The Nineteenth Byte - 2014-03-17

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12:09 AM

I need to get a doge wearing a bowtie...

12:59 AM

Oh, new Stack Exchange Data Explorer data is there.

1:21 AM

Yay! back to Doge!

1:35 AM

I think I discovered a really interesting earth projection :P i.imgur.com/0ECueDp.gif

1:55 AM

Can't get the thing to rotate due to earth's tilt

2:25 AM

@mniip What in the world?

Chris Jester-Young

2:42 AM

@TheDoctor SO just uses your Gravatar. So I guess Gravatar removed your icon, maybe for copyright infringement?

That is why my Gravatars are pictures I took. Nobody could claim the work as theirs (and I will (semi-)aggressively take down anybody using my icons).

(Exception: I do have a Stack Overflow unicorn Gravatar too. But I don't use that very much any more.) My usual two icons are 1. my face (that you see currently), and 2. my Beachlands gorse picture. I can't imagine anyone wanting to use 1, but I do consider 2 my signature too and I don't want someone else using it.

I took this stance because my workmate has a Fry icon that he doesn't own (obviously, since he didn't create Futurama), and somebody "stole" the icon, but he can't do anything about it because, well, it's not his copyright.

Damn, the earth map looks really different from an unbiased cube view

I had mine for ages, everywhere. It's my own work, as well.

@mniip Yeah, same here.

undergroundmonorail

Mine's very much cut out from a webcomic that someone else drew. :P

3:39 AM

Perhaps I should make my own, but I did not steal this image, it comes from wikimedia (wait, did I cite it? I'm not sure)

2 hours later…

5:21 AM

What's up

2 hours later…

7:43 AM

Right now? I've got a ceiling above me.

And above that we have the roof

Then the sky

And probably some clouds

And as we go farther up, we reach out into space.

At which point, how should I define up?

If it is during the day, then the sun would be up.

eventually, the galactic core might be up.

And some other galaxies.

...

5 hours later…

12:54 PM

codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/24353/… was closed unnecessarily fast!

1:22 PM

It looks like the specs were changed significantly 10 hours after posting. Either I should downvote the question, or all of the answers that don't follow your new specs. Which do you propose?

@TheDoctor In case I needed to tag you

1:57 PM

@TheDoctor Or about 9 hours too slow.

If you're going to complain about the quality of questions, you could put a bit more effort into the ones you write, and pass them through the sandbox.

2

Wow harsh

Someone needs some coffee

2:13 PM

@Rusher Really? Have you seen codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/24300/194 ?

@PaterTaylor Do I have to read the entire question, all 10 comments, the stuff you linked to in the comments, and etc. to understand what your point was?

The question looks solid, but maybe it was poor before some edit?

OH!

He claimed that nobody else has posted a good quality question recently....

That is just plain rude

codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/24392/18487 Needs marked as community wiki

2 hours later…

3:59 PM

Oh noes! The rep cap!

4:31 PM

First World problem

First World problem is a slang term used to refer to issues in First World nations that are complained about only because of the absence of more pressing concerns. The term was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online in November 2012. The term "First World problem" arose in 1995 first used by alt-rock singer Matthew Good from the Matthew Good Band, but gained recognition as an internet meme beginning in 2005, particularly on social networking sites like Twitter (where it became a popular hashtag). The term is used to minimize complaints about trivial issues by shaming the complainer. UNICEF ...

Jonathan Van Matre

+1 to codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/24392/18487 needing community wiki

Chris Jester-Young

4:50 PM

@JonathanVanMatre Agree. (Done.)

@TheDoctor Personally I hate popularity contests, so if I weren't a mod (where votes are instantly binding), I'd send close votes to most of them. :-P

But as it stands, I can't do that, so I withhold my votes. ;-)

Jonathan Van Matre

5:10 PM

@ChrisJester-Young I also just submitted this tips thread for Julia. I CWed my answer but I don't have the ability to CW the question. codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/24407/…

Chris Jester-Young

@JonathanVanMatre Done. :-)

Jonathan Van Matre

Thank you, sir

Chris Jester-Young

:-D

5:41 PM

popularity-contest is the lazy question writers tag. Can't be bothered to write a tight spec? Popularity contest! Can't think of anything particularly challenging? Trivial task with a popularity-contest tag!

4

Throw in some fancy words and a misleading title and with polularity-contest you can be sure that there'll be enough around who upvote your question.

@Gareth Re: "Trivial task with a popularity-contest tag!"
I understand the "loose spec" argument, but what does question difficulty have to do with popularity contests?

@Gareth Many questions are like that. However, I only tag as popularity-contest when I want creative solutions; that is what it is for.

