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00:00 - 23:0023:00 - 00:00

12:00 AM
Why dont you drive?
Well we don't really have trains here, so I guess thats why
 
#nycProbs
 
Well gtg later smart ones
 
12:22 AM
@Ixrec do you always lurk in Water Cooler?
 
user55340
12:33 AM
@DeliriousSyntax quite simply, giving someone the bank account information that they are requesting will allow them to remove all of the funds from the account.
 
user55340
:27484963 There's non-ascii output?
 
user55340
(I'm not a fan of tiles)
 
user55340
I learned D is for dragon back in the pre-color days. First time I had a color based terminal it confused me for a bit... "Wait... that D is green..."
 
Amazingly I got a seat after the first stop because I pushed my way to less-crowded middle and the guy right in front of me got up, so I was able to pull out my laptop and screw around with a VM and emacs. I need to just ssh into it instead of trying to change the screen size, though, I suppose.
 
user55340
@Duga Why do people say it belongs on Programmers.SE and then close it as too broad on SO?
 
user55340
1:51 AM
@Telastyn and @enderland postcrescent.com/story/news/crime/2016/02/10/… #WiMNCrimes.
 
user55340
2:23 AM
@enderland I'm just disappointed they didn't go to Pier 500 instead. My favorite restaurant in the area... though there were some in Stillwater that I regret not going to. Apparently the St. Croix Crab House is now permanently closed.
 
user55340
Btw, could you fix that MI to MN... though I'm sure there's some of it up in the UP.
 
user55340
Pier 500 item:
 
user55340
> Brie Cheese Curds - $9
a rich and creamy step up from the original. served with house made lingonberry ketchup
 
user55340
I'd go there and order that along with the chicken fondue.
 
Anscombe's quartet comprises four datasets that have nearly identical simple statistical properties, yet appear very different when graphed. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician Francis Anscombe to demonstrate both the importance of graphing data before analyzing it and the effect of outliers on statistical properties. For all four datasets: The first scatter plot (top left) appears to be a simple linear relationship, corresponding to two variables correlated and following the assumption of normality. The second graph (top right) is not...
 
user55340
2:25 AM
> Jerk Chicken Fondue - $13
roasted chicken marinated with a jamaican jerk blend, topped with oven dried tomatoes and scallions. served with toasted sour dough bread, granny smith apples and smoked gouda cheese sauce
 
@MichaelT the tavern there is within 10 miles of where I grew up. probably was a field back then though...
 
user55340
Hmm... thats the second time I saw Tempest Oyster Bar in Madison getting good reviews...
 
user55340
(was looking for a lobster roll to see if there were any around... this time looked for crab legs... both times, top of the reviews)
 
user55340
A traditional lobster roll is a sandwich filled with lobster meat soaked in butter and served on a steamed hot dog bun or similar roll, so that the opening is on the top rather than on the side. There are variations of this sandwich made in other parts of New England, which may contain diced celery or scallion, and mayonnaise. The sandwich may also contain lettuce, lemon juice, salt and black pepper. Traditional New England restaurants serve lobster rolls with potato chips or french fries on the side. The lobster roll was originated at a restaurant named Perry's, in Milford, Connecticut as early...
 
user55340
And while the east coasters will call me a heretic, the best one I had was on the left coast.
 
2:28 AM
I'm from the Florida panhandle, and every time I had jerk chicken there, it tasted gross and bitter. I had jerk chicken Sunday (we have a lot of islanders in my church in Brooklyn) and it was so good I didn't realize it was jerk chicken until people told me it was. I think all the recipes I've had down south overuse liquid smoke since they don't smoke the chicken like they're supposed to.
 
user55340
 
@MichaelT that looks so good
 
Lobster rolls are awesome
 
oh, that's why they call it a lobster roll. It's a bread roll.
 
user55340
 
user55340
2:29 AM
 
I guess I need to try it.
 
stop making me hungry
 
I have an upset stomach and now I want to overnight a lobster off amazon and make that tomorrow!
 
user55340
Its a good thick piece of bread, cut open half way down and then stuffed with lobster.
 
user55340
2:30 AM
Funny bit... they didn't have Calamari on their menu until after a KQED show I watched.
 
I had to make up some show-off data from my ETL app, so I used Anscombe's quartet. It would look nicer if Tableau would let me adjust the range on the axes.
 
I love the description - 4-6# average, but it's a 10# case, and you get "approximately 2"
so if you got a single 4# one... tough!
 
user55340
@enderland You might get 3x 4lbs though
 
user55340
approximately.
 
