The Whiteboard

12:14 AM

@gnat oh did the chat replace the link you posted? That makes more sense, must be a bug in chat

12:27 AM

btw @gnat you appreciate esoteric music, check out Barry adamson, some twisted atmospheric stuff because his albums are purely experimental since his day job is movie scores

►

user55340

12:40 AM

Whee! Moderator tools!

user55340

(time to find @JimmyHoffa's answers)

psr

what happens if i do a quick 3 downvotes?

user55340

I would be sad.

user55340

Gah! I understand what @gnat was talking about when he first got his 10k. You get to a question and suddenly you see everything that was deleted. Its... yea.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT aww now I want 10k, maybe I'll start posting more answers again

user55340

12:54 AM

Going into What every programmer... is frightening.

user20683

@MichaelT welcome to the abyss.

psr

Can anyone give me a 2500 point bounty? I don't really feel like answering questions and stuff.

user20683

@psr ask them?

user20683

or do what I did and be awake at 4am when we land on Mars again.

gnat

@JimmyHoffa that one is good thanks. I checked further and found out his are Hungry Ants from a soundtrack of my favorite N.B.K.

psr

12:59 AM

@WorldEngineer No, I was thing more of an undeserved handout.

user20683

@psr whore out your questions on Social Media

user20683

answers

user20683

whatever

user20683

things that get ya points

user55340

@WorldEngineer Honestly, I've gotten more rep from @YannisRizos whoring out my answers than I have.

user20683

1:01 AM

@MichaelT I think we all have

user20683

he's the Answer Pimp.

user55340

@YannisRizos is 'da man!

gnat

@JimmyHoffa somehow, this reminded me...

►

user20683

@gnat That one answer was spam

user20683

the one with all the swearing

gnat

1:03 AM

@WorldEngineer wow

user20683

@gnat well not technically spam, vandalism basically.

gnat

@WorldEngineer ah. With that I agree. For spam, there was nothing to sell :)

user20683

spam is basically the same as vandalism in my book

user20683

It's like running up to a store and plastering the wall with stickers to some club somewhere or something

user20683

but yeah

user20683

1:07 AM

just say offensive/vandalism and we'll deal with it.

gnat

1:26 AM

@WorldEngineer I see. Well I was considering offensive but couldn't force self click that "not welcome" selection. Because, honestly, upon reading through their cursing, I recognized familiar sentiment, one I sympathize. So I just pasted what you have read and flagged more neutral Other

user20683

@gnat fair enough

Jimmy Hoffa

1:39 AM

@gnat Yeah I can see that. If you want to hear something really strange though that I can't help but imagine a movie from, look up barry adamson's mitch and andy and listen to the words. It's not even a song, like a mini-noir

You can totally tell that musical scores is his thing in all the stuff he does

user55340

1:58 AM

@gnat another place I found to poke for poor answers / questions - 10k tools feedback. review > tools > anonymous and low rep post feedback > least helpful / overrated

gnat

@MichaelT I've heard of it, but never gave it a try. Now that you recommend, I'll sure take a look. Because if honestly your prior suggestion with marginal answers script has been proven so awesome :) (I am currently completing cut at MaxLength 150)

@JimmyHoffa wonder if you heard of Diamanda Galas

►

user55340

2:17 AM

@gnat The other way to look at it, questions that were overrated or not helpful are ones that if not closeable, are ones that should be edited to help shape it into something better or more useful.

gnat

2:28 AM

@MichaelT interesting, thanks. Have to admit, at quick look these appear not as clear cut as stuff from marginal answers script. I need to give them some more thought

user55340

There are some like a "-10 rep, not helpful review" where the answer might be something to delete. There are others like a "+8 rep, overrated" where its a wall of poorly formatted text, but a good question in there that just needs to be shown how to get out.

Jimmy Hoffa

Just wrote an answer that is definitely out of my main knowledge space, would appreciate any review and thoughts on it

0

A: API Authentication, One time token VS Dynamic tokens

I really like the first approach in general. it's simple to understand and implement it's secure (to my knowledge) it's a not uncommon approach which I've seen used in the past One thing I don't see mentioned about the first that you should keep in mind, the timestamp used to hash the token n...

I've a minimal grasp on common security stuff, but I've worked in SOA just enough to have worked with a variety of different auth techniques

@gnat That is really cool, I'll have to poke around in some of her other stuff; never heard of her.

I don't suspect anyone here is extremely versed in security, due to the true-engineer nature though I'd guess @GlenH7 might have some ideas as to whether or not I'm mis-stating anything, otherwise @MichaelT being a fellow back-end dev has plausible experience designing and working with the security portions of systems

user55340

@JimmyHoffa There's some things I've stumbled across... that I'm tried for a bit to hunt up. auth tokens that expire after each use to thwart a replay attack.

