I’ve recently started going through the Project Euler problems. It’s an awesome site that basically has a list of math problems that usually need computing power to solve. There are close to 500 problems on there right now, but my OCD means I gotta do them in order! I started working on them a bit and realized I was forgetting why I did things a certain way. Many of their problems can be brute forced, but also have elegant solutions available. I wanted to keep a record of what I was doing so I decided to make a page for it. I’m still working on the site, but it’s almost done. This post is actually not about Project Euler, but about what I learned making the site, especially when I moved from jQuery to AngularJS.
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Tag Archives: JavaScript
Security Fundamental Comparison
During the last few weeks at my previous job, I was working on a little project which was originally produced in Excel; so naturally I had to make it… better. I decided it was time to put what I’d been teaching myself to the test and built up this tool using Python (SQLAlchemy, Flask), JavaScript (JQuery, D3), and MySQL.
Using a predetermined universe of companies, the app allows you to compare company fundamental data based on certain accounting figures. Eventually, this is summarized into one number for each of the 5 categories (listed below) as well as an overall figure. A higher number is better, except for those values below with an *. Each category consists of multiple figures:
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Digit Recognizer
I had actually worked on this interactive digit recognizer a while ago. I planned to make it more comprehensive, but will do that later. The basic premise is to have a canvas for the user to write a number between 0 to 9. Then run an algorithm to guess which digit was written. This is a very common problem and has been tackled thoroughly before (For examples, see post offices, license plate reading, Google books). In fact, current methods have over 99% accuracy (but significantly lower on noisy data) when dealing with various inputs. I started with the basics and have a few ideas of my own on where I want to use it next.
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Charitable Giving Trends: Part 2
So far part 2 of this post (Charitable Giving Trends: Part 1), I’ll focus on the tools I used to create these charts. I’ll assume a working knowledge of HTML and CSS, and ignore those parts to get to the fun part of the code. I taught myself JavaScript over the last week or two, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there is ample room for improvement in the code. But I’ll explain everything as a newbie which hopefully will make it easier to follow (and less technical). I used various web resources, and will try to remember the ones I used to help out below.
Charitable Giving Trends: Part 1
For this project, I decided to look at giving data from around the world. I find most fascinating the psychology and sociology behind charity, but I can only infer on that given that I don’t have the means to test various ideas. Most numbers given by organizations are dispersed among many sites making it hard to collect. But, luckily, Gallup conducts a survey that provides some numbers so we can entertain such a discussion.