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12:13 AM
YES YES YES!
 
What's that from?
 
It is back up to 5 now
 
The new review page
 
is this true?!
hath my eyes deceived me?
 
lol
And for the first time in days, i wake up in the morning, and find i have close votes to spare ;p
 
 
1 hour later…
1:51 AM
@KronoS Now it's just a matter of staying on top of things. This new review system is really productive!
 
Only a few low qualities to go!
 
@Paul Yeah. It's been cut in half already
 
It is pretty amazing how effective this system is, still 4.8k is daunting.
A graph would be nice to see the trend...
 
This summer shall be known as: THE GREAT STACK EXCHANGE CLEANUP OF 2012
 
@Paul, I think i'm ready to sink my teeth into /review again :)
@iglvzx, the close vote page might get some more posts on it soon :)
 
1:55 AM
@soandos The thing is, with the system, as quick as you get new close votes in the queue, they are cleared very quickly.
It has been hovering at zero for a while
 
@Paul, I hope so. Dupe finding is a killer though
grr... Need to get Tom's autocomment script again (switched OSes)
 
@soandos I think I saw earlier that @studiohack closed a question a duplicate, but there was no duplicate shown. What happened there?
 
@iglvzx, I don't know. I pinged studiohack about it though
5 hours ago, by soandos
@studiohack what is http://superuser.com/questions/452200/access-denied-windows-xp a dupe of?
 
@iglvzx I just want to make sure we don't kill things that don't deserve it
 
@soandos That is weird.
 
2:01 AM
@KronoS, I really want a followup queue for all these link onlys :(
 
@soandos what do you mean?
 
@soandos Yeah it is most likely a dupe of superuser.com/questions/5039/…
But it shouldn't be closed as dupe without a link else the poster will just repost
 
@Paul, hence my ping
 
@Paul OH! The suggested edit somehow removed the "duplicate of" link
Maybe a bug?
 
@iglvzx, it was more major and occured at the same time?
 
2:04 AM
@iglvzx Wow, I had assumed that the "duplicate" text in a question was inserted by the engine at render time, not embedded in the question text.
 
@soandos The suggested edit was 10 minutes after link was auto-added, though.
 
Oh, I got it
The edit was suggested before the post was closed
after the post was closed, it was approved
that overrote the edits from the closing
(I think anyway)
And the reason I approved it was the autotext was not shown in the edit preview
That last bit is a bug
 
@Paul You'd think it should be that way, huh?
 
@soandos: I am now curious what a 'large computer' is ;p
 
@JourneymanGeek, what do you mean?
 
2:09 AM
@JourneymanGeek REPLY the right way! You make people curious as to what you are referring to
:P
 
@soandos WRT this question ;p
 
@JourneymanGeek, it was orignally a large CPU. No idea what that means. Didn't even know Goodwill had computers
 
We don't have charity stores here.
I have no idea what the hell that is, but i'm in love ;p
 
2:11 AM
@JourneymanGeek Ultrasound machine. lol
 
THREE floppy disk drives. Thats some fancy shit.
 
Relevant:
 
lol
I was born in the 80s. Just a little too late to remember room sized computers, but old enough to remember what a CGA screen was like ;)
 
@soandos, @iglvzx there was a suggested edit that cleared it out
 
@studiohack, why did that not show up in the diff?
 
2:16 AM
diff? @soandos
 
@studiohack, on a suggested edit, it tell you what will change. Why was the fact that the auto-text will be removed not part of that diff?
 
What @soandos is referring to: superuser.com/suggested-edits/13412
@soandos I think your explanation works here: The edit was suggested BEFORE the auto-text was added. The suggested edit was updating a version before the auto-text. The resulting diff shows what changed, but in the suggested page, it is unaware of what happened between posts.
Like @Paul said, the auto-text should not be part of the editable post. The way it is now, it can be bad, especially when trying to find the original post which could have the answer you are looking for.
 
2:43 AM
@Studiohack - sorry if busy, I don't suppose you are free for the usual!? Don't worry if you can't.
 
@iglvzx want to post this as a bug?
 
