Your comment reminds me of Google search, which is also quite simple in front (the UI/usage) and very complex under the hood.
1 karma · joined July 13, 2012
+N.
Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.
Some interesting links there.
Related anecdote: a person contacted me a year ago and asked if I'd be interested in being a co-founder of his startup that would be using $(major_social_networking_service)'s API (as it's main source of information, for doing something that piggybacked on that service's user profiles). After thinking about for a while, I said I didn't want to get into that, and also cautioned him about the risks of relying on another company's API as the basis of the startup, as they could change the rules at any time and that might break his business model.
Interestingly, we've seen events (in the tech news) since then that showed the risks of that approach.
Your theory seems like a more generalized version of my thoughts, and I like it.
Though it works, one potential issue I found with it is that it does not give enough context as to where in the program the exception occurred. E.g. if I have more than one open() call (all for read mode) in the code, it will give the same error message for an exception occurring on any of those open() calls (as long as the exceptions all happen for the same underlying reason, such as "file not found". E.g.:
Exception occurred: IOError(2, 'No such file or directory')
Had you come across this and found any way to handle it? I though of passing some unique code for each case, but there seems to be no way to do it, because we are not calling the except clause ourselves - Python does it.
Edit: just thought of a (crude) way to handle that issue: declare a global variable, say, "location", and set it to a different numeric or string value at each place in the code where an exception may be thrown, or at least at one place, say the top of the function, in each function or method. And then in the single except clause, print the value:
print "location=", location
This will at least help narrow down the area of code in which the exception was thrown.
Interesting point. Q: Is it possible for two different pages to give the same checksum? (Asking for my own info; I do know what checksums are, in overview, from way back, but haven't checked :) them out much.
The Greatest Salesman in the World
by Og Mandino.
http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=uwin
It was created by David Korn, author of the Korn shell (ksh).
You can find the UWin site link some hits down the Google results page. (First link is for its Wikipedia entry, then there are some unrelated hits for the same string "UWin", then the actual site).