Hacker News: anthnguyen94

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Programming books you might want to consider reading"

anthnguyen94 — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:57:26 +0000

Cool to see lots of comments on real life algorithm applications, if anyone is interested in diving deeper there's a good book that came out recently called "Algorithms to Live By" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It talks about how we often use CS algorithms in real life without knowing.

If you want a glimpse here's a talk they gave at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwKj-wgXteo

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ask HN: $1k+ side projecters, what was the best thing you did to market it?"

anthnguyen94 — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:40:05 +0000

SyntaxDB (https://syntaxdb.com) was put on PH and HN and that gave it a significant increase in traffic.

It was actually posted on PH once before, but that time it wasn't featured. Almost one year later, I built an API, several extensions, increased the amount of content, and integrated it with DDG. Eventually I decided it was worth giving the PH people a shout to see if it would get reposted (they let you repost if your product makes substantial progress). It successfully got featured that time.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ooshma Garg, founder of Gobble (YC W14) – Startup School video and AMA"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:07:10 +0000

Hey Ooshma! I was at Startup School 2016 and absolutely loved your talk! I was just curious about how you built your initial product- you mentioned not being able to find a dev who wanted to play the long game. What did you end up trying and eventually doing?

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2016)"

anthnguyen94 — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 14:45:17 +0000

Location: Toronto, Canada

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, Ruby on Rails, C++, AngularJS, Node, HTML/CSS

Résumé/CV: http://goo.gl/jrDw6X

Email: anthony.nguyen(at)queensu.ca

Github: anthonyn60

My name's Anthony and I'm a CE and Economics student set to graduate in December. I have previous internship and project experience. I've worked on web and mobile, Qt, bots, etc. I'm highly adaptable as a developer and learn fast. Looking forward to hearing from you!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2016)"

anthnguyen94 — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 22:03:27 +0000

Location: Toronto, Canada

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, Ruby on Rails, C++, AngularJS, Node, HTML/CSS

Résumé/CV: http://goo.gl/jrDw6X

Email: anthony.nguyen(at)queensu.ca

Github: anthonyn60

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 23:33:45 +0000

Was addressing the other commenter too! Hehe

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 21:54:19 +0000

So many people (including myself at times LOL) have asked for Bash. It'll be on there soon enough!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 21:53:45 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out! As of right now, it all gets updated manually (there's an internal CMS I built and use). As of right now, when people point out corrections they do so via feedback form, and I update accordingly (if I can verify it). Not the greatest but it's what's in place for the time being.

It'll later be open for others to provide new concepts and corrections.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 21:51:27 +0000

Glad you like it! When I designed the page, I thought it would look best if the code sections were split up. Interesting feedback, I'll get some other people's thoughts on this later.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 21:49:35 +0000

Yep, that has to do with the full-text search engine (Solr). There's definitely some optimizing to do, I definitely don't want additional words throwing off the search!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 21:47:43 +0000

The site doesn't actually support Haskell or Obj-C atm (will in the future).

I also need to improve the search engine to handle queries with additional words that might give a null result, as well as words like "foreach" (that has to do with the database). This will be fixed very soon.

It is bad that there are missing concepts, and I'm fully aware that this isn't even close to complete. The goal in the future is to have as few null result queries as possible. I actually make note of queries that don't provide results so I'm glad everyone's making these known, it'll only make the database better in the future!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 20:38:11 +0000

Glad you like it! User contributions will definitely be a part of SyntaxDB in the near future.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 20:37:21 +0000

SO documentation looks very cool actually, and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. I'm all for documentation being easier across all services, and I care a lot more about having this problem solved rather than pushing SyntaxDB to compete with existing services.

With that being said, I think the current integrations and the ones planned ahead will continue to make SyntaxDB a good option, even if other sites try a similar idea.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 18:09:54 +0000

That's the plan! Just a way to allow community contributions, provide incentives while maintaining the quality of content.

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 17:01:29 +0000

I actually have something in place which handles some cases of differences in keywords across languages. For example, searching for "dictionary in java" would return a HashMap.

I guess I didn't account the specific "foreach" keyword with C# (I have it as "for each"), good catch!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "SyntaxDB – Quickly look up syntax for programming languages"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 16:59:24 +0000

Hey HN, I'm the developer behind SyntaxDB. This feedback is good and I encourage people to keep it coming!

A lot of responses will be about "there's no result for x". You're right, there isn't nearly as much content on the site as I'd like there to be!

The content is actually hand written, and as of right now focuses on the very basic programming fundamentals common across all of the languages. The plan is to triple the amount of content in the database (adding DS, special classes, parsing, etc.), and eventually open up the database to outside contributions.

Additional languages are coming too!

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ask HN: Have any of you switched to Bash on Windows?"

anthnguyen94 — Mon, 30 May 2016 00:53:17 +0000

I've had it since it first came out, it's miles better now than it was at first and I'm sure once it hits 1.0 it'll be usable for some dev work. Still going to stick with my Ubuntu book for full stack at the moment though.

Show HN: Syntax Lookup Slack Bot

anthnguyen94 — Sun, 29 May 2016 22:44:10 +0000

Article URL: https://syntaxdb.com/integrations/slackbot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11798571

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2016)"

anthnguyen94 — Mon, 02 May 2016 16:17:38 +0000

Location: Toronto, Canada area

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Java, Android, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Angular, C, C++

Resumé/CV: http://anthnguyen.ca/files/ANTHONY%20NGUYEN%20-%20Resume.pdf http://github.com/anthonyn60 http://linkedin.com/in/anthonynguyen94

Email: 11akhn[at]queensu.ca

I finish university December 2016 (studying Computer Engineering + Econ) and am looking for developer and PM roles. I have previous internship and project experience doing mobile and web applications. I also particularly enjoyed learning about neural networks. Looking forward to joining a company that'll let me learn continuously, shoot me a message if you think there's a fit!

Also check out my side project: syntaxdb.com

New comment by anthnguyen94 in "Kite – Programming Copilot"

anthnguyen94 — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 17:57:00 +0000

What about experts who are transitioning new languages or technologies? I'd say this tool has tremendous value for them. Also, as long as novice programmers understand the fundamentals (DS, algorithms) something like this won't have a 'tremendous negative effect' on their learning curve.