I really like YA fiction. I like contemporary stuff. Fante is my favorite author period, so maybe that helps understand what I like even if he is definitely not YA. I really like Cormier's Chocolate Wars, but his other stuff not so much.

I have: (both links go to Goodreads)

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

• Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

Both are just sitting around and I'd like to swap them out. So if one or two people want to swap, I'll send them to you and pay for postage if you send me a book in return. One for one please. Continental US only please. I am in OK if it helps you estimate shipping.

Thanks

I think True Diaries is amazing and a way better book, but both are good.

I'm running out of ideas, if you have any, please make your own programming challenge.

This challenge is about designing algorithm to solve this problem.

Let's have game field of size x, y (like in chess). There are two wizards, that are standing at [ 0, 0 ] and are teleporting themselves using spells. The goal is to not be the one who teleports them outside of the map. Each spell teleports wizard by at least +1 tile. Given map size and collection of spells, who wins (they do not make any mistakes)?

Here are few examples:

Example 1

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 0, 2 }

Output: false

Description: Wizard A starts, teleporting both of them to 0, 2. Wizard B teleports them to 0, 4. Wizard A has to teleport them to 0,6, which overflows from the map, so he loses the game. Because starting wizard (wizard A) loses, output is false.

Example 2

x:4,y:4

Spells: { 1,1 }

Output: true

Example 3

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 1,1 },{ 3,2 },{ 1,4 },{ 0,2 },{ 6,5 },{ 3,1 }

Output: true

Example 4

x:400,y:400

Spells: {9,2},{15,1},{1,4},{7,20},{3,100},{6,4},{9,0},{7,0},{8,3},{8,44}

Ouput: true

Good luck! I'll comment here my solution in about a day.

Note: This challenge comes from fiks, programming competition by Czech college ČVUT (CTU).

By user invites I mean the invites that are given to Tildes' users which they then can give out to their friends. Personally, I think more often than not they're sort of gifted to strangers online without much consideration or deliberance behind the decision. And the user receiving it hasn't done much to “earn” it.

Now, I'm sorry if this sounds like an obnoxious case of gatekeeping. But I think there's a certain beauty to checking the sub daily waiting for the next official round of invites. And that's the kind of user I'd want to interact with, rather than someone who just accidentally stumbled upon r/tildes, opened the sub, found an invite thread active and got one without having even read the docs page.

What do you think?

Often when I go to post, I have to check first what the most commonly used tag is for the thing I want to post. There is quite a bit of tag duplication/proliferation. Granted, this could also be dealt with in part by suggesting tags as the user types, but:

What do you think about having a specific set of tags to choose from, and when there are a handful of posts about a specific topic, new tags are added by administrators? This is essentially the way Lobsters works, and I think it works pretty well.

On one hand, this could reduce tag proliferation, but on the other hand, it could also corral people into only posting about certain topics that are sufficiently similar to existing tags.

I wanted to make another post asking about podcast recommendations. I last asked this 3 months ago, is it worth just reviving discussion on that post, or at this point is it better to just make a new post?

I know Tildes values long-lasting discussion, but when a post is that old, isn't there value in starting over, especially since there are a lot of new people who haven't answered before and might benefit from a bit more visibility on their answers?

I enjoy taking free MOOC online classes. What are some of the best ones you have taken recently purely for fun instead of career advancement? I really enjoyed taking this one on electronic literature: https://www.edx.org/course/electronic-literature-davidsonx-d004x

I also greatly enjoyed one on superheroes and pop culture: https://www.edx.org/course/rise-superheroes-impact-pop-culture-smithsonianx-popx1-5x