Jimmy Hoffa

2:46 AM

@MichaelT Yeah, that's something I mentioned right up top

> One thing I don't see mentioned about the first that you should keep in mind, the timestamp used to hash the token needs to have a TTL expiry that's exceedingly short (like 1 second) so you verify the message wasn't sent with the same timestamp and token from a message 12 hours earlier; obviously it would calculate as legit but is not in this case.

user55340

3:04 AM

snort

user55340

4

A: Will Java still be relevant in 5 years?

I don't think it'll lose relevance. Java 7 is just coming out with a lot of neat features that will help developers create great software easier. Also Java is used to create Blackberry applications; one of the leading corporate mobile phone. It's safe to say it's not going anywhere soon.

user55340

> Also Java is used to create Blackberry applications; one of the leading corporate mobile phone. It's safe to say it's not going anywhere soon.

user55340

And Blackberry is where now?

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT To be fair, and interestingly, programming languages do not move anything like the rest of technology (our industry would be in a state far far worse if they did; nobody would ever become an expert in their language)

user55340

I'm amused at the use of blackberry as a justification.

Jimmy Hoffa

3:07 AM

@MichaelT You may have referred to nonces here which I just remembered and am adding a block about now

user55340

That looks familiar and useful for your answer.

user55340

It also might be something that the OP was thinking of in that second approach, but didn't fully recall or conceptualize.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Yeah, I think he probably has a reasonable approach in mind on that second one because he clearly knows what he's talking about, but he just didn't quite communicate the whole idea correctly

There, added nonces and pro/con lists for all of them

It's worth looking at all of them just because there's techniques in each one which you can often use in combination, is why I kind of figured doing a larger analysis is something he should be sure to do, if only cursory

user55340

You also find some odd answers that people have said are useful... one from a CW post that Eric Lippert wrote finishes with...

user55340

> Finally, if you're looking for a job doing this stuff when you're older then consider coming to Microsoft as a college intern and trying to get into the developer division. That's how I ended up with my job today!

user55340

3:15 AM

(it was on writing your own compiler)

Jimmy Hoffa

Heh, yeah really can't approach your career much better than that.

Much as I would love to work for MS again or just a generally major software co that's innovative and interesting like that, ironically the only one that has a huge presence here is Oracle (Sun built a giant campus here like ~12-15 years ago)... couldn't imagine myself ever working there, I have no sense of the developer culture or environment around Java etc

user55340

And a foray into bug reporting on MSO...

user55340

0

Q: Navigating pages in 10k post feedback clears date range filter

Under post feedback (anonymous and low rep post feedback. last of the links on the tools page), the filters (underrated, overrated, most helpful, least helpful) and the date range (day, week, month, year, all) are not sticky when going from page to page. To reproduce, go to the tools/post-feedba...

Jimmy Hoffa

3:30 AM

whoa, I just realized, that guy asking that security Q is 18 and he and someone are the "lead developers" heh, good for him. Make's me glad I posted the more details list, he may actually not have had knowledge of those things, though he seems pretty on top of stuff.

gnat

7:39 AM

Carthago delenda est :)

4

A: Has SO ever found a new better solution to a problem

There is a problem of low signal/noise ratio at forums: Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don’t. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you...

thorsten müller

9:31 AM

Great, installed security update packages and get version conflicts in my Rails installation. Seems this day is gone with installing packages and gems :(

gnat

10:47 AM

Without an explanation, this answer may become useless in case if someone else posts an opposite opinion. For example, if someone posts a claim like "There is a replacement for experience", how would this answer help reader to pick of two opposing opinions? Consider editing it into a better shape, to meet How to Answer quality standards. Side note high score of the post that just shows funny picture reminds me of The Trouble With Popularity — gnat 4 hours ago

Blog - Stack Exchange: Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun

Jeff Atwood on January 04, 2010

I noticed that the Stack Overflow question Strangest language feature has been closed and reopened several times now. The text of the question is brief:

What is in your opinion the most surprising, weird, strange or really “WTF” language feature you have encountered?

I agree this is not exactly an ideal question for Stack Overflow, per the FAQ:

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! …

indication of the low effort post is, you can address its issues by copying some prior comment

user41796

11:15 AM

@JimmyHoffa - we might push you over 6k today. You're 10 points closer. Left a comment with some suggestions on how to enhance your answer; you started with a good base. I would have edited them in, but I'm still waking up and didn't want to work yet. Yes, I was too lazy to summarize kerberos...

user41796

<rant> roll-your-own authentication is a great way to put up a flimsy premise of security without actually being secure. The starting key space that the OP was suggesting is ridiculously small. The available entropy from only 80,000 5 digit numbers is so tiny that I'd almost accuse the OP of trolling. GPU clusters built for cracking passwords can roll through 38 billion combinations per second now. RYO is a bad idea, period. Even for experts. ...

