The Whiteboard

Ampt

10:00 PM

gimme teh codez

enderland

also workplace is giong to replace math on the hot questions list

Jimmy Hoffa

►

Ampt

@RobertHarvey did you just reset your own stars? what sorcery is this.

enderland

@JimmyHoffa I love those videos

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland Yeah, I'm poking at some of them now

enderland

10:03 PM

the financial advisor one is ridiculously funny for me, having a lot of knowledge about it

Ampt

Are these stars magic or is someone hitting the tequila?

3

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa This is awesome.

user41796

@Ampt room owners & mods can clear stars on comments

Ampt

@GlenH7 so... tequila?

user41796

@Ampt mas!

enderland

10:08 PM

didn't you watch that video, you guys cant drink cuz youre at work all day!

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT thinking more about that query, I think the better approach would be join the class table rather than from it, but join it as a subselect that unions the completed = 1 joined set and the completed = 0 joined set as separate queries

but I'm really certain the whole approach is just batty...

and he only gave the small snippet of a join rather than his full query so I don't even know which tables are in the from and which are in the join

he might be better off unioning his whole overarching query, or froming multiple tables

user20683

So, I'm running for Mod on Gaming:

user20683

gaming.stackexchange.com/election/4#post-152074

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer This is so not going to help your job hunt :P

user20683

It says "Is willing to voluntarily assume more responsibility".

user15026

10:11 PM

@JimmyHoffa I am running too, so am I also doomed? :P

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer It says "Wait a minute, I'll get back to you; I just have to get the Borgaflax first!" ;P I just mean you need that free time shipping resumes

user20683

@AshleyNunn

user20683

user55340

@AshleyNunn Doomed! Doooommed! Doooooooomed.

user20683

ed

Jimmy Hoffa

10:14 PM

@MichaelT perfect timing...

user15026

@MichaelT sings the Invader Zim doom song

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer Good lord I loved that game. So much. Oh so much.

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa Hmm. Some of those videos are funny, but most of them only think they're funny.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Won't help Ashley's either... but hey...

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey yeah

Robert Harvey

10:14 PM

pretty much like everything else on Youtube. But the IT one is hysterical.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I suggested gamefaqs as a technical writing example, her answers on gaming.SE could sub for some of that if she's comprehensive and detailed in them.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Maru is always funny though.

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT The cat?

user15026

@JimmyHoffa I never thought of that. I am not sure if mine are, but it is definitely something to consider!

user55340

@RobertHarvey Yes, the cat.

Robert Harvey

10:19 PM

OK.

user55340

When aren't cat videos funny?

user55340

(side bit, actual theory on the prevalence of cat videos I've heard... dog owners can socialize at dog parks and while walking the dog... you don't walk a cat... well, I did see that once, and it was funny... but cat owners don't go out to socialize, and thus they go to youtube to share their pets with each other)

user15026

@MichaelT Not a bad theory.

user15026

my sister has a leash for her cat. He loves it.

user55340

I was at Yosemite and saw a woman who had a cat on a leash there. She was a resident/staff and didn't want to put the cat up for boarding for an extended period... The cat even had little booties on to walk around in the snow/ice.

user55340

10:24 PM

Apparently, the first year she had the cat up there the cat didn't like the leash or boots and the rangers got calls of "some woman is torturing a cat" fairly frequently.

user55340

Need to get a FP proponent to say "what are braces? Just use () for everything" on that question.

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn Something you can surely do mindfully; there's plenty of questions on gaming.SE I suspect would require somebody to explain in technical detail some procedure/operation just like in a tech manual, if you're mindful of it when you go to write those answers you can catch yourself and write them with great detail and organization etc just as though you were doing tech writing.

user15026

@JimmyHoffa This is actually super good advice.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT "anonymous classes" ?? Does that person mean "anonymous functions" ? Or does Java have "anonymous classes", and what are they?

anonymous class: public class { public string Arr; } it doesn't really make sense...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/…

user55340

10:32 PM

The fun bit is that when its compiled, they're things like Foo$1.class for the first anon class defined and Foo$2.class for the second one and so forth. So help me, I've seen code that was Foo$10$3$1.class

