The Whiteboard

@MichaelT It's SO, that's probably supposed to be fs&m

user20683

so yeah

user20683

4:42 AM

I can't even make sense of this nonsense

user20683

and I wrote it

5:30 AM

Welcome to the rest of your life @WorldEngineer

Q: Is it bad practice to return different types from one function in a dynamically typed language?

10:18 AM

our question is #9 in the hot list, welcome lemmings coming with meh answers...

31

I come from a statically typed language background (Java). In Java, you have to return a single type from every method. For example, you can't have a method that conditionally returns a String or conditionally returns an Integer. But in JavaScript, for example, this is very possible. In a sta...

javascript dynamic-typing static-typing

gotta get community wiki soon I guess

26

Q: The Anatomy of a Hot Question

Here is the traffic since The Workplace was created: These are the three questions that caused those huge spikes in traffic: Is it rude to leave an interview early if you have already made your decision? How should I deal with an employee who has slept with my wife? What is a 'friendly' ...

feature-request support voting community hot-questions

user41796

2:54 PM

@gnat I need to spice up my answer somehow and get back on top of those lemming votes

user55340

@Tim, I've added data on the new users these questions brought in and their value compared to the harm caused to budding community moderation to my question. (spoiler: they don't seem to be worth it). — jmac 7 hours ago

3:29 PM

@GlenH7 best way to spice for lemmings is to add a porn image... I think

user55340

@gnat Or a croissant?

Q: Dealing with "Find out who's going to buy the croissants"

93

On Stack Overflow at the moment, there is a popular question which is currently high in the Hot Questions feed: Find out who's going to buy the croissants So far it has been closed twice (once by the community and a moderator and once by a moderator alone) but re-opened twice by the community. I...

discussion stackoverflow specific-question off-topic hot-questions

user55340

14

Q: Find out whose turn it is to buy the croissants, accounting for possible absences

A team has decided that every morning someone should bring croissants for everybody. It shouldn't be the same person every time, so there should be a system to determine whose turn it is next. The purpose of this question is to determine an algorithm for deciding whose turn it will be to bring cr...

algorithms scheduling random

A: Can we track the positive effects of a popular question?

...sort of ironic to see objections against too much attention to the meta question which is, in turn, related to questions receiving too much attention from collider — gnat Jul 30 '13 at 11:10

3

Ever heard the phrase "a flash in the pan"? According to my mom, my grandfather and grandmother allegedly used this phrase to talk about Elvis Presley when he made his first break. The idea was that he would have a brief "flash" of popularity and then evaporate into nothingness; he wouldn't even...

user55340

@GlenH7 the other trick is to put a link to your question into a comment on a hot SO question...

user55340

3:33 PM

Or, just go back and copyedit one of your own good questions / answers.

@MichaelT low quality answers scored -2, -3, -3 and -5 make me somewhat proud of Programmers community

user55340

@gnat (note also the person who asked the question... now, if he puts a picture of a croissant on the top...)

enderland

3:54 PM

Don't go there Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us — Marjan Venema 25 mins ago

this video is the most perfect encapsulation of why I am or am not motivated I've ever seen

user55340

user55340

(might as well onebox it)

4:09 PM

this user somehow manages to ask fantastically bad questions - programmers.stackexchange.com/users/101957/ajay-prasad

user55340

@gnat its very useful... I know what company to NEVER EVER EVER contract with.

user55340

(now I'm curious - is that him not knowing how to do it? or an essay from his API design class he's taking)

user41796

4:34 PM

@MichaelT I love the animations on their videos

@gnat Are the others deleted? That one looks like a veiled attempt at promotion.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I just nuked one of them yes

user41796

Not sure if there are more that were deleted

user41796

If so, they would be q-banned. The Q I deleted dropped their rep to 1

@RobertHarvey most likely deleted. Looking at user's gravatar I think I recall some of their answers I flagged

if memory serves these were senseless copies from other's posts

user41796

4:43 PM

Too bad the recently deleted queue doesn't show post ownership. Now I gotta go click on things... :-)

user55340

4:53 PM

10

A: Enlarge ASCII art

APL, 7 chars/bytes* {⍺/⍺⌿⍵} Function that takes the number and input string as parameters and returns the result: a abcde fghij 2 {⍺/⍺⌿⍵} a aabbccddee aabbccddee ffgghhiijj ffgghhiijj 3 {⍺/⍺⌿⍵} a aaabbbcccdddeee aaabbbcccdddeee aaabbbcccdddeee fffggghhhiiijjj fffggghhhiiijjj...

user55340

Almost makes me want to dabble in some APL.

