The Whiteboard

user55340

2:27 AM

Workplace types, would this question be appropriate for a migration over there?

user55340

0

Q: How to apply to multiple jobs at the same (small company)?

There is a company that really appeals to me, with two open positions that interest me. Both are very much programming jobs, that I would enjoy. I think I might like one than another but am not sure. Is it bad, or seeming desperate to apply to both jobs? Should I apply to a specific one, but als...

interview

user55340

3:26 AM

@JimmyHoffa you'll love this - in the 'language prettfier' from Google that SE uses - code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/source/browse/trunk/src/…

gnat

7:41 AM

@MichaelT regarding dupes visualization we recently discussed, estimation and time-estimation topics may be worth it

thorsten müller

8:14 AM

What's the correct way to handle a question a few days old that got (wrong) answers. Is there a legitimate way to 'reactivate' it? Is it allowed to just ask the same question again?

That answer was not correct, he didn't answer on my question, and i change mark on that topic... — Zuhan 6 mins ago

-1

Q: How to link in panel four pic to one. Only winForm

I need to make 4 different images in one, and it will be in the panel. Panel size will vary from 180 to 320. I tried to do one main panel, and in her place 4, which are fixed by anchors... What I have I try to get panels on this style private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { ...

c# winforms

gnat

8:29 AM

@thorstenmüller re-asking isn't recommended...

5

Q: Ask question with wrong answer again?

I asked a question on Stack Overflow, and got an answer, but when I tried the answer, it didn't help. Now the question is old and not getting any more views or answers, even after editing the original question to reflect that the answer wasn't helping. Should I post the question again, or let the...

discussion wrong-answers

thorsten müller

@gnat ok, thank you

gnat

8:58 AM

@thorstenmüller by the way, cross-posting seems to be considered even worse than re-posting: meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/cross-posting/info

> Cross Posting refers to posting the same question over multiple Stack Exchange sites. Cross-posting is strictly frowned upon as it leads to fragmented answers splattered all over the network. If you spot a user cross-posting, please make use of Moderator Flags to inform the Moderators. Refer to cross-posting faq for more details.

for the question with the wrong answer, I think a reasonable approach for the asker would be to bump it by editing in details on how they tried mentioned answer and what went wrong

gnat

9:25 AM

4

Q: Why is this question good?

After a week of absence I went to last week hot questions. Found this one Java while loop - I'm lost with 37 upvotes. Howcome 37 people decided that that question shows research effort, is useful and clear?. I am being more and more surprised by Stack Overflow community voting. There are some...

discussion stackoverflow specific-question up-votes

9 mediocre answers stuffed into it in 20 minutes after posting the question likely made it artificially high on collider, attracting views and votes. It's neither the asker's nor voter's fault that it has gotten more attention than it probably deserves; it's just a typical effect of broken "hotness formula" — gnat 57 secs ago

RhysW

9:42 AM

@thorstenmüller Adding a bounty asking for alternate opinions is a possibility if the poster of the original 'wrong' answer has no alternate views

RhysW

10:04 AM

On an unrelated note, what do you guys think of the push for Flow Based Programming?

fastcolabs.com/3016289/…

noflojs.org

^ The two important links referring to what im on about

gnat

10:30 AM

wish one day similar attention would be given to bug in hotness formula which continuously spams across the SE network, promoting low quality content and permanently trolls over Programmers and Workplace, "making interesting and well presented problems look the same as non-constructive popularity contests..." — gnat 1 min ago

seba229

11:55 AM

Hi! I'm a Ph.D. student and it's diffcult for me to reach "real" software practioniers for my research. However, I think that academic research should focus more on their actual work practices, which is currently rarely done. Our group prepared a short online questionnaire on how and why software practioniers (developers, testers, architects, etc.) use sketches and diagrams, which is available at st.uni-trier.de/survey. It just takes 5-10 minutes to answers the questions.

