They already do. They have Like buttons everywhere on the web.
But Facebook does have a good security track record. This random website does not. I don't trust them with any more information than needed. In this case, that is only a single anonymized token.
There is a good chance that Facebook already knows you visited a particular site because that site is already serving Facebook content (via a like button, for example).
This is exactly why I use a different browser for Facebook than any other web browsing. As far as they are concerned, the only site I ever visit is Facebook.
Same with Google properties. I only use Chrome to visit Google properties.
I'm sorry to be rude, but that strikes me as legitimately paranoid. Why do you care so much if Facebook knows that you visit sites other than Facebook?
I guess it depends on why someone uses Facebook. I (finally) got an account a while ago in order stay in contact with friends and former colleagues. My usecase of Facebook does not include me wanting Facebook to know everything I do.
Hence, Facebook lives in its own VirtualBox machine.
As crazy as it sounds, I actually like the other trackers, because then I get more relevant ads. I'm also one of those crazy people that things adblock ruins the web (this opinion may be because I worked for a website that survived on ad revenue for a long time).
That was fun (in a really nerdy way)!
I'm currently trying to educate one of my team member about regular expressions, this could be a fun way to get him practicing.
Just a heads-up though: There are some typos and grammar mistakes in your explanations, so if you plan to share professionally, you might want to have someone proofread it. Also, your Facebook OAuth window that pops up upon page load is being caught by Chrome's built-in popup blocker. Either way though, I'm always disappointed when Facebook OAuth is the only login method. I get that it's easy to implement, but I can't imagine this is a very security-sensitive app in terms of user-accounts. I would like to save my progress, but it's not worth the risk or analysis required to hook up my Facebook.
My main problem with this is telling the difference between O and 0, the clue O's look more like 0 so I have to copy paste them. (Although I don't think I've had any numbers required for solutions yet).
Yeah, this. Especially for something like regexes where a large amount of your users will be more technical, and facebook is becoming less and less popular among technical people.
Personally, I don't have a facebook account and I will not create one just so I can log in on your website. The disability to save my progress also made me give up on trying to progress since it'd just be lost anyway.
Off topic, but god I just wish Facebook would disappear. It's ironic that such a popular company with such a huge valuation would produce an immediate and significant benefit to me if it just disappeared overnight.
It begs the question, do you mean Facebook the social network, or Facebook the company? Because there are surely many benefits coming from the company that don't necessarily depend on the social network.
Why not create one but never post onto it? That's what I did. I don't see any detrimental effects if I create an account but never use it to its full capabilities.
I had a lot of fun writing a solver in Haskell for a crossword like this a few months ago. Apologies for the self promotion but here's a link to the article I wrote about it http://almostobsolete.net/regex-crossword/part1.html
This highlights how crossword puzzles are a valuable way to stretch the mind laterally. This is a way to think about regexes that rarely comes up in practice: comparing one regex against another unrelated one.
Nice, but the answers being phrases ruins it for me, because you start seeing the answers without needed to check the regular expressions.
Really nicely designed though. Clean UI. Wouldn't mind if it was enlarged to use more of the screen real estate (tiny fonts are hard to read). I had fun with this.
I thought about this too- the phrases- but, isn't that how normal crossword puzzles are? You can gather clues from the context of surrounding words when doing one of those puzzles.
Not really, because rather than using an entire coherent phrase that goes from the top to the bottom of the puzzle, crossword puzzles use discrete and often unrelated words throughout.
It's most like a theme clue -- in an American-style crossword you often have 1 to 4 extra-long answers, almost always horizontal, that are related to a theme (they might be puns, or proverbial sayings, or together spell out a longer quote). It's sometimes possible to solve a theme clue in a crossword when you have only a few letters, if you understand the theme well enough.
In this case, the "suddenly solving the whole thing given only 40% or 50% of the letters" effect can be kind of cool, or annoying if you were enjoying the logic puzzle aspect. In the original MIT Mystery Hunt hexagonal regular expression crossword, most of the grid did not spell anything recognizable, so it was clearly a logic puzzle through-and-through. I guess whether people appreciate that depends on whether they were expecting a pure logic puzzle or a combined logic+word puzzle.
