« first day (1113 days earlier)      last day (4042 days later) » 
14:00 - 20:0020:00 - 00:00

2:22 PM
@enderland It's not wrong, in Britain they use the pint instead of the quart, that was totally on purpose.
user41796
@JimmyHoffa pint != quart*. * Unless you happen to be drinking a Boulevard Brewery Smokestack series
@GlenH7 I could have a farmouse 7 every damn day. That is an awesome session beer.
user41796
No doubt. Friend had a wedding party at their reception hall. Tank 7 was on tap. Soooo yummy.
user41796
Their Imperial Pilsner (or whatever) was really tasty but a bit too nuanced for me. I like my flavors to be more distinct I guess. But it was certainly a different hops profile than what they've used with the other pilsners
@GlenH7 And @enderland's company doesn't care what you say, their headpinters is a great facility!
2:30 PM
lol
user41796
I got lost on the context switch. @enderland are you associated with the brewery I was just discussing or a different one or did Jimmy successfully troll me?
I think you got trolled, hard, but it's friday and I'm not sure :)
user41796
figures. I was due some payback for the FP and anti-matter comments.
user41796
and the interview question is still on the collider at 36
@GlenH7 Say what you will about FP, but so long as I have a monoid, I can always turn it around. Ahhh nyuck nyuck nyuck. Best horrible pun ever! WINNER!
I deserve this for that spectacle of a joke. -----> ☆
user41796
2:41 PM
@JimmyHoffa regrettably, you're the only person in the room who gets the joke.
user41796
And no, please don't try to explain. ;-)
@GlenH7 Regrettably nothing, why do you think I get a ☆ ? For entertaining myself while looking like an idiot, two of my favorite passions in life simultaneously
user41796
I'll star for owning it.
user41796
oh - what was the conversation about yesterday that got dumped to the trashcan?
user41796
I saw in the history that we were visited by users in blue. (men in black sounds cooler)
2:43 PM
@GlenH7 Just enderland mentioning some open vulnerabilities in his company; information that likely shouldn't be publicized
user41796
fwah ha ha ha. Oooops
user41796
not that I didn't nearly share the same sorts of details
user41796
I had been thinking through how to simplify it into a chat worthy story and then realized I probably shouldn't. Great odds that they haven't fixed the root issues
@GlenH7 Aye, in this industry it's pretty easy to have a slip of the tongue; all of this stuff is so normal to talk about at work, sometimes forget what shouldn't leave those walls
user41796
precisely
user41796
2:46 PM
it took them quite a while to scrub my accounts' existence from that system. Long story how we got there, but the short version is we were behind the gun to get it live and didn't always have the time to put the correct changes in place in the correct way.
@GlenH7 and that explains well over 90% of security vulnerabilities in the wild
user41796
compounded by the fact that I was the only person to understand the system. There was a lot of FUD about what would happen after I announced I was transferring teams
user41796
FUD == Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
oh, yeah
2:48 PM
9.9% are explained by people way out of their depth and not realizing it (AKA php "developers" trying to write code)
user41796
commonly used in the sense of "the competition's marketing spreads FUD as a way to promote their product"
user41796
<sigh> Just about put another thing in chat that really shouldn't be public.
@GlenH7 I always preferred reading it as Fucked Up beyond Disbelief. It doesn't make any sense but it's a much funner illiteration to find strewn about
user41796
It's pretty accurate too
user41796
a lot of marketing FUD aligns with your expansion of the acronym
user41796
2:53 PM
@JimmyHoffa - does this have your name written all over it?
user41796
5
Q: What is an example of a continuation not implemented as a procedure?

David CowdenAn interesting discussion about the distinction between callbacks and continuations over on SO has prompted this question. By definition, a continuation is an abstract representation of the logic needed to complete a computation. In most languages this manifests as a one argument procedure to w...

