@Gryphon well, if you ever want to move into a more civilized area come to Switzerland. After 10-12 hours on a bicycle you've probably reached the borders of the country
@dot_Sp0T Yeah, I've got a friend in Spain. He was a bit flabbergasted by the fact that we have a provincial park in northern Ontario that's about 3 times the size of Spain.
@dot_Sp0T It is one of our official languages, but it's primarily spoken in Quebec and parts of New Brunswick. In Ontario, we have to take a semester of it in High School, as well as all through Elementary School, but what you learn if you don't do more voluntarily will get you through a sentence or two at best, and that very slowly.
It's honestly quicker for me to use Google Translate for anything that isn't extremely simple.
On a completely unrelated note to anything we've been talking about, it really irks me when I see a question that's absolutely terrible, closed for obvious reasons, no research effort, bad formatting, and then see it has 2-3 upvotes.
@dot_Sp0T True, but it isn't just random accountless people or spoof accounts. Even if you don't need much rep, two people still thought that was a good question.
To change the topic once again, our Save the Robot answer on Mother Meta is now the second highest one for a single site (after Super User, which probably actually have a bigger grievance than we do, and have way more traffic).
@Gryphon I'm trying to remember if I was given a link to some place that they talked about it, or if I was just told by Monica. It was a long time ago.
@Secespitus if you use it like that, I mostly star questions that could be useful when I finally get around to continue working on one setting idea or another; so I don't accidentally write a duplicate question
@AndyD273 it's impressive, though flawed when applying to humans - humans have the concept of language and interaction, they could explain each other why something is bad
@dot_Sp0T Sure sure, if time/company culture allows it. It's more of a reminder that just because something didn't work in the past does not mean that it might not be ok now, so maybe old ideas should be dug up once in a while to see if maybe they fit better now.
@Hosch250 Well the monkeys did explain it to the newbies, by dragging them off the ladder and beating them. It might not even be a true story. Think of it as a parable used to explain complex ideas in a simple way. I posted it to illustrate that @dot_Sp0T should keep pursuing the banana, even though I was telling him that I was told it wasn't a good one, because maybe things are different now.
If the person at the top says it isn't good, half the time they know what they are talking about, and half the time they just don't want you to have it. Half of the second half they want it for themselves.
I've found the following picture online. It is about the moral/paradigm behind consistent behavior.
Click to enlarge.
The image text says
A group of scientists placed 5 monkeys in a cage and in the middle, a ladder with bananas on the top.
Every time a monkey went up the ladder, the...
@Hosch250 But conditions change over time. We work with a lot of paper in my office, and the process for handling it is kind of dumb. I wrote a concept program that would cut down on a lot of the paper and proposed it to the boss. He said that it was interesting, but too slow compared to handling stuff on paper, and wouldn't save the company money. Now in a few years the technology and software will have improved, so I'm always keeping the idea in the back of my mind.
the monkeys could not possibly communicate the notion of a banana being on top of the ladder because they did not have any shared experience to draw upon for explanation
If so, no. Until one day I come across something new that would make my proposal faster than shuffling paper. Then we can stop murdering so many trees.
Basically data PDFs get generated and then printed out. One PDF might contain details for dozens (or hundreds) of jobs. It gets sorted, divided, and processed. And when it is done it gets scanned back into the computer to go in the archive. I've streamlined as many of those steps as I could so far. My idea was to do the sorting, dividing, and processing on the computer itself and skip the whole printing/rescanning phase.
@dot_Sp0T Oh, I don't know if this ever went anywhere, but it kind of goes along with your question/idea:
TL;DR Does it make sense to establish (or at least test) new review queues at sites other than Stack Overflow?
As far a I understand, answer to above question is not quite straightforward:
This is all pretty much tailored to the needs of Stack Overflow... Not that this precludes using it els...
@AndyD273 maybe the paper archives are a legal req?
i.e. think of one of my favourite scifi dystopian subjects: Only things printed on physical paper are undeniably true, records are kept in books in huge vaults, because data that is only on computers can be altered without any evidence of it
@dot_Sp0T No paper archives. It gets scanned into an archive folder on the computer (which meets the legal requirement), and then the paper gets put through an industrial shredder and recycled.
@AndyD273 machine learning for new questions, would be great - though at least on here it would have to be trained by moderators mostly, or at least have a very high rep requirement; as gaining rep on here is quite easy by blasting answers to bad qs...
@dot_Sp0T Yeah, trying to keep paper copies for 3 years worth of work would be crazy pants. Also probably a fire hazard.
We used to have a very large room full of filing cabinets for a while until we got the scanning process up and running. We didn't have as many clients back then either.
@dot_Sp0T It could cut down on those people who keep making new accounts to avoid question bans that stresses @Aify out so much.
@Gryphon DO learn another language. For English speakers, Spanish is probably the easiest to learn.
Easy parts: Pronounced as written, simple accent marks, lots of cognates (words that sound nearly identical and have the same meaning as their English counterparts), simple sentence structure, recognizable verbs.
Hard parts: Conjugation (6 conjugations per verb, per tense), Direct Object Pronouns (Lo, la, los, las, me, te, etc.), and a slightly reorganized sentence structure.
2. Business (You know you can make extra this way, right? German on a resume, besides being impressive, can, e.g, make you an extra 4% of your salary.)
3. It's fun and cool
4. Doesn't take time, just dedication/motivation (just spend 20 min/day. In the car. Or in bed. Or cooking.)
I will say that the "Pronounced as written" is attractive, working to teach a youngling to read. English has had too many people messing with it for too long. We need English 2.0. Probably call it American so as to not confuse it with English 1.0.
