₦airaland Forum

PurestBoy:
I admire your love for Russia and always follow your argument with missy something and co, my question is, why haven't Russia showed their power like US has been doing bro?

They did. Last year. And the world sang in praise of something genuinely original.
The missiles the launched from miniaturized ships and a submarine in the Mediterranean sea, guided by geolocation over the sea and the desert, hit their planned targets in the Syrian cities, destroying stockpiles of terrorists' weapons. America hasn't been able to achieve that without using drones.

Joavid:
I think you crazy.

Nothing to admire about a dictator starving his people to invest in the military just to stroke his ego.

Hehehehehe. Your reaction was as I expected. Yea, that man is crazy. Most of them aren't volunteers: they have no choice, as all hope of any other form of life has been taken from them. It's why so many of them are eager to escape.
The people wouldn't be starving if that man had let commerce flourish between them and other countries. He just keep pumping money into missile programs with the hope of striking the US (such a fool!). They lost it when their focus changed from challenging Western imperialism (as China successfully did) to preparing for a war they don't need.

@lovelygurl didn't catch my troll. For the most part, military life is dull. Who likes having only his orders, obeying the last command? *yawns*
I'm enjoying myself here jorrr... Good luck and God's grace to all those guys keeping Boko Haram terrorists away; I won't be joining you anytime soon.

PS: NK can come out of this tight position if they recognize they've won the good war (the noble one they started with). They're fairly independent of the US military. They can now open up other aspects of a standard economy, defuse the tension, and have the raft of sanctions eased. But they're as blind as Putin of Russia. Two great countries wasting other potentials for military power.
The Korean war is long over; what's their gripe still? They're fighting a war their grandfathers started, gave up on, and left at their death!

lovelygurl:
Are you serious

About North Korea, I joke. I admire their resolve to build an identity of their own and sustain a military program that has spawned their people to harness their own ingenuity for the protection of their land. But their ambitions (attacking the US, their southern brothers, and using nukes for the sake of it) are not worth supporting. It's time they open up to the rest of the world. They can now secure themselves independent of other nations, to an extent. I still love those people.

About joining a foreign military: it's a wish that keeps stirring up in me time after time. I've always dreamed of being a soldier and an intelligence officer, or an engineer for either intelligence agencies, military, or defense contractors. But I didn't get any of it.
I don't know how one can get into the NIA. Joavid, what'ya think?

asalimpo:
@Craigston
Thanks. I have no ai or math training myself. But for some1 like me to wade into a problem of this scope would result in a bruteforce application. However, anything that works will be a real encouragement.
I already see someways the a simple crude one could be made.

The premises are these:
English language has structure.
All the information needed is already in the sentences.

Humans use a similar process of inference that a computer uses, by just extracting the meaning from the text and using it. But the human method is very fast and very capable of understanding ambiguities.

e.g
in the question
Anna has N30 and Ojo has N185. If Anna saves N5 a day and Ojo spends N7 a day, after how many days will they have equal amounts?
The structure is :
<Sentence>.<Sentence>.
so a paragraph is a collection of sentences .
Sentences are space separated words ending with full stop/period.
if the first sentence is parsed,
you have
[Anna][has][N30][and][Ojo][has][N185].

has is a verb.
Anna is undefined. N30 is undefined. and is a joiner/conjunction.
has is a verb/action word.
N185 is undefined.
the parser sees 'has' and action word and infers that the word before it is an Object i.e a noun.
so it backtracks, then finds the type of the object 'Anna' it combs thru a dictionary no word matching that. It check names - it finds a match. Anna is a person- so the undefined word is now narrowed to a person type. Then it infers that it is a female.
from there it makes more sense of the action 'has' - it infers possession.
Using similar process it infers that N30 is currency. Then it infers that it is Nigeria.
Since it is money it infers it has the properties - comparable, addable, discrete, etc.
The process involves lot of searching of set of words and their types and deducing.
So i think a simple prototype can be built- but thing is even that simple prototype can take a lot of effort and time and resources but the learning from the process will be deep.
It will be equivalent to conducting an msc project or even a phd project work on it. because it could take years of time!!
No matter the solution, i think even ai needs a database of english words and their categorisation into types. No way i see of a program making sense of a string of text without hard coded initial type inference.
This is just my thoughts though.

You may not have to implement all that yourself. NLP libraries that work for conversational English language already exist; you might need to make modifications to one to help it parse Math word problems easily.
Remember it has to know about pronouns and correctly deduce which noun a pronoun substitutes.
Since you're focusing on a library for word problems, the space of cases you have to handle is reduced (still large, but not so much as a complete algebra library or some other beast), and once you get a working prototype, you can understand the problem better.

You're thinking great, appcypher. Wouldn't it be better to contribute to existing cryptocurrencies, and direct your investment to setting up mining racks in Nigeria?
(Errmm... You've not updated us on astro yet; I'm looking forward to exiting times with that language)

Wouldn't it be great should Nigeria cooperate militarily, as well as economically, with North Korea? I may defect soon to join a foreign military.