2:32 AM
I really don't get the hype on Tableau, aside from choropleths you can do all of that stuff in excel, from what I can tell.
 
@MichaelT I know! Such a gamble, which is why I'm cracking up at this lol
 
user55340
> I thought having three-year-old Ben along would allow me to comment on their inexpensive Children’s Menu, but wouldn’t you know it, this three-year-old has discerning taste and asked for calamari not PB&J. We had to tell him that the fried shrimp was calamari because his request just wasn’t on the menu.
 
user55340
that was the review that put calamari on their menu.
 
user55340
Heh... you can see my down voting in yesterday's rep report.
 
user55340
 
user55340
2:37 AM
Hum de dumm... cast some down votes... hey, there's an up vote on basic. More down votes... another up vote.
 
user55340
 
user55340
@quartata hows that for a hot dog bun?
 
3:05 AM
Should this be migrated to Programmers?
0
Q: Do Spring MVC need unit test or just integration test

fdarmantoI'm creating Rest API using Spring Boot (spring mvc, spring-hateoas, spring data jpa, spring-security). Right now, i start refactoring my code also try to increase code coverage. What i want to ask, in my controller (Spring MVC) should i write unit test or i just can go with integration test (s...

 
user55340
3:36 AM
@AaronHall ... meh. Yea, I say that a lot. It depends on what they want to test.
 
i and others have thought it should be migrated, but my flag suggesting it has still not been accepted.
 
user55340
I've got unit tests for my controllers in Spring - that are testing to make sure that the objects that I pass in are coming back in the order I request them... or that if the DAL is throwing an exception that it gets translated to the right HTTP response.
 
user55340
But trying to say "this is an integration test" and "this is a unit test" gets blurry... just write the tests that you need to write and don't worry about what they're called.
 
user55340
btw, @amon did you get that bit about how AppleSoft Basic worked in memory? Some neat and ingenious things there when you think about it.
 
user55340
Each line a node in a linked list that had its line number, and then a null terminated array of tokens (all tokens were in the 0x80 - 0xFF range, well, actually 0xEA - but that was the range)
 
user55340
3:46 AM
And then that meant that you could do replace a line by putting it in new memory and then updating the preceding line next pointer.
 
user55340
100 PI = 4 * ATN <1 >: PRINT "PI = ";PI: END

{ 1D 08 }  { 64 00 }  50 49 DO 34 CA E1 28 31 29 3A BA 22 50 49 20 3D 20 22 3B 50 49 3A 80 00
 
user55340
The basic code, with line 100 (0x64) with the next line at address 1D 08.
 
user55340
>
There are two different methods Applesoft uses, depending on whether the high-order byte of the destination line number is greater than the high-order byte of the current line number. If it is, then the interpreter starts looking for a line with the proper number beginning with the next line in memory. If it is not, then the in- terpreter begins with the first line of the program. The interpreter can quickly skip over lines whose numbers don't match by ex- amining the link field address (the first two bytes of the tokenized line) to determine the address of the next line of the program.
 
user55340
Hmm... I wonder if that was a difference between the loaded into memory AppleSoft program and the written repl style memory representations.
 
user55340
Much easier for repl style if it had the possibility nodes not following one after another. Though that could have a serious performance hit... but then again, it probably didn't matter too much.
 
3:58 AM
@MichaelT so what are you up to?
 
user55340
@AaronHall Right now? getting ready for bed. Us old folks need our sleep.
 
I'm tired myself
 
user55340
And looking at all the ingenuity in the Apple //e.
 
user55340
Things like the USR function so you could load assembly into a specific spot of memory (it was referenced from the zero page address $0A) to run any bit of code in memory - assembled rather than the interpreter.
 
user55340
For example SIN(X) wasn't part of AppleSoft basic.
 
4:02 AM
ok
 
user55340
And it was a pain to calculate in basic. Too expensive.
 
I bet
 
user55340
However, it was in the roms... at $EFF1.
 
in the rooms?
 
user55340
auto incorrect strikes again.
 
4:04 AM
what roms?
 
user55340
So you put some assembly at $0300: JMP $F1 #EF and then put JMP $00 $03 at the zero page $0A to $0C.
 
so if the function was there, why didn't BASIC expose it?
 
user55340
@AaronHall What functions do you want to expose?
 
user55340
Apple Basic only had room for 127 tokens in the language.
 
tokens are like keywords or symbols (*/+-)?
 
user55340
4:07 AM
All of those were tokens.
 
user55340
+ was $CA. IF was $AD. GOTO was $AB.
 
