The Sphinx's Lair

Hmm, why does the star on Emrakul's message looks different?:o

Alconja

@Ankoganit Assuming it's some sort of self-mod-star...

@Alconja That's a thing?:O

Wait, the history of that message says "pinned by Emrakul", so it must be something like that...

Mmm, nice

user189275

6:11 AM

@Ankoganit Your recent wordplay puzzle is fun and good . How did you manage to find the words, though?

@ArbitraryKangaroo Thanks. Python ;D

user189275

@Ankoganit Oooh. How did you manage to get so many words to perform brute search?

I've a wordlist with 435k words that I made by union-ing three or four wordlists available online

user189275

@Ankoganit How long it took to perform the search ?

6:27 AM

@ArbitraryKangaroo Umm..not much, like <1s for each digit IIRC

8:28 AM

Re: "Click here to toggle grid" at Square number of sequences: @Rubio, you are a MathJax ManiaC!

Happen to see the mathjax puzzles? (not many users have) Care to add one sometime?

I've been doing MathJax for like 4 days now. I'm just good at locating useful bits from other people's postings and putting them together to do what I want.

I wanted to show those answerers' results in something other than the plaintext digit dumps they did, but doing anything with fg/bg color in a Spoilers tag makes the color bleed through. I figured there had to be a way to prevent that. Turns out there isn't, but I did find the "click here" toggle bit in another post, and put that to good use to sidestep the issue :)

oh. man. what have you done. now i'm looking at those puzzles and discovering more fun that can be done with MathJax. @humn you monster.

Who's scaring whom? The \toggle command you found is just what many puzzlers here have wanted to incorporate. Talk about interactive! Especially when combined with state tracking. (Variables can be tricky but are certainly possible.)

...

Hiya Jonathan, does your superdoku solver work on small grids? (Thinking of basing a puzzle on a small one.)

8:46 AM

I just read through the first 4 or so puzzles that came up under the MathJax tag and I'm now deeply and tragically aware that I've barely scratched the surface on MathJax. Hehe... Seems like an interesting environment to get to know, and powerful in the right hands.

at least not all of those puzzles revolve around \def tricks

but it is really is great to have a programming language built into each post

I think testing your own puzzle to see if it works is the hardest part of puzzle creation.

ANyone seen this? puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/45345/…

The link won't open on my laptop showing some sort of error...

@Sid Yes. I wondered if it was written especially to be obfuscated (a 256-entry look-up table would be slicker).

@Sid And seeing as it's a programming puzzle, should we say that it belongs at PPCG and not here?

Not sure, I am not a member of PPCG and haven't seen any of their stuff...

8:52 AM

Not an expert but have seen many of them say that the P for "Puzzling" in PPCG is vestigial.

puzzling.stackexchange.com/users/31614/mushroom-bang-boom - I have a weird feeling that this guy is a sockpuppet of some user here... Maybe I am wrong. But that question sounds like the guy is an established user who is pretty familiar with everyone around here...

Are they you? (open question to whoever reads this)

No kidding about test-solving being the hardest part, @Alenanno! And when test-running results in revisions, it becomes the hardest part of solving many puzzles that never even get presented. But at least it's never a race against some of the sprint-solvers around here.

@Techidiot Is the rhyme tag really necessary for your puzzle? Given, that you state that you could use other tags which might be relevant to your question..

@Sid-Rhyme only due to the fact that the lines rhyme.

@humn yeah the revision part is horrible, I hope I don't have to do much of it.

9:02 AM

@Techidiot Nothing to do with the answer?

No. Nothing to do with the answer.

@Techidiot Just the riddle to solve in it??

"Follow the rhyme and reach your destination!" is for a reason. :)

I see that an RSS feed of questions posted to the main Puzzling.SE has been set up here and is on by default. How do I switch it off, please?

9:19 AM

@RosieF I don't think you can...

Mods can, you can't lol

If I understood what you're talking about

are you referring to the drop-down announcements?

9:43 AM

@Alenanno Yes. They are even more intrusive than the "Sphinx" feed, because they stay on screen even if you scroll the transcript.

@RosieF There is a "remove" button when they come out. :P

But I guess that's not enough for you.

@Alenanno A "remove" button? Where? I see a "dismiss" button at the right-hand end of the drop-down (with the RSS logo as a background). But that just dismisses that particular drop-down.

@RosieF Ah yes, that's what I meant.

@Alenanno You're correct. It's annoying to choose: either move hand from keyboard to mouse to dismiss the drop-down, or have it obscure three or four lines of transcript.

the tradeoff is having every new puzzle appear as a (large) chatbot message, or not seeing new postings in here at all

9:50 AM

@Alenanno I know many sites have RSS feeds, but IME those feeds are off by default. Rather than on by default and not turn-off-able.

@RosieF Well, if it was a regular user, you could use the "ignore this user" trick. :P

Personally, I'd turn them off, or allow them to post only some questions.

10:29 AM

I just realized that you can't start a bounty of lower value than the ones the question had before.... I guess dcfyi will also get +500, lol.

I can't decide if I want my answer here to be right, or not.

10:47 AM

Lol. Messed up puzzle :D

No use of pattern anywhere I guess :D

Yeah that was kinda odd.

Given the error, I didn't actually expect that to be the right answer - but OP accepted it, so I guess that was the intended solution.

Yeah. Indeed. I am still lurking in 4 sheets of excel with "AABCEHMUH" :D

user189275

11:28 AM

@LukasRotter Just saying, why are you giving away most of your rep ?

@ArbitraryKangaroo Because it's fun :P

@ArbitraryKangaroo I think he said previously that he doesn't really care about rep, and just wants to keep enough to be able to get around without undue restrictions.

Or, well, ^ that^ :)

@Rubio The things that you said are also correct, I obviously wouldn't do this if I cared about rep. My minimum is 125, though. (so in that sense I do care about it :(( )

@dcfyj Are you here?

user189275

@LukasRotter Ah, good thing.

11:41 AM

BTW, I think TBB finally improved the quality of questions he posts. (at least it looks like it)

@LukasRotter TBB?

@Rubio TheBitByte (he changed his username)