7

Joeri Sebrechts

12:09 PM

Just answered your survey. I hope it helps.

seba229

Thanks a lot!

Thomas Owens

12:50 PM

@seba229 I responded. I also starred up your message so hopefully a few other people who come later in the day can see it and choose to respond.

gnat

1:56 PM

just discovered two tags that look like synonyms to me, are they? dry with 27 questions and dry-principle with 5 questions. Isn't their existence a violation of DRY principle?

2

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat "Why is this question good?" <-- What's the antonym of 'tautology' ?

gnat

@JimmyHoffa DRY?

Jimmy Hoffa

@seba229 You may normally have trouble finding industry programmers, but not right now, that's what everyone here is more or less. You could probably also find a good amount of real industry programmers around various subreddits, may wish to drop your link there as well (I don't know reddit enough to point you to good subreddits for this)

@seba229 This questionnaire refers to 'Sketch/Diagram' but there's kind of two different types and I'm not sure what you're looking for. I sketch things constantly in my work on paper, whiteboards, and sometimes electronically, but that's 90% of the time for communication purposes talking about a concept with a colleague, only occasionally do I create formal diagrams to be used in documentation.

Is your questionnaire referring to formal diagrams for documentation, or off-hand diagramming just during a conversation?

> DRY is short for "Don’t Repeat Yourself". This paradigm advocates to avoid code and data redundancy.

Yep, dupes.

gnat

@BoltClock'saUnicorn keep believing that your precious SO isn't affected by spam coming from collider — gnat 25 secs ago

Jimmy Hoffa

text of the tag itself shows it isn't referring to some DRYSOFT DryWall2000 software or something, it's the principle.

@gnat Bookmarks are best at illustrating a chat log section I find

link to a certain space in time makes it trickier to gain context because there's a lot of stuff around it that's less relevant than what a bookmark can identify

@MichaelT You are aware of the source of the term 'burninate' right?

user20683

2:13 PM

@JimmyHoffa The antonym of "tautology" is "contradiction"

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Yep. Strong Bad.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT You're referring to it as "apparently" a technical term made me wonder I mean, if you're familiar with trogdor you know there's nothing "apparently" about it, it is a technical term. Those villagers got technically burninated not apparently burninated.

gnat

0

Q: Tag merge / synonym request: [dry] → [dry-principle]

Please merge tag dry (27 questions) into dry-principle (5), and make them synonyms. Preference for master tag is because I consider dry-principle a more descriptive name. Tag dry wiki excerpt is DRY is short for "Don’t Repeat Yourself". This paradigm advocates to avoid code and data redun...

support tag-synonyms tag-merge

@JimmyHoffa yeah. Funny thing, iirc I first learned about how chat bookmarks work when you demoed it here

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Its more a in joke for myself... and if any of my co-workers from netapp happen to pass by. When I started out there, I was talking with a tech writer who was translating my jargon for the manager. At some point I said something like "and then we need to ui-ify that page" and he said to the manager "thats a technical term."

user55340

She gave him an "I'm not an idiot" look (she was technical enough). For years afterwards we'd make up jargon on the spot and append it "thats a technical term."

Jimmy Hoffa

2:24 PM

@MichaelT ah heh

@gnat There should really be a privilege and a review queue for tag merging so we don't have to ask mods for it all the time; I wouldn't call it a 3k privilege, but at some level you should be able to vote for it (4 or 5 votes to complete, put in queue to let the votes gather) regardless of your rep in the given tag

gnat

@JimmyHoffa your feature request is status-declined...

88

Q: Can we allow 7.5K users to suggest tag synonyms without a score of 5 in the tag?

Feature Request: Could 7.5K users have the privilege of proposing synonyms without the 5 upvotes per tag requirement? (in other words unrestricted synonym suggestion) Background: I would like to be able to suggest tag synonym suggestions. I do not however, have the required 2.5K rep on Stack O...

feature-request status-declined tags tag-synonyms privileges

although there's a widely shared understanding that something is broken here...