I programmed in Apple BASIC, and Commodore 64 BASIC, and GWBASIC...
 
user55340
You could only have 127 of them.
 
Just toy stuff though
The fern fractal was cool.
 
user55340
4:09 AM
By tokenizing rather than storing the actual strings, it allowed the interpreter to run faster and the file size footprint on the disk to be smaller.
 
127. so like 1 less than 7 bits?
 
user55340
Each token had a corresponding subroutine in rom that was called. Well, most of them. + apparently didn't. But GOTO was at $D93E.
 
user55340
00 was the end of line byte. 01 - 7F was for ascii text.
 
user55340
The strings in the code.
 
ok
I see
 
user55340
4:10 AM
And the variable names - ascii text.
 
Lowercase was a big deal... :D
 
user55340
100 PI = 4 * ATN <1 >: PRINT "PI = ";PI: END
{ 1D 08 }  { 64 00 }  50 49 DO 34 CA E1 28 31 29 3A BA 22 50 49 20 3D 20 22 3B 50 49 3A 80 00
                       P  I T=  4 T*
 
user55340
The token for = was D0. And the token for * was CA.
 
user55340
But you can see the rest of the ascii text right there.
 
user55340
@GlenH7 I'm going to build me a house!
 
user55340
4:17 AM
 
user55340
Wait... chocolate?
 
7:57 AM
> Please answer my question. Very important for work
(and of course it's a php question)
 
 
3 hours later…
11:05 AM
@BobNocraz I see, thanks. Indeed it's not about a programming issue, but of course very related to software development. I couldn't think of a more appropriate SE site for this (programmers.se perhaps?); If you have any suggestions I'd be happy to move the question. — sJhonny 5 secs ago
 
11:28 AM
@MichaelT not at 11pm, plus what about all of South America! :D
and Aus was awake by then surely
yeah I'm bored
 
 
1 hour later…
12:33 PM
@MichaelT this kind of next-pointer reminds me unfavourably of the Story of Mel. Of course, there are a couple of implementations that still use a similar strategy to sequence their bytecode. However, the idea of combining an editor buffer with the bytecode representation seems to be fairly unique. Thanks for this history lesson!
 
12:55 PM
You may gathered by now that your questions for Excel formula homework are not well received. Please consider this site is for programmers at a professional level and you are expected to provide your own attempt to solve your problem. Also your question is incomplete as it doesn't describe the desired output. — Filburt 52 secs ago
 
1:41 PM
Good morning...
 
not really
 
Happy coffee day!
 
1:59 PM
sup kids
 
Man I'm sick of web projects.... the ever expanding toolchains built around grunt etc. kinda makes the advantages of script vs compiled language evaporate. What's wrong with Makefiles / (Ant|Maven) ????
Forgot my <whinge/> wrappers.
 
I love the idea of makefiles, unfortunately the language legitimately sucks, and requires me to specify everything myself (unless I want to compile a hello-world C program). If there's a language-specific build system, it's usually worth learning.
 
Happy Coffee Day
... I thought it was Thursday all day yesterday until just now when I looked at the weather tile on my phone and wondered why it hadn't updated to Friday yet. Sumbitch.
 
If I had infinite time, I'd love to build a re-make, re-markdown, and re-bash with all the syntactic and semantic flaws fixed.
 
On the bright side, I have another day to get this work done. I thought it was due today.
 
2:04 PM
MOAR STACK EXCHANGING
 
Fatal mistake, confusing humpday for Thursday...
 
@amon I worked in MsBuild for a couple years doing build engineering - I have to say: It's actually a very well put together make style thing.
@AaronHall I'M DYING???
MsBuild is much like ant in a variety of ways, but it has some very cool set functionality for querying sets of things, for creating cartesian products from sets etc
 
@amon Not always true - GNU make allows wildcards, string manipulation, and shell expressions to build lists of sources.
 
@JimmyHoffa And also to you.
 
@amon take 3 folders and 3 files, and do <Result include="%(Folder)\%(File)" /> and now %(Result) is 9 items, the cartesian product of your files and folders so you can easily set up groups of copy targets etc very easily. Plus addressing files and folders with wild cards and getting information out of them is super easy. It's kind of a totally hidden thing because people mostly use just the IDE to interact with proj files, but underlying those proj files is a vast very solid language
 
2:10 PM
@PhilLello My #1 gripe with Make and Bash is that it's often syntactically impossible to avoid shell injection. I'm aware that GNU Make has many sweet features and I use a lot of pattern rules and substitutions in my makefiles, but I totally understand why people use CMake or Autotools instead for C/C++ projects. It is hard to write a correct nontrivial makefile.
 
