@YannisRizos or @ThomasOwens or @ChrisF -- Is my answer going to get deleted here? This question had a bounty added and has some kind of warning thing on it that's new I think? I don't understand if it's saying my answer is bad or ?

@JimmyHoffa DON'T PANIC!

@YannisRizos been watching Hitchikers Guide lately?

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, what @YannisRizos said

I'm not paniccing; just noticed that warning thing. What is with that question lately anyway

You have been awarded a bounty - which is a good thing. The answer isn't going to get deleted.

@JimmyHoffa That's just a warning to people posting new answers.

Oh

We throw it on questions that have attracted sub-par answers to warn people before posting to make sure they are adding value with their new answers.

@JimmyHoffa The post notice is in the question, it's unrelated to your answer. The question was closed as NC, I re-opened it and added the notice to warn answerers that further answers that don't fully comply with our guidelines will be removed.

Gotcha, that makes sense

@JimmyHoffa As for the bounty: I've set three small New Year's Day bounties, it's my way of saying thanks for the awesome answers. Enjoy the rep, you've earned it ;)

Wow, bloody responsive, I was just spamming all 3 of you because I figured I'd be lucky if one of you responded heh

Woot thanks :)

What!?!?!?!

@Dynamic Hm, obvious troll is obvious.

@YannisRizos It just got deleted :P

@Dynamic I know, I casted the last delete vote.

Ahhh...

All I'm saying is, that is the coolest waffle maker ever

I would actually enjoy waffles out of that thing

haha

@MichaelT No, for a while is a nested loop for(..){while(..){..}}

Don't. The question could be titled "What would a developer mean when using this figure of speech" to which you have to realize, figures of speech exist because of their wide usability for so many different things

So a developer or anyone else for that matter could mean countless things when using any given figure of speech

Snark, n: A shark that makes wise-arse comments and doesn't know how to spell.

arg, circular include woes

pfleh, I honestly have no idea how developers deal with that crap, I haven't had to worry about any such since ASP3 ~2001

last time I checked that is a shark

and the e at the end of that just goes to prove the point about not knowing how to spell

what the fuck? voting reversal script now does its stuff to deleted posts?

yesterday I flagged one of these posts for spammy advertising, along with voting down all three of their posts - which were quickly were removed, and now script gets at these to tell me it was wrong?

these are posts from user I just wrote about here,...

Come on guys. Seriously?

@gnat on the flipside you got your reps back I guess

@gnat you seem to have lots of problems with that. Maybe you should chill out with the I'm-the-police and get back to just trying to answer the good questions and comment on bad ones to give them direction for a while. The community is supposed to be self-policing and you aren't the whole community

Seems every other day you're in here talking about the down-vote reversal script hitting you

It can't be that fun trying to police P.SE rather than participate, participation is good fun :)

Haha yeah, that was a hilarious article

also for all the fans of The Onion

engadget.com/2013/01/02/ubuntu-for-smartphones

Ubuntu for Smartphones!

metric -> imperial conversions are a source of woe for me today

probably miserably lol

theres this giant table that is used to compute things

and rather than, you know, make all the entries use the same units

it uses inches, cm, mm, and one of the columns in the table has flags for which units

then are run time you have to constantly convert conditionally for every row you examine

ugh

yes

this table lookup is brutally slow too

hi guys

@whatsisname that is genius! Wait, did I say genius? I meant bloody ludicrous! Why no one has executed a script that runs the conversion against the entire table to a single unit choosing the correct conversion based on the unit-types column and subsequently deletes the unit-types column to ensure nobody does something that stupid again I cannot guess

Unit's in data fall under the same rule as time (which is a unit), you always use GMT. Period. Need timezone localization? Convert when it's needed at the UI layer. Always store time in GMT, and always store measurements in a singular unit.

Doing logic in the DB? Great whatever, you're units are all the same so it's not a problem. Force unit conversions to occur in the DAL before queries etc are handed to the DB. Create artificial user-defined types for your units to ensure it's unambiguous in the stored-procedure's parameter type if need-be.

yeah I don't understand how anyone thought it was a good idea, ever

SE is really convinced I'm a robot today. It's asked me on every single post I've made to prove I'm a real boy..

