The Whiteboard

Jimmy Hoffa

8:27 PM

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/254178/…

^-- 10k link - could that be salvaged with some editting to add a little background constraints?

Ampt

you can salvage a deleted Q?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Not sure... Initial thought is probably not.

ratchet freak

you can undelete it and then edit

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt I voted to undelete because...why not...

user41796

@Ampt 10k's can yes. And there's a very small window where a 2k could do it if they had a copy of the post up before it was deleted

user41796

8:31 PM

@ratchetfreak Don't have to undelete first; can just edit.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 wouldn't the edit be rejected upon submission if it was submitted after deletion?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa not to my knowledge

Ampt

lets try!

lol

user41796

@Ampt I clicked edit and then hit cancel. It works. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

requireJS, why do you require javascript in javascript files?? (removed)

user114359

8:35 PM

I need to invent a system that delivers an electrical shock to people who break unit tests then don't fix them.

user41796

@Snowman I've been known to just delete unit tests that I broke.

user114359

at my last job we used the donut system. If the nightly unit tests break and it is your fault, you bring donuts for the team on Friday

user41796

of course, the test was pretty much worthless anyway...

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I don't feel bad about deleting unit tests that break over trivial unrelated crap because they weren't isolated to a single place. If you don't delete those kind, they'll just cause headaches endlessly.

ratchet freak

@JimmyHoffa only 10k will be able to submit an edit so it will automatically be accepted

user114359

8:37 PM

I like to delete unit tests for get() methods

user114359

it's like weeding the garden

user41796

@JimmyHoffa They were some tests written by someone who really didn't understand what the eff they were doing. I didn't feel bad about deleting them. As you said, they were future headaches waiting to happen.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ratchetfreak true enough, I can edit a deleted Q

@GlenH7 yeah, I do that with pleasure.

user114359

8:52 PM

hah, I just ran across this: boolean x = someStringVariable.contains("stuff") ? true : false;

user41796

Any 10k'ers want to get into a delete war? :-D programmers.stackexchange.com/q/71013/53019

user15026

Sometimes I feel so useless to you guys :P

user41796

@AshleyNunn Well, if you check the edit history you'll see that one of our mods undeleted the post for some reason. Not quite sure why tbh.

user15026

Ah, I see.

gnat

@MichaelT sure I remembered that "your site sucks" very well. :) I particularly appreciate your contribution in the killing of Take 1

Robert Harvey

9:04 PM

2

A: Alternatives to multiple inheritance for my architecture (NPCs in a Realtime Strategy game)?

If you define interfaces like ICanBuild then your game system has to inspect every NPC by type, which is typically frowned upon in OOP. For example: if (npc is ICanBuild). You're better off with: interface INPC { bool CanBuild { get; } void Build(...); bool CanFarm { get; } voi...

gnat

Meanwhile, I had some fun at MSE today with a little case study / demo of the answer quality in the hot questions...

0

A: What is the Goal of "Hot Network Questions"?

The question is not if it need a HQ for it sites but it need it for the site is also a community, and a good way for the site is to have vip or so called also a VA to instructed you, and a site almost will work whit a donate or fond in all respect for it owner.

as much as I value other answers here, this one paradoxically appears to be most useful, as it managed to demonstrate key issues experienced in hot questions: answer quality, senseless upvotes, fragile community protection. Maybe, after current bounty is over, I even start a bounty to award this one: "One of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty." :) — gnat 8 hours ago

Robert Harvey

^^-- Isn't this just a variation on the Factory Factory Factory pattern?

var workerType = NPC.Builder
    .Builds(new WorkerBuildBehavior())
    .Farms(new WorkerFarmBehavior())
    .Build();

var workerFactory = new NPCFactory(workerType);

var worker = workerFactory.Build();

user41796

@RobertHarvey Sounds like a reasonable description of what's going on, yes.

Robert Harvey

I could imagine a single factory, but I don't know how you get out of the Type Testing.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I don't think you can. It's just that it's buried within the abstract factory and so you don't have to futz with it elsewhere.

Robert Harvey

9:15 PM

I could imagine some helper class that contains all sorts of generic capabilities for building and farming, etc, that you could pass into the constructor. It wouldn't be pretty though. It would pretty much be a God object.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey this looks like an FCube to me

user114359

Just remember, with a factory that complex, something somewhere is calling each of those factory methods

user114359

factories are great, but at some point you are just shoveling manure into a different pile and saying "yep, it's all clean now!"

