win $10,000
I should note that I work for Microsoft, but not for Microsoft Research, and of course, I don't speak for them.