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rplevy | 5 months ago | on: TestVoice – Buy a number, build an IVR or Voice Agent testbed in minutes

A friend built this service to solve the following problem: if you’ve ever built a voice agent or chatbot that needs to call into real phone systems, you know how painful testing can be. https://testvoice.ai/ makes that process simple. You can buy a real phone number, build dialplans visually, and make or record real calls in just a few minutes.

It’s designed for developers working on voice AI or IVR traversal. You can map call flows, test how your agent handles prompts, and verify latency or routing. All from a web interface. Under the hood it runs on Freeswitch , postgres, python/ Fastapi, and nextjs, and includes features like call recording, versioned dialplans, and IVR traversal testing.

rplevy | 12 years ago | on: Inside the Saudi 9/11 Coverup

Importantly, both Awlaki and his teenage son who was later targeted in another drone strike, were both American citizens. You can argue as much as you like in favor of the joys of murder and assassination as a way of organizing the world, but there is no conceivable argument that this is constitutional.

rplevy | 12 years ago | on: Bitcoin for the Befuddled – Our fancy new book and website

Cicada 3301 is fascinating. Taken at face value (and that's a huge assumption to make) it appears to be a self-styled "cypherpunk freemasonry" of sorts. Care to cite or summarize the evidence and case for a satoshi/cicada link (other than "hey wouldn't that be so awesome if...")?

rplevy | 12 years ago | on: Introducing HipHip (Array): Fast and flexible numerical computation in Clojure

I don't know why no one has answered this (it is brought up a few places in this thread) but if I had to guess why they didn't want to go this route I would say it's the trade-off of not not having your data be native. They presumably have a somewhat highly involved pipeline/topology of computations that data flows through. In the interests of good readable and maintainable code, having a nice declarative data representation is a big plus, and doing the computation with native Java data structures is apparently fast enough for their needs.

rplevy | 13 years ago | on: Pedestal: An open source tool set for building web applications in Clojure

> Adding data-structures to a Lisp ruins it.

By this standard, Common Lisp is a "ruined" Lisp. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#Data_structures

In Clojure the data structures work consistently across the language, which to me is one of many reasons why Clojure is a better Lisp than Common Lisp (but CL has its place).

> Moreover, those Lisp experts I have learned from didn't even mention Clojure.

On the contrary, Clojure is and has since its inception been praised and often adopted by prominent users of Scheme and Common Lisp (the list is too long, but for example the late Daniel Weinreb declared Clojure the future of Lisp). The Clojure conference in Portland this last few days is a perfect example of the cross-fertilization between the Racket/Scheme logic programming subcultures and the Clojure logic programming subcultures.

rplevy | 15 years ago | on: Steve Yegge v. Rich Hickey re: "Clojure just needs to start saying Yes"

This whole "I used the language for 2 weeks so now I am qualified to change it radically" attitude is well-established in the Lisp community (yes I know Steve Yegge is a veteran lisper, but this still applies, especially to some of the other commenters). The authority on this is Brucio, the fictional author of "Lisp at Light Speed" http://replay.web.archive.org/20080722232746/http://brucio.b... Bruce's First Law of Lisp is "If it does not do exactly what you expect with zero hours consideration or experience, it is a bug in Lisp that should be fixed."

rplevy | 15 years ago | on: Has Clojure development stalled?

It surprises me that important contributors like technomancy would not have some additional priority or clout. Without leiningen I doubt we would see one tenth of the explosion of interesting activity going on in the community. That said, I don't think anyone would like the results of democracy.

rplevy | 16 years ago | on: Lisp is sin

This article is a couple years old. The author probably would have tried Clojure for his foray into Lisp had this been written today.

rplevy | 16 years ago | on: _why is no more

Turned off less than an hour ago?

curl: (7) couldn't connect to host

rplevy | 16 years ago | on: _why is no more

Aldor Solutions, 1647 Witt Rd, Ste 201, Frisco, TX. "Todd Abrams" is the contact.

rplevy | 17 years ago | on: The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate

However, in addition to the observation that the communication modes or skills differ, the author makes the claim that the development of one mode/skill will produce deficiencies in the other. I don't think the author provides sufficient evidence that such an effect occurs, and I would further argue that such evidence would have to come from a more empirical rather than introspective source of knowledge (although for sure, personal experience would be what inspired the more rigorous experiment). My own experience is that quite opposite skill sets can and should be developed by individuals. Also from my own experience I would argue that knowing when to employ each different approach to communication is itself an important skill for hackers who use many different programming paradigms and technologies, as well as people who communicate with all different kinds of people (various subcultures of "creatives", scientists, academicians, business people, different socioeconomic/ethnic cultures). I think that being self-aware and well-developed is the key skill for both human-human and human-computer interaction.

rplevy | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: Interesting recent developments in academic computer science.

The power of editing and revising printed text with a keyboard is not something that can be easily duplicated using voice. Consider trying to write code in this way. It's easy to say words but faster to type when you need custom spellings and editing words at a character level. It seems awkward to have to edit text with speech (easier to type something like C-space down down C-s quote . right C-space C-k M-x end-of-buffer C-y than to say it). Maybe some combination of keyboard and voice would work. Voice is not be ideal for a workplace situation, unless it is subvocal silent speech, which it sounds like is a technology that is almost ready.
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