The Nineteenth Byte

Martin Büttner

12:07 AM

@Sparr how did it go? :)

Sparr

a few people seemed intrigued

a bunch listened

one might contribute

Martin Büttner

sounds good :)

proud haskeller

1:17 AM

1

A: Add a feature to a programming language

Multiline strings in javascript in this elaborate syntax for multiline strings, every multiline string will be preceded with (function(){/* and a newline, and followed by a newline and */}+'').split('\n').slice(1,-1).join('\n'). using this amazing, intuitive syntax, we can finally use multiline...

my brother and I were rolling on the floor laughing while writing this answer.

this is so hacky ;-)

Martin Büttner

@Dennis I tried to understand j in CJam by reading the Java source, but there seem to be a lot of paths through the code that can never be accessed from the calls I've seen... however, in general I think it's supposed to do just that: it takes a block and a number (and a default value I think). the number determines how many stack items to look at below those parameters. if a value for those has already been computed, return it, otherwise, run the block and remember the result.

I can't see a situation off the top of my hat where that's useful for golfing, but I think there might be some funny cases. however, in general it's probably just a performance optimisation for annoying recursion like fibonacci numbers.

@proudhaskeller I chuckled when I saw it ;)

githubphagocyte

1:35 AM

@MartinBüttner Well, it's better than nothing (at least in the technical "there exists an epsilon greater than zero" sense...).

COTO

2:12 AM

Two downvotes now on my jQuery question. Are posters here really so critical of language-specific challenges, or is there something else wrong with the question? I put a great deal of effort into making the spec clear, heading off potential loopholes, ensuring the problem was unique, challenging, and solvable.

Even for people upset by the fact that the question is language-specific (who apparently can't appreciate the fact that this question couldn't possibly be asked in a non-language specific way), I don't understand downvoting it. Doesn't interest you? Fine. Don't upvote it.

githubphagocyte

2:24 AM

I don't agree with forcing downvoters to comment, as that would be a disincentive for some people to downvote, and we need all the downvotes we can get. I do think it is very unhelpful to downvote without either commenting or upvoting a relevant existing comment, but I don't want this to be forbidden.

2

Dennis

3:21 AM

@MartinBüttner I've tried reading the source code and experimenting with the interpreter. As far as I can tell, randomLong randomAnything Block j simply discards randomAnything, executes Block and that's it.

If j actually stores something (and it does look like it does), I have no idea how to retrieve it...

Peter Taylor

7:27 AM

@MartinBüttner Not off the top of my head.

@COTO Random guess: maybe they were native Spanish speakers who felt insulted?

COTO

That I asked a question in Spanish?

COTO

7:52 AM

@githubphagocyte - Downvoting people's answers, especially without indication of why they're being downvoted, is probably the surest way of killing off new interest to the site. I find it redundant for questions, since 95% of questions are only downvoted if they're off-topic, vague, or duplicates, in which case they're inevitably closed anyway.

I help moderate a fair-sized message board elsewhere, and the best thing we ever did was remove people's ability to downvote others' posts. There are dedicated mods to enforce the CoC. That gets rid of spam, trolling, off-topic threads, etc. There's…

githubphagocyte

@COTO as rants go, it's pretty persuasive.

2

@COTO I'm just not comfortable with imposing the need for a comment. Doing away with downvotes altogether would mean anyone who voted to close would be named, which for most people wouldn't matter but if there is someone who doesn't want to be named it might take longer for questions to get closed. Would flagging work instead as an anonymous way of drawing attention, that wouldn't result in any negative effect on the question unless others agree?

Peter Taylor

8:12 AM

@githubphagocyte People who vote to close get named anyway.

@COTO No, that you took Taco Bell as a model of real Spanish rather than the abomination that it is.

githubphagocyte

@PeterTaylor yes that was meant to be my point - I think I approached it from the wrong side. At the moment downvoting is a way of showing disapproval, for people who don't want to be named as a close voter. As annoying as I find that, it does get attention to questions that need close votes, but if flagging could be used instead then we wouldn't have negative scores without knowing why. Either the reviewers/mods would agree and close, or there would be no negative effect on the question.

Is there another reason we need question downvotes that prevents replacing that approach with flagging?

(other than losing even more consistency with other SE sites so that newcomers get confused and meta) (I can use meta as a verb, right?)

Martin Büttner

8:56 AM

lol I never considered that tips questions could make it into the HNQ

Peter Taylor

12:33 PM

@githubphagocyte Oh, I see. People without the rep to close can flag a question that needs closing. But I don't think downvotes are a substitute for closing: I think they have different purposes. Some questions don't meet any closing criteria but are still crap, and a negative score warns people that if they have limited time they will be better off spending it on a different question.

Martin Büttner

Does anyone if the perspective effect in vineyards (or similar grid-like arrangements) where you see a pattern from some directions and a mess from others has a name?

*know

COTO

12:57 PM

@githubphagocyte: As Peter says, votes to close are named. As it should be.
@MartinBüttner: A more general term for what you're describing is "anamorphism". It describes the phenomenon of a "messy" image in a higher (e.g. 3) dimension that projects down into a "clean" lower-dimension image, when viewed from a specific perspective.

