Is this user just confused? They posted what looks like a question an hour ago, then deleted it, and have now posted a question that looks like an answer to the previous question. If it's spam, I'm not clear on what it is they're promoting.
I don't really know which one I prefer, they're both pretty descriptive. So good aliases I guess ;) Thanks for making the PR btw, it kept tripping people up.
@Yatin Probably copypasta from some spam site. Could probably give a text blurb of it a google and get a hit somewhere, but I don't think it's worth hunting down.
@SmokeDetector tpu- There is strong evidence to suggest that this user is a troll. I am not flagging the question as it appears to be a genuine question. I will keep an eye on them though.
Nah, if you mentioned the MS search, it should be fine. There's obviously something off about that username and related posts. I'm interested in knowing how that goes, so could you share that info when the flag is handled?
@ppwater By the way, I noticed you changed your feedback from tp to tpuhere. If there's already a tpu on the post, then the user will be blacklisted, and so you don't need to change your feedback in that case.
@SmokeDetector This user is a known troll, who is banned network-wide for multiple years. Another (suspended) network account for this user is here. This post was detected by SmokeDetector. There's a record of about 90 posts on metasmoke. As a ban evasion account, I suggest this account be suspended for 365 days and deleted/destroyed.
@ppwater None of the websites look like spam. The question looks on topic, ralph-waldo-emerson is a genuine person who said "Lose yourself in nature and find peace"...
@Yatin I think ppwater's point is that you're watching the entire pattern, not just the link, which I think is true. It's different from a report where the quoted part is added as a comment.
> Potentially bad ip for hostname in body, potentially bad ip for hostname in title ---------- Potentially bad ip for hostname in body - model.fit suspicious IP address 34.102.136.180 Potentially bad ip for hostname in title - model.fit suspicious IP address 34.102.136.180
@Yatin That pattern looks like it's already caught by Potentially bad keyword in answer and Potentially bad keyword in body; append -force if you really want to do that.
That's weird. They posted the same spam again, to the same question, under the same account. It's especially weird because I had already destroyed their associated SO account for being a spammer. That should have fed them into SpamRam.
@cigien To be frank, I think the golfing in specialized languages designed expressly for golfing is a silly and pointless waste of time. It isn't fun to me at all. But golfing in actual languages is fun and occasionally even instructive. I like to do x86 asm because (A) there aren't a lot of submissions using it, (B) it is a real contender for certain challenges, like numeric ones, and I love to see it beat the golfing-specific languages, and (C) it gives me a chance to write asm!
I don't get much call to write x86 assembly in the real-world.
Aside from the golfing-specific languages, the only thing that really bothers me is exploiting undefined behavior in C. For example, most Code Golf submissions in C will actually target the GCC compiler specifically (Code Golf considers the "environment"/implementation to be relevant for the submission, not the language), and take advantage of the fact that GCC on x86 will automatically return the value of the first parameter if the function lacks a 'return" statement. I think that's bananas.
@cigien Yes, technically/officially you do, but unofficially, everyone knows that languages are compared, too, in terms of how well they do on certain challenges. Besides, since I think the golfing specific languages are dumb wastes of time, I really like to beat them with an actual, useful language. :-)
@CodyGray I believe part of the fun of playing code golf is actually learning something about your language. Doing stuff that you know should never be done doesn't actually cause you to learn anything...
Yeah, the languages designed for code-golfing aren't much fun to me, though the designing of those languages is interesting, and obviously some people like them.
It's been talked about before, but a way to add an optional comment would be useful. So would being able to approve multiple PRs in one "approve" command. So like !!/approve 111 112 113, etc
Ugh. It's... Really late here. My brain's not capable of explaining correctly, but the requested keyword to be watched included "1 TP, no hits on SE search" which wouldn't be ideal, I don't think
@CodyGray If you make a watch like this -- sdc watch cody\.gray "because reasons" --, one might expect the quoted text to be a reason for watching the link, but instead everything following the watch gets, well, watched.
@CodyGray This was some years ago, but I got pinged by my boss that students were passing one of my tests without writing any code in the function they were supposed to fill out. Took a bit of head scratching before I figured it out :p
@CodyGray To not write tests where sometimes the first parameter was what they needed to return :p In general, I stay away from bool returning functions now. Explaining to students that they're going to get points taken away from them because their code has UB is not fun.
@cigien Oh. Uh... that seems like a very bad test. Unless it's really for the first week of C 101, where you introduce "return"...
Wait, what? First off, you should explain to students from the very beginning that points will be deducted for UB. The compiler deducts points for it, so why shouldn't you?
Second, what's special about bool-returning functions with respect to UB?
Yeah, it's for intro programming classes. And we didn't use to enforce that warnings were turned on (i had to push to get that to be the norm), which meant that the students sincerely didn't know they had UB often. And bool returning functions simply means that there's a higher chance they'll pass tests by random UB chance.
(1) Yes! Ugh, warnings should be on by default. For a programming class, -Werror should be mandatory. (2) Warnings have nothing in particular to do with UB... You aren't guaranteed to get a warning in the case of UB. In fact, in many cases, you won't see anything!
1) Absolutely, and we pretty much do that now. 2) In cases where the compiler doesn't warn, we actually have a policy that we don't dock points. I'm not entirely opposed to the policy; it's not really a great thing to enforce in intro classes. We make it clear that "bad things can happen even if they get full points on a test" :) and that it will be enforced in later classes.
@cigien I don't really get that policy. That would only make sense if it was designed for a class where you weren't teaching anything and students were just expected/allowed to figure it out for themselves. But that's a horrible way to learn C, and an even more horrible way to teach a class. Presumably, you're actually teaching the students the correct way to do it, so there should be no issues deducting points when they do it the incorrect way.
The only "edge" case becomes, they figured out a fully correct way to do it that is different from what was shown in class. In that case, sure, they should get full credit. But a not-fully-correct way that is different? No. Maybe partial credit. Maybe. If I was feeling generous.
I'm with you in principle. Note that I'm a grad student, and so while I can push for things, I don't really get to make the decisions. Even the boss has constraints that are not programming related at all; such as needing to have the class average gpa be a certain amount, etc. Makes implementing some of the more idealistic goals tricky.
@CodyGray Indeed. Unfortunately, in a system where, at least for non-tenured professors, the primary metric used is student satisfaction, things like "quality of education" tend to take a back seat. I'm not happy about this, but I've learned not to let it get to me too much.
I've been instructor-of-record twice now. And student satisfaction was definitely a factor. Though I wasn't told details of the evaluation, I was just told I'd done well enough to get to do it again :p
Maybe it varies across Unis, I don't really know about ones other than the one I go to.