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Oh that's kind of neat... it gives either a new instance of an interface (which I'm sure is just given some garbleyname by the compiler and created as a normal class) or does like C#'s extension methods

@MichaelT In C# you can do this but it just compiles to a Tuple<T1,T2,T...>

(unless I'm terribly mistaken and the compiler actually creates a garbleyname class)

user55340

> I had something akin to a three-star moment the other day, in PythonLanguage of all things. For some reason I ended up needing a function that takes a function that returns a predicate, and returns a new function that will return a new predicate, being the complement of the original predicate. It seemed like an elegant solution at the time... --someone

Ampt

@MichaelT sounds good to me. ship it.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT wait wait... what? This sounds like peano numbers, no?

user55340

@Ampt I'm not a pythoner. But I'm sure its a new design pattern.

Ampt

10:36 PM

@MichaelT python has design patterns?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt yeah, but they're called pypatterns and if you get one of the characters wrong implementing one you'll be crucified for antipythonic thoughts

user55340

No, design patterns are ways to fix defines in the language, and python has none (so sayeth Guido)

Ampt

@MichaelT So say we all

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT seriously thought - where did you see this? It sounds terribly similar to peano numbers

or whatever you call them

user55340

@JimmyHoffa c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreeStarProgrammer

user55340

10:38 PM

I was trying to find if there was anything good on anon classes in c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreeStarJava

user55340

@Ampt c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatures

user55340

>
This practice is not only common, but institutionalized. For example, in the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough - often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write.

user55340

(from paulgraham.com/icad.html )

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I have to agree with Paul Graham on his essay about taste - there is something distinctly creative about good design and it is far more subjective than we would all like; because while good design and good taste in design are both subjective things, the consequences of bad design are quite objective.

user55340

While I agree with him at some level, its more of "people are implementing lisp again and again" mindset. (Greenspun's law)

Jimmy Hoffa

10:44 PM

@MichaelT Not sure which essay you're referring to here; I tend to have general agreements with the broad strokes of his essays but disagree about the particulars (generally a better language chosen for your software will result in better software, particularly LISP is not magic on steroids - the BLUB paradox)

user55340

Greenspun's tenth rule

Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states: This expresses the opinion that the perceived flexibility and extensibility designed into the Lisp programming language includes all functionality that is theoretically necessary to write a complex computer program, and that the core implementations of other programming languages often do not supply critical functionality necessary to develop complex programs. Origin The rule was written sometime around 1993 by Philip Greenspun. Although it is known as ...

user55340

(gah, bad oneboxing)

Jimmy Hoffa

My mention of taste is referring to paulgraham.com/taste.html

user55340

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

user55340

(Including Common Lisp)

Jimmy Hoffa

10:45 PM

@MichaelT Oh yeah, I've heard that heh

user55340

So combine:

user55340

> PaulGraham said "Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were 'invisible or simpler' in Lisp." norvig.com/design-patterns

user55340

With "everyone's reimplementing Lisp once the program gets complex enough" and you have "the patterns are just people trying to do what Lisp does easily"

user55340

I'd also give perl.plover.com/yak/design a read

Robert Harvey

Maru really likes boxes.

psr

10:49 PM

@JimmyHoffa I wrote a reasonably conceptual answer (no code) on how to do it with good performance on SQL server, so perhaps it may stay?

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr Did you read my suggestion for doing it with better performance above?

or rather my thoughts

the problem is I don't know the broader context of his actual full query just that he wants that data joined oddly

psr

No, haven't gotten that far. Did you say the same thing?

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr No, not at all, and I don't think that gets what he wants

He doesn't want one resultset or the other, he wants both; he could reasonably union the sprocs you refer to

user20683

Python has design patterns, they just tend to look like spam.