Jonathan Van Matre

5:59 PM

Difficulty can be relative to the tool chosen. A site full of nothing but hard questions would be a site where no one ever takes a challenge as an opportunity to learn the rudiments of a new language.

Right. There's a difference between an easy question and a bad question. Trivial tasks can sometimes be interesting, they're just a lot harder to write to make them interesting. Especially for new users, finding the "accepted" format for questions can be challenging at first.

That's true for SE sites in general, but particularly here, where some of the "normal" rules are interpreted different ways.

Here's a question I think should have an obvious answer when posting, yet doesn't because of lax rules and ambiguous tags. I have a puzzle to post. What tag do I use? code-golf? fastest-code? popularity-contest?

On StackOverflow, if I have a question about thread pooling in Java, I might tag a question with Java, but it really has no bearing on what answers I expect to get.

Here, each tag will bag me a completely different set of answers, and there are no guidelines for picking and choosing any of them

So obviously, new people come here and post arguably bad questions, and then people complain in chat about how many bad questions are posted

Jonathan Van Matre

That's definitely a candidate for the FAQ: choosing your question tag 101

Chris Jester-Young

6:49 PM

I am waiting for someone to create Sandbox 11 before I post my proposed question. ;-)

Right now Sandbox 10 already has nearly 30 posts.

I want to propose reviving my CipherSaber question, which @gnibbler really missed when it got nuked off of SO. (He had some really nice solutions for that, too.)

7:11 PM

@ChrisJester-Young I'm pretty sure you have the rep to create a question in Meta ;P

Chris Jester-Young

@PeterTaylor Yes, but it's offset by my personal laziness. ;-)

Is @undergroundmonorail at all related to sim city?

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher Is that relating to a sandbox post? Or something else altogether?

I was referring to the person in here named undergroundmonorail

Chris Jester-Young

Hahaha, nice.

7:21 PM

It's kind of a long shot. I'm sure there are many popular uses of the phrase outside of that decade old game I used to play. But you never know...

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher You never know, but to me, it brings London Underground to mind.

Jonathan Van Matre

I figured it was a play on the Underground Railroad

which version of SC has it?

Haha. Monorails are not popular here, at least in Texas. SC4 had underground monorails. I can't remember if they were present in the vanilla game or added in the NAM mod pack.

Although I think that going underground automatically converted it to a Subway now that I think about it

Jonathan Van Matre

ah, hello fellow Texan

Hey, ya'll!

Jonathan Van Matre

7:27 PM

yeah, i never played SC4. i think 3 was the last version i touched.

haha, yee-haw

the inter-terminal trams at DFW are a kind of crude take on a monorail

that's the only Texas example I can think of. not much point to one with our terrain and our huge tracts of land

Yea, I've been on the ones at DFW. Six Flags has them too.

Except I don't know if Six Flags counts?

Does anyone here play Diablo 3?

And if so, are you planning to buy Reaper of Souls?

Chris Jester-Young

Yes, I pre-ordered.

I can't wait for the game to come out. :-)

@ChrisJester-Young Have you been playing a lot? I just got back into it. When I left, it was basically a "max this, this, and this" type of game. I was wondering if it was still the same

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher The game has changed a lot since patch 2.0.1. They added a new Paragon system, Loot 2.0, etc.

I guess I can drop 20 dollars then. I got really bored of the old loot system because after the only measurement of wealth was how much gold you had.

Jonathan Van Matre

7:47 PM

Somehow I never got into Diablo

I think I just prefer my RPGs non-multiplayer. No MMO has ever got its talons into me either

Chris Jester-Young

@JonathanVanMatre I like Diablo, but I like Torchlight a lot too.

@JonathanVanMatre Did you know that Doorknob is from Texas too? At least if their userinfo is to be believed.

(I'm not from Texas, so sorry to ruin your party. ;-))

Jonathan Van Matre

haha, three Texans is a party

My latest gaming obsession was Antichamber. Puzzle game with non-Euclidan geometry? Sold!

Chris Jester-Young

Ooof. Non-Euclidean geometry => brainwarp.

I really enjoyed playing Torchlight and Torchlight II especially (neither of these are MMOs, BTW).

But now that I'm on a Mac, and there's no Mac version of Torchlight II, I'm slightly sad.

I do have Boot Camp installed on my Mac, so I can boot into Windows to play, I suppose.

Jonathan Van Matre

hmm, I will give Torchlight a look. I've seen it on Steam

Chris Jester-Young

8:02 PM

Yeah, Torchlight is probably my #1 most-played game on Steam.

Jonathan Van Matre

Most of the good games do come to Mac eventually. It just....takes a while

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/12671560/patch-201-now-live-2-25-2014 <-- 2.0.1 ChangeLog.