 
1 hour later…
4:07 AM
it appears that I'm rather conservative with my VTC's
 
Is is possible to use DSE to get the number of Low Quality posts over time?
 
@Paul, not without knowing the algorithm that the SE team is using (not published)
Sounds like a good feature request to me though
 
@soandos Thats what I figured
It would be useful now during the GSECU2012 but once we are ahead of the game it would probably go unused
 
@Paul I am stunned and trilled with how will SU is run. Its dperessing to look at some of the other sites
 
4:24 AM
@soandos Yeah, sometimes I take a spin through some of the other tech SE sites to see if I can offer some more targetted help and they just seem riddled with low qualities and dupes. I see a question and go "well thats fairly easy to answer, surely it isn't new" and search and see the same question time and time again.
So I am 'trilled' also
 
@Paul, bah, spelling
Would be nice to have a good way to find dupes built into SE
 
Wow yeah. That would be quite something. I'll bet there is some prior art that could be worked into the engine. We need an AI.
@soandos So do you think you might get yourself a proper avatar if you become a mod? ;)
 
@Paul perhaps
I am thinking of doing some research on this topic actually...
any ideas for starting points?
 
For an avatar or an AI?!
 
(thinking noun lists, their synonyms, adjectives, their opposites, and negations to start)
@Paul, AI. Avatar is too hard to think about ;)
Any thoughts?
 
4:30 AM
Heh. Well plagerism detection algorithms might help - ie where the posts are the same semantically if not syntactically
 
Can't imagine that will help though
 
Perhaps naive bayesian might be a better approach
 
Two people could have the exact same problem, and phrase it totally differently
@Paul, what do you mean?
 
A bayesian algorithm can be used to categorise posts. For example, I use popfile, which watches the way that I file my emails in folders, and then begins to do it for me
We have a huge database of duplicates - I am wondering if we can use all that information as a predictor of some kind
 
@Paul, you are talking about a NN of some type, or the probability theorem?
 
4:34 AM
Probability
 
Then I totally don't follow. How do you use that? (in this context)
 
In this case, it would probably only be able to identify a duplicate of something that had previously been duplicated
 
Even then, how does it break apart the post?
 
Well I am kinda thinking and typing at the same time, which doesn't lend itself to good sense all the time!
 
@Paul, don't sweat it, its fine
 
4:36 AM
popfile just uses words (it has a database of stop words that it ignores like 'the' and 'and')
 
and then what does it do?
 
So the underlying thing seems to be "given this set of words", which of these categories is this email most likely to fall in
 
But thats seems like a much easier problem
just match the words to a list of groups
 
And if it gets it wrong, you would file the email correctly, which would reinforce the probability weighting
 
also, very small number of choices (relatively)
 
4:38 AM
But here we have a big database to seed it with - I think the problem would be that the number of unique questions outweighs the number of duplicates by a big margin
 
@soandos I'm writing up a feature request to have the auto-text not be editable/removable.
 
I think extracting a list of the relevant nouns is a decent place to start
@iglvzx, thanks
@Paul, as then at least you are in the right area, and can weed out a lot of false positives
 
I think there are two "phases" to this - my feeling is that past duplicates are a predictor of future duplicates. Like we have "how do I reset admin password" is far more likely to come up as a duplicate in the future than something that has only ever been asked once before
So step 1 might be building a database of common dupes to identify them being duped again
 
@Paul so you are saying weight the odds of the candidate matches by the fact that they have already been duplicated?
 
And step 2 would be identifying a dupe that has only ever had one unique question before
 
4:44 AM
How do you think similarity should be scored?
 
