The Whiteboard

2:55 AM

@MichaelT I can't decide whether SO and P.SE merely get the relatively small minority of crappy interview and exam questions, or if they mostly suck overall.

But I am reminded of so many exams where, if I had good knowledge of the subject domain, could see that the exam preparer clearly did not.

user55340

3:27 AM

@RobertHarvey some links for you: blog.jerryorr.com/2014/04/… and the corresponding reddit reddit.com/r/programming/comments/237518/…

10:33 AM

@gnat back on your timezone again this morning... stupid load tests.

11:45 AM

Bug: The Programmers logo on Meta Stack Exchange is too damn small. Give us the respect we deserve, dammit.

Xsi

How to reduce <script> tags? <input onkeyup="s?e=Date.now():s=Date.now()"onblur="c=this.value.length;this.value+=c/(‌e-s)"><script>s=0</script>

Yannis Rizos

@CharlesWesley It would be on topic. If you've already read through the documentation, tell us (in your question) what your current understanding of enum & struct is and why the docs didn't clarify things (to save you from people copy pasting the documentation in the answers).

12:33 PM

@ThomasOwens you know, I think this whole MSE thing was all wrong; they didn't need to break MSO from SO; they just needed to associate it with a more respectable site than SO. They should have just replaced it with MPSE as the goto main meta for all of SE. It's the best meta in SE after all, it only seems logical...

2

@JimmyHoffa Maybe The Workplace should have been the new Meta SE.

@ThomasOwens they definitely have the space for all of SE to squeeze in considering it's a ghost town there. Ooo!

But, about The Workplace. Has anyone else noticed the quantity of bathroom-related questions?

@ThomasOwens it's an urgent issue

@ThomasOwens I outright avoid TW, but people are weird. This seems to be a topic that's been raised by people at many of the jobs I've worked - just conversationally or even in suggestion boxes etc. I guess there's some rather large section of the populace that takes particular note of their sanitation situation

12:47 PM

@JimmyHoffa TW is actually pretty legit. There are some really good questions. There are a lot of mediocre ones, and some bad ones, too. But that goes with the territory.

doesn't that describe most SEs?

@ThomasOwens askers simply try to repeat success of that "toilet flush" hit. It's a known phenomenon, not even specific to TWP. At Code Golf, there was a similar story about senseless wave of code-trolling questions trying to ride on a success of the first one...

in The Water Cooler, 17 hours ago, by gnat

^^^ I guess the correct answer is to tell them flush the toilet?

@ThomasOwens yeah, but making jest at TW is still fun, considering TW's our toilet it's all just potty humor anyway.

other than P.SE, the only site I have much sympathy for around SE is CR. I am excited to see it get its stripes soon...

1:05 PM

@JimmyHoffa Wait, really?

@ThomasOwens he gets to elaborate on his haskell skills there

Oh. Yay. I should get that 85mm FX lens by Marathon Monday. FYI guys I'm so stoked I don't need to borrow my friend's or go without.

then again he only has score 7 on haskell there yet 35 on his C#

Blog - Stack Exchange: Announcing The Launch Of Meta Stack Exchange

@ratchetfreak when I got tired of FGITW it was the first place I moved away from SO to, then after a while there I found P.SE and haven't hardly been back sense. Haskell is fun and good exercise, but C# is my daily bread and butter, I try to play language lawyer with it. I wish I knew Haskell even half as well as I know C#.

@ThomasOwens "really" what? About CR going full-site? I don't recall anything definitive, but there's been rumor recently; lots of work to clean up and ready CR for it (I got a lot of answer accepts and upvotes there recently as they're trying to tweak the stats) and there have been statements about the idea that it going full-site is inevitable and only a matter of time..

Stack Exchange

1:22 PM

Tim Post on April 17, 2014

We’re very pleased to announce that as of today, we’re (finally) splitting the site formerly known as Meta Stack Overflow into two sites:

Meta Stack Overflow is a brand-spanking new site for discussions specific to the Stack Overflow (programming) community:

Meta Stack Exchange will cover feature requests, bugs, and any discussion topics that affect the entire network:

Meta has always been one of the most important things that make our network… work. Almost all of our most important features, improvements, and community rules were partly or entirely based on our users telling us how we could help …

@JimmyHoffa I'm excited for them. I wish I spent more time on the coding SE sites like SO and CR. It's just that dealing with code is exhausting for me.

