The Whiteboard

Michel

9:01 PM

@YannisRizos Eeyup

Just came here to see if it's normal here too. Or was something special to Programmers =)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Michel make no mistake, this SE site is special...

Michel

@JimmyHoffa Every SE (besides SO) is nice! =) people really enjoy help others and are nice to newcomers =)

user55340

@JimmyHoffa every site is special in its own way.

Michel

SO is more like a Jungle o.O

user55340

Within SO, one can even find sub communities - its shear size makes that scale an issue. The people who inhabit the perl tag may never glance over at Javascript tag to answer a question... just the perl tag feed. And that makes communities form around each tag.

user55340

9:04 PM

When seen in that light, SO isn't one site, but rather dozens of SE's about programming.

user55340

Its just that it isn't practical to make "javascript.stackoverflow.com" and "perl.stackoverflow.com" and every other tag... especially when things can have multiple tags that cross between them.

Jimmy Hoffa

i.e. ASP.NET and C#

Michel

I need to spend sometime to farm rep on the others SE sites... spend too much time on Arqade (I like the place, lot's of post of bacon in the chat =P).

user55340

So the jungle nature of it is seen to a new person when looking at it... and trying to see it in its entirety... the entire forest (or jungle) rather than the individual groups of trees within.

user55340

Programmers is a much smaller community than SO... I'm fairly certain that we have fewer people answering questions on programmers than some of the hot tag followers on SO.

user55340

9:09 PM

The answers that we seek tend to not be short - and the 'fastest gun in the west' problem of SO doesn't appear here as much as a result. Not always... there are the quick answer questions here too, but its not an epidemic of "the only way to get rep"

user55340

(rough comparison, Java tag on SO moves about 8x faster than P.SE - this appears to be true for each of the big language tags)

Michel

Following the SE site you can see the order of traffic on the sites

user55340

We've got our own set of problems here - the biggest one is that the nature of the questions often get close to the line of "you are asking for everyone's opinion" rather than "you are asking a for a solution to a problem".

Michel

Yeah, it's hard to do questions in programmers. Usually you get problems of logic or compatibility, that goes on SO. Here is more theoretical (not that is only it)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Michel exactly, and as soon as you're not looking for a solution to a logic bug, it get's blurry whether your question is subjective or not

that's our biggest problem, that and people presume this is supposed to be a place for asking subjective questions

user55340

9:16 PM

Subjective is ok... subjective where every answer is correct is not so ok.

Jimmy Hoffa

but after getting over that, lots of great high level questions here where you can take your time and write comprehensive answers

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa This is the place to ask subjective questions. Just not crappy questions, subjective or otherwise.

Seriously, a lot of people interpret subjective as anything goes.

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos subjectiveISH

Michel

Good Subjective, Bad Subjective

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos that's because objective vs subjective is a boolean

@Michel you'll fit right in :P

@YannisRizos garbage questions are subjective, they just aren't good subjective

lots of people think subjective allowed here = all subjective allowed here

Michel

9:18 PM

@JimmyHoffa I saw some >.<

user55340

The other set of problematic questions are the overly broad... "I want to do AI programming..."

Jimmy Hoffa

haha that was some ridiculous ambition the other day from that guy.. "I like robots, I want to invent AI before I've graduated college, where do I start?"

user55340

My philosophy is behind every overly broad question or polling there is a real problem and a real question trying to get out... if the time could just be taken to get it articulated properly.

Jimmy Hoffa

I don't necessarily agree, a lot of times the person is missing too much context on the subject matter to have an actual question; they don't know enough to know what they need to ask

user55340

-4

Q: I would like to create an AI for a robot that can compete with human drivers. Where to start?

Ok here is the full gist, I am a sophmore at my school and part of the FRC robotics team there. Through the entry level C++ class I have a beginning knowledge of programming. I would like to create a robot that can compete autonomously in a capable manner with human drivers by my senior year, an...

Michel

9:23 PM

Jimmy Hoffa

Or rather, they don't know enough for any question to be helpful to them

Michel

The first question that I saw in Programmers was this one.

70

Q: When should you call yourself a senior developer?

Possible Duplicate: Whats the difference between Entry Level/Jr/Sr developers? I'm curious what senior developer means because apparently the definition doesn't mean what I thought it would. I keep seeing these teens at 22-23 years old who call themselves senior X developer or senior Y...

job-title job-definition senior-developer

Jimmy Hoffa

Lots of times people just need to google and do a bit of research before they even have a problem they need solved, but instead they ask a huge question. That AI question is perfect example @MichaelT, there's no piece of info that would actually benefit him

Michel

My problems with Google is that sometimes I stuck in some search term that is the wrong one.

Yannis Rizos

> Destroying user 84893

There goes another one...

Jimmy Hoffa

9:28 PM

@YannisRizos ?

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa Spammer.

...or, you know, I'm randomly deleting accounts.

user55340

@YannisRizos How about 35276 next?

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT Can't, there's a rep restriction on mod deletions. I could suspend though.

user55340

As long as there are no side effects or if he doesn't interact with the global state... he probably wouldn't notice for awhile...

