The Whiteboard

12:02 AM

Quick and dirty "answers" posted as comments are perfectly fine. And I've benefited from them more than once, stealing them and posting them as actual answers and gathering the sweet rep... (a long standing SE tradition)

Deco

12:17 AM

mmmm juicy rep

the JLS has given me a lot of juicy rep on SO

Jimmy Hoffa

12:39 AM

haha that's hilarious

I can appreciate that tradition

user20683

12:58 AM

@JimmyHoffa Skyscrapers are banned in Paris

user20683

I forget the limit on building floors

user20683

Germany is MUCH friendly to that sort of building

user20683

as are other French cities

Deco

Skyscrapers are banned in most regional areas of Australia too

where I used to live here the building floor limit was 5

user20683

it's similar in areas of California

user20683

1:06 AM

I remember never setting foot in a brick house or two story dwelling that wasn't commercial, an apartment or a cabin until I moved to Georgia

Programmers Blog

Programmers Stack Exchange Blog: Maintaining Healthy Hands

Morons on November 20, 2012

Keeping your hands healthy and pain free is something every programmer should be thinking about, minor hand injuries will affect your productivity, a major injury could threaten you livelihood. Hand injury is common problem amongst programmers, so it’s not surprising that the question “How do you keep your hands in good condition?” was asked here on Programmers (though closed as off topic).

Dr. Alan Gotesman an orthopedic surgeon with training in hand, microvascular & upper extremity surgery and friend to the Programmers Community has agreed to answer this question for us. …

user55340

2:26 PM

These "how do you name XYZ" questions reminds me of a joke - The two biggest problems in computer science are: How to name things, concurrency, and off by one errors.

unNaturhal

3:12 PM

Hi there!

Jimmy Hoffa

3:37 PM

Hah funny and true. Though i would round it out with asynchrony and replace off by one with dereferences. Oddly index errors seem surprisingly uncommon these days. I blame iterators getting into most languages, so we can thank FP for solving one of the most common error classes

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Iterators work nicely until some fscking vendor stuffs what should be Map<Class, String> into ArrayList<Object> where element n is the class and n+1 is the string... and then later refactor it to have n as the class, n+1 as a string and n+2 as another string... and use classic for(;;) style loop for walking it... but I'm not going to rant or anything like that... nope. Not me.

Martijn Pieters

"This question is intended more as a poll than as a discussion"

Uhoh..

-2

Q: How to name a function that generates key strokes?

We're working on a Python GUI Automation library called Automa and are finding it difficult to pick a name for the function that programmatically generates key strokes. Currently it's called type. Sample uses are: Pressing the Enter key: type(ENTER) Type a sequence of letters: type("Hello Wo...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT haha you should hope bugs in an iterator implementation would be pretty darn easy to identify

@MichaelT @MartijnPieters I don't get it, I've seen well-voted "What should I name this?" questions which are simple and constructive, specifically this one comes to mind programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/174854/…

user55340

3:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa Bugs in iterators are easy to fix and identify... bugs caused by an off by one error where they forgot to add a second string are not so nice. The "why?!" head-desking when there is a proper data type can be painful.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT On second thought after reading the details of your data structure, that sounds like a terrible implementation strategy heh, but that's just me.. I would never think to couple things by index grouping, that's what tuples or structs or objects or what have you are for

Martijn Pieters

@JimmyHoffa It's the 'instructions on how to answer this question' that rub me up the wrong way, certainly.

Jimmy Hoffa

There, I removed that part

whoa I think it pushed my edit through without review

didn't know I had those powers

Frustrating though all the downvotes/close votes people toss around here for questions which are clearly fine and have been ok in the past as I pointed to. Just because the dude put funky instructions somebody should have just told him to remove that part of the question and the rest of it is fine, unfortunately after a question has downvotes it's already DOA

user55340

4:12 PM

The nature of the "how do you name ..." questions is one that tends to be rather localized - "this application, this function, this team." And in the end, don't matter too much (foo() vs vGenKeystrokeEvents() - the compiler / interpreter doesn't care). Do the thing that surprises people the least and you've got a good name.