Yeah - I'd say the common dupes are time-wasters - we know they are dupes, but we have to find a canon question to match them to. If the system did some of this work for us, then it wouldn't be nearly as frustrating.
@soandos Thats what I was getting at before - using the existing duplicates to find keywords or some other correlation to use as a predictor
 
@Paul, I think I am being unclear
 
Really, it goes back to what you were suggesting at the start: keywords, inverses etc
 
ah, right, now I see what you were talking about (different level of abstration)
 
But I am saying we can draw on what we already know. Like if you use the "reset admin password" as an example and find all the dupes for this type of question, then build up a set of keywords (with weighting), and then run those keywords against all the other questions to see how well they serve as a predictor
 
4:48 AM
I think you are right
but I think the harder part is extracting the keywords to begin with
 
Yeah, thats why I was thinking of a bayesian classifier to do the work of the keyword and weighting extraction
 
reading the wiki page now
 
You give it all the dupes for a single question, then give it a bunch of non-dupes for a control and let it work out the probabilities, then give it everything and see if it correctly identifies the dupes
I have never written one but I understand they are relatively straightforward to code and use
 
I just found one online, so that is not going to be a problem
I think that the sample size will be though
for all but the most common dupes
 
Yeah
 
4:52 AM
So at least one other approach will be needed
 
But still, it would make me smile if someone typed "How do I reset my admin -" and it popped up and said "Seriously dude, do a search first"
 
I suppose. Those still account for a very low percentage of all dupes though (based on my anecdotal experience)
 
Perhaps with clippy
Yeah, I am just using it as an example
 
morning folks
 
@Sathya, morning
 
4:56 AM
Monday morning after a 2 week vacation is a bad day.
 
@Paul I am getting the feeling I am going to be hacking at this thing til work today
 
@soandos Heh, very cool
 
@Paul, nah, just nerd sniped basically
 
Yep
 
@Paul, thoughts on using the answers as part of the process?
 
5:16 AM
hates it when his middle mouse button doesn't work properly
 
bah, work proxy is being a pain
 
@iglvzx, looks good and thanks
 
@soandos The answers... nothing jumps out at me, what are you thinking?
 
@Paul, similar answers => similar question (least sometimes)
 
5:28 AM
@soandos No problem. :)
 
makes for a bigger sample
 
@soandos Interesting. Because there may be more variety in the way a question is asked than in the way that it is answered?
So the answers may demonstrate a closer correlation
 
right. But even if not, it might suggest a canonical post.
 
@soandos Ultimately, any algorthim could work with both questions and answers, so if you got that far, there would be no reason not to run the answers through and see what came out
 
Well, there might also be much more variety of the answers
and only one pair of answers from two questions are very similar
or the like
 
5:42 AM
3
Q: The "Possible Duplicate" link/auto-text should NOT be part of the question itself

iglvzxWhen a question gets closed as a possible duplicate, Community ♦ edits the post to insert the "duplicate link": That's great! We should be directing users to the "original" question. The problem with this approach, however, is that this useful path between posts can be broken. Any user can...

 
5
Q: Is it possible to alter an unsigned `exe`?

Jader DiasI would like to increase an exe size without altering it's behavior. It's possible to fill it with blank data?

aren't people trying to save space instead of increasing it?
 
@KronoS A "good" reason to do this would be to change the hash of a file, but not its behavior.
 
@soandos ah.... I guess that makes sense.
 
I've seen people use it to get around AD blacklists
 
@KronoS Or testing AV perhaps. Get eicar.exe and put a few hundred megs of blank at the end of it to see if the av scanner doesn't bail
 
5:58 AM
@Paul guess it also is a very poor man's polymorphic code
@Paul, parser is all up an running now
 
@soandos Wut?!
How is that possible?
 
what exactly does "Active" mean?
 
@Paul, its just a basic "pull all the data I will be needing out of the xml file" to start with
 
does it mean the last time it was viewed?
or the last time something happened to it (edit, answer)
 
@KronoS, time since last edit, answer post, bounty post
@Paul, now for the harder part...
 
6:03 AM
@soandos ok that's what I thought, but was just checking
 
@soandos Yeah I reckon :)
 
@Paul, any idea where I can get a list of computer nouns?
Anyone know how I can download a list of all tags?
(on SU)
 
@soandos There is a Tags table on DSE I thought
 
@Paul, good call
I think those are going to be my nouns
We have a lot of tags...
 
6:23 AM
@soandos Well, no. It's a text editor, not a log file viewer. If I didn't want to filter log files, I didn't need that feature, since search (and replace) suffices otherwise. But it's great how easy it is to add this feature, and well I can integrate it. Notepad++ cannot even sort/uniq lines that well integrated...
 