user41796

... AES 128 has issues with at least one of the five block modes that it has. I think it's the unchained mode, to be specific. Yes, AES is an encryption algorithm, not an authentication protocol, but it had thousands of experts around the world investigating it for flaws prior to being selected. </rant>

user41796

And my "help me find the search term" Q of the day:

user41796

I have some large sets of data that I need to throw into a silverlight XY plot. It's time-series data, so time + value is the format. The problem is I'm throwing too many elements at the plot and need to reduce my data set. I have already tweaked the various things available with silverlight and improved performance there. My current method excludes all zero value entries, and then takes every third value. It's a decent approach, but I'm wondering if there's a better way.

user41796

^^^^ @Ampt, @JimmyHoffa, @MichaelT, @WorldEngineer - help me figure out the correct terms to google so I can pick a better approach for reducing the amount of points to display.

Jimmy Hoffa

12:23 PM

@GlenH7 google the k-choose-n Feynman monad

user20683

@GlenH7 Dimension Reduction maybe?

user20683

You could always ask on Cross Validated.

user20683

12:41 PM

@GlenH7

user20683

9

Q: Smoothing time series data

I am building an android application that records accelerometer data during sleep, so as to analyze sleep trends and optionally wake the user near a desired time during light sleep. I have already built the component that collects and stores data, as well as the alarm. I still need to tackle the...

time-series smoothing signal-processing java

user20683

This might help

Jimmy Hoffa

12:55 PM

@GlenH7 isn't that when you're supposed to derive an equation that plots for you? Or you could use a transform like maybe FFT to degrade the discrete points while maintaining the contrasts

Fft is actually a great approach to his problem likely, it's time data so the DSP space will have good answers for him in general

user20683

@JimmyHoffa DSP has all kinds of crazy applications

user41796

1:12 PM

Cool, and thank you guys. That gets me started in the right direction for research. I'm not sure I can use an FFT or not. But I'll chew on that one for a bit. I'm overlaying several lines (sets) and the FFT might obscure what they're looking for. OTOH, it sounds really cool and they don't know what to ask for, so they might end up with an FFT derived approach. :-)

Ampt

1:23 PM

does that message read 6:15?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - because I know how much love these types of questions. And yes, I kicked off the first close vote. It's out of the community's expertise.

user41796

0

Q: How "usable" is the WTFPL?

I know it offers no waival of liability (I can add that), but, actually, how valid is a license like the WTFPL? Can I use it with no worries in my hypothetical open source project? The license says "you are free to do what the fuck you want". Is the recipient actually free to do so? Can the auth...

licensing open-source

user41796

@Ampt - yes indeedy it does.

user41796

Life + kids == odd hours

Ampt

I just felt a chill go down my spine.. haha. So what was your goal? smoothing out unnecessary points?

this could come in useful for a project I'm working on for school

user41796

1:27 PM

smoothing out unnecessary points has some connotations to it that I don't quite want. I would display every point if the chart would remain reasonably performant. But it's silverlight and it's not performant, despite my tweaks, when I get past a few thousand points.

user41796

In my magical world, I would pick only the points that are necessary to show the shape of the line and to get rid of the redundant points. Which is way more easily said than done.

user41796

my naive approach does that to a degree with the zero value points. I keep the first zero point and then the last zero point before the day's line starts moving. I also do the same thing with the evening's values, so I dump about 1/2 the points from being displayed but maintain the perceived integrity of the line.

Ampt

have you thought about possibly generating a function to fit the data and then drawing that instead?

best fit curve or something to that effect?

I did some research on something very similiar a while back. Didn't have time to implement it unfortunately

user41796

That's probably a bit obtuse. I'm displaying a day's worth of time series activity for various measurements. Hourly samples are easy @ 24 pts. 1 Minute samples get a bit ugly @ 1440 pts for the day. 1 second samples are going to crush the chart.

user41796

silverlight graphs can't take a function, afaik. And I'm limited to silverlight in this case. The FFT approach might be interesting for finding the inflections during the day. But I need to be careful about preserving most of the perceived fidelity of the measurements. They shouldn't be relying on the graph to evaluate a day since the analysis is supposed to be longer term than that. But graphs are pretty and humans have their foibles.

user41796

1:35 PM

The source signals are aperiodic, so that may prevent using a function too.

user55340

@GlenH7 What about a box plot that aggregates the data for a range?

Ampt

I like that option

user41796

That's a viable approach too; I like that idea

Ampt

like the stock market. Gives you all the important numbers quickly

user55340

user55340

1:47 PM

user55340

That one is the one I'd go for. You've got the quartiles, median and outliers.

user41796

yeah, that could definitely be workable; part of the problem I have is their obsession with the lines instead of looking at the bigger picture. Well, the real problem is I understand how to solve the problems of their domain better than they do. But that's another story

user41796

using a box plot would force them to realize that they need to look for trends and averages around events. The fierce push back I'll get will (likely) be worth it just to make the approach the problem more efficiently. And yes, it's bad when your developer is pushing you to understand your problem better.

