The Whiteboard

3:42 AM

holy crap, first bit of haskell I've written that upon showing to #haskell I didn't get called an idiot, more over got told it's actually nice and clean!

that's awesome!

or rather, they don't call me an idiot usually, just make it clear I could have done far better

quite helpful

user7676

2:39 PM

I think I need to play the lottery today :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

4:46 PM

Thaty's a strange thing to think

I actually identify with my generated picture. I've had it over 2 years now and have participated with it identifying me quite consistently that entire period. I've grown rather attached to it.

user55340

4:58 PM

user55340

@user7676 I think I need to buy a pie today.

user55340

@GlenH7 Apparently it was... if you poke at the question again, you'll see it linked that its linked to the Bonar account.

Jimmy Hoffa

Maybe I should save my generated picture in case wherever it's hosted ever disappears or it needs to regenerate them from a new hash for any reason. I would be quite disappointed :(

user55340

Q: What are you doing?
A: Trying different email addresses...
Q: Why?
A: To see which one gets the best gravitar images. Its important you know...

Jimmy Hoffa

haha, it is!

Deco's is quite good too, reminds me of a mexican party

mine is like some kind of torture device, spectacular. :)

user55340

5:16 PM

Personally, I use "+something" on the end of my address to make distinct gravitars for special sites (while playing EVE online I wanted one that was my game avatar rather than this one).

Jimmy Hoffa

I think SE is the only place I have a gravatar at all

user55340

I was amused yesterday there was a time when two people had the same insides, similar outsides, and were only off by a few degrees of hue.

user55340

Alas, someone upvoted me. No pie for me anymore.

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT Same guy. Accounts merged in one big ball of mud, furthered his suspension and asked SE to tighten the tighten the screws a bit. I'm sure he'll find a way to come back eventually, but it will take a bit of effort this time.

user55340

@YannisRizos I feel that he's actually more disruptive than Goma.

user55340

5:24 PM

That 'mentor' thing... the deleted answer from Kavitha (it was "I can do the job if you are looking for it") - there's no real way to try to help this user along to the right way to be a good SEtizen.

Yannis Rizos

He is. Goma has created a ton of sockpuppet, but was never rude to anyone.

user55340

For those who enjoy c2, an early spinoff of it was meatball which was focused more on the culture of the internet. meatballwiki.org/wiki/WhatIsaTroll

Yannis Rizos

> Trolls are often insane. They are created when the insane jump from one community to another looking for a home; after a while they become trained that they are only going to get attention if they attack.

That's both hilarious and... accurate.

Jim G.

@YannisRizos: Do you have MTV in Greece? There's this new show on MTV called 'Catfish'. It's about Facebook romances. // You know what would be great? It would be great if there was a "Catfish" equivalent for trolls. That is, the host would track down forum trolls and see how they live.

Yannis Rizos

@JimG. We do have MTV, but its a Greek version, about 80% of the programs are local productions. I'm sure Youtube will have more than a few videos for Catfish though, brb.

user55340

5:36 PM

@JimG. I don't use facebook and I rarely watch TV (and don't have cable)... for some reason, the concept of an MTV program about facebook just makes my brain want to escape through my ears before I bash it too hard against the desk.

Jimmy Hoffa

haha yeah, that's about my thoughts mike

The fact that jersey shore exists or so many other horrible things is excuse enough for me to be proud I've never had cable

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT The first video I found isn't that bad actually, I gave a speech about net safety in a local school last year and it would have been useful to point the students at it.

Jimmy Hoffa

I used to just feel cheap for not having it, but then the kardashians and all of that other stuff became something that actually passed for programming on cable.. I have no idea how

and cable subscribers eat it all up, now I'm proud to say I'm not one of those. That's just sad. I wouldn't know anything about any of those shows except the gym I run on the treadmill at has 5 TV's on different channels, 4 on the various news channels where 4 people are split up on the screen at once in 4 different boxes and they're all yelling at eachother, so I end up watching the jersey shore TV instead, sadly

pretty representative of cable, you can watch the news shows where they get 5 people who disagree with each other to yell at each other or you can watch actually dumb people who are famous because they're on TV which somehow makes them worth watching

user41796

@YannisRizos and @MichaelT - thanks for the follow-up on identifying if the troll was the same one as before or not.

Jimmy Hoffa

Talking about that lesnar bonar guy being a troll?

user41796

5:49 PM

FWIW, his SO comments weren't quite as rude as they were here. Still the same MO of playing "gotcha" by claiming the question wasn't answered because of a detail not provided within the question.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - yes

Jimmy Hoffa

As soon as I saw his question about not implementing virtual memory I pegged him for a troll, was surprised to see people answering it

the arrogance in the question made it clear he wasn't asking because he wanted an answer, he was asking to be a dick basically.

coupled with the completely esoteric scope

user41796

I thought the virt mem question as coming from a comp sci student who "obviously knew better" and saw some value in the question. From there though, the question quality denigrated pretty quickly.

