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Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

trevorah.github.com

1–10 of 17 posts

Re: Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

#4
post #3
post #2

Opinions?

So it's a full-sentence auto-completer? Interesting; would be nice if it would wait for a whole word (or at least a second without typing) before completing though

Good idea. I think waiting for a second would give a little more control to the typist.

Re: Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

#6
post #2

Opinions?

It seems to be buggy? There were 9 JavaScript errors in the process of typing, "How do I compare thee to a summer's day?" (I know that's not the original text of the sonnet.)

Yeah, only listing the top 10 chars to write next results in a few misses. Its also bit of a pain to test a recursive function that uses random numbers.

Re: Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

#7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be buggy? There were 9 JavaScript errors in the process of typing, "How do I compare thee to a summer's day?" (I know that's not the original text of the sonnet.)

Yeah, only listing the top 10 chars to write next results in a few misses. Its also bit of a pain to test a recursive function that uses random numbers.

I can understand that, but in a web app like yours which is meant to be very responsive, I think you would be better served by handling misses rather than letting errors throw away the stack (so to speak) every time a miss happens.

Re: Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

#8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, only listing the top 10 chars to write next results in a few misses. Its also bit of a pain to test a recursive function that uses random numbers.

I can understand that, but in a web app like yours which is meant to be very responsive, I think you would be better served by handling misses rather than letting errors throw away the stack (so to speak) every time a miss happens.

Very true. I've just updated it now to handle misses. Its a bit of a ugly hack, but it stops the errors for now. You can check it out here - https://github.com/trevorah/backseat-writer/commit/b749d3154...

Re: Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

#10
post #2

Opinions?

Is this intended to produce 'sounds like' gibberish or structured sentences? Just curious at the end goal.

Gibberish I guess. Doing a lookahead for letters was how I started, and its kinda interesting to see how it turned out as a quick project. Storing the probabilities for each letter given a string prefix is the limiting factor, and took a bit of effort to get it to reasonable size for a browser. I think using words instead of letters may result in better sentences with the same amount of space though...
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