Ampt

lol. If only that was our biggest problem

Yeah I was going to say the only bad part about box plots is seeing trends as they emerge

unless you break it down into finer and finer chunks

user41796

The non-technical challenges on a job tend to be more emotionally draining for me than the technical challenges. I can almost always fix the technical challenges.

Ampt

1:52 PM

but if all of this is done post-hoc I think that this may be the way to go

user55340

You might try to show the trends as a small line.

user41796

@Ampt right now, they look at things in 1 day increments and that's really only 12 hours (or so) of activity. When we move into 2 or 4 second data then that's really not going to work for them. It will be 24 hours of activity at a time and they're relying on the chart instead of the metrics to understand what's going on.

user55340

Ampt

@GlenH7 I can agree with that, but I'm more of a people person so I sometimes enjoy my interactions with the other people

user55340

Its hard to see in this size, but to the right of the data is a trendline for each type.

Ampt

1:53 PM

plus I'm new so it gives me a chance to show my strengths

user55340

In the current version of Excel, they have something called 'sparklines' - mini embeded charts within the table.

user55340

user41796

to be fair, my previous gig gave me a lot more exposure to the domain of our external clients. So my internal clients are at a disadvantage regarding domain experience. But that doesn't forgive their recalcitrance in learning the domain better. They're trying to stay within a very small corner that's kind of irrelevant to our external clients. My internal clients are chasing perfect sinusoids off of real data. My external clients are chasing millions in potential or lost revenue.

user55340

You could consider trying to do something like that over the box chart.

user41796

@MichaelT not sure if silverlight can pull that off, but it's interesting. Kind of similar to what we do with one of our winform apps.

user41796

1:58 PM

Oh, and take my whinging about my internal clients with a grain of salt, please. I dislike political posturing instead of just getting the job done. I'm a little frustrated because of some recent posturing that's been going on.

Ampt

that's the worst

love working at a small company because that crap usually doesn't fly

hi @gnat

user41796

2:25 PM

Reading Q&A on CrossValidated is an intellectually humbling experience.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Yeah, kid screamed me awake at 6 this morn too... time was he'd sleep until 7, but times are changing :/

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I treasure the mornings they sleep in. Still trying to find a panacea for the armchair coaches I have to deal with. I hate hearing "Well, I would coach if it weren't for ..."

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt That varies, sometimes small companies have it the worst because it's much easier for them to be homogenous which can result in a lot more group-think, exclusivity and ignorance

@GlenH7 Yeah I realize the inaccuracy an FFT will give you, but you're looking for a lossy algorithm so some variant of inaccuracy is going to kind of be inherent in your solution. Another little snigglet creeping up from the back of my mind that I couldn't detail at all is eigen vectors can be used for predictive correction, that may be some other crazy math that can clean up your data there. Granted if you can step away from the line chart this all gets ten times easier.

adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976JApMe..15.1307B

user41796

2:46 PM

<rant> the one piece of this project that was supposed to be throw-away candy has generated quite a bit of the problems </rant>

Jimmy Hoffa

eigenvector.com/MATLAB/OSC.html

@GlenH7 In that case I would say exactly that. Let whoever's running this know "This functionality is presenting far greater complexity than anticipated, is it worth continuing with it given that it may take an extra XX days and is unnecessary for the first release"

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I got a partial victory on that particular point. Partial win is that future requests in that vein have been severely curtailed. Partial loss is I still have to put in this round of change. It's not a complete loss because once I show due diligence on the performance aspects I can tell them to bugger off.

user41796

They weren't paying for the development so "of course it's necessary!" A completely uncommon situation for the industry, I know.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Honestly, I'd take it as an opportunity then. They can't gripe because they're not paying, and in the meantime you have an opportunity to practice some interesting techniques which you've likely not (or hardly) used in industry that may be useful skills later. Come up with a known mathematical approach from the various things listed; best fit, transforms (there's plenty other than fourier as you know), eigen vector correction (which seems the most arcane thus the most interesting)

I recall one place I was, fellow used eigen vectors to identify and remove lens flares in images, it predicted how the image should look, and corrected the part that was clearly not how it should look

user41796

3:02 PM

And that's the approach I'm going after, despite all of my earlier whinging. The techniques I come up with will be useful for some of our other displays, so it's not complete pearls-before-swine work at the moment.

