Is there a specific time of day (please specify timezone you're in to convert from) when the site is most active? Or is there a good time relative to that (directly before, etc) to ask?
I will often find that I want more answers - I don't even care about views, but I want a variety of approaches...
Fun fact: Puns used to bee a way of showing ones linguistic prowess, but slowly their comedy value out weighed that and turns them in groan machines (no not, those groans machines)
@dot_Sp0T Lots and lots of typing, I suppose. :) And a little less reliance on the use of pictograms to represent the different functions of the computer.
@MichaelKjörling I'd say adding this to your question, especially the pictogram part, would probably improve answers and steer them into something more akin to that
right now it seems people are focusing heavily on sociologic measures (something that will drive commercial development but not necessarily enough)
Ok nvm, I just remembered that people already preorder the next iPhone
You've got a point, though. I'll give that some thought. I've been awfully busy both yesterday actually as well as today, so perhaps am not at my best as far as phrasing questions go.
@MichaelKjörling yeah; well it always was about taking dragons apart and describing the cuts of meat you get; because asking for recipes is opinion-based from 200 miles against the wind
"How to Slice your Dragon" might have been a snappier question title. The problem is that you need a snappy title to drive traffic to reading and answering. I guess most people answer the title rather than reading the actual question (since they assume the title is a summary of the main question (and can't be bothered to read))
True. I freely admit that I added a humorous answer. I couldn't really resist it, even though I got stamped on by a moderator. Sometimes the loss of rep points is worth a bit of humour.
I do end up deleting quite a few answers I create across the SE sites when they've not been well received. Puts me in my place at any rate.
I saw recently that the Kingkiller Chronicles will be made into a TV series. Somehow I can't really see it coming out too well. Some things are best not adapted.
The production company for Kingkiller is New Regency. They've made some nice films, but they're not so hot on the TV side (Malcolm in the Middle, The Bernie Mac Show, Roswell). The last fantasy movie they've given us was "Legend" (The one with Tom Cruise, not the David Bowie one).
RE user6760's question about Big Brother. I'm not so sure that people's general privacy would be invaded while the vast majority (well, male) members of the security forces will be doing nothing except watching people having sex.
@MichaelKjörling Because I just watched Disney's Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last night with my daughter, I have to disagree. That is an excellent movie, and, in my opinion, the single best fantasy adaption to either tv or movie.
@kingledion I feared as much already. See: At this age your daughter will be mightily impressed by the kitties fwur as she might have exclaimed already. The issue there is that the effects and digital afterprocessing of the movie will do their parts to make your daughter overlook the issues in plot and the generally at-most mediocre representation of the books
if you're talking about the movie I think you are, I thought it was pretty faithful to the book. The book wasn't too good, but that's a different matter
@dot_Sp0T Ack! Say it ain't so! No movie has been as true to spirit of the book as the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I'm saying this as someone who read the entire series to the girl while she was still in utero.
@DaaaahWhoosh While the book is a bit simplistic, it is easy to read and understand for kids, and is chock full of Christian allegory, if you are into that
I did watch Eragon, though I did not read the books. The movie was fine, although not that memorable.
I don't think I've thought about it since I watched it so many years ago.
@kingledion the movie was the worst movie based on a book I've ever had the mispleasure to have watched; the books themselves are a cross of StarWars and LotR
@kingledion according to my google-fu the first book came out in 2003, and at least when the second book was due I started finding them bland (that was in 2005/6 when I was 12/13) so I don't know. I don't think age has necessarily to do with writing skill
Let's say my terrestrial planet has a stable circumbinary orbit around two suns similar to the Kepler-47 system, in the habitable zone, with an orbit similar to Kepler-47c. The challenge here is that I'm trying to set it up similarly to Venus, with a retrograde rotation (probably from an ancient ...
E.g. in Switzerland where I live we have a strong currency, thus we have, what is perceived by others as, high wages/income. What we also have is comparatively high prices, which in turn equals out the income situation. Now we're a relatively small country, and the surrounding countries have weaker currencies (aka the Euro); so two things emerge: People driving into another country to do shopping (stuff in Germany/France is cheaper than here, due to their economy..)
@dot_Sp0T If you can solve income inequality (and by association, solving poverty) then the logistics network will work itself out because the poor/remote people not currently served will have enough money/value to make it worth the investment to get a logistics network out to them.
AND People from Germany, France, Italy, Austria working in Switzerland but living in their own country, thus earning comparatively more money than if they worked in their own country
btw if anyone got a pointer (harhar I am so funny) on how I could make my answer to Michael KJörlings (shame on me if I got it wrong again) GUI question clearer and easier on the eye I'd be delighted
@AndyD273 yes we do, we recently even passed a motion about forcing companies to consider in-land-workforce before hiring experts from other countries
About 50% or more of the people I work with at the office are not from this country
When I worked in another town about 40% travelled over the border every day to come to work
that happens in a lot of places, though I guess over country borders is worse than over state borders
I know my dad worked in Pennsylvania while we lived in West Virginia, though I'm not sure if that's because it was cheaper or because he didn't want to move
The issue is that big companies (and there's a huge number of them in Switzerland as we're an tech nation..) will hire the cheapest people and lay off others in Switzerland
There's the situation of laying off people that are not needed anymore which is just fine; but there's also banks and similar companies laying off and relocating whole branches of development just to make a small net-gain that will be negated due to lost knowledge
@dot_Sp0T The exact same thing happens here in the US. Offshoring of jobs is one way. A more pernicious approach is the use of cheaper H1B visa holders (H1B is a "I work here and plan to emigrate" visa) to replace higher paid native tech workers. Disney and several other large corps have done this.
@dot_Sp0T Employee turn-over and lost institutional knowledge never seems to make it into the beancounter's calculations.