That Game of Life in APL video shows the power of the language

@MichaelT They'd probably call you an ingrate. "I'm giving you the opportunity to create your own incentive structure, and you're dissing me? Are you crazy?"

@Oded I've always wanted to program using hieroglyphics (this is me being sarcastic).

@RobertHarvey I don't disagree there... I find it fascinating to watch a master at work there, but I wouldn't ever pick it up.

user55340

@RobertHarvey That was actually referring to the account that asks fantastically poor questions. The incentive is a "neither I nor my manager knows how to do incentives for a knowledge worker" which isn't an uncommon problem (my former employer had the same problem).

4:57 PM

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Overflow Chat, 6 mins ago, by Undo

We have programmers arguing about randomness over here. Tickets $1 each.

user55340

@Oded I'm half tempted to try to retag things so I can get a tag badge for random.

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Overflow Chat, 1 min ago, by Man of Snow

pseudo randomness isn't real randomness

@MichaelT if you tag things at random, you might get one.

user55340

Or not.

user41796

@MichaelT My count is 10 & 2 on those two tags.

user41796

5:01 PM

You're more random than me apparently

user55340

@GlenH7 Need a larger sample to determine if its random... evenly distributed doesn't mean random.

user55340

(random bit on random...)

user55340

> Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel): The most probable suit distribution in bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most evenly distributed. This is because the world likes to have unequal numbers: a thermodynamic effect saying things will not be in the state of lowest energy, but in the state of lowest disordered energy.

user55340

From home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/number.html

@gnat Bikeshedding at its finest. I'm proud to say that I'm the one who finally deleted that question, although not as proud that I waited so long to do it.

user41796

5:04 PM

@RobertHarvey I wish I had been able to pull the stats from that question prior to deletion though. I think it would have made for an interesting comparison to see how the voting & answers differed across sites.

user55340

Hmm... can a 10k (or mod) timeline a deleted question?

user41796

@MichaelT mods may be able to. 10k can't

user55340

@GlenH7 Just verified that too... yea... nope.

Thomas Owens

Link?

@GlenH7 What kind of stats? 20 answers. Top voted answer scored 115. Many of the answers were either attempts to show how smart they were (using Rube Goldbergian contraptions), or attempts at humor.

user41796

5:07 PM

@ThomasOwens SO Version: :13442959

The whole thing was very "ha ha so serious."

user55340

@RobertHarvey A page dump of the timeline would likely be the best case as it has votes, answers, and comments over time.

Thomas Owens

Oh. An SO question. Not on Prog.

user41796

@RobertHarvey That "ha ha" part probably ruined the experiment. But I was going to look at total views; # of answers; vote splits on answers (timeline reveals that); and which answers got purged by mods

user55340

Though, @ThomasOwens just curious if you can see the timeline of (random recently deleted question) programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/225539/timeline

5:08 PM

@MichaelT 223 events. See below.

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT 404 for me. So I'm guessing no.

user41796

@ThomasOwens This was the Progs version: programmers.stackexchange.com/q/206073/53019

223 events
when toggle format	what		by	comment
Oct 15 '13 at 22:46	history	 deleted	 Robert Harvey♦	 via Vote
Oct 10 '13 at 7:47	history	 undeleted	 GSerg
Martin Smith
VonC
Adam Rackis
hugh
Oct 3 '13 at 19:13	history	 rollback	 animuson♦	 Rollback to Revision 19
Sep 7 '13 at 12:52	history	 deleted	 user7116
meagar
kapa
Arun P Johny
Wooble
marc_s
Jason Coco
LittleBobbyTables
Robert Longson
Soner Gönül	 via Vote
Aug 24 '13 at 9:35	 reopen	 vote	 Cody Gray
Aug 29 '13 at 3:00		 aged away		 aged away

user41796

What a cluster bomb of a question...

Q: The Anatomy of a Hot Question

@RobertHarvey deletion fixes only a symptom, real decease is well known...

27

Here is the traffic since The Workplace was created: These are the three questions that caused those huge spikes in traffic: Is it rude to leave an interview early if you have already made your decision? How should I deal with an employee who has slept with my wife? What is a 'friendly' ...

feature-request support voting community hot-questions

wonder what reason will be taken this time to decline a suggestion to cure...

regarding performance "expenses", worth noting that it can be totally avoided if "hotness correction" is limited to posts already picked by current algorithm. Take 100 questions and less than 1000 answers already selected as of now, adjust their score, reorder and feed top 3-to-26 into sidebar. That's it. O(1), performance "cost" is negligible — gnat 21 hours ago

O(1) gotta be hard to blame as too much hit on performance

user55340

5:15 PM

just takes a bigger 'hot question' to make SO types notice it... the meta effect on it doesn't help... the other part though is that its not new users from elsewhere showing up, but rather users within the existing community suddenly pilling on a bikeshead.

@gnat Tim Post seems to think that a solution is forthcoming, once he clears some other work first.

Mods evicting questions from the hot list seems like a sensible solution.

user41796

@RobertHarvey I think that quicker community protections would help too. Won't stop the lemming voting; but will decrease the trash they leave behind.

@RobertHarvey that other work is MSO/MSE split, gotta take 6-to-8 weeks. Call it a delaycline if you wish

user55340

@RobertHarvey argueably, it only fixes a symptom... and requires active moding which isn't always present on smaller sites.

@gnat They have anatomy? "The dorsal side is covered in leeches which is only shown halfway through it's life when it turns over and they all come up for rep."

5:18 PM

Tim, the issue I have in this case is that the only reason I had the wherewithal to go to the meta.so chat is because I'd been there before and figured there was a mod on there. Other users may not be as savvy, and then what? Expecting all community members to know which corner of the ever-growing SE network to visit to get immediate help is going to become less and less practical. At least a quick and easy fix like an @CM ping to call a CM to your chat or something otherwise universal. Maybe a Giant Red Button in chat saying "Help" that lights the CM-signal and calls them over. — jmac 12 hours ago

and damnit I lost 50 rep to a migration

mumble

@GlenH7 In my opinion, every question that is hotlisted should get immediate, automatic protection.

A: How can I perform a conditional join in mssql?

5

You have two join conditions and if either are true you want to commit a join - That's a boolean OR operation. You simply need to: RIGHT OUTER JOIN report ON (CONDITION1) OR (CONDITION2) Let's unravel that a moment though, what is condition 1 and what is condition 2? WHEN class.complete=0 TH...

knew that was going to get migrated

stupid dumb question

discussion feature-request protected-questions answer-quality

16

I noticed today that a request for protection came up due to the the large number of me-too answers on a trending question I answered recently. This got me thinking, since trending questions get far more attention than the average question, should questions that trend be automatically protected?...

user41796

5:19 PM

@JimmyHoffa enjoy the double rep from it. :-)

user55340

Still rather impressive:

user55340

To be completely certain - I don't know that you can even do an or of this nature because it switches the predicating table based on a conditional, so test it and let me know if SQL just complains at which point I'll delete this. The reason I don't know if you can is because as I say, this is really terrible SQL and as such I've never done such to my knowledge (I hope not anyway) — Jimmy Hoffa Jan 23 at 21:27

user55340

This appears to work, meaning no syntax errors. Much appreciated! And this is updating a legacy system, so I think the performance will be acceptable. — incircuitous Jan 23 at 22:40

user41796

@RobertHarvey I agree; but it seems that SE remains very sold on keeping things open for the blue moon answer

I've heard the arguments against, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times in Stack Overflow's entire history that someone like Alan Kay (having 1 rep) wandered in and offered an answer on a question.

