The Nineteenth Byte - 2017-01-18 (page 6 of 6)

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7:08 PM

0

Q: ASCII Art "Flight Simulator"

Background I like ascii art animations as I tend to call them so here is another one. I don' think this is too difficult to implement so will hopefully get some short and interesting answers. Challenge Here is an ascii plane --o-- Here is an ascii runway ____| |____ The plane starts ...

code-golf ascii-art kolmogorov-complexity animation

I AM A DEPRAVED ROBOT

Can we mod-delete ^?

@NewMainPosts WTF???

TrojanByAccident

@Pavel +1

@El'endiaStarman kill it with fire ^^^^

@NewMainPosts how do you delete other people

7:10 PM

what flag's most appropriate for it?

Chat doesn't give flag choices

TrojanByAccident

@muddyfish moderator attention; "inappropriate"

@Pavel on the site

@TrojanByAccident I chose offensive

TrojanByAccident

@muddyfish works too

@NewMainPosts Honestly, same, @New Main Posts

7:13 PM

can we flag-delete it rather than VTC it? That hides it better

delete from posts where

We can ask @Dennis or another mod to delete hammer it

-12 so far

Anonymous

I'm sure it's been flagged a few times

-13 now

Anonymous

7:14 PM

Community will take care of it if there are enough offensive flags

I can't see how it isn't gone with 13 downvotes

Anonymous

Ok we really don't need a live count of the votes in chat

well now i just want to know what it is

how many flags is it for community to kick in?

Anonymous

Should be 3 R/O flags

7:15 PM

@Mego [auctioneer voice] -13 -13 we have -13 do i see -14 going once going twice

I deleted-hammered it

oh that's funny

i loaded the page before the delete and i regret nothing

Anonymous

Wait, isn't this the same guy who got chat-banned for spamming in Russian after being told to stop?

ok i've had my fun

does mean that the OP doesn't get the penalty for the flags

7:17 PM

@Mego yes

and I handled that one, too

Anonymous

@muddyfish They will get automatically validated

I can still see it though. Normally community redacts it

wasn't spam-flag-deleted, then

Anonymous

Since it was manually deleted by users, it may take mod intervention to burninate

I was also suspended for spamming Russian once.

7:18 PM

can't we just undelete it and burninate it?

Anonymous

Nah, the mods will take care of it

Anonymous

Including probably slapping a suspension on the user

apparently I have 69 helpful flags now :P

Would an interesting challenge be to output the user's location? You can chose GeoIP, builtin GPS device, etc.

Anonymous

@Dennis Got your mod-flamethrower handy?

7:20 PM

@Mego Sure. What needs nuking?

@Dennis codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/107266/…

I just noticed the last line of the challege
> Win most small implementation

Anonymous

@GabrielBenamy Sounds like it was put through Google Translate

Even if we ignore the subject matter, the challenge is just horribly written.

'Some kind of UI'? Really?

@Pavel apparently it got upgraded to GUI on QT

7:22 PM

it also asks for 4K VR

@Mego Tbh, I'm not sure what kind of flames I should throw at it.

kerosene?

@Dennis Can you burninate it so normal users with enough rep to see deleted posts can't see it?

No.

Mods cannot hard-delete posts.

Anonymous

Only Community?

Anonymous

7:24 PM

I did not know that

Not even Community. Hard-deletion requires at least a CM, probably a dev.

@Dennis Nuke it with an exploding star the size of 1000000e1000000 suns and make it disappear with a black hole

I'm pretty sure that overflows to 0.

Anonymous

Community can redact in response to spam and R/O flags, though

@KritixiLithos to say the least, that would kill all of us, too

7:25 PM

So... ping GraceNote and ask for help?

Anonymous

Alright, who voted to undelete?

Anonymous

That's a paddlin'

@muddyfish o_O well OK then

Anything VR would be a cool challenge tho.

@Pavel Why? It's already deleted, and if you forget about the word porn for a second, it isn't worse than the usual off-topic crap we get.

7:27 PM

That's what you were pinged for. I can't see it at all, that's just what other people were saying.

@Mego I could undelete and hammer with a R/O flag, but I'm not sure it warrants one. Anyway, that only hides the offensive content in the revision history. I guess I could edit it and redact the first two revisions (that requires only two mods), but that's a lot of work for zero gain.

I don't see anything offensive in the revision history

Just to shift the conversation to a different direction, I was wondering if there was a way to run a shell script blah.sh like blah without the sh in the front and without linking it to /usr/local/bin/whatever

I mean, the challenge is at -13 and deleted, that's what you should do with terrible challenges

@Qwerp-Derp You really need to update your docs for Logicode. < and > aren't mentioned at all, along with a few other operators. They're used in the recent Logicode quine.