Joavid:
words fail me

Can the op sue Jumia ?

I'm not sure at this point. I don't know the nature of the agreement they had with Jumia and the lobbying power of Jumia. But I'm sure a lawsuit by all affected marketers (about fifty indicated in the post by OP) will be the best way to go.
Jumia sold me a defective product the only time I tried them. BunchaThieves!

Joavid:
Stop taking soft drinks, una no go hear!

make your natural fruit juice at home and drink! much more healthier and tasty.

or just drink water.

Yea, drink plain water, eat fruits, drink fruit juices, eat home-cooked natural foods instead of junks...
Help me shout it loud.

They're just here to defraud Nigerians, aren't they? I heard Konga is an indigenous company; it's time we promote them over Jumia.
Joavid com'an help me reason this matter o... There are new thieves in town.

Eldergod:
it's possible, but it's not worth the stress.

I think it's worth doing. It presents an opportunity to learn so many interesting things. Forget the monetary incentives; the knowledge derivable is important and transferable across domains.

asalimpo:
The language parsing aspects could be used other applications too:
e.g to read and process messages and automate responses.
Even carry out conversations.
e.g read an email, get the gist, forward the gist to the owner.
query databases without knowing sql.
e.g
a shop owner oversees monitoring his shop thru a saas software could say:
show me all sales for the day between 8am monday last week to date! :
tell me everytime a customer returns a defective good to the shop.
which day had the highest sales. Which day had the lowest.
how much sales were made when john was on shift?
does inventory match records on the books as it should?
produce a sales trend for the past 3 years by month.
Then the ultimated fuzzy query:
Software,How is business doing today?!

I see where you're going; that's the domain of AI (probably machine learning) and NLP. If you want to go into it, I'd encourage you sincerely. For now, my skills aren't up to it; I still have a long way to go, so I may not be of much help.
But the possible applications are many and diverse, and it can be disruptive in the way it can change businesses, education, industry, ...
Keep thinking, keep working. You have a sound mind, unlike some ponzi script retailers.

TheLordIsGr8:
If you have any experience with programming, pm me so we can see if we can do something.

But from what I'm thinking, you're essentially looking for an AI that will recognize certain words and phrases and make sense of it.
It can be done to a good extent, but the amount of investment involved is not worth it. Such problems are too trivial to for it to be of economic value.

Just what I thought. There's no incentive in solving word problems in algebra using NLP; the purpose of those problems is to teach the pupils to think, and there's no benefit in automating the process.
But it would be a nice project for learning NLP.

@asalimpo
I don't know of any such software existing; I think dhtml18 might know of one. FincoApps and larisoft are math enthusiasts too, so there.

talktonase:
It is not by class of degree oh.The race is not for the swift or powerful or intelligent but Time and chance happenth to them all...

Time and chance happens to them all, but they happen to some more than others. Also, not all times and chances are equal.

dhtml18:
I no gree say Atom dey slow. I think it depends on your system - what is the specs of your system?

Atom is definitely slow at startup, and uses hundreds of megabytes of memory. It also consumes more CPU cycles than Sublime Text.
On my system (with 4GB RAM, 2.67 GHz Intel Core i5 quad core processors), Atom starts up in not less than 5 seconds on first start, a little faster on subsequent restarts. Sublime Text starts up in not more than 3 seconds. Geany, too, starts up faster than Atom.

If you have enough RAM and CPU power to give to JavaScript, Cloud9 has a good cloud IDE; try it out if your day is cloudy.
https://c9.io/.
It supports Vim, Emacs, and Sublime Text key bindings.
I've used gedit, kwrite, kate, Sublime Text, Emacs, Nano, Micro, Eclipse and Aptana Studio (the other names for bloat), Notepad++, Editra, Atom, Brackets, Geany, Netbeans, Codelite, Codeblocks, DevC++, Kdevelop, PyCharm, Spyder, Visual Studio Code, and HTMLPad.

My favorites had me hooked on certain features: elegance, malleability, and open source.
Emacs: very customizable, but not so elegant. That interface needs some redesign; I'm looking at what Remacs will be.
Sublime text, HTMLPad and Notepad++: customizable, elegant, but closed source.
Kate and Kwrite: elegant; they just work and have decent usability.
Geany: simple, elegant, customizable, and easy to work with. I'd like a plugin for Emacs keybindings in Geany.
Kdevelop, Netbeans, and Codelite: well designed, elegant, open source.
Visual Studio Code, Atom, Brackets: customizable, elegant, and open source.
PyCharm and Spyder: neat for Python development; I've not seen better options than these.

In the end, I just pick anyone and start working, only switching if I see the need.

pcguru1:
KDE is the ish left unity since

It's beautiful, but it's quite heavy. And the 'meta' key (the windows key) doesn't open the applications menu in KDE (and Xfce too). I have to rebind it to 'meta+A' to make it work. Little annoyances here and there; Browser tabs don't close with 'Ctrl+F4', something I find handy in Gnome, Cinnamon and Unity. Somehow, Gnome is rather intuitive in its design. It just needs more malleability and support for Qt.