Jonathan Van Matre

Even Antichamber isn't officially out yet for Mac, but I got it from Humble Bundle

Chris Jester-Young

@JonathanVanMatre Humble Bundle is a great source for multiplatform games, yes.

Jonathan Van Matre

that seems to be a new fad - need beta testers and funding for your Mac port? put it on Humble and get both

not that AC had bugs....ran smooth for me beginning to end

Chris Jester-Young

8:09 PM

@JonathanVanMatre Likewise, I was quite pleased with the Mac and Linux versions of Torchlight.

(Linux version was available exclusively via Humble Bundle. I'm playing the Mac version via Steam.)

8:24 PM

@Rusher The highest voted question on our site is 'Print 2014'. The second highest voted question on our site is 'Print 42'. The third highest voted question on our site is an excuse for people to take the piss out of beginners. Is that what we want representing the best of our site? If the popularity contest tag did not exist, neither would any of those questions because they'd've been closed straight away, and the place would be much better off for it.

@Quincunx All the questions on this site involve creativity. A question is created and then answers are created for it. Popularity contest is not about how creative you are, it's about how many people you can make laugh. Perhaps we should get rid of all the other tags, just have popularity-contest questions and change our name to chucklefest.stackexchange.com.

@Gareth I get what you mean now. Previously, I thought you meant "Trivial questions are created with the popularity-contest tag." Now, I understand that you said "Trivial question remain open because of the populairty-contest tag."

The key difference is that "remain open" is the fault of moderators, not the question asker

My earlier point was that poor code-golf challenge are equally likely to be created, but they are moderated differently such that poor questions are closed.

@Rusher No we get trivial stuff for all tags, but with any tag other than popularity contest it will probably be too easy to have a objective winning criterion so it'll get closed for that reason.

@Rusher Yeah, that's pretty much the way I see it.

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher No, you misunderstand the role of moderators.

Not moderators

Moderation

As in, the group moderation that the site as a whole performs

The croud-sourced kind

Sorry, I did say moderators earlier

Chris Jester-Young

@Rusher Right, yes, high-rep users should be bolder in closing bad questions.

@Rusher Yeah, and the SE philosophy is that moderators should be as hands-off as possible, only performing tasks that high-rep users cannot perform.

That way, there are (in theory) no tyrants in the system, except the tyranny of the majority (of high-rep users).

Jonathan Van Matre

8:34 PM

FWIW, the top-voted questions being trivial is not a phenomenon special to PPCG

for example, these are the top DBA questions: What's the difference between a temp table and table variable in SQL Server?
How do I list all databases and tables using psql?
Why is Database Administration so hard?
Why shouldn't we allow NULLs?

Half the top questions on English are only on top because they have something to do with sex or gender.

Chris Jester-Young

@JonathanVanMatre The long tail. :-P

Jonathan Van Matre

Haha, urite

I don't regard all popularity-contests as evil, though. I think it is a valid way to objectively decide a contest, and given a well-specified question it can lead to good, interesting code.

Given a well-specified question is the crux of that, and I think Rusher is correct that were our standards for popcons at the same level as for other questions, we'd still have them but they'd be less shameful to mention.

Chris Jester-Young

@JonathanVanMatre True, but it does feel like a cop-out to me, often.

@JonathanVanMatre True.

The wiki page for popularity-contest says that good questions encourage creativity. Only a psychologist could really be the judge of that. Programmers are probably as far away from being psychologists as it gets. Just shorten the wiki to "most votes wins", and then abstract out what makes challenge good or bad and apply it to ALL tags. That way, a good challenge is a good challenge regardless of what tag was stamped on it.

Jonathan Van Matre

8:50 PM

@ChrisJester-Young No doubt, that happens. I have definitely seen instances where the tag was the rug someone swept their incomplete spec under.

OTOH, I have seen some that I think do answer yes to the standard StackExchange question: "Does this make the Internet better?"

Does anyone else agree that a good challenge is tag independant?

independent*

Thank you Google for spellcheck

Jonathan Van Matre

Even code trolling, at the top of its game, can produce some brilliant parody that is genuinely instructive.

Sorry to switch topics, but I'm trying to create this challenge and I've really been stuck at this wall for over a day now

I've populated a 2d array with animals, and every iteration they move. If they land on the same square, they play rock-paper-scissors to see who dies

The problem it, I don't know how to move them all simulataneously

They can't move one by one, because I need to check for collisions after everyone has had a chance to move

Copy them into a temporary array which supports multiple animals per field

And then resolve the fight and copy them back

I tried allowing multiple animals by making every cell a list, then collapsing the list after each iteration

the problem is, Java doesn't like ArrayList<Animal>[][]

Chris Jester-Young

9:01 PM

@Rusher But you can have List<List<List<Animal>>>.