Jimmy Hoffa

and high claims he made during it. If you're a kernel hacker you're good enough to know why or why not to do things in whatever way you may do them, you don't go around asking that kind of crap

@GlenH7 a cs student wouldn't have asked it anything like he did

I presumed he was some greybeard wannabe who thought he knew a lot more than he did trying to sound smart and asking the question so he could argue with people to not just sound smart but in argueing prove how smart he is

user41796

@YannisRizos - not sure if you looked at Canary or IDontDoFaqs to link with Leslar Bonar either. Those are two other notable trolls as of recent. Canary's questions were also dropped onto P.SE in rapid fashion in late afternoon for US Central time. I want to say IDontDoFaqs had a similar MO. Wording of questions was similar from what I remember, but Canary was blatantly off-topic

Yannis Rizos

5:54 PM

@GlenH7 All merged into a big ball of mud...

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - I cede to and acknowledge the wisdom of your gray beard knowledge on this one.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 let's just be glad he went with the name leslar bonar

user41796

@YannisRizos - good to know my hunch wasn't off-base. Maybe I should nominate myself for the upcoming mod election (Feb 18) so I can answer these questions myself. (I'm only jesting, I don't think I have the time available for the commitment it would require)

Jimmy Hoffa

bonar is a great troll name to continue to refer to his clones as, just as goma is

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 Feb 18? I thought it was 8...

user41796

5:57 PM

See, I would have missed the deadline anyway.... ;-)
@JimmyHoffa - good points on the troll's name!

user55340

@GlenH7 Programmers the Role Playing Game... Artifact "gray beard of knowledge" Grants possessor +3 int and +3 wisdom. Apply a -3 penalty to charisma for people outside of the programming, wrestling, and ZZ Top professions. For more information see RFC 2323

Yannis Rizos

Ah, you're right, it's Feb 18.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I was expecting some kind of RFS regarding the number 42

*RFC... rfs? reiser strikes again?

user41796

regrettably, my beard is turning grey. <sigh>

user55340

@GlenH7 I have a non-insignificant number of white/gray hairs in my beard.

user55340

6:01 PM

The worst part is that the white hairs grow faster than the others... so you shave, and a few days later, you've got these white hairs that are a quarter inch longer than the rest.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 regrettably, I do not have the genetics to grow a beard and thus will never be able to become a grey beard.

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 The workload isn't that much, I typically spend about an hour per day moderating ProgSE. But you'll need some time to find your way around at first, tons of stuff to read, and quite a few new toys to learn, the first couple of weeks the diamond is a time-sink.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 or to put it in practical terms, I will unfortunately never be able to write any sort of successful or good programming languages..

Did glen just get a diamond?

I really need to pay more attention to meta.. like any at all..

user41796

@YannisRizos - thanks for the add'l info. I'll ponder then.
@JimmyHoffa - NO. Or at least, not yet. But I think it's a bit of poor taste to start campaigning _this_ early. And I think you meant **functional programming**, but based upon your earlier comments we already know that you're progressing in that realm too. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 what do you mean FP? Neither imperative(1) nor FP(2) languages of any merit exist in my future

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler

maybe if I start rogaining my face

neither my pops nor gramps had any capability for bearding though so I'm not holding my breath

user55340

6:09 PM

For the rest of the day when I see "functional" I'm going to replace it with "fractional" and try to figure out how to do it in fractran.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT holy crap that is weird

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - was referring to your toying around with Haskell.

Jimmy Hoffa

weirder still because I'm actually not 100% certain it's a turing tar pit

user41796

yes! I get my obligatory xkcd reference in. NOW I can run for moderator.... :-P
http://xkcd.com/1168/

user55340

xkcd is importable...

user55340

6:12 PM

I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I know, but I was referring to alenz.org/mirror/khason/why-microsoft-can-blow-off-with-c.html

user41796

and I beat @MichaelT to the post by a few seconds, so I'm going to claim he stole my answer. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

tar -xzvf

Did I win?? What do I get??

user55340

That said, with my grey beard of knowledge, I am old enough to remeber uuencoding tar files. I still can't make myself to put a hyphen on the options.

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa I can give you a week's vacation (from Programmers) if you want ;P

Jimmy Hoffa

6:14 PM

Let's be honest though, everybody knows a valid tar command. One. They memorized it, because it was the one that worked, out of sheer fear of ever having to open the tar man page again they will never forget it.

@YannisRizos you'd like that wouldn't you?? I am nothing if not a rebel! I'll go answer a question now just to spit you! Down with the man!

..also to spite you..

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - here's one to tackle. programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/185577/…

user55340

Should that question be migrated to superuser?

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 tackled! answered with close vote.

@MichaelT yeah that would actually be reasonable

(I think, but I can't figure out the rules around here so I've decided to start making up my own)

user41796

@MichaelT - I would agree, likely candidate.

Jimmy Hoffa

I also answered anyway, because again, I make up my own rules!

and like to help people, even if the answer is commonly known to everyone who even belongs asking questions here to begin with

user55340

6:24 PM

@YannisRizos mecurial and git... meh... p4 and if you want the dvcs, go play in their sandbox.

user41796

@YannisRizos - it's edits like that one that make me wish I could upvote the edit itself.