user41796

and I've used up all of my CVs in the review queue today, so what else do I have to do? :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I'm feeling very repwhorish after hearing about the 10k tools, I'm almost inclined to post your Q for free rep

user55340

You get to see all pending close and reopen votes in the last 30 days, delete votes, activity from the "was this post helpful" that no and low rep users are asked, migration details...

user55340

Where the hot spots of activity are (views, votes, comments, edits)

user41796

go for it - it's certainly become more constructive through the chat conversation. I started out with "I need search terms" which is off-topic.

user55340

3:12 PM

To an extent, having access to the tools makes me more disappointed in the "keep it all" thoughts from other 10k users, because they can see where the problems are (this question is +1/-8 from low rep reviews) and aren't taking any action to try to fix those questions and answers.

user41796

Rose glasses are easier to wear if you never stoop over to see what's underneath things.

user55340

For example... this question is +4/-13 for low rep reviews... things people are doing when they aren't site regulars and hitting the site and seeing "was this post useful?"

user55340

11

Q: What is an algorithm?

What exactly is an algorithm, as in what does Algorithm mean? The little I understand the word, is that it's not specific to a particular language, or design pattern, rather it's one the most basic principles (so I guess this question makes me look stupid). One of the "options" I have of underst...

algorithms

user55340

13 people who can't vote said that question wasn't helpful to what they were looking for.

user41796

SE makes it hard to find the post-feedback pages. Sheesh

user55340

3:17 PM

No, it shouldn't get deleted, but what it does mean is that the question could get improved and a good answer should be written.

user55340

And when people fuss about old stuff getting closed or deleted? They have the ability to see it before it becomes a problem. Every close vote thats out there... all the "not useful" reviews for the day.

user55340

@GlenH7 I've got a bookmark now to programmers.stackexchange.com/tools/post-feedback

user41796

@MichaelT but that's effort. :-)

user41796

SAVE. THEM. ALL!

user41796

0

Q: help me convert this code

i have this code in vb10 and i want to convert it to delphi 7 any help will be appreciated Private Sub getf(ByVal path As String) Dim fileStream As FileStream = New FileStream(path, FileMode.Open) Dim stringBuilder As StringBuilder = New StringBuilder() Dim length As Long = fileSt...

vb.net delphi

user55340

3:22 PM

I am further disappointed to see moderately active 10k rep users in the "not helpful" with an answer that is +1/-4 who haven't done anything to improve their answers.

user41796

ESL can sometimes be an issue there. But I see a few examples that I just can't defend either. OTOH, those 10k users may not know they can go see the anonymous feedback.

user41796

OP on conversion "question" deleted his post.

Jimmy Hoffa

I've still got too far to go before reaching 10k...grumble...

Rep on P.SE is kind of hard to get too, you have to find questions that you really know something about, can't just be like on SO "Oh, I see a bug in this code, I'll get rep for the answer"

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Our lesson from earlier this week on being a rep whore - ask dumb, reddit-grade questions and beg Yannis to pimp them for you.

user55340

Heh. It still has to be reasonably well written and persuasive.

user41796

3:33 PM

And I'm not trying to pick on Yannis, I think the Q's he advertizes are good. But saying that takes away all of my snark.

user41796

@MichaelT it only has to be reasonably well written and persuasive in order to stay open.

user41796

speaking of which....

user41796

the arrogant programmer question has been closed for >2 days, so it's eligible for delete votes.

user55340

@GlenH7 I fairly quickly used up my 5 votes last night.

user41796

My recent question finally surpassed it in views, but it took a while getting there

Jimmy Hoffa

3:36 PM

Ah man, I got good rep from that Q heh

user55340

There were a number of ones that had 2 votes on them that were quite deserving of it.

Jimmy Hoffa

6k doesn't give me anything, does it?

user55340

@JimmyHoffa someone marked this as 'helpful' in the past day...

user55340

5

Q: What monad is the opposite of the error monad in haskell

In the error monad, the first failure halts any execution further just carrying the fault through any following binds. What monad halts on success only carrying forward successes, and basically swallowing any faults and trying the next bind disregarding the failure of the previous one? The erro...

haskell monad

user41796

@JimmyHoffa not for delete voting, sorry

gnat

3:45 PM

some closures feel... unusual

casting a binding CV at the question you answered per flag from another answerer, feels fair isn't it? :) Sine ira et studio — gnat 3 hours ago

user41796

@gnat - I'm still struggling with the canonical book aspect. I realize that highly specialized fields that do have a canonical reference are on-topic questions. But those terms are so subjective. And it also seems a bit unfair that a field without a canonical reference should have the question closed because the book doesn't exist. It's an interesting logical conundrum, but I don't want to dredge up the book on-topic discussion again

user41796

chat != meta back to my memes

Jimmy Hoffa

> Thank you for reviewing 20 Close Votes today; come back in 8 hours to continue reviewing.

user41796

I guess that having a back log in the close review queue is a good sign that the site is growing. But it still irks me.