@GlenH7 Plausibly.
user41796
I don't think it will hit the collider, but rep is rep, right?
So long as he doesn't say "coroutine" because I think I understand them, but people much smarter than me have given me the inclination that I may not
user41796
That's how I feel with my karate. I think I understand it, but people much smarter than me have given me the inclination that I may not.
2:58 PM
> There are however two problems with continuation passing style:
>
> Passing around continuations increases the size of the call stack. Unless you're using a language like Scheme which eliminates tail calls you'll risk running out of stack space.
> It's a pain to write nested functions.
Yes, Yes, Yes.
Well known facts among people who understand CPS, but yet so much of the industry sees CPS and as soon as they get their head around how it works think "oo that's clever, must be good!" WRONG!
Sorry, that's from the linked discussion in the question
and it quickly sums up why Node.JS is simply wrongheaded.
user41796
This is why I stick with simple questions that can stick to the collider. I don't have to think as hard when knocking out answers
user55340
@GlenH7 Which is part of the key to the collider - neither does anyone else.
user41796
Interview Q has me halfway to rep-capping against today.
user41796
I mean, obviously it was a great answer. But was it really a 500 rep great answer? Then again, I wrote it, so.....
user41796
</sarcasm>
user41796
3:10 PM
As often as I have to put a sarcasm tag in place, it seems like I should just have a default tooltip hovering over my comments saying "apply a liberal dose of sarcasm filtering"
user55340
Part of the key to getting rep is also keeping it out of cw - that in part means deleting answers or protection in many cases.
user55340
If it wasn't protected, it may have hit CW, and then you'd be bemoaning that.
user41796
yes, agreed. I think the second protection was at the right time for it
@GlenH7 I am curious to see how well I can write answers here now, I think I've got a "rep whoring" plan :)
user41796
There is certainly an art to it.
3:18 PM
basically an answer has to be slightly provokative or edgey but in a way peope like
and TL;DR normally doesn't work
err, needs to be short
user41796
yes to all the above. You can throw an actual summary in at the top and then have an explanation under an <HR> element. But the summary needs to be pithy
user55340
My repwhore answer...
user55340
159
A: Is it OK to split long functions and methods into smaller ones even though they won't be called by anything else?

MichaelTTesting code that does lots of things is difficult. Debugging code that does lots of things is difficult. The solution to both of these problems is to write code that doesn't do lots of things. Write each function so that it does one thing and only one thing. This makes them easy to test with...

0
A: What is an example of a continuation not implemented as a procedure?

Jimmy Hoffatl;dr; The type is the overarching abstraction over a continuation The closest thing you will find to a non-procedure based continuation is likely the continuation monad in Haskell as it is expressed as a type, for which many functions may be used to interact with the type to interrupt, resume, ...

My first pass at it
user55340
Seriously, my original content in that question is:
user55340
3:21 PM
> The solution to both of these problems is to write code that doesn't do lots of things. Write each function so that it does one thing and only one thing. This makes them easy to test with a unit test (one doesn't need umpteen dozen unit tests).
needs some restructuring; the rant about "closure" not "procedure" in the middle is kind of out of place
user55340
Everything else is quotes.
user41796
@MichaelT I've got a long way to go to beat out your answer. I think I only have 70UV or so
@MichaelT Heh rep whore. I can't say I can recall writing a single answer that wasn't almost entirely original content
user55340
@GlenH7 reddit and ars technica both contributed.
user41796
3:27 PM
Has anyone identified which questions ars technica picks up from us?
user41796
which ones / why / how do they pick
user55340
(I'm still debating adding arstechnica.com/author/stack-exchange/feed to the feeds for the Whiteboard so that we can see when we get incomnig from that source)
user55340
@GlenH7 arstechnica.com/author/stack-exchange - Don't know which ones the select until they do, but its right there.
user55340
And as they do it from one 'author', we can get the feed for it. Put it in the room like a blog post from SE.
user41796
no harm in adding it. Really no different than the SE blog postings that roll through
3:30 PM
0
Q: Correct comment to put for boolean function arguments that are "false"?