Jimmy Hoffa

43 mins ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT thinking more about that query, I think the better approach would be join the class table rather than from it, but join it as a subselect that unions the completed = 1 joined set and the completed = 0 joined set as separate queries

42 mins ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

he might be better off unioning his whole overarching query, or froming multiple tables

user55340

10:53 PM

Does one consider the schwartzian transformation a perl pattern? Or the lisp decorate-sort-undecorate?

user55340

is map-reduce a pattern?

psr

@JimmyHoffa Hmm, I may have read the question wrong. No particular point in breaking it out that way if that's true, unless you want to re-use the sprocs. If you want one or the other table SQL server doesn't seem to hit on the "run one or the other" plan on its own.

user55340

(must have been a python pattern)

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr Yeah the execution plan is going to be terrible when you have a join where an or changes the predicating table because SQL server won't know which table to match on and will probably just end up doing a table scan on both tables

@MichaelT map-reduce is no pattern, it's a catamorphism

user20683

@JimmyHoffa That's the Mario pattern

Jimmy Hoffa

10:59 PM

@MichaelT I don't recognize this but I'll just assume it's probably a hylomorphism

Hylomorphism (computer science)

In computer science, and in particular functional programming, a hylomorphism is a recursive function, corresponding to the composition of an anamorphism (which first builds a set of results; also known as 'unfolding') and a catamorphism (which then folds these results into a final return value). Fusion of these two recursive computations into a single recursive pattern then avoids building the intermediate data structure. This is a particular form of the optimizing program transformation techniques collectively known as deforestation. A related type of function is a metamorphism, which is ...

so the anamorphism would be the decorate, the catamorphism would be the sort/undecorate

This category theory nonsense brought to you by YOURSELF FOR EVEN TALKING ABOUT FP.

:)

That's actually a surprisingly easy to follow wikipedia article compared to most of the category theory wikipedia articles

psr

@MichaelT I can say from personal experience that an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp is sometimes a step up.

user20683

@psr So an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implemenation of half of PHP?

psr

@MichaelT also steve-yegge.blogspot.com/search?q=lisp+is+not+an+acceptable

@WorldEngineer Is it possible that PHP is an onomatopoeia?

user20683

11:14 PM

@psr If it is, what is the source of that sound it is duplicating?

psr

@WorldEngineer a raspberry.

user20683

@psr pi? That explains much of @maple_shaft's agony...

Jimmy Hoffa

0

A: What's the easiest (quickest) way to save one item to a database

If you just want to share something that lives clientside in your browser, you can always access querystring arguments with JavaScript and use that as the input, and have the javascript display a URL string that would recreate the live image. The data required to recreate the image may be signif...

I'm on a roll... rep-whoring FTW

3 answers today, I better sit down

psr

@JimmyHoffa You should have given him a schema with 12 tables.

user20683

johnnyhollow.com/album/a-collection-of-creatures

user20683

11:22 PM

Solid gothish folkish rock

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - Islay Storm is worth picking up if you ever find it at Trader Joe's. Nowhere near as strong as laphroig, but it has a good peaty flavor to it.

Akater

For anyone who has both Julia and Mathematica experience, feel free to join this Google Groups discussion groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/EQH5LJZqe8k Well, it's not a discussion yet, merely an initial post of mine. How strong is Julia compared to Mathematica's language in terms of high-level features? (I'd be happy to see a discussion here, too.)

user20683

@Akater Most here won't have used much Mathematica, might try SciComp's chat

user20683

I know Julia is supposed to be really fast.

jmac

11:39 PM

@MichaelT My experience with aggressive edits is that a good comment goes a really long way to getting the asker to understand the purpose behind it, and usually thank you for trying to help them get an answer. I have 4 bad receptions out of 30 significant edits, so I don't worry too much about it.

user15026

If I have a interview (fast food, but hey, it will keep me in beer until something better comes along), and it could be at multiple locations, how do I politely ask where to show up?

jmac

@AshleyNunn Call whoever you are in contact with and say, "I just want to confirm the details for the interview. X o'clock at Y location, is that correct? Thanks in advance! I'll see you then."

user15026

@jmac Super. :)

Akater

@WorldEngineer I know. It's more of a fool's hope to post it here. :-)

user20683

@Akater fair enough. Were that I did more math work, I'd use Julia probably.

jmac

11:56 PM

@AshleyNunn Good luck. Remember to smile. Smiling is good for most jobs facing customers.

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