John Resig did once. Everyone in the comments went zomg John Resig!

user55340

5:22 PM

Random question (not about random), if a P.SE question is tweeted, and has twitter special things in the text of the title, will that do twitter things? or do they get filtered out?

user55340

Which is better: a bunch of getters or 1 method with a selection string parameter? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/225791?atw=1 #design

Tweeted by StackProgrammer on January 28, 2014 at 4:32 PM

user41796

Agreed. I won't deny that they sometimes (okay, rarely!) happen, but the damage caused by that principle is disproportionate to the benefit gained.

user55340

(just an example tweet to see what the format is)

That is a hash tag tag?

user55340

Yep.

A: Why can only moderators protect questions less than 1 day old?

5:23 PM

10

I'm not so sure that "proactively" protecting questions is beneficial. You could be missing out on good answers from people who aren't already established on your site before you even run into any problems. Not every popular question will attract spam and crappy answers from new users and not ev...

user55340

Our tags -> hash tags in twitter conversion.

did I downvote it? you bet!

user55340

But if I had a question that was "How do you use @array in perl" would that ping array on twitter?

If you put #design on a twit, won't you get lumped in with...

user55340

@RobertHarvey Likely.

5:25 PM

@RobertHarvey that makes me wish to do some dependency injection

Doesn't seem all that useful to me. Then again, Twitter doesn't either.

@gnat I know you didn't just say that.

and patterns are definitely neat

user55340

@RobertHarvey he's all into inversion of control.

#ontop

user20683

#snowinginatlanta

user55340

5:31 PM

So, the trick now is to get @RobertHarvey to sign up for twitter with some programing related term and then can that in P.SE questions to get tweeted to bother him.

Not a chance.

user55340

You know you want to do that tweeting thing.

2

user55340

Btw, I recently got the "notable question" for the homework. 2.5k views. (whoo whoo! -- 10k views, here I come!) and the only meta.P.SE favorited question (25 users)

user55340

(because we all know that people are looking at meta badges all the time...)

user41796

5:45 PM

@MichaelT badges are badges; don't matter where from

user55340

@GlenH7 But people don't see the shiny meta badges often... and those upvote reps go to /dev/null (so sad)

user41796

probably just as well that meta votes don't count for squat.

user41796

especially not when you look at the disparity in MSO rep vs SO rep for a lot of users

I agree with Kate: "This would be a better answer if you explained how the code works." — Robert Harvey 46 mins ago

at Programmers, it's much easier...

Programmers is about conceptual questions answers are expected to explain things. Throwing code dumps instead of explanation is like copying code from IDE to whiteboard: it may look familiar and even sometimes be understandable, but it feels weird... just weird. Whiteboard doesn't have compiler — gnat Jan 23 at 2:54

user41796

@gnat If that MSO question is the worst problem SO has then SO is doing great

5:56 PM

-{SQL Certificate}- there I gave you a SQL certification, are you better at SQL now? A cert won't make you better, study and practice will. — Jimmy Hoffa 18 secs ago

user41796

@JimmyHoffa and now it has a close vote on it

Q: Stack Overflow technology makes me write bad answers

6:12 PM

126

Today I had some time and felt like writing a relatively good answer on Stack Overflow; explaining both the underlying mechanisms and good practices, unlike usual declarative answers in a "do that" style. It took me like an hour of time, $50 if I were free lance. It'll bring me nothing but 3-5 o...

discussion stackoverflow answer-quality

that seems to be their problem

user41796

"bad" is so judgemental

user41796

If it answers the question then how can it be bad?

@GlenH7 It won't answer future questions, a good comprehensive answer will halt a slew of future questions from ever being asked

user41796

@JimmyHoffa It was more in reference to SO answers that are essentially code only

user41796

As opposed to worthless questions asking for fast food restaurant hardware recommendations.

6:24 PM

@GlenH7 but of course!

user41796

I should probably disclose that I'm listening to Kanye West right now, so my cynicism is at a pretty high level.

@GlenH7 I do hope my answer which could have been "Here's the code" was explanatory enough as to aid future people trying to do strange joins who get confused about how to logically construct them

but if that question were asked on SO the code-only answer would have showed up before I had time to write that up

even for "My code bork! Halp!" questions that ask for code-only answers, there's such thing as an answer that's much better than just "FTFY!"

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Most / all of my SO rep comes from migrations

man I wish I had a cupcake tin... and some muffin mix.

or just blueberry muffins already made

user55340

Font recommendations?!

