The Whiteboard

Dynamic

12:10 AM

@WorldEngineer That is awesome!

قلب means "heart" by the way :-)

gnat

6:19 AM

@WorldEngineer شكرا

quite a relief, thanks!

gnat

6:50 AM

@ChrisF interesting. Answers (from regulars, no occasional passers by) look a bit too divergent for what I'd expect from a well spelled question. I would want to check with Thomas...

@ThomasOwens would you mind taking a look at this question? I wonder if it would allow a salvaging edit, like one you recently made at WP, in rev 4 of this question?

gnat

8:20 AM

@GlenH7 well, regarding down-voting the crud answers, this could impact reputation in the opposite way than it looks at the surface. Did you notice how piling of garbage answers eventually turns things CW (more than 1700 answers scored 25+ turned community wiki)? This turns upvotes given to good answers into zero rep; if downvoting crap answers somehow tames that, this effectively means good answers will be bringing more rep to authors — gnat 1 hour ago

@GlenH7 ...I just checked: of your posts, 3 are CW, with total score 149. Of mine, 12 are CW, with total score 498. Rachel has 30 CW posts, with total score 479. If only half of these is "eaten" by CW, this makes something like 550 votes go into zero. This would make 5500 rep lost to just three of us. Wow. Just... wow. How much does downvoting a garbage answer cost? -1? just one point? compared to mentioned losses, this is nothing. — gnat 29 mins ago

check the score of your posts that went CW; learn how much rep garbage answers cost you

Thomas Owens

@gnat My edit to that Workplace question wasn't salvaging. All I did was remove the extraneous stuff that was leading to an emotionally charged question.

As far as the Programmers question, I don't see how it's viable. The answer is right there in the dictionary definition of professional. Anything else is purely subjective.

gnat

8:41 AM

@ThomasOwens I see - thanks Thomas

user55340

2:42 PM

I was poking at one of the questions that I had that turned CW

user55340

95

Q: How does learning assembly aid in programming?

I have been programming in higher level languages (Python, C#, VBA, VB.NET) for around 10 years and I have completely zero understanding on what's going on, "under the hood." I am wondering what are the benefits of learning assembly, and how will it aid me as a programmer? Can you please provide...

user55340

(I have an answer in there...)

user55340

The thing I was wondering is what to do about the very low quality answers in there... flag them and have a mod delete the answers? Try to edit them to salvage them? Something else?

user55340

-8

A: How does learning assembly aid in programming?

Well, the answer is that just simply because the language you are using must be interpreted or compiled into assembler at the end. No matter the language or the machine. The design of languages derives from the way the CPU works. More on low level programs, less on high level programs. I will e...

Thomas Owens

Don't flag them unless they aren't answers. Only spam or offensive answers are deleted. Down vote them or edit them.

user55340

2:48 PM

I've already downvoted a few of the bad answers in there... Is there a way to clean up CW answers that are just wrong and misleading?

gnat

3:20 PM

@MichaelT as far as I know there is no such a way; downvoted answers are supposed to be there unless author decides to remove - but, since downvotes to CW don't impact reputation, it's painless. If you add that attribution looks almost anonymous on CW, typical author won't give a damn

Jimmy Hoffa

I love going back through my answers and deleting ones that turned out among other answerers to not be worth having around

gnat

actually all in the CW looks in favor of preserving downvoted answers

Jimmy Hoffa

End up going back and seeing some answers that after all the dust settled I'm rather proud of.

gnat

especially if these managed to collect some cheap upvotes in the beginning, when the question was hot and was under CW-limit amount of answers (16 here at Programmers0 - author who'd delete their downvoted CW, would loose their reputation (that was gained with cheap upvotes in pre-CW period)

@MichaelT the best possible way to "cleanup" CW is to prevent it from happening; after it's already there, there's not much you can do

...and moderators have limited reach, within SE rules and guidelines (which is a good thing by the way:)

...though if there is "we're looking for the long answers..." notice in the question, it may give one a chance to appeal via flagging, chat or meta, if there is a justification that answer blatantly violates notice

10

A: How can we encourage down-voting over deletion on answers?

Regarding down-voting and deletion: they each have their place, and on an ordinary question there's not too much to worry about - some folks down-vote, some folks vote to delete, and some folks do both; what actually ends up getting deleted vs. just down-voted usually boils down to the effort put...