@ThomasOwens I think it's exhausting for everyone, just to varying degrees. I know whenever I finish a day where I've written a lot of code I feel like a zombie even though it's not like I did anything physically laborious.

@JimmyHoffa I think part of it is personality type, too. I tend to generally be extroverted. Head down in an IDE is the exact opposite of what I like to do, which is get out and deal with people. I do have some introverted moments, and if I have code to write during those moments, they are some of my most productive.

@ThomasOwens I'm not sure I believe the correlary. I've known engineers who strongly prefer the quiet alone-time in their work avoiding socializing a good bit, clear introverts, who with all that quiet heads-down time still don't churn out any more significant portion of code than extroverted ones. I would think if the introversion made them less exhausted by the act of coding, they would ply themselves to it in more productive fashion than the rest of us

@JimmyHoffa I'm not relating productivity or quality to introversion or extraversion.

1:31 PM

that's not to say you're wrong; it's an interesting hypothesis and I wouldn't be surprised

@ThomasOwens no; but I'm assuming a correllary between a programmers level of being exhausted by coding to their amount of productivity

it could be an inaccurate assumption, but it's just as logical as your idea

True. I'm not sure how well you can test it, especially since personality types are hard to measure. And some people (like me) tend to vary depending on circumstance and mood.

1:46 PM

How long has SO had the same off-site resource recommendation close reason as us?

And who had it first?

@ThomasOwens @RobertHarvey posted it stealing it from SO when we were choosing our custom off topic reasons

Ah, OK.

I think our custom off topic reasons haven't changed once since they were initially created (the meta thread is not hard to find)

We should look at them again considering our new on-topic page...

@ThomasOwens I still think we should really have all of them somewhere in our help center. I made the meta post asking for it a good while ago but it was never actually done (to my knowledge?)

1:51 PM

@JimmyHoffa All of the reasons?

as it stands the standard close reasons are in the help center per SE for every SE site, but the custom off topic reasons should also be in there IMHO

Let me follow up on that.

Q: "What reasons do questions get closed for here?" should be in the help center under the "Asking" heading

6

Our new off-topic close reasons have come in so handy and been so well used I think they do a good job of giving clear guidance to many on what they can expect they should avoid. Granted they're a subset, but they were chosen due to being such an extremely common subset. Given that, I think we s...

feature-request close-reasons help-center

Frankly the where in the help center to put them - I don't know or care really. I just think they should be in there somewhere

programmers.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions

That's where they should go.

That page is not editable by mods, though.

@ThomasOwens Yeah, I think that's the reason the meta request was never implemented

to be sure though, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be in the help center somewhere

anywhere's better than nowhere.

1:55 PM

Neither is the avoid-asking page. I'll follow up, though, and see what other mods are doing or if editing of one of those pages can be enabled.

@ThomasOwens maybe I should make an MSE request that the standard SE avoid-asking page across all sites be edited to include each sites individual off-topic reasons by default...

can't hurt.

I just poked some people to find out what current state is. I'd like to see if on either /help/dont-ask or /help/closed-questions.

It makes more sense on closed-questions, IMO.

user55340

@YannisRizos (If you need a ref for explaining that in more words than fit in a little text box: meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6559/… )

Q: Add site-specific custom off-topic reasons to each sites help-center "Avoid asking" or "Close Reasons" page

0

Just what the title says, each site has it's own custom off topic reasons (or can) as of a feature request from sometime ago, but the Avoid Asking and Close Reasons pages which are not editable by mods and are standard across the help center of each individual SE site only have the standard non-c...

feature-request close-reasons off-topic help-center

user55340

2:14 PM

wow that is old

user55340

And Safari 5.0.3

user55340

That corresponds to a last use between Nov 18, 2010 and March 9 2011.

3:07 PM

Maybe this will help — Jimmy Hoffa 10 secs ago

ahh that is fun...

ah, I topped over 10100 again, time to drop another 100 rep bounty somewhere

3:49 PM

why is 10k bad?

flags?

