Facebook Hackathon at Princeton
Things I learnt today & yesterday:
During the Japanese test yet another time realized how bad I’m at recalling the writings of kanjis under time pressure. The reason is very simple - the lack of practice: the only time I actually write in Japanese (not type) is only during these short essay sections of the tests.
Inserting given grammar items in partially incomplete sentences (every item must be used only once) is hard even if you know what each grammar point means. Sometimes sentences can be so incomplete that it is not clear what the intended sentence was.
Scraping Quora with its AJAX ‘More’ buttons is non-trivial. After numerous fruitless attempts with BeautifulSoup (python library), I will most likely stick with the Selenium with PHP bindings.
While building Tokoro I experienced first hand how using Bing API to retrieve images, copying images from URL locally and then resizing them turned out to be so painful and consuming. What’s worst is that PHP still complains that some files returned by Bing are not actually images.
curl-multi is the way to parallelize API calls in PHP!
Skipping sleep is the worst! Even if you’re building something innovative and exciting. Realized at Facebook Hackathon.
Self-satisfaction is the path to failure!