Johannes Schaub - litbFrom some open source projects, I gathered the following coding style void someFunction(bool forget); void ourFunction() { someFunction(false /* forget */); } I always have doubt about what false means here. Does it mean "forget", or does the "forget" refer to its corresponding paramete...

user41796
then we'll know who is about to win the rep lottery
isn't the answer here, "rename the variable to make sense?"
user55340
@GlenH7 Thats my thought. I'll make the change to add the feed. Might spam a few posts from current things.
@MichaelT Do it. They're not that busy of feeds I wager
user55340
Its about 1/week or so.
3:31 PM
That won't annoy anyone
1
A: What is an example of a continuation not implemented as a procedure?

Jimmy Hoffatl;dr; The type is the overarching abstraction over a continuation The closest thing you will find to a non-procedure based continuation is likely the continuation monad in Haskell as it is expressed as a type, for which many functions may be used to interact with the type to interrupt, resume, ...

user41796
@enderland yes, yes it is. :-)
@MichaelT @GlenH7 easier to read now?
user41796
@JimmyHoffa yes. I'd still break out the tl;dr portion somehow. visually doesn't flow with the rest of your answer
3:33 PM
@jozefg proof read my answer there if you would to let me know if I'm mis-stating some information or misunderstanding something when you can.
posted on August 17, 2013 by Stack Exchange

Breaking down the possibilities of breaking in.

posted on August 24, 2013 by Stack Exchange

After bombing a question in an interview, one programmer needs some help.

posted on August 31, 2013 by Stack Exchange

Sometimes you're just slow. Sometimes your boss is out to get you.

posted on September 07, 2013 by Stack Exchange

Should you teach your peers advanced code, clever tricks, all of the above, or none?

posted on September 14, 2013 by Stack Exchange

Developers weigh in on testing the software as-is versus making it easier to maintain.