gnat

@GlenH7 well, canonical book aspect was what was holding me from casting CV there, I don't have strong enough position on that. It's when I figured that question revision failed to "redirect" it to canonical book, and that it remains good old clean shopping...

user41796

4:00 PM

If we start trending into consistent double digits in the backlog then I'm going to howl for more votes to use in the queue. It doesn't help SO at all to have a 64k backlog

gnat

...ithen I pushed to close

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 Yeah, I was just going to pull up my old de.se q/a per week graph but my openid endpoint is failing so I can't login there :/

user41796

@gnat and I'd argue that distributed computing within Java just isn't that specialized.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa back to your earlier answer on security - a single point of failure seems to be a critical limitation of almost all token systems.

gnat

@GlenH7 well I try to thread carefully in complicated cases. Distributed, canonical. I could possibly cast a vote, but I'd never dare to flag stuff like that - particularly because I learned our mods decline unclear/subjective flags in a heartbeat

I flagged only when I figured that I can prove failure of salvaging edit and that Q remains blatant "looking for some books"

Jimmy Hoffa

4:04 PM

data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/102122/…

It's been very stable

Which is interesting because the close queue has been crazy recently

user41796

oh, I don't worry about flags being declined. I'll flag troll-checks because something smells fishy. Officially, they should always approve those because the intent is good. But I don't get bent out of shape when I see a response of "no, doesn't match known IPs" along with a decline. It's just another silly number IMO

user55340

I will point out that dropping answer rate is not necessarily a bad thing.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa yes, @gnat came back from vacation. ;-)

user41796

I need a rimshot sound effect for some of my comments in here

Jimmy Hoffa

I prefer curly's nyuck nyuck nyuck

gnat

4:15 PM

@GlenH7 And I worry about my flags quite a lot. If I want to just toss some fuzzy idea, I go to meta or to chat. I reserve flagging for clear cut issues - that's why decline is painful to me, it means either I failed to judge the issue, or failed to explain it. Neither is good

also, I have a sympathy for mods after Shog once demonstrated me some examples of messy flags and suggested how would I evaluate these. I figured that 1) my head would explode trying to decide and 2) I'll do my best to avoid bringing such a mess from my side :)

user41796

those are good points, and I definitely don't flag with wild abandon. Based upon the 10k tools, I didn't get the impression that there's a lot of flagging. OTOH, I don't know what the custom reasons may be

Thomas Owens

> flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

user41796

@ThomasOwens good point and I had forgotten about that

Thomas Owens

I understand that some sites may have an exception: doing what the answer says may cause injury or death.

user41796

I can see where that would be an issue

user41796

4:23 PM

is a rant disguised as an answer "just" a wrong answer though?

Thomas Owens

If it is an attempt at an answer, then no.

Err. Yes.

Yes it is just a wrong answer.

user41796

that's fair, and that's a reasonable distinction

Ampt

I feel like it really comes down to how many flags you have to deal with doesn't it? I mean in the perfect world, we could curate the answers to the questions to only be helpful ones

Thomas Owens

I've declined flags and then down voted before.

Or edited. Or commented. Or up voted, even. Because the flag is just not a reason to flag.

I don't think there's a mechanism for finding posts that need improvement and bringing them to the attention of people who can improve them. Maybe posting them in chat, if a chat user can make the changes.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens Answers that suggest a face mask is not necessary when handling lye for instance

user55340

4:27 PM

@ThomasOwens I've found the anonymous/low rep feedback, which has lead me to some...

user41796

I'm thinking about that particular rant, and pondering what a better course of action would be. I down voted it. I didn't want to comment as I felt it would just engage a zealot on something they knew nothing about.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa proper handling of lye means you should never have to wear a face mask. And that's because someone else is doing the handling.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 As far as I'm concerned, lye should only be handled in glove boxes heh

user41796

it can be crazy stuff, no doubt

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 meta.politics.stackexchange.com/questions/1362/…

user41796

4:31 PM

@YannisRizos nice try in getting me to join politics.SE. Ain't gonna do it. ;-) Good Q&A though

Yannis Rizos

> Ask your self: Do I really want content to be removed from the site based on Yannis' personal definition of bizarrely wrong, amazingly misleading, or horribly opinionated?

user41796

feature_request mods must indicate type of alcohol consumed when deleting content from the site.

Thomas Owens

Tequila! Mead! Beer! Vodka! Cake Vodka! My strange concoction of UV Blue and Mountain Dew!

user55340

►

user41796

scope creep comes with wanting a special community review queue based upon the alcohol that was selected at time of deletion.

user55340

4:36 PM

(alternatively, the lyrics to one for the road work nice - allthelyrics.com/lyrics/the_jolly_rogers/… )

user55340

Mead, stout, vermouth and gin
Vodka, bourbon, and a sly grin
Moonshine, tequila, cognac and schnapps
Some old sour mash and two belly flops
Goldwasser, ouzo, white lightning, green toad
Absinthe, sombuca, and one for the road!