SO mods had once reported successfully managing a question using notice-based deletion of crappy answers

user55340

3:40 PM

@gnat In the case of that -8 answer, the author hasn't been seen since he registered and created the answer. I doubt if there is a practical way to have him remove the post.

Stack Exchange

Blog - Stack Exchange: Announcing a new way to change your profile picture

Jeremy Tunnell on January 15, 2013

One of our New Year’s resolutions here at Stack Exchange is to take a hard look at our user experience. As the network has grown and our audience expanded, the system has grown with it – but there are some rough edges in places that can use a bit of smoothing. You’ll be seeing a lot of improvements over the next few months, but today I’d like to announce the first bit of polish: built-in profile pictures.

We have used Gravatar to let you manage your profile picture since roughly six to eight weeks before Stack Overflow entered beta. Gravatar is a wonderful service that lets you use a con …

user55340

Realizing that this is different territory... would it be possible to have a community "delete answer" vote on a community wiki akin to the "close question" process?

Yannis Rizos

3:56 PM

@MichaelT 20K+ users can vote to delete negatively scored answers

user55340

Would it be possible to identify the CW answers such that all votes are negative and there are 3 or more or the number of downvotes outnumbers the number of upvotes say... 3:1 with the intent being either to salvage the answer or delete it?

Yannis Rizos

Yes. Data Explorer & Database schema documentation for the public data dump and Data Explorer

gnat

@MichaelT what practical benefit would be there from deletion of this post? I mean, I would understand worries about deletion of positively scored crap which creates broken windows; but distinct negative score kind of warns users against posting garbage doesn't it?

user55340

4:17 PM

Lets see if this works right...

user55340

user55340

Well, lots of white space there (first time in libre draw).

user55340

With the thing of who is the primary audience - the people answering or the people reading? I take that as the readers. The goal of SE, as I understand it, is to have knowledge. Having poor quality answers doesn't further this significantly.

user55340

In general, I don't believe that having heavily downvoted answers serves to warn people who would create such answers themselves.

user55340

The "Bad answer upvoted" seems to be more of a problem at SO, though the changes to review queue might have helped reduce that quadrant. I don't see it as significantly here.

user55340

4:41 PM

A SE site has two audiences. There is the seekers of knowledge (from google) and the lasting community. A low quality answer with downvotes does not help either. Whats more, it doesn't help warn or discourage people who show up once, for one day to answer one question with a low quality answer that we will likewise have trouble cleaning up.

user55340

Its like if you were looking at wikipedia and editors were prohibited from removing incorrect information. The auroral tree octopus would still be listed as a native species of Oregon.

user55340

To that extent, drive by low quality answers are worse than drive by low quality questions. With the questions, they can be cleaned up to ask a meaningful question. Or they get closed, downvoted, and eventually culled (if I understand the process correctly).

user55340

But there is no way to remove an answer. And a just wrong answer can't be changed into something meaningful without rewriteing the answer in its entirety. As such, they linger as a wart sitting at the bottom of the list of answers that isn't helping anyone.

Anna Lear

4:57 PM

@MichaelT Not necessarily. A wrong answer can teach someone what not to do. This is why we discourage flagging wrong answers as "not an answer". They're answers. Just bad ones.

user55340

@AnnaLear There are a few classes of answers. There are some where a bad answer is not harmful. Telling someone the best screw to use is the flat blade ones (rather than phillips or square) is wrong, but not harmful. Nothing bad happens, just an inconvenience.

user55340

There are some answers where the wrong answer is harmful in some way. If you use blue teflon tape rather than yellow teflon table for natural gas pipe threads you risk an explosion.

Anna Lear

Sure, but if a seriously wrong answer has upvotes, deleting it is even worse - now you know that it's a common misconception, but you're not teaching anyone that it's a bad idea. Leaving a comment and downvoting would be a better approach.

user55340

Having a wrong knowledge question doesn't tell people what not to do in the way of using a less than optimal screw driver, or prevent bad things from happening. But it is still misinformation out there that isn't helping anyone.

user55340

A seriously wrong answer (section 1 in that diagram) is quite bad in a number of ways. And deleting such isn't necessarily the right answer. The key is to find ways to not get upvotes in the first place (the review queue issue). Ideally, someone would upvote a correct answers more than the incorrect one so that the wrong one falls to the bottom.