English 2.0: Imagine English, but we kept all the good parts and removed all the not good parts. Like verbs for negation, they are no here anyomore. Just use a positive and add not. Like 'This food-item is not good' or 'Have you seen Tim? The look not healthy'. English 2.0, now in your places where you buy stuff!
I don't know about removing words per se, but as someone who is trying to teach his kids to read, I'd start by simplifying the alphabet and spelling rules.
For instance, get rid of the letter C, and just use the letter K or the letter S.
I don't know how often I've had to klarify a word. "No, ce...
As a moderator at Psychology & Neuroscience for over 6 years (a site with particularly stringent requirements on 'how to ask'), I have formed a pretty good impression of the 'typical lifetime' of questions asked by new users.
The original question almost always requires elaboration which is requ...
This is a feature request that addresses the problem (at least on Math.SE) that low-quality questions are often quick-shot answered while the closing votes are still piling up. This often makes several quality problems out of one, given that there has been so little time for composing an answer.
...
There has to be a balance between the ability of newbies to ask questions of gurus and the problem of newbie accounts being used to spaminate SO.
On one hand, we see that experienced users frequently ignore newcomers by looking at reputation and accept rate. If this happens often enough to a que...
Lately I've noticed that in some groups the quality of the questions have dropped significantly or are in general pretty low. A lot of these questions are closed, and the amount of closed questions are becoming rather annoying. Most of these questions have one thing in common; they are asked by n...
everything on this site is about peers, the reviewing process, the voting process, the closing/opening process.. but not approving new questions, why?
it makes no sense in the concept
Stackexchange is not an inclusive place as they claim, you can't do anything until you've asked a few well-received questions / answers. Yet it does not want to have mechanisms to allow new users starting off with definitely well-going questions
Also 3 hours until you won't see me again for a long time on here
@dot_Sp0T One of those I linked to has a good explanation; There are a lot of question sites like Quora, Experts Exchange, etc, and closing questions before they even get asked would be a huge downside for new users, and as big as it is, SE still needs a steady stream of fresh blood in order to survive. We can't live in a walled garden. So we have the first time question queue, and the other queues to allow users to police bad questions. And what we have does work, even if it is not "efficient"
@AndyD273 honestly, putting questions on hold for the first 30 or so minutes after they have been asked wouldn't put any dent in the question statistics on any page on the network, probably not even SO itself. There are sites like gamedev where most questions don't even get answers for plenty time and they still have a huge influx
@James The evils of efficiency for efficiencies sake, especially when applied to certain problems, and relating to the idea of preemptively putting new questions on hold in order to give them a chance to get feedback before exposing them to the unwashed masses who might post an answer to a bad question.
@Aify That'd be an interesting functionality to have until it gained sentience and used all of our ideas and destroyed the planet...and probably several other planets...sorry Venus.
@Aify Please write and train this, then make a chatroom where it posts anything it thinks is bad, so we can all band together and close it (if it is bad, that is).
Imagine Europe around 1810. Imagine Netherlands. Imagine that it is the colonial age. Imagine also that the colonies are mostly under open rebellion.
Imagine that the region of Netherlands (imagine only) and the surrounding states already have the following technologies:
1) Telegraph (telephone...
I will say that the "Pronounced as written" is attractive, working to teach a youngling to read. English has had too many people messing with it for too long. We need English 2.0. Probably call it American so as to not confuse it with English 1.0.
@Hosch250 Oh, that discussion. Unfortunately, we haven't succeeded in changing English yet, so I'll keep editing for grammar according to the current rules until the grammar revolution actually occurs.
@Gryphon I fear it'll be like switching America over to Metric. Doesn't matter how good it is, there is a lot of momentum to overcome. For my part I use a tape measure with both metric and standard units, and just use whichever side makes the most sense for what I'm measuring.
@Hosch250 The problem is partial units. I'm laying tile at home, and they are 50 cm long. If I need a piece 225 mm long, it's hard to do that when measuring in full tiles.
I could make all sorts of half smart comments about those temperatures but you're actually used to dealing in Fahrenheit so they wouldn't make a lot of sense.
Though it does make the point of "why do we need celsius?" Fahrenheit is made for human comfort, with 0 being uncomfortably cold, and 100 being uncomfortably hot. And Kelvin is good for science, when actual numbers are important. The only thing celsius is good for is if you want to know if your tea is hot or solid.
@Hosch250 All I can every really remember about the Fahrenheit scale is that -40 is the same as -40 C and a body temperature over 108 should be lethal.
@Hosch250 I know, and that's why it's based around water. When they were calibrating their thermometers that they had just blown out of glass and filled with mercury, they'd go out on a very cold quiet night, put the unmarked thermometer in water, and wait for it to start to freeze. As soon as they heard the first sound of the ice forming they'd etch the thermometer.
To get the upper range they'd put it in water and heat it, make a mark at the point where it boils. From there you just keep dividing the space between the two points in half until you have all the degrees.
Actually, Fahrenheit is, apparently, originally based on the temperature of the human body and the freezing point of water with 2^8 degrees between them.
Plus whatever time it takes for them to go pick their brats up from school (delayed CR by about 30 minutes, but we knew because one of the mods wrote the program to calculate it).
@AndyD273 I had to read that twice before I didn't see "because people boil at different...", I've been looking at too much stuff about the unpretty effects of vacuum the last couple of days.
@Hosch250 In theory you can survive a couple of minutes of hard vacuum before it does too much harm but it's extremely painful and unpleasant immediately.