2

Robert Harvey

Are FCubes the new Monad?

user114359

what is an fcube? Never heard of it. Google says it is a movie theater chain

Robert Harvey

9:24 PM

I think it's something that Jimmy made up.

ratchet freak

derived from his NCube I guess

user41796

Jimmy is known for despising NCubes. And I'm pretty certain he thought the play on words with Factory was funny. I think it's time to remove the awful-puns from the room.

Robert Harvey

user41796

room topic changed to The Whiteboard: General discussion for programmers.stackexchange.com [good-booze] [horror-stories] [monads] [my-code-is-compiling] [parsing-errors] [the-other-monitor]

user41796

That was one awful pun too much for the room, I'm afraid.

psr

9:26 PM

Jimmy wrote a pun killing factory.

MetaFight

a garbage collector?

user114359

ugh I'm done. Literally, with the work week.

user41796

@Snowman Congrats?

user114359

after this week, that is probably warranted

user114359

I have had to put up with a ton of stuff starting with a scratched cornea to some of the most inane QA feedback

user114359

9:31 PM

"something is broken, but I won't tell you what it is" for example

user41796

@Snowman Blech. I tried to get rid of some of my internal users for doing that sort of stuff.

user114359

unfortunately the people who do this kind of stuff don't report to me. My reports are all pretty good and do things that make sense.

Ampt

9:47 PM

@Snowman "I fixed the bug, but I Won't tell you how to get the patch"

gnat

"reparations for people who have been down-voted" -- so very true. The very least we can (and should) do is to stop showing these soulless numbers -1, -2, -3 and show beautiful flowers instead. "- I've got 3 roses on my answer today. - How cute!" — gnat 27 secs ago

user41796

@gnat What? You don't like roses? What's up with that? And I think that's a lily you linked for an image, not a rose. But I could well be wrong.

gnat

@GlenH7 blame Spolsky for the wrong flower (and by the way, thanks for recent deletions - to you, Robert, Bart - I've got over 10 repz refund for deleted downvoted answers)

Blog - Stack Exchange: Kicking off the Summer of Love

Joel Spolsky on July 20, 2012

It’s summer here at StackHQ. Have a flower!

You’re welcome. Now on to some serious work. Can we talk about cultural anthropology for a minute? I’d like to talk about what happens when a community (online or off) gets to be about… oh, three or four years old.

Every community starts out needing to recruit members, so they tend to be very friendly to newcomers.

After a few years, an insider group of old-timers forms. They get to know each other. They know the rules. They know the history and the legends of the community. And it’s only natural to get little bit irritated when newbies show up who don’t know the rules. …

user41796

@gnat I picked up quite a few today too.

user41796

Yeah, quick skim of images.google implies that's a water lily.

gnat

9:57 PM

@GlenH7 I suggest to reserve lilies for close votes. Let delete votes be tulips. How many tulips did you offer to people today Glen?

answers will get roses

Robert Harvey

10:13 PM

Bad answers will get black roses.

2

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 @JimmyHoffa programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/71013/… - There was a flag there saying the top answer was extremely good, and I'm pretty sure that's why Chris undeleted it. I have absolutely no idea if the answer is good or not (way outside my expertise), but (unless I'm horribly mistaken) both Chris and the flagger are experienced with the technologies involved.

Robert Harvey

Link-only answers will get Venus Fly Traps.

Yannis Rizos

So... if you really want it deleted, take it to Meta please.

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos hrmm... I don't disagree with the opinions expressed in that answer, but it seems pretty subjective... that said I hadn't looked at the answer when I voted to delete. I did so simply on the basis of the Q. I could go either way now that I see the answer, meh.

Yannis Rizos

Meh is good enough for me.

gnat

10:23 PM

@YannisRizos oops! I didn't know that I'm not yet outta delete votes

Ampt

Have they been optimizing the site for mobile?

I swear its gone through a couple changes since last year

Yannis Rizos

@Ampt Yes.

@gnat Ok then, I'll cheat and lock it.

Ampt

Works pretty well on Windows phone anyway

Yannis Rizos

51

Q: Mobile web refresher, part 2

After a sizeable amount of work we are releasing a new version of the mobile web site, this time focusing on the question and answer page. We have also fixed or implemented a minimal large part of the issues and requests mentioned in the previous refresher question. Changes Question and answer...

gnat

@YannisRizos that sounds about right. Although, historical significance lock would likely fit better than content dispute

Yannis Rizos

10:32 PM

@gnat 1585 views in 3 years doesn't really scream historical significance. I think it would be easier to justify the lock by accusing all of you of having a delete/undelete war (the prime directive of moderating: cover your ass ;)

Ampt

@yannisrizos you're not wrong...

psr

108 users with delete votes. I guess we could have a little war if everyone showed up for it.