@Green nope, because the people making these decisions do not work for the companies long enough to be caught in the fallout; they have their yearly goals to save so and so many dollares and muchos dollares can be saved by laying off people, after all they're just assets
Worse still, the corp requires the employee to train their replacement as a condition of their severance package. Don't train your replacement, get zero money.
@dot_Sp0T Mmm, right. Also I'd argue that a sentence should convey an actual meaning; it has to make sense. If I have to read it multiple times and I'm still confused, it's gibberish, not English.
@AndyD273 Agreed. What's really fun is to start weight training and aiming for 3000 calories a day. It doesn't matter what it is, stuff it in your face.
it sounds like too much effort... Finding a local gym, getting accustomed to the rules and people there, trying to do your own thing while there's other people around... people in general.. people
@dot_Sp0T My objective is to get as strong as my schedule and genes will allow. For me, all those obstacles you listed are merely inconviences, not deal breakers.
@DaaaahWhoosh I've enjoyed and seen good results from the Starting Strength program.
@dot_Sp0T I know what you mean. I aim to be at the gym when everyone else isn't.
Starting Strength is the most bullshit-free program I've seen. You don't see many books/programs that frequently reference research literature (though I wish the author would include the actual references instead of just alluding to them) instead of "I heard this exercise platitude once so it must be true!"
My oldest friend started doing OOP in Java, then started C++ at work, then moved on to C. After doing the latter for a while his girlfriend asked for his help on her dissertation done in C++. He then complained that he had a mini existential crisis because he'd forgotten how to static object. And was evidently useless.
@NexTerren I'm reading this C++ so that the Python bindings will hopefully make sense. The package I want to use "supports" Python but there are no examples and the original code is C++, therefore all the examples are in C++ too.
I've been using AngularJS, thinking about making the jump to Angular 2 after some self study, but figured I should take a step back in case there's something better out there. Was hoping somebody would have working-knowledge-level advice.
@dot_Sp0T Honestly "hobby work, and small projects in my non-developer group at work." I don't want to learn 3 frameworks to that end, just want something clean, and multipurpose. Nothing specialized.
@dot_Sp0T I disagree. So far in my both private and professional careers, literally everything I've wanted to code backend-side has been doable just fine with C#. There might be a language with some more advantages, but the advantages aren't significant enough to justify the switching costs. Technologies can be multipurpose.
@DaaaahWhoosh It's... it's a JavaScript manipulation/simplification library. It's not really a replacement for something like Ember, or React, or AngularJS.
How many JavaScript questions can be answered with "use jQuery"?
Looking at JavaScript questions, all too often the answer seems to be "use jQuery," sometimes in as few words. We can end up with answers which feel more like plugs getting the asker to try jQuery (the Silver Bullet) than a concise...
@NexTerren The size of Javascript frameworks is one of the things that bugs me, especially considering you have to download them every damn time you load the page.
Yeah, you can manage it on the web server side to enforce caching. I learned that when the development web server was caching my (custom) javascript files without telling me, or my debugger!
Which was unfortunate for a day's of productivity!
After finals next week I have a bunch of math-y projects to work on, including that one. I did want to ask what was, you know, the purpose of the generator? Once you have all these stars, what do you do with them?
@dot_Sp0T AngularJS uses many custom JS files. Not large ones, but it does use them. One controller.js for each view.html, and we like separating the data-layer (in our cases calling an API) in a separate folder.
@dot_Sp0T Well you need to account for advance data validation, and compiling a form into a single REST request. Seems like you'd just be making messy HTML at that point, and stuffing bits of business logic into your view.
@NexTerren wrapped in the emotions of a million strangers.
@kingledion After staring at C++ all day, python examples are welcome.
However, I've just found that the 3.3 version of the package I want doesn't really support Python, but there's a beta 4.0 version (that I'll need to build myself) that hopefully includes better Python support.
...and Visual Studio takes forever to download and install.
@Green What are you using Visual Studio for? I haven't played around with it a lot, but PyCharm seems to be a better editor for python than Visual Studio is: jetbrains.com/pycharm
@James COBOL is for business logic, accounts payable, schtuff like that. There's also no evolutionary algorithm, neural network, musculoskeletal or physics libraries in COBOL.
Any single of those libraries represents many man-decades of work which I have neither time nor inclination to reimplement (and I'd likely do it wrong.)
@James Dude. You've spent at least three hours talking to me face-to-face and many more hours over text. You know precisely how out of my god-damned mind I am. :)
I found a page that says there are 6 different fundamental tasks the hand can do. I figure that if an alien hand can do all those things then that's sufficient capability/potential to get that species into orbit. After all, we can do those six tasks and we're in space.
@dot_Sp0T The simulations will be non-graphical but the output will certainly be something that can be rendered.
No sense in having an alien hand that you can't see.
@dot_Sp0T Pretty much. I generate a generation of individuals, test them for fitness, the most fit individuals breed and survive while the less fit individuals die.
@dot_Sp0T Normally, I'd say yes but given the degree and novelty of this work, I'm not going to automatically open source the code.
I have it in the back of my head that I might want to publish the results....In short, I don't know yet.
@dot_Sp0T I'm still working out which parts of the simulation I want to be run by which products. Physics, muscle and bones will be done in OpenSim (SimTK). Rendering/visualization in Blender. Neural Networks/muscle control using PyBrain.
@dot_Sp0T Yep, hopefully I'll get farther than glorified ideas with this project. I'm very much in the habit of having an awesome idea, figuring out how to do it then moving on to something else after I've figured out the general idea of how I'd do it.
Would the world freeze up with two month long nights? Would it burn in the day? How would animal life adapt to such long cycles? Plant life?
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor