The Skunk Works

HDE 226868

12:00 AM

AMELIA made its way into a question: engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1834/…

Stack Exchange

1:09 AM

0

Q: Should we have a "soft-question" tag?

I saw this question yesterday, and though, "Hey, maybe it could use a soft-question tag." However, I voted to close it, and it was closed (reasons explained in comments below the question). There may be potential uses for the tag in the future, though I can't think of good examples. Should we ha...

user41796

1:36 AM

@jhabbott Awwww yeah! Close that repz gapz!

jhabbott

yeah - go for it :) We need more good answers and questions

user41796

I'm very sensitive to community pile-ons to questions. But we've just seen one of our most egregious "do the work for me questions" that I've seen in a while. Please review and down vote if you feel appropriate.

user41796

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Q: Contracting out a TRNEdit/TRNSED build: can I do this?

Didn't have any luck on Reddit so I am going to ask here. I have a nascent company and we are looking into building small greenhouses that are 100% powered (heating, cooling, irrigation) by renewable energy sources.These little greenhouses are going to be awesome but I want to know now in the pr...

civil-engineering structures design

jhabbott

Yeah I saw that but didn't have a clue what it was on about

user41796

Something about the "I'm too lazy to study this fancy-shmancy stuff myself, y'all go do the hard work for me instead" that really irked me

jhabbott

1:42 AM

oh I thought it was more like is it possible to hire people in this field? type thing. but I've never heard of any of those acronyms. Pretty daft question really - I mean if it's a thing that's used commercially, then there will be people who can do it, and certainly some of them will be contractors, so sure, go hire someone!

What's the convention for multiple answers to the same question? is it bad? or good/better to have two different possible answers each of which might be the right solution for the OP?

user41796

I can't say that the question will continue to exist after the next 12 hours elapse... :-)

user41796

@jhabbott So long as they are different approaches, then that's fine

user41796

Repeats of essentially the same answer aren't a good thing though

jhabbott

engineering.stackexchange.com/a/1839/95 and engineering.stackexchange.com/a/1838/95

hazzey

@HDE226868 I'm confused about your meta question... I have seen a string of "this question has an update" and everything changes......

That must be an active post

HDE 226868

1:56 AM

@hazzey Take it as it is now.

hazzey

Got it.

Does anyone else have issues with being logged into the meta site? I can only get logged in if I add "https://"

HDE 226868

@hazzey Not me.

hazzey

This is not happening on two computers. I think that it has to do with logging on to the main site with "https:"

I have httpseverywhere to thank for that.

Trevor Archibald

I just fixed like 6 typos in an answer without using the keyboard once

I'm a wizard

jhabbott

@TrevorArchibald how did you do that?

hazzey

2:05 AM

All autocorrect?

Trevor Archibald

@jhabbott Chrome's spellchecker lets you right-click for suggestions, like most do I think

jhabbott

clickety click! Just make sure you don't incorrectify any English spellings to American ones! :P

Trevor Archibald

I don't think it marks those out as misspellings though

No, it does not.

jhabbott

'tires' instead of 'tyres' is the worst offender since 'tires' has a separate meaning. I don't mind the lack of our stupid 'u' characters though in words like 'colour', or using 'z' instead of 's' though, they actually make some sense.

also 'check' instead of 'cheque' - even though that's another weird french-influenced word.

Trevor Archibald

Neither of those get underlined either, nor does aluminium.

jhabbott

2:14 AM

I don't like how words like aluminium are stupified - Americans aren't stupid... well many are, but many also aren't. I'd say make it even harder and step up the game :D

Trevor Archibald

It's not that, we just don't got time for that

We're clearing out the unnecessary syllables

jhabbott

There's a massive stereotype here that all Americans are stupid, but all the ones I know are actually very clever, so I'm biased the other way I guess.

The whole George W Bush thing was a deal clincher I think.

we were like "that country's fucked... should we send in aid?"

Trevor Archibald

And your decision was to send in Tony Blair?

jhabbott

I don't think he came across as stupid per se... just a massive obsequious prick

I stopped following politics a few years back... seriously I just gave up on the whole thing. It's not going to work out, we need a new system,

we need a "something better"

we should get Steve Martin (Roxanne) to come up with 20 "something betters" - shouldn't be too hard.

Trevor Archibald

Hey so do we!

jhabbott

2:21 AM

You've got Lesterland

I honestly don't even know what we've got these days, though most likely pompous pricks fucking the people over, lining their own pockets, and slagging each other off in dick-waving competitions in the house of commons instead of sorting things out.