7:29 PM

I don't think it needs anything above that; there's no actual porn on the page, just the word porn

@ais523 how dare you say that word, i'm reporting you

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Last Minute Texas Hold'em Poker Plans Your friend invited you to a high-stakes poker game at the last minute and, as a computer scientist, you've decided to use your skills to gain an edge on the game. Your task will be, given 2 cards (your hand) and 0, 3, 4 or 5 cards (the dealt cards), you mus...

Anonymous

IMO asking a porn-related challenge is worthy of a suspension. It's explicitly (har har) clear in the Content Policy that sexually explicit content is not allowed anywhere on the network.

Anonymous

But that's for the mods to decide, not me

@Mego this is why I called you naughty earlier...

7:30 PM

@Mego Personally, I'd just nuke the account. There's no value to be had in trolling. And it's been involved in trolling before.

Anonymous

Looks like Community did redact it and burninate it

@GabrielBenamy well we decided that brainfuck is fine anywhere but titles (and the only reason it's disallowed in titles is that it has a tendency to set off content filters on the entire SE network if it happens to hit HNQ)

Anonymous

@ArtOfCode I suppose the one valid answer isn't worth the trouble the user has put us though

deleted, locked, and closed

@ais523 It's only allowed because it's a language name. Excessive usage of words like that can cause problems for users at work or in public areas.

7:32 PM

what a well-rounded post

@Mego s/Community/me/

@Dennis Looks like me did ...

Anonymous

@Dennis Yeah I didn't notice that you did it until I looked at the revision history

Anonymous

What

Anonymous

Did... Did they flag their own post?

7:33 PM

Look at the revision history.

hmm, from an orthogonality point of view you'd expect a mod flagging a post as offensive to cause community to redact it (on the basis that the mod's flag counts as six)

@Mego i'm ??? sobbing

also you can't flag your own post as offensive

(I tried to flag my own post by mistake once, offensive wasn't one of the options)

(obviously I didn't actually send the flag)

Anonymous

Sure, but you can flag it as something else

Anonymous

Only custom mod-flags, it seems

7:35 PM

so what happened on the post was that the user voted to undelete their own post after it had been deleted by community votes

then Dennis undeleted it (to make it flaggable) and modhammered an offensive flag on it

Why are we still talking about this post?

then Community redacted, deleted and locked it

I had a byte to eat for lunch.

there, hopefully that should clear up all the confusion and lingering questions now so that we can move on

How about you?

Anonymous

7:36 PM

We probably should drop the subject, since any further action would be done by a mod/CM/dev, and thus doesn't involve us

Any feedback for this sandbox post?

Anonymous

While we're asking for sandbox feedback: 4 days, 0 votes, 0 comments

Honestly, I think not enough people play in the Sandbox anymore.

@mbomb007 i only had a nibble

@GabrielBenamy *nybble

El'endia Starman

7:37 PM

@Mego Well yeah, you're not done. :P

there are some questions that work better in the sandbox than others

@Mego You need test cases

it works best if a) you know the question will work; b) there are some details that you're unsure about and need help with

Anonymous

@El'endiaStarman I take upvotes on Sandbox posts to mean "this is a good idea for a challenge". If there aren't any upvotes, I'm not going to spend the time making test cases.

@Mego is a Mathematica graph literal allowed as input?

Anonymous

7:39 PM

@Pavel Probably, but I don't know enough about Mathematica to be sure that it doesn't fall afoul of the no-additional-input rule.

'Graph' is just a data type in Mathematica.

(There are a lot of data types in Mathematica)

El'endia Starman

@Mego Hmm. Historically, I typically upvoted for "I like this challenge idea". (I haven't voted very much for a while.) I do also know that some others upvote to say "This challenge is ready.".

I'm like 99% sure there's a builtin for longest cycle.

I upvote on the Sandbox to say "I think it's worth putting in effort to get this challenge ready"

Anonymous

"This challenge is ready" is communicated by upvotes and a lack of comments saying otherwise

Anonymous

7:41 PM

No votes and no comments means it got the classic Sandbox treatment: summarily ignored

Well, I think it's clearly specified and an interesting challenge.

New Sandboxed Posts

1

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Where am I? code-golf(Some other tags pls help) Your task in this challenge is to output the location of the user. This may be done by means of GeoIP, a builtin GPS device, or any other means. Output should either be in the format (latitude, longitude) accurate to at least one degree, or (City,...