Jimmy Hoffa

5:18 PM

@MichaelT there are common misconceptions we've all seen in the industry that are downright wrong but common enough to end up with a net positive vote score in answer form. I tend to vote to delete those and add a comment in case it's not deleted. If it's already downvoted I won't bother with the deletion but you're saying I should never vote to delete them?

and we all know people don't always look at the list of answers and just take the chosen one or the best voted one, most of us read the list of answers to learn a complete picture of the issue if we're trying to solve a problem

so if the correct solution is +10 but sounds hard and complex and there's a +2 answer which sounds correct and looks easy... people are going to try it

user55340

5:50 PM

@JimmyHoffa I think that I sufficiently rephrased that objective C question.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Cool. I don't know objective-C at all. :)

user55340

@JimmyHoffa As a mac person, I've dabbled in it. Wrote a few desktop utility apps. It is a beautiful language that I can best describe as "rewind 30 years of C++ and Java thinking, switch to a parallel universe, and wind forward 30 years"

user55340

Its a dynamic message passing language as opposed to a static method calling language. You can easily send any message to any object. It may or may not respond to the message (it doesn't care). It may also respond by saying "I don't know how to respond to this, so I'll send it to this other object"

user55340

This makes some aspects of UI very nice. "I don't know how to respond to a click, so I'll pass the message to another object that happens to be my container"

user55340

The issue is that since any object can respond to any message, it becomes challenging to make it so that certain messages are only responded to by the superclass (a final method in the Java world).

user55340

6:04 PM

Remember that objective C is quite C like - and C doesn't have private methods either.

user55340

6:24 PM

And another CW just popped up with activity...

user55340

-1

A: Do Programmers sometimes intentionally over complicate code?

J O B S E C U R I T Y. It's sad, but it's true.

user55340

6:36 PM

Maybe auto CW from too many answers should get an auto protect?

Jimmy Hoffa

6:57 PM

@MichaelT I have a lot of interest in objective-C personally though I'm an anti-mac person heh. I just love the message-passing OO actor model concept. When I first learned about it after many years of Java/C# OO thinking, I realized somebody at some point made a terrible mistake that the industry is bearing the brunt of heh

shakes fist at stroustrup

Dude's way smarter than I'll ever be heh but methinks he did a dumbs

user55340

Oddly, I really learned programming in a message passing language LPC used for programming a certain set of text based multi user games (MUDs).

user55340

So when I started dabbling in message passing languages again, it was a "Oh, I know this already" but didn't know what it was back when I was programming it.

user55340

LPC (programming language)

LPC (short for Lars Pensjö C) is an object-oriented programming language derived from C and developed originally by Lars Pensjö to facilitate MUD building on LPMuds. Though designed for game development, its flexibility has led to it being used for a variety of purposes, and to its evolution into the language Pike. LPC syntax places it in the family of C-like languages, with C and C++ its strongest influences. Basic structure Almost everything in LPC is an object. However, LPC does not precisely use the concept of a class (MudOS has something called a class, but it is really a struct)....

Jimmy Hoffa

Heh fun. I learned to program with the K&R and tweaking about with DaikuMud as a lad.

user55340

7:14 PM

I was taking programming classes in college, but as we know how different college code is from real world... at the time I was also playing an LP mud and coded for it. Suddenly thrown into the world of working with other programmers, hostile/stupid end users, and actually having end users. With guidance from the more senior coders there I learned quite a bit about coding that one doesn't learn in an academic setting.

user55340

Eventually I took over the codebase of one of the classes (mage) and rewrote it based on what I learned in academic OO setting (mid 90s, OO picking up). I wrote the core lib for it, another guy flushed it out, and another one did really neat stuff with what the two of us did. Between the three of us, it survived two decades (still running!) of people trying to make it better, faster, or smaller.

gnat

7:47 PM

@MichaelT zombies attack through the old broken windows. There are two more (quite a pity I'm out of votes for today)...

-1

A: Is the C programming language still used?

IMHO and very limited use, it is one of the best ways to write cross-platform game engine, that can then have a very thin ObjectiveC, Java or even JS/HTML wrapper and have very limited porting required

0

A: When to favor webforms over MVC

My 2 cents is to always use ASP.NET MVC for new projects if you have the option. In my opinion, webforms is not a good way to develop web apps, period.