@PhilLello err.. what's wrong with ant|maven? For web projects..lots of things. A majority of people working in web projects know JavaScript very well and ant/maven not at all - plus why would you make them use Java based tools when they're working on entirely non-java systems?
NPM and bower exist as package management tools connected to the public node repo, they work very well, they're very simple, and they aren't tied to any fixed build nonsense where maven if I'm not mistaken is tied to private repos, and tied to build tools specific to Java I believe? Also doesn't Maven demand Java style packaging of folders-as-namespaces with some pom.xml thing 'n such?
that stuff has absolutely no place in the packaging or building of an entirely client side single page application written wholey in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML (or jade or whatever)
 
@JimmyHoffa I'm sure MsBuild is great (though XML is horrible), but I won't spend my own time learning stuff I wouldn't use in a GNU/Linux environment. My only regular interaction with Windows is booting up the development VM at work.
 
@amon hah I'm not encouraging you to learn or use it; just mentioning it's kind of neat - I always think it's cool when you find those hidden languages underlying things that people rarely know and they turn out to have some cool features. MsBuild is a really neat language for the domain (agreed about XML, but c'est la vie on that one), tha's all
then there's those underlying-languages that you stumble into which should absolutely die a thousand deaths; InstallScript for instance. Ick.
MSI's themselves however function as a kind of database-as-make-style-thing which is really interesting in it's way. Full of sequencing-by-dependencies like make but instead of being a textual language it's all described by records in a standard set of tables
 
Gravitational waves, how do they work?
3
We're going to apparently find out in a little over an hour. It's blowing up my Twitter feed.
 
2:21 PM
See when one supermassive object meets another supermassive object and feel a very strong attraction towards each other ... trails off into a galactic birds and bees ramble
 
There's some big press conference about gravitational waves. At 10:30 Eastern.
 
They work a lot like light waves, only with gravitons instead of photons.
Because everything in the universe vibrates. stares off into the corner, thinking intently
@JimmyHoffa wow, awesome to be bombarded with a TV commercial while I'm trying to read. screw you, CNN. closes tab
 
@KitZ.Fox I'm actually trying to figure out how to use Readability right now to fix that because yeah, screw CNN (that said, you need to install chrome extensions to block all that ad bullshit unless you enjoy malware)
very cool application
(one of my phone's apps uses it for news links)
need to create an account to get a token and use it though :/
(it appears)
oh they have a chrome extension!
Awesome! From now on I can just click that when bringing up a news article site - because news sites are the bloody worst
whoa it'll let me send these articles to my kindle?
 
People need to start listening to me. I'm great at predicting what will happen in the future.
 
2:35 PM
@ThomasOwens Like how you predicted I would read this book.
 
Yes. What did you think about it?
Was it useful/helpful?
 
I'm picking away at it, but it does seem like a good choice for our implementation.
 
@ThomasOwens how's the blog doing?
 
@amon I've been swamped at work. I have like 3 posts that I need to proof read and post.
I just haven't wanted to sit at a computer when I got home.
 
2:37 PM
I will investigate that when I get home.
NO! My binding of Rapid Development is weakening. Page 156 just fell out.
 
3:03 PM
I'm sorry man. I don't create the rules, I follow then in order to maintain the community as concise as possible. I do agree that this is a good kind of question but there are many ways to answer you and all of that would be driven by the developer feeling on which would be a better fit architecture. Either your question is too broad or opinion based here. Maybe you could try on programmers.stackexchange.com and it is even possible that it would be considered also off-topic there. — Jorge Campos 7 secs ago
@JorgeCampos primarily opinion-based are offtopic at programmers.se as well. In fact, I think they're pretty much offtopic in all SEs. — MetaFight 18 secs ago
 
user55340
3:34 PM
@amon tangent to the editor containing the tokens - it would make porting the language to say French or German easy - a matter of changing the lexer for entering and the printer when listing. But the code would be the same.
 
3:47 PM
Interesting
 
3:57 PM
 
@gnat +1, best spam filter ever
 
I looked at his -2, should I flag as not an answer?
 
@AaronHall flag as spam
Quick! It's about to be gone.
 
is that really the right thing to do?
 
@AaronHall absolutely
 
3:59 PM
It's more of a link-only.
 
@AaronHall anytime someone is advertising something they may or do have connection to - it's spam
 
ok, show me the policy that says thus
I know it is against the rules to not say you're associated with something you link to that you're associated with.
 
@AaronHall exactly - that's an advertisement, and spam.
 
It's also bad to provide link only answers.
 