Jimmy Hoffa

You're just jealous because my number's lower

user55340

9:32 PM

sigh and no merging with Goma anymore...

Yannis Rizos

btw @JimmyHoffa did I thank you for volunteering to be my guinea pig every time a new mod feature is implemented?

2

Michel

I need to go now... see you guys later =)

user55340

@Michel Take care.

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos not in traditional greek fashion with a bottle of ouzo, no.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa You are behind by nearly 1000 rep now...

user55340

9:35 PM

(me? jealous? nope.)

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I reversed the race, I'm beating you back to 0.

user55340

You mean I need to downvote 5k answers now? That would be rivaling gnat's votes.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT see, I'm not just winning, but by 1 metric gnat

user55340

Btw, last page of "rep change by month" - programmers.stackexchange.com/…

Jimmy Hoffa

haha

user55340

9:39 PM

-36! Go gnat!

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT 50 rep bounty few days ago.

user55340

Ahh... well... His downvote rates are still fairly impressive.

Jimmy Hoffa

10:27 PM

Mods can't remove votes?

Wait that's nonsense, you could close then reopen a Q

that would flush the close votes

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa And re-open and close, to clear pending re-open votes. Lots of nonsensical re-open votes lately...

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos I got a declined flag claiming you couldn't clear close votes on:

2

Q: Software failure due to maintenance oversights example/case study

I'm doing some investigation into the role of maintenance in software development and the use of metrics within the development cycle. What I am asking is for a point in the right direction or possibly a direct example in which there has been software failures due to the oversight of maintenanc...

maintenance software metrics failure

But you can, what gives?

One of you mods owes me one helpful flag

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa Fact that we can use it doesn't mean we should, it's more of a hack really.

Jimmy Hoffa

...says the php programmer

Jimmy Hoffa

10:50 PM

and an equally cryptic response to my suggestion of speaking his native language:

Thanks, at the moment I think I will use 2 collums of user table to save first id and last id on list table, so I overwrite if the max is reached, so I consult DB whit orderby DESC and get the last view. But I will get trouble when 2 users make your register at same time and get same id range. — Lucas Rodrigues Sena 14 mins ago

@YannisRizos what is SE's stance/process regarding on asking questions in a language other than english? Could somebody go post a question on SO in greek and just let it ride until another greek person answered?

or would it be closed?

user20683

@JimmyHoffa there are site proposals for "SO in whatever"

user20683

there's also the Language sites

user55340

I cannot say with certainty... I would write it once in the site standard (English) and then put a '-----' and then in the native tongue. This way, if someone wants to fix the translation, they can... but it isn't even less comprehensible for the site standard.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I'm just curious if the site has an actual rule about other languages, are they not allowed?

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa SE sites are English only. If a good Samaritan translates the post to English, so be it. The only exceptions are some of the languages sites, but even there when people post in the site's language, someone always adds an English version later on. In the past, chat rooms in languages other than English were tolerated, but I'm not so sure about the current status. There were a couple of instances where non English chat rooms were obliterated.

Jimmy Hoffa

10:55 PM

ah interesting

Wonder why, guessing it has to do with incapability to moderate effectively across many languages within resource constraints

user20683

@JimmyHoffa that and the tech origins of the network where English is the lingua franca

Jimmy Hoffa

True, you really can't get very far in software if you don't know english

user55340

Moderation is key. I've seen else-site where something was said nicely in English but very rudely in another language - when people who could read the rude text read it they were quite upset, but most people didn't know why.

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer The "SO in <whatever language>" proposals are stuck. SE started trying to make the platform multi-lingual in anticipation of the Turkish SO proposal (that was growing fast), but... it's low priority and no actual progress has been made, although the Turkish SO proposal has qualified for beta months ago...

Jimmy Hoffa

Interesting that turkish is the one that went somewhere

user55340

10:59 PM

I would have expected russian...

Jimmy Hoffa

I would have expected portuguese for brazilians or hindi to make it before that

user55340

English is the common language in India... I've spoken to two indians who didn't have a common dialect native - just english.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Northern europeans speak english by and large, russian's it's quite common too, I would say it's less common in the more 3rd world countries

Ah yeah with the colonial history (and the fantastical language fragmentation) I could see that

user55340

One of India's big advantages over other eastern outsourcing locations is that they speak English (granted, not always the easiest for an American to understand... but it is English and not Chinese).

Jimmy Hoffa

makes sense

Yannis Rizos

11:06 PM

@MichaelT Moderation is indeed the biggest problem with non English chat rooms and comments, and I imagine it would be with non English SE sites when (if?) they launch. Trying to grok whether a conversation turned rude or not via Google translate is a recipe for failure... And of course you could argue that non English sites will have moderators that are native speakers of <whatever>, but sites don't get moderators immediately and even after they do, SE needs to intervene once in a while.

user20683

If SE were the size of say Epic Games (not huge but not small) they'd be able to fully do localization

user20683

okay maybe a bit bigger

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