"hey here I can chit-chat about how git is fantastic..."

user55340

I wish there was a better way to address necromancy. Maybe a rep requirement to post to a question older than N months? It would take two of the three necromantic answers (The third was by someone who had > 100 rep)

user55340

Or combine that (either or) with a number of bytes requirement that is substantial (greater than the max length of a comment) so if someone does have a substantial answer to an old CW they can post it.

TRiG

@MichaelT I like necromancy. Old threads don't die; they sleep.

user55340

When they are disturbed by someone who doesn't know better on what a good answer (or hold old the problem is) and just wanting to add "my 2 cents" or "IMHO" isn't a good thing.

user55340

8:09 PM

@Gnat a bit before I got on today...

user55340

1

A: Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes?

That answer is that there's no future in it. I have twenty-two years of experience as a mainframe programmer and I've been out of work for five years. I'm going back to school to get my Bachelor degree in web development. Why would anyone in their right mind want to be a mainframe COBOL programme...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Sometimes I really enjoy digging back into wicked old question and up voting through arbitrary loads of them good answers just knowing people are going to get rep noticed for something they wrote over a year ago. Just fun knowing they're going to get some weird reminder of something long forgotten

and there's plenty of good answers to old questions

user55340

Realize that casting votes on CW isn't likely to be noticed.

Jimmy Hoffa

Not CW

you're welcome @ThomasOwens

@MichaelT see? it's that easy? :D

user55340

Much of the old questions I've seen today were necromantic CWs.

Jimmy Hoffa

8:17 PM

oh

no I meant like going to programmers.stackexchange.com /questions?page=__INSERT_BIG_NUMBER_HERE__&sort=newest

oops, it thought that was a url

there we go

You're welcome @RobertHarvey

Especially fun giving +1 to the good answers that didn't actually get the accept.

Sorry @ThomasOwens, but I had to give that vote to @DaveBell, his answer was just more comprehensive.

You're welcome @Oded

Jimmy Hoffa

8:43 PM

RobertHarvey's the underdog, that's two mega-old questions his answer was better than the accepted answer now

gnat

9:14 PM

@MichaelT per my observations, necromancy has been noticeably harmful mostly when the question is both popular and old - these tend to be honeypots for senseless passer-by answerers who just happened to got there from web search...

...in regular old questions its effects are rather positive: occasional late answers turn out either valuable contribution from people genuinely interested in a topic (note there's even a badge for that - "Necromancer") or, well, spam that strangely enough tends to bring to light non-constructive questions that escaped closure by mistake

...you see, it's the question popularity that looks like causing trouble, just as in article you referred bash then: ...human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon... (A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy)

things that work well on regular questions, however old just tend to break on the hot ones

...exactly as Shirky article seem to expect :(

> The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale...

> Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group...

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat there, even a necro-vote for you ya cold bastard

How much time did it take you to compile all of that information writing that answer? Sheesh.

I think the longest answer I've ever written on SO was like half a page

I must just be a lazy git (british git, not to be confused with a poorly committed repository)

...I wonder if I could manage to walk all 770 pages of P.SE and give a vote to the best answer on every not-closed question that had a good answer...

gnat

9:38 PM

@JimmyHoffa well the answer on that is right there, in comments - ain't it easy to just scroll to these... oh wait I guess this is not the case :)

@JohnFisher well according to JIRA, back then I spent 6 hours compiling and summarizing these references :) — gnat Sep 15 '11 at 6:34

Jimmy Hoffa

haha yeah, scrolling to the comments there is not easy

user55340

11:27 PM

New user who seems familiar to an earlier banned one...

user55340

0

Q: In Linux application software development, is an ELF executable enough to run on any GUI?

For example, Linux, the kernel, aside from any GUIs built atop it, will run any ELF directly. But... What determines the difference in GUIs? Must you compile it to an ELF and link it with certain library files, and appropriate drivers like on Windows? Because say I build my own complex GUI sys...

linux

user55340

There's the P.SE question...

user55340

And his SO question that made me wonder...

user55340

0

Q: How can I accomplish writing to onboard video memory on the motherboard?

It's a cheapy Intel Celeron motherboard with an Intel G41 Express Chipset. I am writing an OS, and would like to write to the onboard video memory for immediate display data (how else?). I switched in to both Protected and Long modes, but I'm not sure if there's any differences in doing this p...

video

Jimmy Hoffa

11:38 PM

@MichaelT How to write to onboard motherboard memory 101: Step 1: Grab Sharpie, Step 2: Lay motherboard flat on table Step3: Write whatever you want on the memory

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