@JohanLarsson not bad, it's just all the rep I need. Anything above it can go to charity.

I've no interest in any of the privileges gained over 10k.

Ok I kind of lost interest in SO after getting a bunch of upvotes for a really crappy answer just cos it was fast.

@JohanLarsson my biggest answer here was something I wrote because somebody had made an FGITW answer on the Q and I wanted to make a point of showing that doesn't work around here. It got 7 times the upvotes of the quick answer

The questions and answers on programmers are pretty big.

Never spent much time here before this week. Skimmed a few pages of questions sorted on votes.

user55340

4:07 PM

@JohanLarsson if you want to annoy Jimmy, upvote his Workplace question...

I don't want to annoy him more than with asking dumb questions here :)

user55340

He answered a question here, it got migrated there and got popular there... and he's got lots of rep from it. Well, not lots bit a fair bit for the site.

@RobertHarvey according to my M.P.SE Q on where to put the custom off-topic close reasons, people didn't want it in that section of the help-center which you suggested.

People?

A: "What reasons do questions get closed for here?" should be in the help center under the "Asking" heading

-1

Great idea! Except for most of what you said! This should be a new page and not on the "What types of questions should I avoid asking?" page, I don't want to clutter up that page, or think this content shouldn't have that page's title

ah I guess I didn't make the on-topic section a choice in the Q

Maybe you're right. Frankly I don't care where it goes... though I do think close reasons makes more sense, but you make a good point

4:14 PM

Well, I did put them where I did on Stack Overflow because that was the only page I could edit at the time, and because people were looking at "concerns unique to the programming profession" as tacit permission they could ask their vague, underspecified, off-topic questions. They are unlikely to look anywhere else but that page for evidence.

@RobertHarvey Fair enough. I've just wanted it in the help center for a long time now... I couldn't give a shit where. I made the MSE request because it really should go on every SE site - at which point the non-mod-editable pages actually makes more sense for the location so it's not colliding with custom community content on the mod-editable pages

In fact, there have been a couple of cases where I've had to tell people "You didn't read far enough down the page."

@JimmyHoffa The functionality in the Help Center is pretty spartan. AFAICT, it doesn't even fully support Markdown.

So implementing an automatic change like that could be an ordeal.

@RobertHarvey I agree, it could be ideal indeed.

;) really though, no one said anything about automatically...

Every developer advocates test-driven development - citation please? — Jimmy Hoffa 12 secs ago

Well, you could make some of those pages editable. But the generic close reasons are adequately described there. The "what questions can I ask here" page seems a natural fit for the custom ones, and I don't think you can make any one laundry list too long, or people will stop reading.

@RobertHarvey who writes laundry lists? That doesn't even make sense, you just toss it all in the washer, why on earth would you write down a list of the items?

user55340

4:22 PM

It would be nice to have a spot where one could go to read the off topic reasons as help/custom-off-topic or the like that is populated from the close reasons rather than needing to go to flag a question to see that list. Being able to link to it is useful.

The "And it is not about" on Stack Overflow came about because people were complaining about not being forewarned about the custom close reasons in the Help Center. I took away that excuse.

user55340

Best part about MSO MSE split - people can't complain about losing rep on MSO for stupid things anymore.

A: Users Can Report Bugs On Whatever Child Meta Site Suits Them

@MichaelT On Stack Overflow, there are a couple of "And it is not about" reasons in "what questions can I ask here" that are not actual close reasons. I kept "must demonstrate a minimal understanding," even though we nixed that close reason, and "homework questions must show their work," even though that was never a close reason.

The pedants on Stack Overflow complained about that, of course, saying that it wasn't an exact mapping.

Anyway, it's not exact copy from the custom close reasons.

user55340

12

It might help y'all to know that we can and do have tooling to track bugs across the entire network without the need for unproductive migration: If a report is properly tagged, we will see it no matter where it sits - if you want to be helpful, then adding cross-links between duplicate or rela...

user55340

4:28 PM

@MichaelT can too.

user55340

@RobertHarvey btw, do you know if they're going to migrate the Skeet Question Checklist for SO from MSE to MSO?

