Hello from HackTX! It’s been a long day. I worked on a goofy little web app that tells you how much an article title is clickbait. It’s backed by a machine learning prediction model based on training data that I manually collected from Buzzfeed (clickbait) and other actual news sources (not clickbait), and some heuristics that I came up with like word count, includes profanity, and whether it starts with a number. Some of the source code is available here. It’ll stay up for 30 days while I still have a free Azure trial.

What did I do this past week? We got the Allocator project submitted early (actually too early, since the assignment was still closed the first time we tried!) to make room for the rest of the week. I finished up my Compilers project for the week, as well as some leftover homework from other classes.

What’s in my way? I have a Compilers exam on Tuesday that needs studying. The next OOP project is now posted, so I’ll need to read over that. And registration opens soon, so I’ll have to plan a schedule out.

What will I do next week? Do more reading, studying, working, the usual.

The name of the game this week is vector and all of its intricacies. It’s fun seeing how a basic (and perhaps naive) implementation of an auto-expanding array of items quickly gets complicated as each use case is considered. It’s not so fun trying to remember all the details during quizzes though, especially the constructor behavior corresponding to copy assignments :(

Honestly, I don’t have much to report, and I’m pretty tired now that I’ve stayed up for too many hours at HackTX, so I’ll keep this post short.

Tip of the Week: The Windows Calculator (the default one that comes with Windows) has a programmer mode that lets you input and convert from binary to hex to decimal to octal. It’ll also perform ORs, XORs, NOT, and ANDs. It’s much faster than doing things by hand, and it even supports two’s complement signed values. Give it a shot the next time you have to do bit manipulation.