Just needs test cases.

And that

Anonymous

It's really hard to justify recommending the Sandbox to new users when us older users can't even get feedback

3

7:41 PM

is why you don't link to a new sandbox post.

this is why a custom sandbox: We can have separate votes for "this is interesting" and "this is ready"

@NathanMerrill Just comment "this is interesting"

well, the Sandbox usually will help new users avoid obvious issues

if there's something wrong with a challenge that 99% of PPCG users will spot, it'll nearly always be commented on very quickly

@Mego No, see, it's really easy to get feedback for an obviously bad challenge.

2

@mbomb007 that might work for me but that's not the natural way people vote

7:42 PM

Besides, if it's just mediocre someone will comment "Welcome to PPCG. Interesting challenge!"

If a user is in the sandbox, they hopefully read the info at the top

Anonymous

See, the 3 upvotes in as many minutes tells me that people like the challenge, so now I'm going to actually make the test cases

@Mego I think your challenge is boring and uninteresting

please don't post it

You probably posted it when everyone was asleep or something.

/sarc :P

7:43 PM

@Pavel I'm asleep right now. I golf in my sleep.

Anonymous

@Pavel 9:00 UTC is during our most popular time

/shrug

@Mego Probably because that's the overlap of UK and USA work times.

@Mego I did actually look at your challenge before you mentioned it here, and I didn't see any obvious flaws, but I wasn't too interested, so I just moved on

that said, some sort of "queue" would certainly help that for me: It would push users into giving feedback on challenges instead of just skipping them

Custom review queue?

7:51 PM

@El'endiaStarman I may draw some inspiration from "Markdown Writer FX" after all

El'endia Starman

@Pavel +1 year of design development hell. :P

(We've already asked for a number of custom features to be part of our site design.)

Anonymous

See, the damning thing here is, I put a canary in the Sandbox post to test if people actually read through it.

Surely if we get that custom sandbox, we could also get a custom review queue for it?

Anonymous

There is absolutely no reason for the graph to be weighted, for a challenge about finding the longest cycle.

Anonymous

But not a single person commented on that.

7:56 PM

I can confirm that although I read the Sandbox from time to time, I haven't read your post specifically

Oh. I assumed that when you "travelled" along an edge in your path, you added the weight of the vertex to the length.

Anonymous

Three people read it and upvoted it, but missed the obvious issue.

I thought it meant the highest weight cycle

Anonymous

@Pavel If you have to make an assumption, you should ask for clarification.

Anonymous

In the example I gave in the rules, there were no weights.

7:57 PM

@Mego Then I get scared of looking dumb.

@BusinessCat Yeah, exactly.

Anonymous

@Pavel It's more foolish to blindly assume something, especially when it's a test to see how thoroughly people actually read Sandbox posts.

Anonymous

So yeah. I'm done with the Sandbox.

Because it also doesn't say that you need the cycle with the most nodes

Fair enough. I think that for a simple enough task, you don't need the sandbox when you've been around for a while. You know what a good post looks like.

I wonder if we could get a PPCG puzzle sandbox through Area 51?

Anonymous

7:59 PM

@ais523 Almost certainly not

that way, puzzles planned for PPCG could be posts there

HAHAHAHA no.

it seems something like an abuse of Area 51 though

TrojanByAccident

@ais523 Maybe a general sandbox?

As in a site for proposing questions on other sites

it seems odd, but I think it would be cool

We've talked about it before in meta, it was decided against.

8:01 PM

well here and possibly Puzzling are the only sites where you try to make questions better before they're posted

on a site like, say, Stack Overflow, you ask a question because you care about the answer

so improving the question inherently doesn't change which answers are valid

and thus you may as well just post the question live; if it's answered early, no big deal

the thing that makes PPCG and Puzzling fundamentally different from other Stack Exchanges is that improving a question can invalidate the existing answers, and that answers generally aren't useful for the original question-asker in particular

The alternative argument is that the Sandbox isn't incredibly well populated, and only serves as a module for the community it serves. Trying to split up one service among two communities so that we can make our sandbox fancier is a bit of a waste as well. I think all we need to do is make the Sandbox more visible, instead of making it a separate thing.

it's permanently in some prime real estate in the sidebar

its major issue is that people have no real incentive to check it

Badges

"Visit the sandbox for 7 consecutive days"

right, badges seem like the most obvious incentive

you'd want to generalise it SE-wide with some sort of "red tag"

like "needs-feedback" or whatever

(sort-of like "featured" but specifically requesting people to visit the page repeatedly, leave comments, vote on answers, etc.)