I suppose
Anyone implemented a kd-tree here?
@Paul comparing every pair will be basically impossible
100+ billion of them
wait, silly me...
its 58 billion. Still too large
 
@jokerdino what the?!
why did that get tweeted?
 
bah. someone get that tweet deleted.
 
the post is deleted now
 
6:38 AM
but the tweet isn't
 
@jokerdino I have no control over that...
@Sathya you around?
 
@KronoS trying to be.. office proxy insists on kicking me out. What's up
 
@Sathya oh that's why you keep going in an out lol
who has control over the Super User twitter?
 
@KronoS (prolly)community. Defi dev team.
 
so I guess a ping to @RebeccaChernoff would be my best bet
 
6:41 AM
Super User twitter is a bot, unlike Arqade
 
@Sathya I figured as such
 
@KronoS probably..
@KronoS we'd asked for Mods to gain access to twitter but that was shot down. shrug
 
@Sathya really?
that's a bit odd...
but oh well
I guess they're afraid of a crazy mad mod going nuts on them?
 
@soandos 58 billion pairs of what?
 
Posts
but I just realized its much less
that is all posts, not just questions
 
6:47 AM
Big Data
 
@Paul the sad part is that this is peanuts
relatively
14 billion question pairs
what is a good regex for getting what is between < and > ?
 
51
Q: Would allowing moderators to update their Stack Exchange sites' Twitter accounts improve visibility and offer more value?

RahulStack Exchange sites have their own Twitter accounts, like http://twitter.com/StackUX. These accounts appear to just autotweet the latest interesting questions using the question's tags as hashtags. But there's a problem with this: Twitter is not an RSS feed that happens to have a 140 charac...

 
@soandos what are you coding in?
 
c#
I can do it in another way, but figure i'll learn so regEx while I am at it
 
Ah. Ok, if this was php or python I'd be inclined to convert the entities back to their actual tags then striptags, which would leave me with text
 
6:51 AM
sounds expensive
 
It is hacky
Depends whether you are just trying to get the data into shape to analyse or are building the actual algorithm up
 
getting data in shape
my current way is split by '&' then take every other, and strip off first 3 chars
hacky, but least does not slaughter my performance
@Paul If I was doing this in PHP I would die of old age before it processed the data
 
Heh
@soandos I suppose \&lt\;.+?\&gt\; would have done for the regex
Non-greedy anything between the two entities
 
I think the splitting by the entities is still hard
just going to split by ">" and then dump the first 4 chars
 
Bob
@soandos (no idea what you're talking about) that would only work if < directly follows every >
 
7:01 AM
@Bob, it does
parsing an SU data dump
 
Bob
o.O
I have no idea what format they're in :P
 
its just an XML file
nothing fancy
know any good online sorting algorithms?
 
Bob
Online sorting?
 
Sorting when not all the data is available
 
Bob
And for some reason, this situation reminds me of a rather popular SO answer:
 
7:06 AM
so you are forced to make suboptimal decisions
 
Bob
4432
A: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

bobinceYou can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool th...

No idea on the sorting, sorry
 
shudder on parsing XML with regex
it must be possible though, as regEx is turing complete in most implementations
 
Bob
@soandos But very very painful
 
@Bob, I am just waiting for someone to do it with Perl regEx es and then shout it to the world ;)
 
Bob
I've attempted to extract some data from HTML with RegEx, very recently in fact, and it was painful
 
7:08 AM
why not use an xml reader?
 
Bob
@soandos It was in JavaScript, as a plugin for something else, where all I was provided was the source of some random webpage
 
does the DOM do this?
 
Bob
Not when you're working on the source contained in a string
93
A: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

xanatosThere are people that will tell you that the Earth is round (or perhaps that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, if they want to use strange words). They are lying. There are people that will tell you that Regular Expressions shouldn't be recursive. They are limiting you. They need to subjugate yo...

 
got it
 
Bob
So, um, what were you trying to do with the data dumps again? :P
 
7:12 AM
find duplicates
 
Bob
huh
in any case
I just found out opening a 250MB XML file in IE causes its memory usage to climb over 1.6GB
hm.. perhaps I should try the 64-bit version
 
ouch...
 