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 No need for a request, just post it as an answer here: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/189515/…

user55340

Btw, that bug I logged on MSO was reproduced and fixed quite quickly.

user41796

@YannisRizos tempting....

user55340

@GlenH7 It would be amusing to see how many upvotes you get.

user41796

4:39 PM

I think I've got at least a few coming from those in the chat room

user41796

OTOH, that would be the first not-quite-serious answer in that poll question. I'd feel kind of bad about ruining an otherwise good thing.

gnat

4:54 PM

wow. Just wow. I know the question is not a good fit for P.SE, but answer crappiness is simply amazing. Where are my votes? Oh all gone for today

0

A: How to get basic knowledge in data structures (e.g., vector, linked list, queue, stack) in c++?

May be these link help you.. https://github.com/BrockCSC/acm-icpc/wiki/Online-Resources http://www.acmsolver.org/?p=417

unupvoting MichaelT to borrow-from-self is not an option :)

user41796

@gnat it'll hit the close queue now. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat close voted (and flagged the answer as very low quality)

user41796

Color me glad I'm not a mod on SO: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/189567/194162

Ampt

5:11 PM

> plz help answer this question thx

@GlenH7 programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/205427/… plz help answer this question thx

user41796

@Ampt I'd love to see a flag like that collide with one of our mods during a tequila fueled weekend. The rest of us could take bets on the number of days suspension the flag would land.

Ampt

Alright.... I just have to get the timing perfect

Yannis, Plz help ansr ? thx

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt It's actually a fine Q for SO, which says a lot about how much effort it takes to ask an SO question vs P.SE

user41796

banned from the site shouldn't ban you from chat, so you should be able to check in and let us know who won the betting pool.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I'd say not so much. It's a low quality question with no research demonstrated. Not saying there aren't crap Q's on SO, but that one isn't going to help SO any.

Ampt

5:18 PM

@JimmyHoffa I just picked the first Q with downvotes ;)

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 I agree, but that stuffs fine for SO to an extent, it's got a snippet of broken code, a statement saying "This code is broken, it does X not Y, what's wrong?" That's really all it takes to make a perfectly fine SO Q

user55340

The way I did multiple "sheets" in a csv was to have the first column be the sheet name. Then the excel macro that was imported into the workbook would split it apart.

Jimmy Hoffa

SO is dripping with no-research questions that work totally fine on it's format and help people in the future

user41796

We can agree to disagree. :-) I see tapping into a proprietary format through a raw approach without any understanding of the target format.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT That makes sense, alternatively you could just put a delimiting row like a blank row without even commas = end of sheet

Ampt

5:20 PM

I like to think that SO is more technical in nature "Help me debug this code" and P.SE is more theoretical in nature "How can I best solve this problem?"

which is why I stick to P.SE mostly

user41796

I don't think it deserves the down votes it got. That level of ignorance is somewhat excusable. AKA "be nice, we all started somewhere"

thorsten müller

Yes, but all that requires that the recepient has this importer

Why not just export Excel file directly?

There are enough libs for that I think

Jimmy Hoffa

@thorstenmüller Yeah, there's no standard in CSV for multple sheets though

user55340

Indeed... some systems, however, don't export excel directly. Spitting it out from an ancient database that doesn't have MS apis... you can write it as a text file and be done with it.

Jimmy Hoffa

They're probably terrible and he probably doesn't know how to use excel from PHP to generate his data

gnat

5:21 PM

@GlenH7 @JimmyHoffa thanks guys. I tend to blame SE team for proliferation of crap like that

@Shog9 well, whatever. You have several thousands posts telling readers loud and clear: link-only answers are welcome. And this amount will only grow, because 260 guys who upvoted that famous link-only manifesto won't make a difference - at least not until their hands are tied behind their backs. Regarding your note on comments being broken windows, I don't buy it sorry - as far as I can tell, this is only so because SE doesn't want to condense them. — gnat Jun 9 at 21:31

thorsten müller

Can only say for Ruby and for what he wants to do it would be dead easy

Jimmy Hoffa

@thorstenmüller In ruby it's easy to take an array and generate a multi-sheet excel spreadsheet?

thorsten müller

@JimmyHoffa Posts.where(created_at > Time.now-30.days).to_xlsx

user41796

@gnat I can only offer a few hundred to invest in that project. Maybe Skeet could loan some out.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Yep, you just open up the Array class and write to_excel() as one method, and to_xls() as another, and to_msxls() as another...