Anonymous

8:23 PM

The best incentive for using the Sandbox is the Sandbox actually working

Anonymous

And the best incentive for reviewing Sandbox posts is quid-pro-quo - knowing that, by reviewing posts, you're encouraging others to use the Sandbox, which allows you to get feedback on your own Sandbox posts.

Anonymous

Contrary to popular opinion, Peter cannot do all of the Sandbox reviewing on his own. Everyone has to step up and help out.

El'endia Starman

Crazy idea: what if we created a repo on GitHub and used it to sandbox some challenges? Just as an experiment.

Anonymous

I don't really like the idea of having to use an external tool for sandboxing

Anonymous

Anything that isn't on our site will get less attention

El'endia Starman

8:28 PM

Hmm. Basically, I'm trying to think of ways that we can make it easier for people to follow which challenges are at what stages.

Anonymous

Views drop off exponentially with click-distance from the home page. Our Sandbox is one click away, and it has major problems.

El'endia Starman

E.g., make a new chat room and write a bot that posts updates to it.

I'm not suggesting that everyone use this stuff.

We just need several more users actively reviewing Sandbox posts.

Anonymous

We can't force people to open the Sandbox and review posts

El'endia Starman

Of course not.

We could ask the SE dudes to create some badges for us

Anonymous

8:32 PM

A review queue would just be shoving the problem elsewhere: not everyone does reviews

Anonymous

Site-specific badges won't happen anytime soon

0

Q: Longest Cycle in a Graph

Given a directed graph, output the length of the longest cycle. Rules Any reasonable input format is allowed (e.g. list of edges, connectivity matrix). The labels are not important, so you may impose any restrictions on the labels that you need and/or desire, so long as they do not contain add...

code-golf graph-theory

Anonymous

Before we can even think about asking for site-specific badges, we need our site design. It's been nearly a year since graduation.

Anonymous

@Dennis @MartinEnder @Doorknob Has there been any news from the SE team about our design and site-specific text?

If there is, we'll tell you.

Anonymous

8:41 PM

Could you guys ask the CMs very nicely for a status update? It's been several months since the last time we heard from them, and it would be nice to know that we haven't been overlooked again.

I was actually going to ask about that earlier

I remember the announcement from last summer, but not much has happened

Or winter I think

Sad

Don't worry, the design will be here for the 1st November.

Or maybe in 6-8 weeks.

9:22 PM

yesterday, by betseg

Help my friend uses Emacs, how do I save his soul?

He prefers tabs over spaces too D:

I think you should listen to your friend

He seems saner than you

Show him Notepad++

At the very least

They made a character specifically for making indents, but you lot insist on just using spaces.

Yes

Notepad++

Best text editor

Because the size of \t is variable across terminals

But the width of a space is constant

@Pavel but the tab's length isn't standardized, x spaces is the same across everywhere

Damn ninja'd

9:24 PM

Ninja'd

Ninja'd on the ninja'd

Anywhere it's not four shouldn't be used for displaying code in the first place.

When you're just indenting lines I don't see how it makes a difference how wide the indent is

The length of the line is variable

If you really really have to line things up, use spaces for sure

And can look bad on some teminals depending on the indent size

9:25 PM

@TuxCopter but that's good

uh

If you need it lined up, use spaces. WHEN DO YOU NEED IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

if I have <a><span>text</span><a>, does the entire span become a hyperlink, or just the text?

>PERDECTLY

Perfect.

I would assume the whole span

El'endia Starman

9:26 PM

@GabrielBenamy Uh...the entire span?

@GabrielBenamy entire span becomes hyperlink

Damn ninja'd again

Of course it still wouldn't be a hyperlink because there's no href :P

so I can click outside of the text and it'll still act as a hyperlink?

hush you

El'endia Starman

@GabrielBenamy I guess so. Why not test it?

@GabrielBenamy yup

9:27 PM

Tabs work in HTML. Spcaces get compressed to one.

El'endia Starman

I've only used spans for things that don't affect any visible change.

TrojanByAccident

@BusinessCat lol :P

@Pavel <code>/<pre>

Anonymous

@GabrielBenamy Just the text

bah

Anonymous

9:28 PM

jsfiddle.net/5q8j6oqh

bleh. I forgot how crap the defualt chrome faunt is.

jsfiddle.net/26Lfvt2a

doesn't work :C

@Pavel it takes default font from system settings

Well, looks my default font is shit.

@Pavel s/au/o/ s/ua/au/

'night

9:31 PM

Oh shit oops

Good night

I'm gone too, cya guys.

9:41 PM

@Downgoat how goes fixing the thingy?

