asuth

long-form transcription is a pretty different problem for language models than parsing search queries. There's lots of audio-processing overlap sure, but parsing a voicemail definitely has different, harder challenges.

Alan Louie (one of the founders of Imagine K12) has been advising us on Quizlet.com for awhile. What they're doing is terrific. I think it'll produce some great companies.

(see http://quizlet.com/about/team/)

We've been using SoundManager 2 on quizlet.com for playing audio clips. We're not just playing long music clips in the background, so it's essential to have all the precise APIs for preloading, playing, and firing callbacks when sound is done playing. It handles all the browser deficiencies very elegantly, either with HTML5 or flash. Also, it's just 10k of js (gzipped) so it's pretty lightweight.

link: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

We're Joyent customers as well, and their support has always been great, so this is definitely surprising. You should get on the phone with them (they provide an emergency number). What kinds of machines are you running? Is it just one, or many? It shouldn't be necessary, but message me if you're still not getting through and I can ping some contacts.

I was at an event at MIT with one of Watson's designers as I watched the show. I asked him about the 20s thing, and he said they talked about it when they were designing Watson but they figured the scenario wouldn't happen where another contestant gave the wrong answer and Watson gave the same-but-different wrong answer. Edge case!

from unscientifically looking at network sent packet counts, it's definitely phoning home for the answer.

SF, CA (no telecommute)

Quizlet is an education platform for high school and college students. We're one of the few web companies that's gotten lots of traction in education -- 2M uniques a month and growing.

We're looking for developers who are excited about making an impact in education. Small team, no BS.

andrew@quizlet.com

http://quizlet.com/jobs/

Also would love to have hacker interns for January and summer breaks!

We do exactly the same thing -- data-sensitive requests sent over HTTPS with a secure cookie, normal browsing over HTTP. At this point it seems difficult to implement site-wide SSL (CDN issues, browser bugs, overhead in SSL).

It seems like an important area of development for the web community to improve the tools and services available to make SSL on regular sites easier to implement. Yes, it's easy to turn on SSL, but there's a lot of nuance in a good implementation.

SF, CA

Quizlet is a study platform for high school and college students. We're one of the few web companies that's gotten lots of traction in education -- 2M uniques a month and growing.

We're looking for PHP/JS developers who are excited about making an impact in education.

http://quizlet.com/jobs/ http://quizlet.com/testimonials/

It doesn't quite work like that. TCP works in packets, so 256 bytes of cookies does not necessarily translate into an extra packet sent over the network. So if you have 10 static files per page, you might push a few of them over to an extra packet, but not all of them.

It's something worth doing, but it's not the biggest win you can get.

We were using cookieless domains at quizlet.com for our static assets (css, js, images) for awhile, but recently turned them off. Some of our users (enough to be of concern) wrote in saying the site looked all wrong, and on closer inspection, weren't receiving our assets.

Because we're used in a lot of school systems, and many school districts have weird rules (domain whitelists), our static domains were not resolving while our main quizlet.com was. We decided (for now) it wasn't worth investigating how many of our users were affected or if we could do a workaround.

We're still using a subdomain off our main domain (a.quizlet.com) which prevents most cookies from sending but not al.

Going forward, I'd prefer to start base64-embedding images in css (only for compliant browsers) and using more sprites to reduce the number of overall requests.