@AaronHall and spam is worse
always lean on the worst offense when flagging. If someone is being verbally vulgar and clearly offensive - you don't flag as "not an answer"
 
4:03 PM
I'm looking for the spam rule, I don't deal with spam often.
 
spam and offensive flags get different behaviours that clear away those things quickest
Spam is often actively harmful (outright scams) - we want our visitors to never click a link that scams them out of money or catches them in spear fishing - thus spam flags clear away those risks as quick as possible
and offensive, well a visitor who shows up and finds visually vulgar images for instance - will never come back here again. So again, those get cleared off quicker than other flags (is my understanding anyway - spam and offensive flags are specially treated by the system)
 
I'm not sure a youtube video is quite spam
 
10
A: Should this question be marked as spam?

Mad ScientistThe disclosure requirement is for answers, and it only applies when the somewhat promotional answer actually answers the question. Disclosure doesn't allow you to post promotional content anywhere you like. This is spam, it is purely promotional. So I think flagging as spam is justified.

 
Yeah, but that's a commercial video set
not a youtube video
 
> __May I promote products or websites I am affiliated with here?__
>
> Be careful, because the community frowns on overt self-promotion and tends to vote it down and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, so be it. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.
^^ from the FAQ
 
4:08 PM
alright, well I flagged it as NAA, since it's a matter of discretion.
oh, and the other was the same
:(
Maybe spam was the way to go
 
@enderland still getting answers to the 2 blanket question - just got what I actually think may be the best one so far. Hell, I'm going to select it as answer - it qualifies as a creative life hack, as well as being the most likely to actually work of all the solutions.
1
A: How can I keep 2 blankets together on a bed?

Paul WesselkamperWhen I was in the Marines (what seems like forever and a day ago) I used to hook bungee cords at both bottom corners (which were folded in the hospital corner method) connecting under the mattress pulling the sheets and blankets tight and one on only one side of top corners under the mattress. S...

 
I don't understand the problem.
 
4:24 PM
@KitZ.Fox well, when 2 blankets care about each other very much, they get on a bed together and... well, I don't think this conversation is really appropriate for The Whiteboard.
 
Put one blanket under you and the other over you.
At least, that works for me with the ladies.
 
Well I'll be damned, LifeHack's statistics are actually really good for a beta (other than Qs per day): area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/64409/lifehacks
I expected that site to tank right fast
 
Well, I wouldn't get too excited.
Writers has similar stats and has been in Beta for years: area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writers
1910 days.
 
4:39 PM
@JimmyHoffa just noticed, their SO account does the same: stackoverflow.com/users/2370872/user2370872 - free spam flags for everyone
...except for MichaelT :)
 
@KitZ.Fox I don't actually care, I'm just surprised that it's not in the crapper. It had a severe struggle assigning an actual scope and definition to itself in the first couple months which I watched a little just as a curiosity. I mean - what is a "life hack" ? It's rather subjective an idea to begin with. It's surprising they have such a large active user base for a site with only 2 qs per day and a scope hardly defined
 
5:36 PM
I have some new words of wisdom for everyone here.
If you ever get thrown under the bus, you need to flip that bus over.
 
user55340
5:47 PM
0
A: Open bounty prevents closure

MichaelTFrom Close votes shouldn't expire on bountied questions on MSE: Remember: closing is a nomination for deletion. Saying, "Oh, no need to involve a moderator; if close votes don't expire, I'll just sit on my hands until the bounty is done and then close -> delete it" is effectively saying...

 
5:57 PM
> closing is a nomination for deletion
it absolutely isn't
closing is marking as "requires editing/salvaging"
although I'll grant you that once a question has transitioned from "on hold" to "closed" then perhaps that's an indicator that it's a candidate for deletion
but the act of closing I strongly disagree with your Shog's assessment!
 
6:17 PM
@PreferenceBean I think many people here would agree with that. We don't consider closure to be on the path for deletion. Especially for older questions.
 
user41796
I'd certainly agree with that
 
user41796
And at one point was geared up to write a missive about it. And then Life waylaid me. :-(
 
That closure is not a nomination for deletion? Or that it is?
 
Hi. Is Microsoft a good place to grow as a programmer?
 
@pavelkolodin Yes. No. Maybe. I'd say no - I interviewed with them twice (once for a co-op, once for full-time, two different teams). I wasn't interested in either of the two teams that interviewed me. Didn't think the work was interesting. But some of my friends love it there. It does have name recognition, which can be a good stepping stone. But they also do get a lot of applicants, so it's competitive.
 