Q: Monospaced Comic Sans equivalent?

6:28 PM

helvetica

user55340

For comic-sans?!

user55340

-1

Unpopular opinion: I think SQL looks beautiful in Comic Sans. The only problem I have with the font, though, is that it is not mono-spaced. I've tried to do some searching on Google, but I couldn't find a good Comic Sans equivalent that is mono-spaced. Does anyone have a good font in mind?

ide source-code fonts

no. you get no recommendations for comic sans you plebeian.

user55340

@jozefg @amon do either of you know of an OO language that doesn't have a base Object class? I think its fairly standard now, but if one goes back in time, was that always true?

6:31 PM

try font used in this site about page — gnat 36 secs ago

@MichaelT try OO languages without classes, e.g. prototype-based OO. There could be multiple root prototypes

user55340

> Earlier versions of Comic Sans had an eye in the Euro sign. This was later removed because 'The EU was going to sue us over that'

2

@MichaelT I was thinking about this and the problem is "OO" language - if you're referring to a language that does Java/C# style OO I think they all do it like that, there are languages which have a different concept of OO or aren't totally focused on that which don't have that

user55340

( fontfeed.com/archives/… )

user55340

6:36 PM

@Ampt hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts

user55340

There are some intresting bits about "programming" fonts - in particular notable differences between I and l and 1 along with O and 0.

user41796

@MichaelT C++ doesn't

user55340

(I use "Source Code Pro" as a font)

Courier new is the only acceptable choice.

@MichaelT (I use "whatever font stuff is in" as a font)

user55340

6:39 PM

google.com/fonts/specimen/Source+Code+Pro

A: Can we say that Java or C# are strictly hierarchic language

@GlenH7 you want to throw down fisticuffs?!

user41796

shameless plug for up votes:

user41796

1

You could argue that the two languages are strictly hierarchical since they both require inheritance from a base Object class. But I'm not sure what that claim would buy you. They're object oriented languages and they use a base Object to facilitate some language features. Are there any obj...

@Ampt My source code exists as bits and bytes, it exists not as fonts! Pfah!

user41796

@Ampt I'm fine with folks up voting your answer too. Gets you closer to 3k. And where do you think your first up vote on that answer came from?

6:40 PM

@GlenH7 IT SHALL BE A BATTLE TO THE DEATH!

LOSER MAKES BLUEBERRY MUFFINS!

user55340

@GlenH7 you know, if you're the one that pushes him over 3k, he'll be just as pissed at you as the guy who gave him 1347 rep.

@MichaelT ugh. quit bringing it up.

@MichaelT The topic is also discussed in this Wikipedia article:

Top type

The top type in the type theory of mathematics, logic, and computer science, commonly abbreviated as top or by the down tack symbol (⊤), is the universal type—that type which contains every possible object in the type system of interest. The top type is sometimes called the universal supertype as all other types in any given type system are subtypes of top. It is in contrast with the bottom type, or the universal subtype, which is the type containing no members at all. Support in programming languages Several typed programming languages provide explicit support for the top type. Not...

@GlenH7 Sorry, no upvote from me, it misses a lot by just mentioning a single language and not speaking to the fact that duck typed languages have no need of a unified inheritance tree, or that prototypal OO is sort of also "OO" even if not the OO he's talking about, or mentioning SmallTalk's OO behaviour or others

user41796

@MichaelT - you forgot to turn off caps lock on the other keyboard

user55340

6:42 PM

Though, he'll have another go at it at 31337 rep... which is even more epic.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Care to edit that into my answer?

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Good point... Perl's OO has no "base class"... just "blessed things"

> [...] just "cursed things"

FTFY

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I'm fairly sure you could write a code filter that makes 'curse' an alias / rewrite to 'bless'

user41796

I'm still at a loss as to why he's asking about "strictly hierarchical" and how that makes a language conversation more constructive

6:43 PM

@MichaelT "Foo"->isa("UNIVERSAL") for all values of "Foo"

user55340

perldoc.perl.org/functions/bless.html

@GlenH7 I'm debating VTC... my critique tells me the guy's asking for a poll (list all the things that X) and or too broad (What formulations of OO exist? - That's a book on language design theory and history)

@GlenH7 He made up the term no less, and then he used the word "objective" which is a very old term that evolved into "object-oriented" - I'm really wondering where he's coming from in his experience to be asking this question

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - threw a bit more in there to help get away from the polling nature. I don't think it's a poll though. They just came across some term and are trying to figure out what it means.