Yannis Rizos

I'd love a delete vote war! But that's probably only because there's no way I'd lose.

gnat

@YannisRizos is it about time to drop slavishly following SO specific norms here? They didn't have NPR time when people honestly submitted content by the rules and tried to make it as good as possible. 3 years ago at Programmers is like... 30 years ago at SO, ancient history, stone age, museum times

@psr would be great to have such a war if we'd get our own, site-specific norms for historical locks as result

Yannis Rizos

That sounds like the start of an interesting Meta discussion @gnat...

psr

10:40 PM

It would be quite strange (though quite possible) if the path to getting site-specific norms for historical locks involves mass delete/undelete of random questions.

I agree that deleting stuff that was on topic at the time it was asked seems unfair to those who asked and answered, even if it isn't historically significant.

gnat

@YannisRizos yeah I am "drafting" this in my mind for about half year now :)

@psr that's sort of my point. Frankly I can tolerate some er unfairness when it comes to really average view / score posts but ultra-high standards for historical locks set at SO which had maintained essentially consistent topicality from day one, just don't feel right either

user55340

@psr Shattered Planet is not a bad rouge like.

user55340

@psr Note that if the post is older than 3 months and has a score of +3 or more, the poster doesn't lose any rep from a deletion.

user55340

Or something like that... not exactly sure about the date threshold there... though it is the case that sufficiently old rep is grandfathered even if the post that created it is deleted.

Yannis Rizos

2 months.

user55340

10:52 PM

btw, @YannisRizos you missed the discussion on flaming greek fried cheese earlier.

Yannis Rizos

Saganaki?

user55340

Yep.

gnat

draft for Prog meta post about historical locks

Oct 22 '13 at 17:04, 6 minutes total – 27 messages, 3 users, 2 stars

Bookmarked Oct 22 '13 at 17:12 by gnat

^^^ I lied about half year. About full year

user55340

4 hours ago, by Robert Harvey

Yannis will just pour tequila over everything.

user55340

Conversation starts there....

gnat

10:55 PM

Oct 22 '13 at 17:04, by gnat

@MichaelT you know, when I look at old, currently inappropriate questions with solid, good quality answers, I ask myself, why do we need to blindly follow SO stringent requirements for historical lock? "The post is stellar... large number of views, upvotes and inbound links" oy wey. These may be fair for a site that changed smoothly, slowly and gradually, but Programmers are not like that!

user55340

@YannisRizos data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/220020/… - while the answer is good, the people hitting the question from outside aren't finding what they're looking for.

user55340

The Coding from phone one that got recently deleted... (10k link) you can see again, clearly not what people are wanting to find:

user55340

Post Link          Q/A +/-/? AnonVotecount viewCount Score Author
------------------ --- ----- ------------- --------- ----- ------------
Coding from phone? Q   +     12            4012      11    Saikris
Coding from phone? Q   -     48            4012      11    Saikris
Coding from phone? A   +     4             4012      51    null
Coding from phone? A   -     2             4012      51    null
Coding from phone? A   +     2             4012      6     TZHX
Coding from phone? A   -     1             4012      22    Hoa Long Tam

Yannis Rizos

That sounds like the start of an interesting Meta discussion @MichaelT ;)

user55340

A difficulty with locks (in general) is that it completely freezes the information. This is not a bad thing for timeless info, but awful for something that changes. Note the 'awful for something that changes' is also true of closed questions.

user55340

11:05 PM

It boils down to "can the question be changed such that it matches what the people are expecting and match the good answer?"

user55340

Post Link                                                Q/A +/-/? AnonVotecount viewCount Score Author
-------------------------------------------------------- --- ----- ------------- --------- ----- ------------------
Which mobile development platform is easiest to develop? Q   -     2             1568      6     jpartogi
Which mobile development platform is easiest to develop? A   +     3             1568      24    Alexander Battisti
Which mobile development platform is easiest to develop? A   +     1             1568      -1    Shirley Rogers

user55340

-2 anon feedback isn't that significant, but the fact that its all negative without a positive anon feedback to it.

gnat

11:27 PM

►

Thomas Owens

@RobertHarvey I'll moderate SO for a day. I'll just mod message everyone and be like...SUSPENDED FOR 500 days!

draft for Prog meta post about historical locks

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