TrojanByAccident

I'm actually doing pretty well writing my own parser

I can add in certain things i like without worrying about it messing up the rest

lol

9:55 PM

> We estimate that responses to the 2016 survey cost 14.6 years of total developer time.

Wow

Accounting for the fact that an individual developer won't work more than 8 hours (legally), then it will take a single developer 15987 days to complete that project.

@betseg Where did you find that statistic

Or 300 devs just over 53 days.

@Pavel stackoverflow.blog/2017/01/…

10:41 PM

Am I the only person who's sad to see that in the voting for Best Mathematical Insight an answer which involved original research is lagging behind an answer which used little beyond basic bit-twiddling that's widely known?

6

No

Anonymous

@PeterTaylor Sidi vs Proth? Yeah it's a bit disappointing.

I didn't actually vote for any the mathematical insight category

I couldn't understand any of the nominations well enough to feel like I was making an informed decision.

@Mego, exactly.

@PeterTaylor Yeah, I wish downvoting comments was a thing for this.

Anonymous

11:01 PM

@ConorO'Brien CR does separate questions for each category, with answers for nominees, so nominations can be downvoted as well as upvoted. I don't know why we don't do it that way.

@Mego I like that idea a lot. Maybe that's something we can do next year, if not this year?

Anonymous

We're 2 days into voting, so it's a bit late for this year. Next year, we absolutely should do that.

Anonymous

We might run into some issues with serial voting, but we can avoid them with some care

SE-wide annual best-of support would be cool.

Half of what meta is is 'how do we get around this SE restriction to do this cool thing we want'

4

Anonymous

@Pavel Just getting a site design seems to be a Herculean task, and that doesn't involve adding a feature to the entire network. I'm not getting my hopes up.

11:05 PM

Is SE open source?

Anonymous

@Pavel I've said it before: as much as I love SE, I'm just not sure if it's the right platform for our site.

Anonymous

@Pavel Not even a little bit

Anonymous

If it was, we could fork the source, ~~golf it~~, and make our own modifications so that it fit our purposes better. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Welp. Where else could we host PPCG? For all of SE's faults, so much of what it offers is incredibly useful.

@Pavel even if we found the ideal other site for PPCG, we still wouldn't have the traffic benefits that we get from HNQ and SE in general.

11:08 PM

tru. I searched 'regex golf' (after seeing that one relevant xkcd), and PPCG was the only even slightly relevant result for me.

@Mego well a little bit. I think MD editor is open source along with some other frameworks used for backend

@Pavel :o that's a cool story

@ConorO'Brien HNQ is not generally good traffic unfortunately however

@Downgoat traffic is traffic. Good traffic is good, and bad traffic allows us to see what's already wrong with the site

@ConorO'Brien will do soon (was at school)

11:09 PM

@Downgoat oic

Just try searching. I actually don't know of any other code-golfing sites, yet I know they're out there.

Anonymous

The best solution IMO would be a MathOverflow sort of situation - hosted by SE, powered by SE software, but run independently of the rest of the network.

@Pavel anagolf?

@Mego TIL that's a thing

MathOverflow is run independently? Do you have link for more info?

@ConorO'Brien i.imgur.com/Cu3Ulm3.png HAHAHA no.

11:13 PM

@Pavel abbreviation for "anarchy golf"...

Ah

Anonymous

@Downgoat This is a good explanation

oh that's why it has no hnq

Anonymous

Basically, the guys who started MO started it independently of SO/SE, got people interested in it, got funding to run it, set it up as an A51 beta, and then it got turned into a fully-fledged sister site (like Server Fault, Ask Ubuntu, and Super User), run by those original guys.

Anonymous

It runs on the SE software, and has some connections to the rest of the SE network (the association bonus works in MO and its questions can appear on HNQ, but it doesn't show HNQ), but is funded and managed independently.

11:18 PM

Doesn't SE also distribute a version of the interface and backend for private use?

Anonymous

Maybe? I dunno

I remember reading about that

But I can't find it now

stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise

Sorta?

relevant meta post

11:48 PM

@PeterTaylor I had that exact same thought.

One of the perils of voting for best-ofs is that easily accessible and understandable things are popular regardless of their relative value.

Actually, all voting -- I've had the feeling that sometimes less-golfed things get more votes because voters understand the more basic level of golfing that was done.

Destructible Watermelon

how to make a pseudo random number generator in to a real random number generator:

pick a (pseudo-)random website, check to see if schools block it

bonus points, the type of filter is (pseudo-)randomly selected

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The Nineteenth Byte

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