6:28 PM
@ThomasOwens thank you for response. Do you mean "Microsoft is famous corp and it is good to have it in your CV" by words "it does have name recognition" ?
 
@pavelkolodin It may or may not be good to have in your resume. I work in aerospace, and Microsoft may not mean much if I want to continue working in aerospace. But if you want to work in commercial software, then Microsoft may look really good. But I think there are more important things than having a job to look good on a CV.
 
@ThomasOwens speaking from experience?
 
Consider the technology that you are working with or have the opportunity to work with. The projects and teams you are working on. The problems you are solving. The compensation package. The opportunity for movement to other positions and/or geographic locations.
@Ampt No. Not yet.
 
@JimmyHoffa that was fun last night! Glad I bought that!
 
@ThomasOwens i agree, there is more important things than having a job to look good on a CV. And my question was addressed almost to the people who can clarify that more important things in relation to MS.
 
6:34 PM
@pavelkolodin I don't think any of the regulars here have ever worked for Microsoft.
 
@ThomasOwens Microsoft is so big: you almost have no chance to determine if some team good or bad.
 
@pavelkolodin If you interview on-site, you tend to interview with people in your group. You may not be interviewing with everyone, but you can get a feel for the group's culture.
 
@ThomasOwens your userpic reminds me the special agent Jason Bourne :)
 
@pavelkolodin Shh.
 
@PreferenceBean Yeah, closing is marking as "requires editing" just like moving someone to the ICU is marking as "requires treatment"... And you should always hope for the best, but... Be aware of the reality of that situation.
If you see your buddy moved from outpatient surgery to ICU, or your question moved from "can accept answers" to "on hold", be cognizant of the fact that there's a very real chance they're not gonna be with you much longer.
 
user41796
6:43 PM
I'm not so certain that analogy holds even though it's quite amusing.
 
Or were you suggesting that ICUs are more successful at treatment
 
user41796
@Shog9 I'd hate to see the liability insurance for a hospital's ICU if it were run similar to how Progs handles On-Hold / Closed questions. :-P
 
heh... If Progse was a hospital, it'd be in trouble
 
user41796
But think of the ones who survive! I mean, that's optimizing for pearls not sand.
 
@Shog9 if people who went into the ICU stopped trying to help themselves, that's a valid comparison. But people who go into the ICU nearly always want to get better and are willing to do treatment/etc (especially after their release)
if you go to the doctor and say "I have problem" and then whenever they asked you followup questions and didn't respond... I don't know if that's really the hospital's fault
 
6:56 PM
@enderland are you also arguing that the ICU is a bad comparison because questions are actually less likely to survive closure than patients are ICU?
Because... That's fair. Just doesn't jibe with the attitude I've heard here before.
 
@Ampt Yep, it's a great little game. They're still doing development on it too - it gets new functionality every now and then from what I've heard which enables people to create more complex games in it
 
... I'm not sure what you are saying. I'm pointing out that if people showed up at the ICU and stopped telling doctors anything or providing any feedback to them, it'd be a better comparison (presumably most people/families in the ICU want to get better?)
 
@enderland and yet, presumably you don't jump for joy when you hear that a loved one is in the ICU
 

How to qualify spam?

3 hours ago, 7 minutes total – 20 messages, 3 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked 25 secs ago by Jimmy Hoffa

@Shog9 can you speak to that for me? I actually couldn't easily find any background to qualify that as spam
Made me second guess myself; now I'm not sure if things are supposed to be enforced as "spam" as strictly as I had been understanding.
 
29
Q: Defining the limits of self-promotion

Jeff AtwoodFirst: DO NOT LYNCH THIS USER. Please. Calmly read what I'm about to write before doing anything. This post is not meant to be an incentive to attack a user, but a discussion about the issues. Consider a user whose posts all roughly look like this: Not open source but may be worth a try {lin...

 
7:02 PM
@Shog9 thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
 
Agh. History questions.
0
Q: What was the first language that allowed a class to contain a member of it's own type

SidneySo, I had to create a class that had a member of it's own type. I looked into why this was possible, which is fascinating. Reading the answer, I find that a lot of work had to go into making this work, and so it probably didn't exist in older languages. So my question is, just as the title says, ...

Let's play "Stump the Chump."
 
Also is it arrogant of me to think that the concept isn't fascinating and is more or less plainly obvious?
 
7:18 PM
How do you know? — A J 1 min ago
^^^ kind of magic I guess
Ahhh, well, i know, but some person or the other always answers. — A J 2 mins ago
^^^ @Shog9 I suspect you teach SO users some wrong things
 
@Rob Questions being closed before they can be answered, thus encouraging people like AJ to post crap questions because "some person or other always answers" despite knowing they're not meeting the expected quality level. — TZHX 1 min ago
Um, what?
@gnat That's going to make me think twice about helping folks out in the comments in the future.
 