+1. This is especially true for "Experienced #5" which required me to figure out about 4 letters out of 16 using the regex, the rest being obvious from the clue and the other 4 letters.
All the hitchhikers ones are pretty obvious though.
Fun! When I saw the title, I was expecting the opposite: a normal cross word with the usual "42 Across (4): It gets things done" style hints, but the answers were valid regex's. Someone make that too!
No in this case the regex on the bottom only applies the . to the square in question while the \sSAI in question applies to the second square. It seems that it could be a I or a T.
The MIT puzzle (from the 2013 Mystery Hunt) was called "A Regular Crossword" and its credit says "Dan Gulotta, based on an idea by Palmer Mebane".
(Just so it's not credited to MIT in general; each year's Mystery Hunt is written by a specific puzzle team, and indeed each puzzle is written by specific puzzlers!)
This new site is super-awesome and challenging, but a great thing about the hexagonal grid in "A Regular Crossword" was that each hexagon was constrained by three intersecting regular expressions rather than two. That meant that the constraints could be trickier or vaguer in some ways, and comparatively more dependent on the sequence of elements within a regular expression rather than on the process of elimination between two intersecting sets.
Elsewhere in this thread, a commenter points out that the square grid regular expression puzzle can encode 3SAT instances, so I was wrong to call these easier than the hexagonal version.
I liked this puzzle too and I also made a web based version: http://stardrifter.org/regexp/ . Yours looks nicer but I do miss one feature from my version which is the ability to click a clue to rotate it into view.
Thanks, that was fun and not as tricky as the blank grid initially made it appear! And the implementation was nice (although a little twitchy if you rotate twice quickly).
Pretty cool but I don't feel like I am actually learning regex. I think the explanations/definitions need to be more clear and probably the answers less easy to guess.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadYeah, maybe... let me check: NOPE.
But Facebook does have a good security track record. This random website does not. I don't trust them with any more information than needed. In this case, that is only a single anonymized token.
Same with Google properties. I only use Chrome to visit Google properties.
Hence, Facebook lives in its own VirtualBox machine.
A bit of customisation of the default bootstrap look would have been nice too.
Just a heads-up though: There are some typos and grammar mistakes in your explanations, so if you plan to share professionally, you might want to have someone proofread it. Also, your Facebook OAuth window that pops up upon page load is being caught by Chrome's built-in popup blocker. Either way though, I'm always disappointed when Facebook OAuth is the only login method. I get that it's easy to implement, but I can't imagine this is a very security-sensitive app in terms of user-accounts. I would like to save my progress, but it's not worth the risk or analysis required to hook up my Facebook.
With the exception of DHH, do they believe in Open Source in Denmark? (jk)
Perhaps the hint font should be different from the answer font. Or at least better zero's.
Personally, I don't have a facebook account and I will not create one just so I can log in on your website. The disability to save my progress also made me give up on trying to progress since it'd just be lost anyway.
You might find this hard to believe, but I don't have a Facebook account.
"How about you store my progress in a regex! (Which can be put into a browser cookie as an afterthought.)"
I had a lot of fun writing a solver in Haskell for a crossword like this a few months ago. Apologies for the self promotion but here's a link to the article I wrote about it http://almostobsolete.net/regex-crossword/part1.html
Really nicely designed though. Clean UI. Wouldn't mind if it was enlarged to use more of the screen real estate (tiny fonts are hard to read). I had fun with this.
In this case, the "suddenly solving the whole thing given only 40% or 50% of the letters" effect can be kind of cool, or annoying if you were enjoying the logic puzzle aspect. In the original MIT Mystery Hunt hexagonal regular expression crossword, most of the grid did not spell anything recognizable, so it was clearly a logic puzzle through-and-through. I guess whether people appreciate that depends on whether they were expecting a pure logic puzzle or a combined logic+word puzzle.
All the hitchhikers ones are pretty obvious though.
I think I found an error in “The Lektor Device“: The “I“ in “WITH” could also be a “T” from the rules, but only the “I” is accepted.
This is the web incarnation of that hexagon puzzle.
(Just so it's not credited to MIT in general; each year's Mystery Hunt is written by a specific puzzle team, and indeed each puzzle is written by specific puzzlers!)