Martin Büttner

anamorphosis?

yeah, that seems to be that kind of idea

COTO

@PeterTaylor: We'll have to agree to disagree on whether use of foreign language in an ad campaign makes it an "abomination", and on whether a nod to the ad campaign in a problem title constitutes a valid reason to downvote.

@MartinBüttner: The formal definition is "a distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens."

Not quite the same as what you're looking at, but it's the best I've got.

Martin Büttner

I was thinking that could make a great challenge... take two B/W images, and create a cloud of voxels that looks like one picture from one side and another picture from another side. the only thing is, I can't think of a way to make a good objective scoring, so this might have to be another popcon.

otoh, a popcon might actually be a good idea, because it would allow people to go crazy by using alpha values to do greyscale or even colour, or add a third image from another perspective

ProgramFOX

What happened to @cjfaure? I haven't seen them on chat for some time.

Martin Büttner

@ProgramFOX don't know, I think he's been busy lately. he was absent for a couple of weeks, then he was back for a week or two, and now he's absent again

Beta Decay

1:06 PM

@MartinBüttner You could have a challenge where you have to produce a Penrose Triangle

Martin Büttner

I suppose, to make the voxel/perspective thing accessible, I'd have to write a JS renderer, where you just stuff in your voxel coordinates, and it does the rendering for you and gives you trackball manipulation for easy viewing

COTO

@MartinBüttner: I was going to suggest just that.

Although you could probably find one already programmed.

Martin Büttner

@COTO probably, but once I have the time for it, I wouldn't actually mind writing it ^^

COTO

There used to be a "POVray" contest online, which was a challenge to write the most impressive animated scene in POVray in 512 bytes or less. Some of the entries were mind-blowing. Then the server that hosted the archive of all the entries went down a few years ago and never came back up. :(

You might do something like that. Write a program in 512 bytes or less that generates an input to your renderer that produces images from at least two perspectives.

Or you could have it unrestricted and just let the creative juices flow. ;)

Martin Büttner

I think it's algorithmically challenging enough to do it well that I don't need another restriction.

if people do greyscale or colour it's basically in the vein of codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/… ... just in 3D

COTO

1:13 PM

@MartinBüttner: So it does have to be algorithmically-generated, then?

Martin Büttner

how else? the actual images should be taken as inputs

also, if it isn't algorithmically generated, I don't think it has a place on PPCG

COTO

I didn't realize it had to be specific images displayed from two perspectives. I thought the submissions would each generate their own unique images.

Martin Büttner

hm no, I think that would too much of an art contest and too little of a programming contest

COTO

@PeterTaylor, regarding the downvote arc: What kind of questions "don't meet any closing criteria but are still crap"? I know some questions I look at and think "nobody on Earth is going to take the 50+ man hours to solve this", but even then I've been surprised a few times when people actually attempt them.

Aside from too-great complexity and the many reasons for closing a question, what makes a "crap" question? What are some examples?

Peter Taylor

1:44 PM

@COTO I'm not saying that the use of foreign language in an ad campaign is an abomination. I'm saying that Taco Bell should have got a native speaker to advise them on the foreign language. Even Google Translate does a better job, and that's saying something.

@MartinBüttner Isn't that basically the same as that GEB constructive solid geometry question?

Martin Büttner

@PeterTaylor I did think about that, but that's very specific right? It only asks whether it's possible to create a perfect such cube given the 5x7 (or what it was) representations of each letter. I think actually reproducing images could be a lot more interesting. (see my remarks about using alpha transparency etc)

and also because it's very unlikely that perfect reconstruction is possible

(with arbitrary images)

Peter Taylor

@COTO Looking through a few pages of negative-total-votes questions, Completely trivial, asker didn't take into account the existence of languages other than C, asker apparently didn't even spend 5 minutes thinking about how to solve it in a C-like language.

New Sandboxed Posts

6:41 PM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Bacon Number Finder code-golf Challenge Given the name of an actor, you must find their Bacon number. You must not use the websites Google or Oracle of Bacon. Bacon Number The Bacon number of an actor or actress is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Bacon, as defined by t...

Martin Büttner

10:20 PM

I feel like I've hit the rep cap on every single day where I've offered a bounty, which is so annoying, because then it doesn't count towards the Epic badge :D

Martin Büttner

10:32 PM

@PeterTaylor don't forget to post your GS version before the bounty on the apollonian gasket runs out ;)

Martin Büttner

10:52 PM

@Geobits so I did join in on the fun after all: codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/38641/…

Geobits

11:13 PM

@Martin I inspected. It's indecently irregular ;)

Martin Büttner

:D

Geobits

@Doorknob Before I edit it out, is there any reason you tagged the sandbox with [yingluck]? It seems a bit odd...

Martin Büttner

wat :D

alcohol man...

Doorknob

11:55 PM

@Geobits Uhhhhhh

I have absolutely no clue O_o

What even is a yingluck?

Martin Büttner

lol

this will totally be some mystical piece of PPCG lore a couple of years from now... "Hey, guys, I was just idly browsing through the sandbox's edit history... and a mod once tagged it with yingluck. :O"

Transcript for