So we've gone around, and around, and we're back to years ago.
There's already a fork of the Unity desktop on GitHub. It'll probably not take off strong, as there are other desktops with stronger following. But if it does, it might be something good.
I already saw Ubuntu going the Redhat way. The company is maturing, and innovation at breakneck speed is stifling. The investors and potential shareholders want money, unbounded growth and a fine balance sheet; Canonical obeys the last command. That's the way of corporate capitalism.
A possible solution is to make Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Core, and other enterprise-focused products Canonical's main thrust, and turn Ubuntu Desktop to the community, just like Fedora is to Redhat, providing enough support for the community to go strong with it.

Canonical spent too much time doing something unnecessary, but I don't blame them. If this will move the community forward, it's welcome. Most of the talent laid off from the Unity project can contribute their experience to Gnome or KDE, or any other DE, so we get more quality.
One thing that needs addressing on *nix desktop is compatibility between Qt, GTK, and other frameworks. Qt does a good job at that, but the GTK team is still slacking.
Also, power management has continued to be a pain to me. My system runs like a server, not like a laptop. It's one thing that needs attention of the community.

On 3 April, you posted this thread (www.nairaland.com/3720495/newbie), from which I gleaned you're a newbie. It's probably not the time to think of projects to do. It's time to understand the fundamentals, and know them to a comfortable level before starting projects. Do your normal algorithms and data structures exercises well for now, until you're comfortable. Then take a leap.
If you really want a hands-on approach, I'd recommended you enroll in an MOOC on edX (www.edx.org/). There are a number of introductory courses; find your preference and enjoy it.
Openlearning also has some good courses, so check them out too.
If you are a good solo learner, you'll enjoy it; if you prefer pairing, find someone that's at least as good and enthusiastic as you. I'm not suggesting anything, but I intend to start programming tutorials for beginners (on-demand) in PH by October. There are also better programmers on this board that can give you a good hand-holding until you're comfortable.
Use the internet well, get good books and video resources; they help a lot.

ourema:
The man is better off with Wike than Amaechi. It was Wike who restored his entitlement as a governor of rivers state to the man

I had information that those entitlements (tentacles to the treasury) haven't been paid to him at any time. They did that only to placate him.

Let everybody go get tattooed then. Let's see who they'll arrest.

Do you mean total lines of code in a source file, or length of a single line of code? Well, I don't know for either one, but I'm sure I can exceed my current maximum if I rewrite it in Java.

zzzzy:
assange was in support of trump last election.

Yea, he's very eccentric. He supports Putin too. But his service against corruption is huge, more than the few corrupt people he supports.

aribisala0:
You don't knw the content of the petition but say it is disappointing

I had a hunch. It's human to act according to intuition, especially with incomplete information as we have here.

9jakohai:
Well, the oath we medical doctors take on being inducted into our profession has a lot of references to God...or at the very least to divinities.

And most doctors swear using the Bible or Quran on taking the oath (although you can opt out of doing that ).

And that, really, could be someone's problem, regardless of it being optional? It doesn't make sense, except to validate some conspiracy theories.

I hold Edward J. Snowden in high esteem everyday, unlike Donald J. Trump and friends.
Edward Joseph Snowden, Julian Assange, ... They're true heroes.

On what grounds was the MDCN petitioned? It's disappointing that their first move would be this. OP ebusfav, tell us what the petition entails, if you have information on that.

DanielTheGeek:
I may not be active on Nairaland, accept my apologies. Friendosphere went down due to a failed renewal fee transaction blocked by my bank. I can't currently make international transactions, I moved a lot of my short term/ small scale web apps to WhoGoHost which cost me N10,000 per site, I'd move friendosphere to WhoGoHost in April along with some of my other websites... I don't mind donations for friendosphere since it's a free service.
Friendosphere will be back in April, I'm sorry for vanishing folks, I'd try to remain as responsive as I used to be.

I wanted to suggest that (donations) but I decided it's up to you. I don't mind donating my one pence; I like the effort you put into it.
Yea, just hold on; we'll vanish together to another forum, but stay with us until then

dhtml18:
Thank you people, I was about to take my sabbatical but i saw a development going on somewhere.

Serious? E be lyk say changi don finally come o...

directonpc:
This troll is building a reputation for himself in the open source community... Unlike the ponzi marketers than do nothing but rub more mud on the reputation of Nigeria.

Sure. He's of a kind I follow and learn from. And he deserves that medal as chief troll of the wild ranges of Nairaland.

dhtml18:
I hereby resign from my case, i think i am due for a long vacation off this board.

Oga wants a sabbatical, err... It's about time sha. Happy vacation!

Yay, he's back!
On topic: forget Nairaland; it's now a place for trolls (that's why you're still here na).
It's surprising that the chief troll around here is complaining. It's that serious.