user55340
And there's the one off spam as it picks up the first feed. Should not be bad after this.
@GlenH7 Clearer?
user41796
much
user41796
@enderland enjoy the lead on that question
3:36 PM
ha. that sort of stuff is obnoxious
@GlenH7 Thanks for giving me the lead on that continuation question :P Here I was trying to get work done...doing a presentation in..crap, 30 minutes. unthanks actually :|
user41796
oddly enough, I don't think that question has enough behind it to make it explode on to the collider. Just not enough to discuss / rehash.
bool variables drive me nuts when they are vague
especially in 3rd party libraries or other places
user55340
Unless it is truly a bool, it becomes a ugly thing later.
user41796
@JimmyHoffa you're welcome. Always a pleasure. Next time don't troll me about knowing people who work for breweries. :-D
3:37 PM
I've a friend who dropped out of a PhD program to work a brewery lol
user41796
I dropped out of PhD to get paid
@GlenH7 And because trying to formulate a denotational semantics started giving you throbbing migraines?
user41796
nah, it was just neuroscience. I could actually understand it unlike that FP stuff
user55340
adjustGrade(bool professor, char newvalue) --- bad. You'll later have (bool professor, bool instructor, bool admin, char newvalue, char modifier /* + or - */)
user41796
3:39 PM
my thesis was building an alternative model representing how and why neurons fire
@GlenH7 That's pretty awesome, and yeah probably a lot less actual greek than that FP stuff..
user55340
It should start out with adjustGrade(Role role, Grade newvalue) - where Role and Grade are Enums.
user41796
dendrites are easier to understand IMO
I think CS is somewhere in that space between physicists and mathematicians, but from the math degreed folk I've met; FP CS people are somewhere past the mathematicians...
user55340
(and I'll bet that question will hit the collider too)
3:41 PM
question score is what really drives items there i think
user55340
@JimmyHoffa You forget the philosophers...
user55340
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of mathematics in people's lives. The logical and structural nature of mathematics itself makes this study both broad and unique among its philosophical counterparts. The terms philosophy of mathematics and mathematical philosophy are frequently used as synonyms. The latter, however, may be used to refer to...
@MichaelT No, the FP CS folks are fairly firmly in that branch, near as I can tell they're basically theoreticists
@MichaelT plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-linear notice which school this is stored in, and you will find a lot about linear logic on philip wadler's blog (one of the haskell creators) as well as general topic of discussion among haskellers
user55340
Math is just applied philosophy.... and when you get to metaphysics, philosophy is just applied philosophy.
user55340
(I was 2 classes away from a degree in philsoph - it was a backup for "can't get through the math in CS")
3:47 PM
Trying to make sense of all this intuitionistic constructivist monoidal co-algebraic linear dependently isomorphic F-type jumbo mumbo makes my head spin
I wish to understand it, but I'm pretty sure a wish is all it will be for most of my life. Oh well, at least I'm a good coder, so there's that.
user55340
@GlenH7 The lisp guy back in the lab (lab being 'room with lots of computers') that I hung out in in college went on to work on neuroscience simulations.
user55340
4:14 PM
Beards are great for hiding drool. Just sayin'... — Shog9 Sep 18 '10 at 23:33
user55340
4:53 PM
@enderland Its on the collider at a score of 14 currently. The fold is at 53.
5:04 PM
garr my attempts at using F# for parsing shot down. Meeting failure.
Oh well. Was worth a shot
Now to go write parser combinators in C#...
@JimmyHoffa Sounds like me when I look at FP
@Ampt It get's better, first you have to break all the bone fragments in your head apart, but even that's not enough to understand things like linear logic, that stuff requires half your genes to come from moonites
5:22 PM
@MichaelT 23 now. who knows - it's not really a good enough question to get question upvotes
grumble, 3 up votes on a detailed answer regarding complex useful concepts on continuations and 64 up-votes for an answer that amounts to "Juniors are dumb, treat them as such"
stupid populism
#welcometotheinternet
I got 99 answers and a bitch aint one.
and now I have recreated the Either monad in C# again
sort of..almost..as well as I can...
psr
psr
5:50 PM
@MichaelT We can get you the rep easily. I'll post "During a demo my random generator gave me "DaadIYEE" and I'm in trouble because my boss didn't think it's random enough". You can be ready with an immediate giant authoritative answer about random number generation. FGITW and the collider will just get you second-most upvoted at 42 upvotes, just ahead of "Walk out the door man and don't look back" but 63 votes behind "Just hit your boss in the head and say 'was that random enough?'".
user41796
@MichaelT Weird. It should be on the collider at this point with a score ~25. The interview question is still there, but the boolean question is not