I'm not sure if you disagree with me, or I'm just doing a piss-poor job of trying to explain what my point was?
 
1
A: What was the first language that allowed a class to contain a member of it's own type

AProgrammerAlgol 60 didn't have record type. Algol W (1966) and Algol 68 had them, and both had a notion of rebindable, nullable reference allowing recursive data types. I'm citing both as the reference manual I've for Algol W is dated from 1972 and I don't know how much the language evolved since its firs...

Chump stumped.
 
admittedly, juggling SO comments and trying to get child to sleep doesn't put me at my most lucid
 
@TZHX Stackoverflow has been frustrating for me for quite some time now. A few years ago everyone started asking "What have you tried," and now Stack Overflow is the GOTO place every time someone writes some broken code, a subject matter I'm not remotely interested in.
All you can learn from that is the innumerable ways people can fuck up code.
 
7:35 PM
Yes. From my POV you're somewhat of a celebrity so I've seen your posts on meta, etc. and agree (I think) with most of them.
 
I tend to be a bit of a renegade.
 
"debug my very specific issue that no one else will ever encounter" is boring.
 
@RobertHarvey welcome to the club. I also used to help-in-comments until I found out
 
It's a bit jarring to see your POV actually confirmed by a user.
 
(which, as a hypocrite, I occasionally answer for the internet points in the hopes of one day getting the rep required to vote to close)
 
7:41 PM
hi all. good day to you from a very cold Raleigh, NC
i have a project to create a new WPF app based on a vendor Windows app. vendor app uses Access db. we don't have documentation on either but a user who knows the vendor app well. they need to bring the Access data into SQL Server.
 
is Access still a thing?
 
i wish it wasn't
a thing as in John Carpenter's "The Thing", yes it is
Access db has lots of tables with cryptic column names. not normalized.
i'm about to go insane trying to get a handle on this.
what's an approach to this? we're starting fresh with a new app, but the old data... how do we make sense of it?
 
eh. I think my first instinct would be an ssis job to pull it into a more sane dbms.
 
yep. that's done
it's on SQL Server. but it's still the same data.
i'm digging through the db... some 79 tables with data out of 140
 
then it's just a case of going through and working out what the relationships are? can't think of anything can be done other than just grind through it.
 
7:52 PM
i was hoping you wouldn't say that :)
thinking the same thing
i know 4 tables with data have relationships. no indication of what the other tables are used for
or how to display the old data to the users in a new app
like you said, it's going to take lots of research in the data. table by table
 
@RobertHarvey it's a nonsense question because it was in maths before programming even existed
 
db stuff is a side / occasional component of larger consulting jobs for me, though, so others may have better ideas / tips.
 
thanks, @TZHX. i appreciate you taking time to answer. looking just for a sounding board right now for my frustration with it
 
@RobertHarvey I'm surprised this is the first time you saw this.. I've seen it on multiple occasions here on PSE..
@Alex you can generate a diagram of the DB in SQL server - that will at the least identify any keyed relations that exist to give a visual of entity's and relationships. Otherwise just sounds like some good old software archaeology needs to be done.
 
@JimmyHoffa, thinking the same thing. only 4 tables with data that have relationships. the old app doesn't have any features to wipe data, so for now will ignore empty tables.
planning to using WPF with MVVM Light and EF
 
8:00 PM
@Alex ignore empty tables, and don't presume the relationships are all there are. Could be no foreign key relationship when there's a data-relationship between 2 tables.
 
@JimmyHoffa, yep. will not make any assumptions. the app writes to lots of those 79 tables. so will have to go one by one and see what's in them. write notes along the way.
it's for a state job, so will think of it as service to the people :)
time to get my fedora had and whip... it's archaeology time!
*hat
an additional challenge, i don't have a logon to the app. logon password is encrypted as a series of numbers on one of the Access tables. waiting on another team to create a new logon
i feel like indy about to descend into the Well of the Souls... "indy, why does the floor move?"
 
@Alex "Recreate this thing. We can't tell you anything about it or let you look at it -- that's not a problem, is it?"
 
8:21 PM
@TZHX, yep
figure out this black box. ooohhh, the mystery.
 
sometimes modernising stuff can be almost fun. I was given a monstrosity of a fortran program once and told to re-create part of it. thankfully the person who wrote it had only retired, not died -- which is not always the case.
 