@Gareth That's why you need to format your questions so that trivial solutions are not valid answers. It's not hard to set up the criteria so that they don't work.

Chris Jester-Young

Don't mix arrays and generics. :-)

Yea, but some of the cells are empty. What do I put in an empty spot in the list?

A new animal called "Empty"?

An empty list?

:-)

TimWolla you are brilliant

Chris Jester-Young

9:02 PM

Or, you can have List<List<List<Optional<Animal>>>>.

(where Optional is from Guava)

@ChrisJester-Young Starts looking like lisp

Chris Jester-Young

@TimWolla Lulz.

/me is a Schemer.

Jonathan Van Matre

They all move at random?

Nah

Bears move in circles, stones never move (and they always roll Rock), and lions are kind of diagonal and roll randomly

Code Golfs challenge will be to implement the Wolf class

I'll add all submissions to a single project and let them compete on a large grid

Jonathan Van Matre

ah, cool

9:04 PM

highest survival rate after so many iterations wins

@Rusher Roll Rock? Not Rock 'n' Roll?

@TimWolla The stones stay in one spot. They never roll. Unless they are The Rolling Stones.

Jonathan Van Matre

I am reminded of an old MacOS game where by night you did this psychic combat that was a glorified version of rock paper scissors, and by day you went around the town playing politics to try to gain a strategic edge

I hope this isn't too similar to the BattleBots challenge

Jonathan Van Matre

Ah, this is it: Trust & Betrayal, the Legacy of Siboot forums.somethingawful.com/…

It was very innovative at the time, but didn't sell well at all.

9:07 PM

lol 68 page instruction manual

Jonathan Van Matre

Well, most of that was a novella providing back story

I do like backstory

Maybe I'll use my previous challenges to provide a backstory

9:46 PM

@TimWolla Thanks again. I now have collapsible animal rock-paper-scissor arenas! All that's left is to actually write up the challenge without actually including ALL of the code...

@Rusher You're welcome!

And somehow convince people that a competition purely in Java is fun... like that will ever happen

You helped me with my question as well.

I'm actually going to sandbox this one just because I don't think it will be popular as a Java only competition

Which one?

oh minesweeper

Jonathan Van Matre

could it be extended to all JVM languages at least?

9:48 PM

I don't know. I'm going to provide a class and say "fill in the blanks"

I used enums so it would be super obvious how to move left, up, down, right

and how to roll rock, paper, scissors

All you have to do is fill in the Move and Attack functions for the Wolf class

Anyway... I'll save the rest for sandbox. I'm sure people will have good suggestions

So it'll work with everything that is compatible to Java, probably

That's good. If I can call "game.populate(TimWolla_Wolf.class, 50);" then I'll be happy.

I'll scatter all the TimWolla's into the wild and watch them be devoured by my far superior (and hive-minded) wolves

Oh, I don't do JVM actually.

Jonathan Van Matre

The list of JVM-compatible languages has gotten pretty lengthy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

including for some reason, 4 different Schemes

Or to specify: I don't like to do JVM. This one was pretty fun actually: codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/22869/3396

9:57 PM

I can't think of a way to pit submissions against one another without forcing everyone into a single language

WOOOOO 5:00

Time to play Diablo 3

Jonathan Van Matre

Oh this is awesome learnxinyminutes.com/docs/fa-ir/brainfuck

Brainfuck explained, in Farsi

1 hour later…

11:09 PM

@JonathanVanMatre When I worked in minigames I once pitched a puzzle game based on non-Euclidean geometry. Provisional title: Surface of Genus 2.

@ChrisJester-Young I'm bolder than I was, but if I let my heart rule my head I'd close-vote about 90% of questions.

@JonathanVanMatre In addition to questions being well-specified, it's definitely preferable that they take more than 30 seconds to knock out an answer.

Chris Jester-Young

@PeterTaylor That's not necessarily a bad thing. ;-)

@JonathanVanMatre Scheme is remarkably difficult to implement well on managed platforms, and some compromises must be made one way or the other. Different JVM Scheme implementations make different compromises.

I want to write an invokedynamic-based one, that will hopefully be fast while still allowing me to implement Scheme to the full (including continuations and tail calls, neither of which are natively supported by the JVM).

@Rusher Specify an IO format and use pipes. See codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2357/…

Chris Jester-Young

11:28 PM

or socketpairs ;-)

Jonathan Van Matre

Named Pipes! :D

Chris Jester-Young

Unix-domain sockets! ;-)))

(That's the named version of socketpairs. :-P)

Jonathan Van Matre

@PeterTaylor I would play that based on premise and title alone.

11:43 PM

Help! codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/24353/…

Chris Jester-Young

@TheDoctor What kind of help do you need?

Almost reopened!

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The Nineteenth Byte

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