@Ampt also no +1 for you because I have a hard time squaring "procedures" with "events" -> event based design is often far more associated with much higher level design styles than procedure (like actor or reactive etc) whereas procedural programming would be more apt to say everything is a "procedure" and they all call eachother with a globally shared memory space, but perhaps I'm wrong, that's just my understanding

user41796

@JimmyHoffa dang you're being tight with votes today...

user41796

6:50 PM

user41796

ok, I give up on that answer now. At least I'm only 130 rep from getting 20k

jozefg

@MichaelT C++ doesn't IIRC

7:06 PM

@MichaelT Source filters? Hell no, a simple function would work. There even is a module that does that … although Acme::Curse is the exact opposite of blessing

user55340

@amon Thats... beautiful.

user55340

@amon btw, did you happen to see that Reasonable Ruby talk I linked to the other day?

user55340

(even touches on some Scheme R6 stuff that FP types might be interested in)

user55340

The scheme bit - funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-class-environments.html

@GlenH7 ok I caved, I re-read the question a couple times and edited your answer

7:09 PM

@MichaelT Umm, I didn't take the time to watch that talk. Is it worth it (for someone who doesn't write Ruby)?

user55340

Its about how first class environments that have certain characteristics allow you to do WAY too much.

user55340

And the implications with writing closures. Having the information lets you look at other languages and see how they solved those problems.

@GlenH7 and now you get my +1

user55340

For example, Perl's Safe module lets you work with environments - but it made different design choices than Ruby. There's even some Objective C things in there about how it handles first class enviroments.

user55340

7:19 PM

@MichaelT Well, I'll take a look.

user55340

classnamer.com — Robert Harvey 1 min ago

Object-Oriented Software Construction

the more I study this book, the more I feel like it has answers to most of the object-oriented questions asked here. If I studied it 3-4 years ago, I'd probably have 2x-3x more rep at Programmers today...

Object-Oriented Software Construction is a book by Bertrand Meyer, widely considered a foundational text of object-oriented programming. The first edition was published in 1988; the second, extensively revised and expanded edition (more than 1300 pages), in 1997. Numerous translations are available including Dutch (first edition only), French (1+2), German (1), Italian (1), Japanese (1+2), Persian (1), Polish (2), Romanian (1), Russian (2), Serbian (2), and Spanish (2). The book has been cited thousands of times in computer science literature. The book won a Jolt award in 1994. Unless o...

user55340

Alas, not on Safari Books. I'll have to get a hard copy.

user55340

@amon btw, the site that is mentioned there (and I kind of linked to) is a another one of those 'good reads in CS' funcall.blogspot.com that even @JimmyHoffa might want to poke at. And its all functional (at least all I've read so far).

Your worth is not based on a test. My advice is to forget about it. You'll get plenty of bad advice in your life; the real test is sifting it out and ignoring it. — Robert Harvey 1 min ago

user55340

7:36 PM

@Ampt send some snow plows down to Atlanta.

user55340

user15026

@MichaelT It finally stopped snowing here, so I think I could spare a few... :P

user55340

@AshleyNunn Ampt works for a company that makes snow plows.

user55340

So next time you're driving next to one, hope that he got the testing on the wing plows working correctly.

user15026

@MichaelT Ah, so now I have someone to blame... :P

user55340

7:39 PM

Jan 23 at 20:12, by MichaelT

Oh, I can see it now... high speed wing plows doing a "flip the cars in the other lanes away" - like pinball paddles.

user15026

(I was shovelling yesterday, and TWO plows came and dumped in the driveway while I was working :( )

user55340

Jan 23 at 14:45, by Ampt

broke everything at work. Gonna be a long day.