The Skeet Question Checklist is mostly SO specific.

you misunderestimate the unicorn complaints "My horn is too pointy/dull/long/yellow/crooked" - they can complain about anything.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa You need to read the comic "Heavenly Nostrils"

@MichaelT that doesn't sound like something I want to read at all.

4:30 PM

It was largely replaced by stackoverflow.com/help/mcve and stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask, but the Skeet list is referenced in the latter.

user55340

3

@MichaelT That should be the entire content of "How to Ask" on MSE.

@MichaelT alright, those are pretty hilarious.

user15026

@MichaelT Heavenly Nostrils is awesome

4:34 PM

Sorry, a lot. But almost every project has a .travis.yml thus unit testing — Vinz243 1 min ago

Can anyone make sense of this ---^

I don't understand what he's saying there at all

user55340

Every project he has looked at has a .travis.yml (which is used for CI - not unit testing) and thus every project has unit testing... which is... well, wrong.

user55340

docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-configuration

@MichaelT: I made some changes to meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/a/6486/1204

Hey guys, KFC is bringing back the Double Down.

user15026

@ThomasOwens That will make my grandmother happy, if it also happens here

4:45 PM

Mmm... 540 calories. 32g of fat. Must taste really good.

@AshleyNunn It's temporary, I read. April 21st through mid-May. But it sounds like all locations.

The article didn't mention a limited release.

@ThomasOwens just in time for the boston marathon!

user15026

@ThomasOwens Good to know, because she loved that thing. A lot.

@JimmyHoffa Hmm. Yeah. I wonder if there are any KFCs on the route...

They should hand them out to runners. but not at the end, somewhere around the 6 mile marker so they're getting a little hungry and they might actually eat some of it, but have far enough to go that the runners would definitely find themselves wishing to their core they hadn't eaten it

4:48 PM

Speaking of the Marathon, I need to figure out what side of the street I want to be on. It's nontrivial to cross the marathon route, I understand.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Thank you.

user55340

@ThomasOwens Stand in the middle.

user55340

Get the runners as they are running at you.

@ThomasOwens the photographers in here will talk about sunlight and time of day and shit, but ignore them; you need to recognize your priorities. 1) Beer. Which side is nearest to it? 2) Toilets. 3) Pizza.

user55340

Shoot with the sun behind you if there's an issue there.

4:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa I'll be on Boylston, so lined with bars and restaurants.

@JimmyHoffa TW, on the other hand, will actually talk about beer, toilets and pizza.

Not necessarily in that order.

They would talk about toilets first.

Maybe what happens when a coworker brings in beer and pizza into the restroom.

@ThomasOwens that's where the bombing was last year, no? gotta say, I'd be a little tense at the prospect of being near the boston marathon after last year. Good on ya for not letting that hold ya back

@JimmyHoffa Yeah. It's exactly where. It may be crowded, but I may even grab lunch at Forum if I can.

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Yep, I lived about 3 blocks away from that square over the summer.

Also Hi Everybody

5:00 PM

Wait. When the runners cross the finish line, they cross it such that the word Finish is upside down? So the 5k and the marathon do cross the finish line in the same direction. Need to photo-op this on my phone.

TIL.

Yep. I figured out where I'll be. The side with more bars and restaurants.

May also make for better photos of spectators, since they have outdoor seating and such.

@ThomasOwens especially due to the bombing - I'm a little surprised they're allowing that space open to the public

@JimmyHoffa Everything is open as before. Just with added security.

@ThomasOwens good for Boston.

I think that one baseball player said it best.

> Chew tobacco and blood dope FTW

?

5:17 PM

@JimmyHoffa boston.com/sports/blogs/obnoxiousbostonfan/2013/04/…

I believe the FCC declined to fine anyone for it, since it aired all over the place live and uncensored.

MetaFight

5:35 PM

Has anyone read this yet?

infoq.com/articles/remote-working-works

A: Are now all questions about teaching programming to be considered off topic?

@MichaelT: I think I'm done editing. If there are any objections, you can fix or roll back. I pretty much overhauled Primarily Opinion-Based.