Jimmy Hoffa

4:22 PM

I agree POLA is basically the answer but that doesn't mean there's no value in the questions. We've all often times run into the exact same naming conundrums in our day to day repeatedly ourselves, so it seems to reason we would run into the same naming questions someone else did. Moreover naming can often have patterns applied to make it simpler like if you have a Ball entity and you have a model and a view for it you could call them BallModel BallView and perhaps have a BallRepositor

naming questions allow illustration of patterns like that which can help many people who are unaware of such patterns or techniques

user55340

The key is to ask them in a way that can demonstrate the pattern. The simple semantics of the python question in question doesn't lend itself to any underling patterns (other than don't re-purpose existing method names in the core language).

Jimmy Hoffa

You say that because you don't know of any patterns specifically designed not to repurpose existing method names

That queue question I mentioned brought one to light; I don't agree with it but it's a patterned approach to not repurposing keywords, the pattern? Change slightly the spelling. Bad idea in my opinion but that doesn't mean there aren't good patterns to approach that problem, I just don't know any off hand myself :)

If someone went and answered that question with a patterned approach to the problem of avoiding repurposing language intrinsics in your naming that you and I could agree was actually a good pattern for approaching that problem, you wouldn't be calling it a bad question

user55340

4:43 PM

The way that I read the question was a "synonyms for type" type question. If the question was instead "approach for not using the same name as an inbuilt method" I would have a different opinion on it. I believe the key is generalization of the question to apply to more than "this project"

Jimmy Hoffa

I agree, it was poorly asked.. heh though the meat of it is your second statement there, he did phrase it like the first

user55340

5:16 PM

A cow-orker was asking about different ways of cooking turkey... I pointed him to cooking.SE and he was quite intrigued.

Stack Exchange

5:45 PM

Blog - Stack Exchange: SE Podcast #37 – Back At It, Again

Alex Miller on November 20, 2012

Welcome back! We’re actually back to a fairly normal podcast this week and want to bring you back up to speed on Stack Exchange after our adventures the last few weeks. What’s on the agenda? What’s new this week?

Starting with the review queue and its new segment: the reopen queue! It’s exactly what it sounds like (the reverse of the close queue). David and Jay walk Joel through the review queue and its features.

One of the problems with the review queue is people clicking “Looks good” all the way through just so they can get a badge. Who would do such a thing? [Spoiler alert: We will talk about the review queue for a really long time.] …

user55340

9:10 PM

Random history trivia question - why is "i" commonly used as a loop index?

makerofthings7

Something with Fortran... my bet

user55340

Yep. Undeclared variables were assumed to be REAL, unless the name started with I-N in which case they were assumed to be INtegers. Thus, 'I' was the first integer variable.

grasshopper

in general, what do you think is better in regards to adding content related to a site, to allow users to add content to the site and put a flag button to report it if it doesn't fit with the site, or if just I add the content and remove that option?

it will be a small site but i dont know if i'll manage to scan the site constantly or deal with the flags and on the other hand im worried that the site wont move forward because there will be lot less content, thoughts?

Jimmy Hoffa

9:38 PM

@MichaelT that is really bizarre, I always just assumed i for index. Learn something new every day

user55340

@grasshopper what type of content is being hosted? How large is the user base (that could be flagging it)? Both options you presented are viable, though involve different levels and types of moderation.

user55340

10:39 PM

Random observation - while not certain this is always the case, it feels like better questions are asked later in the (US) day. It would be intriguing to see a graph of "asked at hour N" against "closed %"

grasshopper

11:37 PM

@MichaelT well it will be a small site, actually my first, which takes certain videos from youtube, so that's how it relates to the content, I dont want irrelevant videos being added. All in all i think it will have a small user base, but hoping for the best. Which option will you choose in this situation?

ento

@MichaelT Here's my attempt at such a graph. Hours are supposed to be in UTC. The hour with the lowest closed % is 9:00 UTC...is that around midnight in the US? But the highest closed % hour is 3 hours before that time.

data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/86495/#graph

Deco

I'm usually sleeping when the best questions are asked :(

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