user41796
gah. Ignore that previous comment. I missed it. It's higher up than I expected it to be
user41796
@enderland - biggest variable at this point will be QScore. QScore is multiplied by the # of answers. Since there are 7 answers, each Q vote has an effect greater than 1. As more answers pile on, that effect continues to grow
user41796
now, should I be shameless and register with reddit so I can drop a link there or not....
user41796
@JimmyHoffa sometimes the limiting issue is who will or can maintain the code. If you're the only person on the team doing FP, then no one else can maintain it. That's a recipe for disaster. I'd nix the suggestion too if I didn't have others that could work on the parser.
6:06 PM
@GlenH7 I get it, it still sucks. Manager and one other team member are happy to learn it and agree that it's concise and a clean approach etc, but manager just doesn't figure it's worth the trouble and risk to long term maintainability with F# being a "fringe language"
I should have known even for one small component it's still not going to be allowed
user41796
He has some valid points there. (sorry)
@GlenH7 I know; it still sucks
user41796
without knowing the cost from that component failing (aka can't maintain anymore), it's hard to say if he's being unreasonable with his risk tolerance.
user41796
On a small project that I could replace for relatively low cost, I'd be willing to gamble on the chance it provided some amazing benefit
Doesn't mean I won't stop pushing for FP. I think the learning curve is strongly overclaimed especially for a language like F# where you can code imperatively
user41796
6:07 PM
But I would always want to keep tabs on my future liability when MS lets F# wither on the vine
I think that FUD is far more the mitigating factor on people picking up FP stuff than reasonableness
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa - Sorry about the meeting. Are you going to come over to the dark side of parser generators or do parser combinators in C#?
Given an already complete not-too-large component written in FP, most .NET developers would have a minimum of trouble figuring out and maintaining it. However the perception from them is that it's this behemoth thing
@psr combinators. We spoke about generators in the meeting but we all kind of agreed we didn't really want to both add a tool chain and deal with generated code
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa - You would think maybe the decision would be made after other developers took a look at what you wrote. (Or, if not, then make the decision before you wrote anything).
At the end of the day, F# parser combinators would be more clear and concise to work with and maintain than a formal ANTLR grammar (in this case, given the simplicity of the protocol), and if they aren't goign to accept fparsec they also weren't really willing to accept ANTLR
user41796
6:12 PM
hint: all this babbling about monads and xdfuyaersadfjunctors is a bit scary.
@psr I went off and wrote a prototype; maybe day and a half's work at most (most was actually not-throwaway parts of a larger system) and then presented it in F#. Like I said, they looked through the code with me and said yeah it's nice and would be a good way, it's just the long-term maintenance risk they weren't happy with
@GlenH7 I know, but it's all FUD. If I handed you the parser component in fparsec and as your job you had to figure it out to do some maintenance on it, you would pick it up much faster than you think
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa Not accepting ANTLR is even weirder, to me. Long term maintenance fear seems unreasonable. Kind of NIH syndrome.
The difficulty of learning this stuff is way oversold
user41796
@JimmyHoffa I think you overestimate had adaptable this engineer is. ;-)
@psr Nah, it's not that bad; it's just a matter of "I likely can't find F# devs, and I don't know F# so I don't know how difficult it is for C# devs to pick it up down the road"
as for ANTLR, I could probably go that route and sell it but defining the formal grammar from scratch is creating something which needs to be maintained that is still in a language none of us, me included, really care to deal with. If the protocol were more complex I would start looking at ANTLR instead of hand-spinning combinators in C#
psr
psr
6:20 PM
@JimmyHoffa I guess my parser generator in MUMPS is right out then?
@GlenH7 Nah; that little belief in your mind is exactly the reason the industry stays away from FP. Everyone thinks it's more than they can chew. FUD. It's totally oversold though.
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa I take it you've researched parser combinator libraries in C#?
Seriously, whenever I learned something it looked terrible at first (with the exception of Ruby which is cute). I totally gave up on the concept of 'difficult'. Timeconsuming sometimes maybe.
anyStringTill " " .>>. anyStringTill " " |>> fun (firstParserResult, secondParserResult) -> new Name(firstParserResult, secondParserResult)