@JimmyHoffa thats ok, someone already gave me the -1

you're welcome. our system randomly selected you to be the sole recipient of MORE SNOW!*

*terms and conditions may apply

user15026

@Ampt I do not like that lottery. :P

@AshleyNunn I don't think there would be much left of you to complain if one of those wing plows came down on you... they are heavy and sharp

that said, I'm sure it'll be fine. I tested it for at least 25 minutes or so.

user55340

7:48 PM

@Ampt Sending that one to Colorado?

user15026

@Ampt I feel so reassured!

@MichaelT wherever jimmy is....

user55340

@Ampt btw, got a new job for you - testing table saws.

user55340

psr

@Ampt The end zone of Giant Stadium.

7:49 PM

@MichaelT lol those seem really neat and I like the idea, but... still not trusting my fingers around one.

user15026

@MichaelT I like the idea, but I dont want to be the one who gets the one that fails

user55340

@AshleyNunn Thats right... you need a job too...

user15026

@MichaelT I do!

interesting... deleting answers removes that rep from your account... this could be useful!

user55340

@Ampt Yep. Its as if it was never there.

user55340

7:52 PM

It also deletes downvotes too... well, the rep loss from it.

classnamer.com

perfect. now if only it didn't use so many vowels

user20683

user55340

@Ampt clssnmr.cm ?

user20683

klassnamr

user20683

gotta be sufficiently hipster

7:56 PM

sup folks

not kids, that's what!

seriously... I am at work and it is my only escape

crying babies wear thin on you after a while

@maple_shaft If that were a bug report I'd mark it as "Working as intended"

Its not a bug, its a feature

but congrats nonetheless!

7:58 PM

ty

I actually came in to let peoples know that I got my Raspberry Pi working on Arch Linux finally

then I tried to overclock it and it is broken again

user15026

Yay for it working, boo for it not working anymore

@maple_shaft overclocking the pi is... tricky

it's very sensitive to clock changes

I did

arm_freq=1000

default is 700

changing the frequency isn't hard, getting it stable is

its not responding to putty anymore :)

8:01 PM

pretty sure it's just down to the manufacturing process and the tolerances of the die itself

try increasing your baud rate by 10/7?

I want to go home and see if my office burst into flames :)

@MichaelT - thanks for the David Attenborough rendering. Gave me a laugh :)

next time I will know not to mess with config.txt logged in as root over ssh

shutdown -r now

....

...

user55340

@Oded Heh. Every time I go out to close vote a poor question... nope, oded closed it already.

5 minutes later its still not connecting

8:03 PM

@maple_shaft this is why you can't have nice things

@MichaelT Poor Whiteboard - I am taking all the fun

that and you have a newborn.

user55340

@Oded Well, I'm out of close votes... so please continue to suck our fun of close votes away.

@Ampt If I wanted nice things I wouldnt have had a child

hehe

8:03 PM

instead my hobbies are now under $50

:)

user55340

@maple_shaft Diapers > $50?

@maple_shaft good call! College educations aren't cheap!

user55340

(see, if it was under $50, it could be considered a hobby... and... well...)

I like doing awesome things in abject poverty

user55340

Oh, how long until you get your kid an iDevice or android?

8:05 PM

relatively

@MichaelT a few weeks if my trending calculations are correct.

@MichaelT If he can learn to program a simple point and click adventure game in Scratch then I will give him an expensive toy like an iPad... which is what it is , a toy

user55340

amazon.com/Introductory-Calculus-For-Infants-Inouye/dp/…

user55340

Or for that matter, go through thinkgeek.com/geek-kids/newborn-infant and see how many times you chuckle and debate pulling out ye ole credit card?

I can't wait until he is older! I am not a newborn kind of person I have figured out

but...

He learned how to smile back at me a few days ago!

2

I have never been so proud

user55340

8:10 PM

When they're old enough to kind of talk with you, thats when it gets fun. Then the 3+ range and they start having big ideas... oh man...

user20683

I learned to talk at 7 months

user55340

(best part of being an uncle - can get away and no diaper duty)

user20683

full sentences by a year

@WorldEngineer And you were probably moderating forums before you were out of diapers

;-)

user20683

@maple_shaft Nah, I moderating the cat's tail.

8:12 PM

@MichaelT My sister in law said the same thing

user55340

I make a point of going down to visit about 1/month... though my niece (will be 4 in march) really wants me to visit more often.

