
Rise4fun - from Microsoft Research - ot
http://www.rise4fun.com/
======
mdonahoe
"all tutorial automata concurrency design infrastructure languages security
testing verification"

I attempted to parse that as a sentence before realizing it was a navigation
bar

~~~
steverb
Sadly, I did not realize it was a navigation bar before reading your comment.

I thought it was something generated by a poorly constructed markov chain.

------
_delirium
Note that the projects are at wildly different levels of
availability/maintenance, so if you see something interesting, google [edit:
or bing :-] to find its MSR project page (not sure why those weren't linked).

At one end of the spectrum, the graph layout engine (AGL) costs $279, and its
last release was Automatic Graph Layout 2007. At the other end, the Z3 theorem
prover, while closed-source, has a free binary download, three MSR employees
developing it, active maintenance and support, and good
documentation/examples.

~~~
gosub
I guess it could be very uncomfortable to use a theorem prover that is not
open-source, especially if your work is at stake. Closed-sourceness abruptly
cuts the chain of trust at Microsoft.

~~~
ot
You don't have to trust a theorem prover, it gives you either a proof or a
counter-example. You can use another tool to verify them.

------
gee_totes
The regex thing is amazing: <http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/>

~~~
mturmon
It sort-of does something I've wanted: given a regex R generating a language
L, produce a few strings from L in a helpful way.

Of course, L is usually infinite, so it's easy to generate strings in an
unhelpful way.

For instance, the phone number one:

<http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/phone>

and the URL one:

<http://www.rise4fun.com/Rex/weburl>

You can modify the given regex, click "ask rex", and wait a while, and it will
return two patterns from the regex. Just two...

~~~
_delirium
There was a discussion of that on HN a few years ago, but the site that was
linked seems broken now: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1725447>

~~~
mturmon
Thanks for that, which was new to me. It seemed to do what I had in mind.

I raised this a few months ago, but commenters thought I wanted to solve a
different problem, such as a tool to check a regex against a group of strings
that I would supply myself:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297788>

------
sanxiyn
Z3 is great. It pretty much destroys all other solvers in _both proof power
and performance_.

<http://www.smtcomp.org/2011/>

~~~
qznc
Theorem prover seems to misleading. It seems to be an SMT solver, not a
competitor to Isabelle, Coq, etc.

~~~
sanxiyn
Well, SMT solvers do prove theorems, just not kind of theorems that
mathematicians care about.

Wikipedia thinks the usage is OK. "Theorem prover may refer to: Automated
theorem prover, or Proof assistant, an interactive theorem prover."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theorem_prover>

------
bjacobso
I hate to criticize a clearly awesome effort on MSFT's part but: why are those
links not <a> tags? The result being a user is now unable to right click and
open the examples in new tabs...

~~~
manojlds
It's been fixed now, as far as I can see!

------
jibbist
More of this, less Sharepoint MS

------
rayhano
Microsoft Research should be the core focus of the consumer facing parts of
the company!

What I would do if I wore Steve Ballmer's shoes for a day:
[http://www.rayhano.com/post/11818893068/microsoft-
research-s...](http://www.rayhano.com/post/11818893068/microsoft-research-
stores)

------
muyuu
Mostly closed source, sadly.

~~~
gosub
I guess the next "evil" step would be to remove also the binary-only closed-
source downloads and allow access to these tools only via rest api.

~~~
rbanffy
And then start billing the calls after someone builds a successful business on
them. ;-)

------
zobzu
All these are actually pretty cool!

------
mahmud
MSR is fun. Love their work very much.

------
rbanffy
I'm always impressed by the number of domains Microsoft registers. What's
wrong with microsoft.com?

------
gcb
<http://www.touchdevelop.com/>

nice, incentive to write code on mobiles finally. I guess the mobile
revolution will came from microsoft after all. oh the irony.

~~~
freehunter
TouchDevelop is nice, but it still uses its own marketplace for applications.
Hopefully with Windows 8 they'll extend it, add in a few more libraries, and
allow code to be published to the official Marketplace. What's nice is that
the TouchDevelop code on the unofficial marketplace is open source, you can
fork the code and push your own variant back.

~~~
contextfree
TouchDevelop scripts can be submitted to the "real" WP Marketplace, see
<http://www.touchdevelop.com/help/wp7app> . IIRC this is a new-ish feature, it
may not have been there when last you looked.

------
mkramlich
Wanted to quickly "open in background tab" through each of them but couldn't
it. Leave it to Microsoft research to not deliver web links that work right.
"When you're so advanced, you can't even do the basic things!"

~~~
gfodor
Man tough crowd. Can Microsoft do _anything_ right around these parts? Sheesh.

~~~
latch
I think it's constructive to tell them their site is broken (which I also
agree that it is[1]). However, you are also right that your parent was
unnecessarily condescending.

[1] There are billions of links which are just plain <a href="X"></a>, so the
fraction of the ones that do something weird (like this, or target="_blank")
really break the browsing experience for people.

------
geuis
Sorry for the link to twitter but it's the only way I could attach a
screenshot from my phone.

<http://t.co/Belra6Lw>

I literally have no idea what this page is supposed to be, given how
absolutely _horrendous_ it renders.

~~~
sauravc
Rise4Fail? Really? So basically since the book's cover is ugly the story must
be a fail? Obviously that's the case. Brilliant researchers always have great
looking websites, right?

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/>

~~~
geuis
I commented on the unusability of the site that was linked to. Mr. Knuth's
site is perfectly readable because he's using regular html which renders just
fine on a modern mobile browser. Meanwhile I have no idea what is going on on
the parent page, except that it's unreadable. Another person shared a similar
screenshot in another comment.

You may dislike my snarky little hashtag on Twitter and that's fine. I was not
being snarky here on HN in my comment. I _was_ making a perfectly valid
criticism about usability.