With no explanation whatsoever you can probably come up with a lot of ideas about what that little bit of code does, imagine how simple it would be if you actually took a little time to read the docs to see exactly what it does?
@psr In the past I'd looked around, I was never particularly impressed with what I found, some blogs that overcomplicated things and none that generalized things compositionally
maybe one or two DSLs for them but they were equally odd. It doesn't take much more than a simple Either structure, a kleisli composition function and an alternative
(for very basic parser combinators)
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa The variable anyStringTill looks at itself then makes a face, which is fun with the 2 parser results so it gives them a new name.
user55340
6:39 PM
Went to lunch with former cow-orkers. They're getting laptops there. If you lose it, you owe the company $2k. You can't use it outside on the clock until everyone has one (not scheduled until mid November - this is Wisconsin). You can take it home. You can't install personal software on it. You can't develop at home on it (they can't make sure you're properly on the clock).
@MichaelT ...why can you take it home if you're not allowed to use it at home?
user55340
@JimmyHoffa thats a really good question. But if you leave it at work and its stolen, you're out $2k.
@GlenH7 you remember the first time you saw LINQ? Were you thoroughly confused? Did you decide it was too difficult and best avoided (it is risky, future developers might not be able to maintain code you write with it)?
@MichaelT I still can't believe you worked there.
user55340
Btw, the false question is at 68 (#2) now. Top question is 198.
user41796
LINQ still kind of confuses me, but that's because I haven't used it that much yet. But I have identified cases where it's faster to use LINQ instead of manually iterating over collections and things. Lambdas still bother me, but only because we put too much code (IMO) in a lambda
user55340
6:44 PM
(and it just got another answer)
user41796
The confusion with LINQ is also due to lack of familiarity with syntax
user41796
@MichaelT bumps collider to ~70 then. Woo hoo!
user41796
based upon views, I don't think it's been dropped onto reddit or tweeted yet
user55340
Its absurd how easy it is to manipulate it once you find a question that would go that way (and we're often picky... you often find things from english or math or rpg on there...)
@GlenH7 ...sounds exactly like what would happen if you were asked to deal with F#, a little unfamiliarity but you'd still be able to work with it, and over time you'd lose that unfamiliarity...
user41796
6:49 PM
no, I think my head would explode. That's what all the FP haters have told me. I've already got too much floating around up there, and I can't bear to think how messy the the aftermath of the explosion would be.
user41796
I mean, all of the haters know FP so well that they totally avoid touching it. Truly a case of where ignorance is bliss. What you don't know can't hurt you....
user41796
30 points away from a trifecta rep-cap.
user41796
@JimmyHoffa oh, and lest you think your observations are falling on deaf ears... FP in some form is on my list of subjects. I have a few higher priorities since I'm "making up time" from when I was doing more systems integration work than programming. But it will bubble it's way up. If nothing else, I think it will help me with set theory and will improve my queries against DBs
There are probably company's out there where they don't even let anyone use maven or ant or make, because they can't risk having to find people who know all those other languages; everything should only be done in Java or C or whatever it is all their devs know
psr
psr
@JimmyHoffa LINQ didn't confuse me at all the first time. F# and Haskell both did.
6:56 PM
@GlenH7 Not remotely, I'm quite good with SQL and data modeling / query design and tuning etc, I can't say I have any sense that FP has made the slightest touch of difference in the way I think about any of that or really even related concepts to it for me. It has given me a couple ideas about how to deal with graphs, but in an algorithmic processing sense, not a modeling sense. FP really hardly touches that stuff at all
user41796
@JimmyHoffa Even worse are the ones using PowerBuilder and the like. They're locked into a fragmented path with almost no hope of escaping. But your observation is correct. I've seen / heard of them from my days as a consultant.
The only thing FP has taught me about modeling is that you can get really far on nothing but primitive types, and there's no reason to bother modeling things in complex types until the model itself is particularly relevant.
or rather, until you basically must
user41796
delayed decision making can be good.
@GlenH7 FP teaches you to find generalized abstractions that can have true reusability unlike the claimed "reusability" of much of OO. (One of the keys to more general abstractions is that avoid specific types/stick to primitive types where possible) But more than anything, it teaches you to model computations instead of modeling state
user41796
yeah, I'm going back to saying that sounds like too much work.
7:02 PM
haha
user41796
easier to pull off tri-fecta rep cap days. C'mon 20 more!
I'm just trying to correct your expectations, you may at some point start looking at FP and if you expect to learn stuff that will help you designing queries or SQL; you'll be sorely disappointed.
user41796
nah, when I start something new like that, I try to go in with an blank slate for expectations. By not expecting anything, I think I end up getting more out of the learning experience.
@psr Nonsense, these things are both extremely straight forward, I mean; they're basically C.... .......
user41796
All claims to the contrary are merely professions of ignorance
user55340
7:43 PM
sigh I've been out of close votes for awhile.
user55340
Go go World Engineer!
user55340
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about implementation related issues. Normally this would be migrated to Stack Overflow but given the lack of any effort shown, it fails to meet the minimum migration standard. — World Engineer 1 min ago
user41796
it's probably wrong to add to homework questions
user41796
and I hit a tri-fecta rep cap! woo hoo!
user41796
41 more times and I'll earn an Epic badge
14:00 - 20:0020:00 - 00:00

« first day (1113 days earlier)      last day (4042 days later) »