@TZHX, good point. i'm going to learn MVVM with this, along with Entity Framework. and get deeper into WPF
i'm a web dev usually. but this job has me stretching my skills
 
8:49 PM
The Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. In 1927, it appeared in a second edition with an important Introduction To the Second Edition, an Appendix A that replaced ✸9 and an all-new Appendix C. PM, as it is often abbreviated, was an attempt to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. As such, this ambitious project is of great importance in the history of mathematics and...
^^ @RobertHarvey apparently that's the first publishing thing referencing sets built from types
 
it is the first attempt I know of to build the foundations of math entirely out of logic
what do you mean by "sets built from types"?
 
@Ixrec elements with a deducible type trait
that Q about "first programming language with self-referencing types" - in maths, types are more often than not self-referential, because there's no concrete machine underlying their formalisms, so they have to tie together a logical theoretical foundation - which gets referenced and re-referenced all the way up.
My point being that looking for an innovative programming language as the source of the concept is the wrong place to look. It existed long before computers did.
like church encoding, it has 2 simple elements at it's foundation that just get continuously re-referenced to build out from that
 
9:14 PM
@JimmyHoffa Thanks again for your Haskell help. I've now reset my thinking and find it reasonably straightforward to do the coding. While I have less code (for more information) than in other languages, I still have surprisingly many boilerplate definitions.
I was very surprised to find out that in "data T = A { a :: Int } | B", the A and B aren't types and therefore can't implement typeclasses >:( And "a :: T -> Int" which simply throws a runtime exception for "a B", which discards a lot of type safety!
 
@amon yeah, sometimes I try to get away from boilerplate and just feel nothing will solve the fact that, we have lots of rules and you can't infer all of there nuances and we will always have an amount of boilerplate.. on the other hand, I'm handily not that strong on Haskell. I never did make it through the "Scrap Your Boilerplate‌​" papers.
@amon Generic Algebraic Data Types can (I believe) demand type classes on data constructors... One second
@amon that's interesting that it compiled when you tried to hand over B as a T -> Int - or did you hand in B as the T in an actual T -> Int function? You might have had incomplete pattern matches (no match in your T -> Int for the B case)
  data Term a where
      Lit    :: Int -> Term Int
      Succ   :: Term Int -> Term Int
      IsZero :: Term Int -> Term Bool
      If     :: Term Bool -> Term a -> Term a -> Term a
      Pair   :: Term a -> Term b -> Term (a,b)
^^ You could use GADTs to create a data T a where A :: Show b => a -> T b
this would demand that A takes an a and gives you an element of T which implements the Show typeclass
that way specifically A is a type constructor for a T which has Show, and B could be a type constructor for T which has other type classes
this looks like a smaller possibly more straight forward piece on GADTs - and it's example I think is precisely the problem you're trying to solve there with type classes on type constructors
 
user55340
Hmm. Basic line numbers was closed. It will likely be reopened. When reopened, it bounces. And I will get more rep! MHAHAHAWAHA! Unless of course I am rep capped.
 
9:30 PM
@JimmyHoffa with record syntax, the above accessor function a is declared as "a :: T -> Int" not "a :: A -> Int" because A isn't a type. So under the hood something happens like "a (A x) = x; a _ = error "nope"" and everything happily blows up.
 
user55340
(I now wonder about the flavor of basic on a chip...)
 
@JimmyHoffa I will experiment with this, lets see how it goes. Thanks.
 
@amon oh yes, I see what you mean there. record functions are known not to have complete matches. record functions are largely seen as the most flubbed thing in all of Haskell, which is part of why Lens has become a de facto standard piece of Haskell because it provides a better solution to addressing record members etc..
@amon glad to help! I wish I understood this stuff better myself frankly, but always enjoy an opportunity to share what little I can grasp
 
user55340
@JimmyHoffa 👆 Helping
 
9:51 PM
interesting
so I looked at the top voted questions on gamedev and 80% of them it seems like are closed
whereas only a small handful are closed here
 
@whatsisname well.. we aren't shy about pink screening here
 
10:32 PM
Topic of the day?
 
user55340
10:52 PM
@DeliriousSyntax proper scotch to coffee ratio as a function of time of day.
 
No idea about that, but I can give you crown to coke ration or the best coffee at Starbucks
 
user55340
There was a bit about Haskell earlier. I'm still ruminating on basic line numbers.
 
Haskell makes me want to vomit
I'll stick with more popular languages
 
user55340
Any language that changes/challenges how you think about programming is worth learning.
 
@DeliriousSyntax any particular reason why?
 
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