@MichaelT Worst case is that it would remove bad advice.

Worst case is that you create an army of anti-P.SE users who upon their death and zombiefication hunt us all down and eat our brains (our delicious brains).

@ThomasOwens You are far too underestimating of worst case scenarios is all I'm saying

I'm fully prepared for zombie apocalypses.

For the record, there are over 3400 comments that contain %programmers.stackexchange% on Stack Overflow as of the December 30 data dump.

I suspect that some may be valid suggestions.

Nonsense, we should try and get P.SE added to the national treasure's archive and have it frozen in time forever

You may be prepared for zombie apocalypses, but you are underestimating the scenarios that may cause them, like deleting 3400 comments on SO for instance

You never know which of those 3400 people is already infected

It looks like a good chunk are actually links to Prog.SE questions that are related/relevant.

Yeah. The query needs refinements. I just had a few minutes, so I threw one together to get a ballpark figure. I highly doubt it's that big of a problem, but I personally tend to flag the poor comments suggesting that bad questions go to Programmers as they come up.

@badp if memory serves, I got rep back prior to that, when spammy posts were removed. Per my reading of flagging summary this happened few hours before that funny "undownvote"

@gnat - nice catch of the spammer, by the way.

@gnat @psr Interestingly, she doesn't appear to be a spammer after all, just unaware of our disclosure guidelines. She came back and updated the one answer, removing the link completely (and I've undeleted it).

@JimmyHoffa Wouldn't that mean it's asking if you're Pinocchio?

@ThomasOwens The Data Explorer is updated weekly? Really? Since when?

@Dynamic that's what I said, a robot, like pinocchio. You have a different name for a walking talking wooden non-humanoid automoton?

@YannisRizos yup I also checked her posting history at SO and SQA before flagging. There are slippery posts but nothing as blatant as it was here. Undeleted answer looks OK to me; not particularly great but not too bad either for NC-question

@JimmyHoffa Cartoon seems to fit ;-)

Guys, can you help me remembering a website? It was about algorithm challenges. You choose an algorithm challenge, and then you could choose one from lots of programming languages to solve it. Your program is supposed to receive input and then output an expected result. When you're done, the site will test your program against hundreds of random input values to check if your program works, and then awards you. I found some couple similar sites, but it wasn't any of them.

@Omega TopCoder seems to match

and Project Euler

as gnat said, TopCoder allows that sorta thing in their practice rooms

as far as i remember - there's hundreds of challenges

unable to stop debugging

uh oh thats not good

I think Codility does something like this?

Thanks, I will take a look at these and let you know

@gnat: I doubt it is Project Euler, and TopCoder's website design is quite different than anything I had in mind. However, when I searched for TopCoder, Google Ads had codechef.com, which seems a lot more like it. But I can't remember if there was a chef at all, so it might not be it either.

Well, I now doubt it is codechef as well. The registration process asks for things I'm pretty sure I never answered in my life.

@Jimmy: Codility doesn't seem to be the one either

If it helps, I remember there was a basic algorithm challenge about a teacher who was going to give candy to her class students - she placed them in rows or something, and I think that the amount of candy given to a kid depended on how well-behaved was this kid compared to the one next to him. If he was better behaved, he would get more candy than the other kid. Or something like that.

You had to determine the amount of candy she had to give in total. I can't remember the form of the input though.

Sounds like the input form was hersheys kisses

@YannisRizos Are hersheys kisses prevalent over there at all?

@Dynamic Since November, I think. It hasn't been long. It includes all sites and metas that are out of beta. Last update was December 30th. It tends to update sometime on Saturday or Sunday.

@ThomasOwens Cool... I've been trying to check by Archaeologist badge progress and the numbers won't budge:

data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/89149/…

Do you think I can make a question asking for such website?

@Dynamic You having an issue with the query you mean?

Queries wrong

@Dynamic have you edited any posts that have been inactive for 6 months?

Actually that table doesn't have sufficient information to write the query.

@Dynamic @WorldEngineer there's a query for you to figure out if you wanna learn some SQL, figure out how to using the PostHistory table identify if there is a 6 month gap between an edit and the previous activity on that same post. There's a few ways but they all require some more complex querying if I'm thinking about it right

Six stages of debugging.