thorsten müller

5:24 PM

github.com/randym/axlsx

If the lib you have is worth that name

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT You mised to_xlsx

Ampt

@GlenH7 are you saying skeet posts link only answers? I'm simply curious as I've never come across one

Jimmy Hoffa

@thorstenmüller I'm guessing the guy just doesn't realize there would be an easy to use excel generating library for PHP somewhere to even look it up

gnat

ahh CSV... Reminds of my very first answer at SO

thorsten müller

phpexcel.codeplex.com

gnat

5:26 PM

11

A: CSV API for Java

Reading CSV format description makes me feel that using 3rd party library would be less headache than writing it myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values Wikipedia lists 10 or something known libraries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSV_application_support I compared lib...

user41796

@Ampt no, no, not at all. Just saying he's got 600k rep and could blow 24k without blinking.

thorsten müller

pssst? is Yannis around?

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat Shit how do you remember your first answer on SO? I have absolutely no recollection of mine, now I'm going to go dig it up...

user41796

he was earlier, but it looks like his icon has aged out from the window

thorsten müller

from the guys profile: "PHP/Mysql and Wonderful wordpress themes/sites"... answers everything

gnat

5:27 PM

@JimmyHoffa it sometimes pings me with occasional upvote

psr

@gnat I like comments. If anyone feels they are noise, they are formatted to be easy to ignore. I don't want them cleaned up. Waiting for account suspension in 5, 4, 3...

Jimmy Hoffa

ah snap, I been a member longer than @gnat (which has helped me none)

gnat

@psr not that I like comments but... let's say I really really dislike idea of auto-removing these. I think anything auto is just too dumb for this. Condensing / collapsing is a different thing though...

19

Q: Automatically hide old comments

Comments are useful. Many, many posts need some small amount of meta discussion, and comments fulfill this need. Comments are also noisy and distracting. Occasionally, someone will post an insightful and informative comment that complements the post its attached to... But more often, they're ta...

feature-request comments

painless and to the point

psr

I genuinely don't find comments noisy or distracting. It's weird to me that so many people say that.

gnat

...and quite an appropriate target to convert link-only answers into

Jimmy Hoffa

5:31 PM

@psr I love them, more often than not they give the little details that round out answers; they're the space where you hear the opposing view that keeps answers from sounding like silver bullets

gnat

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat I blame that on supercollider which I don't usually like the questions or answers from anyway

gnat

> Rephrasing Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand, I feel that the world is awash in comments, but not answers...

Jimmy Hoffa

My first answer on SO..

3

A: C#.NET :How to Sort a List <T> by a property in the object

Doing it without Linq as you said: public class Order : IComparable { public DateTime OrderDate { get; set; } public int OrderId { get; set; } public int CompareTo(object obj) { Order orderToCompare = obj as Order; if (orderToCompare.OrderDate < OrderDate) ...

Yep, I do not remember writing that at all

dang, almost to the day 3 years ago

user41796

every now and then I think I ought to answer more Q's on SO and bump my rep there

Jimmy Hoffa

5:43 PM

I can close vote and enter the queues. Don't need anything more.

user41796

There's always more

Jimmy Hoffa

I really don't want anything more at SO

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Admit it, you want to help out with SO flags.

Ampt

He wants to be a moderator ;)

user55340

@Ampt I don't think he's that crazy...

user41796

5:50 PM

@MichaelT are you sure? I don't think you've been paying close enough attention.

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa what kind of bug would lead to that number being used though?

Off by 1?

bad math?

or maybe his birthname ended in an SQL Injection error haha

gnat

and I for one like to mess around at SO. My tag is low traffic, it doesn't force me to play FGITW. I can hang off for a week or two (heck, for a month or two), then get back and read all what was there while I was away. there's not much questions and answers, meaning I can deal with each individually. Like a small, quiet village. If only it wasn't a dying technology :)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Added.

Most commonly those are buffer overruns from unsafe conversions

could be a pointer/memory leak error as well, lots of ways to get that really, countless.

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa you've got my upvote then!

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/507/…

locked with the top answer at 42 upvotes

psr

@JimmyHoffa Yes, exactly.

Ampt

5:54 PM

perfect

Yannis Rizos

@Ampt Mod abuse.

psr

@gnat There must be a user script that turns that into an expandable/collapsible question or something like that.

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos I wish we could abuse the mods, but usually it's all the other way around...

Ampt

@YannisRizos between that and the broken bounty system, I'm ready to up and leave this place. I'll know whether I'll stay or not by the end of the week.

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa I wish I could abuse the mods as well... I miss my trolling days, you can't have fun with a diamond next to your name...

user41796

5:58 PM

@YannisRizos Yet another example where mods need to indicate what alcohol had been consumed

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Find a question with a lot of chatty comments and flag 'em all.

user41796

@Ampt and WHERE'S MY 100pt BOUNTY?!?!?!

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