Bob
2.2GB and counting
3.3GB
 
...
 
Bob
system physical RAM usage is at 98%... for the first time ever :\
 
7:14 AM
How much RAM do you have?
 
Bob
8GB
 
@Bob Heavy!
 
thats insane
 
Bob
IE has hit 5GB
Firefox just lost 200MB :\
wow
it actually loaded
 
sounds like fun.
 
7:16 AM
@Bob why are you doing this in IE?
 
Bob
@soandos Because it's my default XML handler? :P
 
that is very silly
 
Bob
I don't normally work with XML files
Outside of Notepad++, anyway, which would be equally unhappy with such a large file
 
@Bob, it would be unhappy, but not that unhappy
 
hmmm... anybody know what SU time is?
 
7:19 AM
@KronoS UTC
 
7:18
 
what do you mean?
 
@KronoS, hover over your username on the main page
 
oh nice thanks @soandos
 
Oooh I got a nice new shiny deputy badge
 
Bob
7:20 AM
Wow. I can't close it now.
 
@Paul I'm working on my Marshall
anyways. I'm head to bed. l8rs all.
 
good night
 
@KronoS okok
@KronoS How near are you?
 
@Paul bout half way
actually little over
 
for some reason, there are more marshals in Ask Ubuntu than on Super User.
 
Bob
7:23 AM
@jokerdino Perhaps flagable posts survive longer?
Or there are more flagable?
Or more people can be bothered flagging?
 
Possible.
 
Bob
:\
 
Maybe we don't have enough mods? xD
 
@jokerdino, far more flags from far more users on SU is my hunch
(and slhck has 1700+)
 
Bob
@soandos If there's more flags, wouldn't there be more Marshals?
 
7:24 AM
@Bob not if the distribution was thin tailed
 
More flags from a wider population of flaggers
 
Bob
:\
 
So the flag per head is lower
 
@soandos You are saying the total number of flags in SU is higher?
 
@jokerdino, I would assume so
 
7:25 AM
That is not true. AU actually gets more flags than SU.
 
Bob
@soandos How are you detecting dupes?
 
And @slhck steals all the flags anyway?
 
how many flags does Ask Ubuntu get?
 
@Bob, still very much in the theory stage
and open to ideas
 
Bob
@soandos Wait, are you looking for similar questions?
 
7:25 AM
@Sathya More than 2.2k flags / month. Let me find that chat message from one of our mods.
 
Bob
Or are you trying to pull out those already marked as dupes?
 
also note that we mods who handle flags don't get our flag count increased
 
@Bob right now, going to extract all the nouns (tag names + tag synonyms names) and compare based on that
@Bob yes, find similar
 
unless it's spam/offensive in which case I use the spam flag as a binding flag
 
Bob
@soandos Ouch :\
 
7:27 AM
That part will not be so hard
 
in Ask Ubuntu General Room, Jul 10 at 13:02, by Bruno Pereira
@jokerdino 2,5-3,2K per month is the average since the beginning of the year, something like that
 
it is the rest of it that I have not thought of yet that will be the killer
 
ha, found it.
 
@Sathya, what are we at?
 
Bob
Wait a second. Are a user's votes visible in the data dump?
 
7:28 AM
@Bob the votes are cleansed.
 
@Bob no
 
Bob
Oh, good :P
 
@soandos the talk about Marshall badge & why Ask Ubuntu has more marshal badge awardees
 
:P
 
@Sathya, I meant the number of flags for SU (ish)
 
7:29 AM
@soandos oops. In the last month we've had 3k flags.
 
mod election mayhem I suppose ;P
and the new review queue too?
 
the latter, @jokerdino
it's the same people who were flagging earlier, just that they're flagging more.
 
@Sathya, I find it harder to flag with the new /review
too much of a hassle
 
@Sathya ah, guessed so.
 
@soandos same, I spend too much time opening the question, reviewing the question & answers on it before taking a decision
and my requests to embed the whole damn page hasn't been looked at yet
 

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