Mostly, I tried to condense the verbiage overall.

user55340

I'm happy with those changes.

user55340

5:51 PM

> Asking about how to teach a child how about syntax (because the asker is a programmer) is no more on topic here than asking how to teach a child to balance a checkbook on The Workplace because the person asking is an accountant for some company.

user55340

Whee!

user55340

0

My father taught me to program back in the days of old. He was a college chemistry lab director before he retired and had never taken a computer science class, nor was computer programming ever in his job description or duties. The point I want to make here is that he was never a computer profe...

6:04 PM

programmers.stackexchange.com/users/127250/gidmanma - profile says "member for today", no posts besides single question at +0/-2, no edit suggestions and 80 rep over association bonus. Do I miss something?

user55340

Curious.

rounding error?

user55340

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/73787/…

user55340

Got it...

user55340

Question migrated from SO long ago.

user55340

6:06 PM

Deleted some point later, but after the period which grandfathered the rep.

user55340

User created, gets grandfathered rep.

user55340

The key to this is the 'Teacher' badge programmers.stackexchange.com/help/badges/1/…

Why does this chat thing tell me I have to be logged in when I'm already logged in to SO?

user55340

SO, chat.SO, everything else.SE, and chat.SE are separate sign on systems IIRC.

user55340

Some information is shared between them if you are already 'logged in'. Furthermore, they've either tweaked DNS, the certs, or existing sessions recently which would cause people to get 'logged out' of one or more service.

6:15 PM

Ok, could be I haven't been in any of the SE parts for a while and wasn't logged in there.

Is it reasonable to ask for a team of four devs to read and know the code we write?

@MichaelT thanks! I suspected this should have something to do with that badge but didn't figure to click the link

user55340

@gnat when I saw it I thought "thats an answer badge.. and he doesn't have any..."

New custom close reason here on meta - has been put on hold for - New custom close reason here on meta

@Johan as so often: it depends. Do they actually have the time to do so? Are you talking of many small projects mostly done by a single dev each or a larger code base? In any/most cases at least some code review can never be wrong, at least each piece of code seen by two people.

user55340

6:21 PM

I kind of like my comment... "Do it" wasn't long enough. nor was "Do it. Do it." Thus "Do it. Do it. Do it."

@thorstenmüller We are a team of four and started a month ago. I suggested that everyone should try to stay updated with the ~relevant~ parts of the code. Skim what gets checked etc.

We work on the same code so I don't really see an alternative.

@gnat: What will happen if I vote to reopen the question? It will brake the recursive close and release all the energy...

@thorstenmüller sounds scary!

@gnat: yes, all the combined reputation being activated at once.

►

@JimmyHoffa by the way, Chad figured the name for that funny voting pattern we spoke about few days ago...

in The Water Cooler, 2 hours ago, by gnat

@Chad ah, I see. For a while I was thinking maybe replacement to gnimmels would do the trick. But really, "Driveby Unread Mostly Benevolent And Statistically Significant" seems to nail it, good catch. :) That face-urinating "answer" is pretty close to becoming leading example, at +4/-5 it gives answerer nice +30 rep totally motivating them to keep it there. Oh by the way, isn't it time to visit some SO questions in the hot list...

in The Water Cooler, 2 hours ago, by Chad

@gnat Just seems a little long... maybe we just just use the acronym

6:47 PM

It's a slow day and you have votes left? You like functional programming? Upvote this answer and get a fellow user closer to 10K!

rep begger

Not begging – it's just an advertisement.

And it's for a good cause (my amusement when I can look at deleted Andy-style questions).

user55340

7:04 PM

@amon Admit it - you really want to be able to see programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/46835/… and programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/136210/…

@MichaelT the latter should be undeleted and after that, re-deleted by Yannis. This would make a perfect circle of death

@MichaelT thanks for the links, bookmarked for later :)

user55340

@amon When you've got 10k, you can see the favorited deleted items - thats where I keep mine.

user55340

Meta will give meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6569/… and meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6232/… from my favorites.

I remember the criminal activity one. That was wildly creative, but in an unhealthy way.

user55340

7:16 PM

I really want to get to 10k on MSE so I can see those fun deleted posts... though unfortunately can't get the "embarrassing list" from Robert anymore... gotta ask Oded for the fun... or check to see if Yannis has any bookmarked.