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT perforce is nice, but I avoid anything proprietary in general.

user55340

@YannisRizos The backing files are nice old ,v files in the style of RCS. You can pull them into anything else if you need without too much hassle.

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos hah, that is quite a statement to inject into someone elses answer :P

Oh I misunderstood the edit, that was a comment on the edit

thanks :)

Stack Exchange

8:02 PM

Blog - Stack Exchange: Why We (Still) Believe in Working Remotely

David Fullerton on February 01, 2013

It’s 2013, almost three years after we first raised money and started growing beyond the first four employees. At the time, Jeff wrote a great blog post about working remotely, basically laying out our plan for how we were going to make it work. Now we’re a few years in and it’s time to update it with, well, what actually happened.

First, where are we now? Stack Exchange now employs 75 people, roughly evenly split between sales (and sales ops and marketing) and product (development, ops, design, community management). The product side is where our remote working happens: we have 16 full-time re …

user924731

9:29 PM

Hi. I'm new to chat on programmers.stackexchange, and I was wondering if anyone could advise me on getting into the field of programming / web development professionally. (I understand this is off topic in the main forum).

In particular, my question is as follows:

I've been teaching myself python and django for a couple of years, but I don't seem to find many entry-level python jobs in the UK.

I'm looking to begin a career in programmming / web development, and don't have a CS degree, (although I have degrees in philosophy and linguistics, which are not altogether unrelated in their more formal areas - logic, semantics, syntax etc. ).

Would I be better off trying to learn and find a job using another language, and then looking at Python/django opportunities once I've got some more professional experience?

e.g. PHP, C#, Java

Thanks in advance for any advice - it is very much appreciated.

user55340

@user924731 Web development is a very large field. The python / django is a niche of this market. There are a number of people who have been professional in this niche for years and those are the ones people want to hire.

user55340

Get an entry level position in any web programming area, and learn the associated languages and methodologies.

user924731

@MichealT. But presumably there are both more jobs but also more candidates for, say PHP?

user55340

If you are working full time at a company, you might find some point where a python or django solution has advantages over some other solution and use that as an in to work on those technologies.

user924731

Ok. So basically learn as many web development technologies as possible, so that I can take the widest range of opportunities...

Breadth rather than depth at this stage, would you say?

user55340

9:42 PM

Yes. I'm a web programmer. I know Java EE, Java SE (for webstart opportunites), perl, ruby, a tad bit of python, signficant bit of apache administration, weblogic, jboss, and tomcat administration...

user55340

I could do php if I wanted to (the perl -> php is not a significantly painful transition).

user55340

The other approach is to set up your own demo sites and demonstrate your depth of knowledge beyond what everyone else does so that you can sell yourself as a non-entry level one python/django programmer.

user55340

If you go the consultant route (rather than full time), strive to get pulled into python projects. Over time, you will get the experience that you are after.

user924731

Ok. I do know some PHP, incuding some object-oriented PHP, but I sort of dumped it once I got into Python. That may have been a mistake.

user55340

Depends on if you got out of php before it rotted your brain irreparably.

user924731

9:47 PM

:-)

Well, if I get back into it I might use some MVC frameworks like Laravel or something, which I hope might guard against PHP-induced brain rot.

user55340

In the '70s, it was "Basic considered harmful." -- I strongly suspect that it is "Php considered harmful" in today's world.

user924731

There do seem to be a lot of jobs in it though... :(

user55340

Someone has to maintain the code that some contractor spewed halfway out.

user924731

Hmmm. That sounds kind of awful. Maybe if I learn RoR and Java + [framework] I can avoid PHP then :)

And node, maybe (since I already know quite a bit of javascript)

user55340

Consider also Jeff's blog...

user55340

9:55 PM

codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/…

user55340

codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html

user924731

Ok, I'll have a read

Thanks

user55340

But don't let that bias you against php... ;-)

user924731

Ok, I'll do my best :)

user55340

An important thing to realize, is that most of the code that people do (especially in the realm of "this is not our product" that web development often operates) is that most of the code you work on will be maintenance.

user924731

10:02 PM

Well,it was more the "spewed halfway out" that dismayed me rather than the "maintain" that dismayed me.

Having worked through one or two non-framework based PHP books, and as a result having written some fairly messy code myself and then learned how things are done in django, I think I have an inkling of how bad "halfway spewed" PHP code could be.

Although I expect those contractors probably write better PHP than I did at the time...

So maybe its not so bad

Anyway, thanks for your help, you've given me good points to think about.

user55340

There is a project at the company I work at were we had a contractor doing something. They worked on it for a bit, and then left after a few weeks because there was a better offer. Another spot in another project, one team was really late in getting him info, so by the time he could start working on it, he had other contracts that needed attention.

user924731

That sounds like a pain

user55340

Indeed it is. Does wonderful things for timetables.

user924731

10:26 PM

Ok, well I'm loggig off now. Thanks again for your help, I appreciate you taking the time to give me some advice.

user55340

@user924731 most welcome. Chat here is a fairly friendly place for honest questions that don't fit well as a question.

user924731

That's good to know. It'll keep me losing too much reputation through downvotes for offtopic questions :)

Thanks

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