35

Q: Does the tag synonym suggestion system work?

I've never seen a tag synonym created via the voting mechanism and I see evidence that the system isn't working to create synonyms without moderator intervention. Does anyone have any figures about the number of synonyms that are create by votes as opposed to the number created by moderator fiat...

discussion tag-synonyms tag-suggestions

Jimmy Hoffa

2:39 PM

@gnat Starting my morning with some Kurt Elling if you don't know him, great modern jazz vocalist, does some creative things with the standards but pulls it off rather than it coming out like a disrespect as many modern folks attempts at being creative with them tends to

@JonEricson why was it never tried to simply create a review queue for them? I was thinking this morning about how tag synonyms always require mod intervention on P.SE (and on lower volume sites than SO altogether this is probably always the case), and my thought was make it a simple privilege just like the others: 7.5k or 10k or whatever required, 4-5 votes required to pass it, and a review queue to ensure it gathers those votes, the last part was obviously key when I thought about this as tag suggestions would quickly be overlooked. — Jimmy Hoffa 1 min ago

Alternatively you require X rep in the tag for it to show up in your review queue (regardless of site rep or along with X minimum site rep) but as you mention, visibility is a requirement and review queues were invented for precisely this reason. — Jimmy Hoffa 23 secs ago

I know it's long dead, but.. whatever... it still makes sense

enderland

2:56 PM

@JimmyHoffa having this as a review process makes a lot of sense, actually

gnat

@JimmyHoffa Kurt Elling has been highly recommended to me by some fellow music lovers 5 or 6 years ago. Back then, I gave him quite a lot of listening time. Agree that he's good, although somehow he didn't become my new favorite

►

enderland

so if you were designing a database layout/etc, what is a good tool to do this?

seba229

@ThomasOwens Thanks!

@JimmyHoffa Thanks for your remarks. Our questionnaire refers to both, off-hand drawing as well as formal diagrams. Just think of the last sketch/diagram you created, regardless whether it was formal or informal.

Jimmy Hoffa

3:11 PM

@gnat Well then here's your musician you've never heard of before for the day.

@seba229 Ok. If you want to get a more accurate bit though you may formulate two separate questionnaires later for the two types of diagramming; In industry they are very different. I sketch stuff for myself just when I'm trying to think through things all the time, you can't really speak to "revisions" with it because it's a creative activity like coding, you sketch a little then scribble some parts out and sketch some more then throw it away and sketch something else and so on and so forth

When formally documenting something for a presentation/advisement or generic documentation however, the whole process, end-goal, everything about it is different.

Often times the formal diagrams programmers make for that type of purpose are quite useless to the programmer himself and of minimal value to other programmers. They are created to fulfill a required level of detailed specification, but frequently that detailed specification is more about answering questions and less about communicating concepts

seba229

@JimmyHoffa That's are exactly the things we want to find out.

I mean "that are"

Jimmy Hoffa

"Those" are :)

seba229

Ok, sorry :-) You know, many people in academia think that UML is the standard for everything. I don't think that's true.

enderland

It blows me away how good so many people who are not native english language speakers are.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland No joke, people speak english way better than english speakers speak other languages. By a looong shot.

user55340

3:19 PM

@enderland Yeppers.

user55340

Just picture @JimmyHoffa trying to speak Greek...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT "Gyro"

user55340

(well, he does Haskell, so not too far away...)

enderland

(I'm assuming @seba229 you are German based on the link? but other than your "that's" just now I would literally have had no clue you were not a native english speaker)

seba229

@enderland Thanks. You're right, I'm German. :-)

Jimmy Hoffa

3:21 PM

@seba229 UML falls into the formal type I was speaking about that rarely is useful to the programmers themselves, they're almost always created for presentational purposes to answer questions from non-technical types (I will isolate the sequence diagram as the single technically-useful UML diagram type I've seen)

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