HDE 226868

. . . you just described the entire United States Congress, too.

jhabbott

It's like that scene in Crocodile Dundee where he's only seen TV once before, so he turns on the TV and sees "I love Lucy" playing and says "yup... that's what I saw". Whenever I check-in every few years to see what's going on in the world of politics... yup, same old crap.

I should put more work in to define society 2.0, it's quite a meaty task though

Air

5:03 AM

@jhabbott I'm not sure what you mean by "stupified" - the "aluminum" spelling pre-dates the "aluminium" spelling. It's not a corruption by any means, it was used by one of the first people to identify it as an element.

It's very different from "nookyouler"

For example

xkcd

Little-known fact: The 'Dawn of Man' opening sequence in 2001 cuts away seconds before the Flinstones theme becomes recognizable.

Stack Exchange

1:41 PM

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Q: On the topic of meta tags

We have now had a couple of discussions about meta tags. Should we have a soft question tag? Do we need a homework tag? Do we need a research tag? So far the support has been strongly against the use of meta tags. The point of this post is two-fold; 1) to congeal the discussion of meta-tags ...

discussion meta-tags

Stack Exchange

1:56 PM

0

Q: Questions like "What is this?" [photo attached]

There have been a few questions that mostly rely on people knowing what something is in a photo. The latest one is this question on a nautical item. This doesn't seem like a valuable question. It will not bring in search-engine traffic. A counter example that seems like it might be related to ou...

discussion

user41796

3:09 PM

@jhabbott I misspoke yesterday. It would be better to put those two answers together as one. I thought you were referring to multiple users providing multiple answers to a question. Which, in hindsight, clearly wouldn't have been what you were asking about. Sorry about that.

jhabbott

5:00 PM

@GlenH7 I see - well no big deal. I was thinking that the OP might accept one answer over the other, but that both answers might be valuable to other people finding it via searches later on.

user41796

Or by giving them two-for-one you increase the chances they'll like either of them and accept your answer. :-)

jhabbott

yeah - one of them might be accepted by OP and the other voted the community favourite. If you chuck two solutions in the same answer and it's accepted, one of them might be a really dumb idea - so others reading later on might get confused (unless the OP also comments to clarify which answer they used)

so what are the cons of two answers?

Air

5:17 PM

Multiple answers by the same user tend to make Q&As look more and more like bulletin boards.

See:

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Q: Bulletin board - Database optimisation

This question is a follow on from this Question The project and problem The project I am currently working on is a bulletin board for a large non-profit organisation. The bulletin board will be used to allow inter-office communication within the organisation. I am building the application a...

php mysql database-design normalization

Ironically, the question itself is about a bulletin board

PerformanceDBA did the multiple answer thing a lot, and it was usually because he would hit the max word count through tons and tons of edits

user41796

@Air So he'd open another answer to avoid community wiki status? Or literally ran out of space?

Air

I don't think he cared about CW status

I think he literally hit a hard limit

Either in the datatype of the "message body" column, or in the application code

To his credit, he put enormous effort into helping some people with really lengthy, broad issues

Stack Exchange

0

Q: Are multiple answers from the same user good or bad?

I recently answered a question twice with two different approaches that would answer the question in different ways (i.e. offering different solutions to the same problem). On the one hand, the OP might accept one answer over the other, but the other answer might be preferred by the community, o...

discussion moderation

user41796

@Air I have seen that come up on MSE, where the response has been "No, we don't really want answers that long...."

user41796

But props to him for putting that effort into it

Air

5:23 PM

He would actually create whole data models for people on SO

And host them on his website

user41796

Wow, that's not really sustainable

Air

Yep.

He's also insufferable.

For instance, this exchange with S. Lott

Or his tendency to refer to people who use surrogate keys as idiots

And rant about how nobody understands the relational model except him and 1-2 other users, and everything is science, and there's no such thing as denormalized, you are only allowed to say "unnormalized"

jhabbott

Well that's plain wrong - I can take some normalised values and multiply them by an infinite amount of possible numbers in order to de-normalise them :)

user41796

@Air So he's a pedant who needs more hobbies?

user41796

Looks like he hasn't been active in about 1.5 years

Air

5:30 PM

Yeah, he took his ball and went home.

Shame, his posts are very useful if you can get past the zealotry and attitude.

Air

6:11 PM

I think this question wants a tag to reflect that it is about employment, the workplace, job hunting, something in that neighborhood. I am open to suggestions about what sort of tag we'd prefer to create for that purpose.

Something as focused as job-search might be appropriate, if we expect to be able to field questions like that in the future.

Workplace.SE has job-search.

I had originally thrown on compensation just to have a tag, but I think either that or salary would be too narrow.

Trevor Archibald

8:08 PM

@Air employment maybe?

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