Q: broken windows - MSO tag wiki references

comment flaggers, you can go over my comments and increase your weight! Just pick these where I complain about link only answers...

0

I used to refer MSO tag wikis in the past, like this: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/broken-windows/info and especially like this: would you mind explaining more on what it does and why do you recommend it as answering the question asked? "Link-only answers" are not quite welcome at Stack...

discussion tag-wiki broken-link

user55340

7:40 PM

@RobertHarvey Oh joy. You know what the MSO / MSE split means? You get back all the question banned whiner/lol'ers on MSOld!

user55340

On sorting and why you should use quicksort: ljs.io/projects/rainbow

►

user55340

8:15 PM

user55340

Meta was the first website, having been established over 2000 years ago.

user55340

Better image:

user55340

8:28 PM

Btw, I'm working on killing howto and how-to.

user55340

And it looks like they're empty now... so should get purged tonight.

user55340

Though close voters, please check the recent activity - lots of those are closeable though I ran out of close votes.

9:51 PM

@JohanLarsson Even with Quicksort, this is slow.

user55340

10:07 PM

The dancing is interesting, but things like the movement and extra dancing steps for the test don't show the speed of the algorithinm well.

Rainbow doesn't show some of the other very fast sorting methods like shell sort and radix sort.

Ethan

robert

ethan

403 error.

Good for you.

user55340

@RobertHarvey I wish it did... I still like the 'merge sort military anecodete'

user55340

CS guy was in the military, he and another guy were given the task by the drill sergeant to sort this stack of forms (social security numbers) in 1 hour or they'll have to scrub the barracks with their tooth brushes or similar..

user55340

10:15 PM

The non-cs guy was despairing looking at the stack of forms. CS guy had them place each page in one of 10 piles - 0 .. 9 by the last number. Then he stacked them in order and had them separated into stacks it by the second to last number...

@Ethan: Phishing doesn't impress me.

Probably not for long.

@MichaelT That sounds like Radix sort.

user55340

And so on... They got done before the 'unreasonable' time frame was up and sat around for a bit relaxing. When the sergeant got near the place they picked the last sheets off and make like they just got done.

[grin]

user55340

The sergeant was expecting them to only be part way through and started yelling... and they said "but we're done!" and then said "oh"

[The guy with the trench coat and white socks leaves.]

10:20 PM

What the heck was that?

Some Google Drive phishing page that Ethan apparently hosted... on Google Drive.

He seemed quite proud of it.

Meh. I don't need to see your.... thing.

I don't think he invented it either. I read about phishing using Google apps so that the URL is from Google a while ago.

Just another script kiddie.

I wonder what the point of kicking someone our of a chat room is, if they can just re-enter the room immediately? Seems like there ought to be at least a 10 minute wait.

I'm curious what Google will do about the phenomenon.

change their certs around at least

10:26 PM

@gnat hah. That works. Clearly the acronym for that is DA Voting.

Q: Impose a re-entry delay on users kicked out of a chat room

0

Currently, mods can kick users out of a room. I've done this to two users now, and they just come back in. I conclude that it's not effective for its presumed purpose (slowing down trolls or other troublemakers, on a room-specific basis). I propose that a delay be imposed on users after gettin...

feature-request chat

10:53 PM

Everyone pays their dues, in one way or another. In my experience, the best way to get the things you want is to be the "go-to guy," the problem solver. The one who is extremely knowledgeable, and knows how to communicate that knowledge and expertise well. The way you become that person is by getting better at your craft, and by solving other people's problems. — Robert Harvey 3 mins ago

11:06 PM

@RobertHarvey why did you post that here? The 2nd part is much better: “There is only experience, which of course is what you get immediately after you need it”

You're right. I linked that here before I wrote the second part.

11:48 PM

Hey, @JimmyHoffa; is there a "y combinator in plain English" somewhere on the interwebz?

I've seen the alligator eggs one, and it's easy to understand, but it doesn't really tie the concepts to anything practical (other than gaining an insight into the relative merits of various alligator relationships).

@RobertHarvey - Sharing your research helps everyone. What about Wikipedia was hard to understand? :)