I don't know what it is like to be an uncle, just the occasional distant cousin

I went straight to dadhood and that was a shock to my system

like jumping into a cold swimming pool

your over there easing into the shallow end slowly

user55340

@maple_shaft thinkgeek.com/product/eb1c

LMFAO!!! Pregomancy!

user55340

@maple_shaft Given I'm the eldest sibling, and single... if I do find the right woman the age range implies that the shock will not be one that starts at 0.

user55340

8:16 PM

It would be more like "guess what! You've got a teenage daughter now!"

user55340

@maple_shaft thinkgeek.com/product/ea15

That would be a shock and a half. There is a girl from my past that if she ever knocks on my door with an 11 year old then I am going into defcon mode

because that might have actually happened

@amon the thing is with duck typing you don't have to type annotate a method or declare a variable as some unified type, you just .quack() the instance and the type doesn't matter as long as it quacks. As for smalltalk it's even a little more confusing because types are less of a thing, you don't declare a type for a variable, you just say here's my variable and smalltalk says they're all objects - not through inheritance but just as a thing

and she was the type of person that would have been crazy enough to keep that a secret from me

and crazy enough to take a pin to a condom to get her way

user55340

@maple_shaft No issues from the past... more the "step daughter" A challenge here is finding... well, finding is an initial challenge. Silicon Valley was quite bad for the 'finding' aspect too (dating companies would actually bus women in from central valley).

8:19 PM

a practitioner of the dark arts

@amon while in smalltalk there are types, and they do have inheritance, that inheritance exists only as a means for composition, instances are all just objects, and each object supports some set of messages, you don't declare your instances type, and you don't (generally) annotate a method to require any given type

Egads... SV sounds like a pretty hellish place to live

user55340

When I moved out there, it was just after some census data was published. 77 single women between the ages of 20 and 29 for every 100 single men in the Palo Alto area.

user55340

The only area with more disparity was Alaska... but then Silicon Valley population > population of Alaska... so it makes it a bit more difficult.

user55340

Gender difference isn't bad here... but on the other hand when the personals ads include such features as "sober for N years" or "all my teeth"...

2

user20683

8:23 PM

I just sort of wandered into my relationship

user20683

has worked out so far

user15026

@MichaelT What charming qualities.

@JimmyHoffa duck typing is structural typing, where the “empty interface” is the top type. However, this has little to do with root classes – duck typing refers to only to the usage of the object, not to the existence of a node in an inheritance graph. What you say about Smalltalk sounds very much like any other dynamically typed OO language.

user55340

@AshleyNunn Yea. Its more the fact that someone feels to note that this is an attribute that is worth mentioning and would differate them from others.

user15026

@MichaelT Yeah....that says a lot.

8:26 PM

@amon Yeah it's similar in many ways, the point I'm just trying to get across is that whether or not there is a unified type simply doesn't matter in languages with type systems like that such as they do in other type systems

It speaks to the spirit of the question if not the letter

user55340

Now you've got me trying to poke at old phd comic blog posts to see if I can find the infographic.

@maple_shaft I had no idea how to properly uncle until I had a kid to practice with. Now I'm the awesome uncle.

@JimmyHoffa Thanks, the point now has gotten across to me. It seems I confused the existence of an unified type system (which most languages almost have) with its practical need in more flexible or dynamic languages.

Whoa. Whoa. I don't know what that was.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa give gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt a read. (Plain text one is better)

8:47 PM

@MichaelT Heh I read that before, good for another larf all the same, and followed the link to gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.hup which is pretty hilarious as well

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Ever read "Android's Dream"?

user55340

amazon.com/The-Androids-Dream-John-Scalzi/dp/0765348284

@MichaelT I'm mostly illiterate

I like picture books though

user55340

That "A human diplomat creates an interstellar incident when he kills an alien diplomat in a most…unusual…way." part...

user55340

Just read the first bit... even the first sentence. books.google.com/…

8:53 PM

Bizarre.

^-- to say the least

Pretty far stretch from a failed ed session to that book heh

user55340

(just scrolled through, the entire first chapter... which is the only spot that's really an issue (its just a setting up for the situation for the rest of the book) is in there)