The Whiteboard

1:24 AM

@RobertHarvey JimmyHoffa calls himself a developer, and he doesn't believe in assignment statements.

Pretty sure @JimmyHoffa knows how to do a JOIN.

anyone have a good beginner JS tutorial/site recommendation?

I've heard JOINs have something to do with programming, but I could never put the two together. (Ba Dum, ching)

Two tables walk into a bar...

They sit at different tables becuase no one knows how to join them.

1:26 AM

@Ampt codecademy.com/tracks/javascript

user20683

4:02 AM

@Ampt

user20683

javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly

user20683

That's the site I used

4:52 AM

to moderator who handled my recent flag on this question: I don't mind decline but next time, please consider that my estimates for stuff like that tend to be quite accurate. It did hit hot list (#8 as of now) and it picked some lemmings crap just as I warned — gnat 10 secs ago

I removed this comment to avoid confusing non-mod readers but diamonds can see it :)

user15026

Oh man, you guys get some massively upvoted stuff. O.o

8:22 AM

@FrostEngineer Another person effectively saying Crockford is o-so-smart but his advice is not to be followed...

user20683

8:57 AM

@JimmyHoffa I pretty much cannibalize the resources and ignore the advice.

A: What is meant by "Now you have two problems"?

11:59 AM

wonder who upvoted this?

0

A programmer has a problem. "I know", the programmer says; "I'll use threads". Now have you two oprbslem.

16

Q: Answers quality in hot questions

For few recent months, I've got a habit of downvoting answers which quality doesn't look OK to me. These probably can be generally described as low effort and/or these lacking relevance to question asked. Opinionated slogans, claims that are not backed up by appropriate references or by ...

discussion answer-quality hot-questions

maple_shaft

12:14 PM

@gnat I just wonder how in less than 24 hours it got almost 5k views. Must have been reddited or something

I know how you feel about poor quality answers... but there is a reason why the elite are in small clubs and poor are in masses. There are just more people out there with a poor answer that want to be heard than there are people with an intelligent well thought out, well formulated, well researched answer that want to be heard

Poor answers are just easier.

Sometimes as moderators I feel we are using a bucket to get water out of the boat that has a 4 ft wide hole in it.

12:31 PM

@maple_shaft 5K views, interesting. This indeed doesn't look likely coming from the hot list. Probably reddited or something like that. Although I am not yet fully confident how its recent move from collider to sidebar could impact views. As for poor answers, I agree that these are inevitable price one pays for high views. I only feel bad when their amount becomes unmanageable because of hotness formula (here it seems to be not the case, question has been timely protected)

1:50 PM

@gnat It got tweeted.

And then retweeted by the Stack Exchange general twitter account.

I wish high rep users could queue up questions to be tweeted, not however they are selected now.

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2014

2:10 PM

0

user20683

I find the irony of a question about regex having a "Don't give one line answers" notice especially delicious.

2

user41796

@ThomasOwens Has that been requested on MSO before? If not, I'm willing to float the Q and suffer the voting churn. :-)

Oded

@FrostEngineer problems = 1 + number_of_lines?

@FrostEngineer what would be the regex to detect one liners?

user41796

@FrostEngineer - thanks for the feedback from yesterday

2:23 PM

@GlenH7 Maybe. I don't remember. I don't like the automated tweeting, though.

user41796

Might also be more useful to prevent it from being tweeted.

user20683

@gnat You'd want a regex that matches end of line characters.

user41796

One of those cases where the question was "meh" and could be tolerated. But then it got publicity and became schlock.

user20683

@maple_shaft

user20683

shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920029595.do

2:30 PM

Hello,

user41796

Hola

i am a bit confused weather this question can be asked in 'programmers'.. !
Q:Linux or Windows is best for HTML/PHP coding?

user41796

Probably not a good fit.

@GlenH7 not surprising. Tweeter bot brainlessly picks questions based on defective hotness formula, the rest is business as usual

20 hours ago, by gnat

@Ampt this question will probably hit hot list, with 6 answers in less than an hour meaning you're guaranteed to be disappointed, with brainless upvotes, lemming meh answers etc etc. @MichaelT it looks worth protecting now to prevent / tame coming damage, doesn't it?

i would like to get the openion of some programmers..

user41796

2:33 PM

"best" is ridiculously subjective in this case and therefore hard to answer (if not impossible)

user41796

It also reeks of gorilla vs. shark, which in this case means you're making unfair comparisons or comparisons that can't be equated.

this question will be applicable to all programmers and not just for me...

user41796

But if you like opinions, then it's worth asking here in chat. Just not a good fit for the main site

user41796

@owleye "meh" :-) It's still heavily opinion based. But that's okay in chat.

user41796

@gnat That's an interesting point, and may well be how it's chosen.

2:35 PM

ok whats your opinion...!?

user41796

@gnat - I'm not willing to tilt at the formula for a bit, but trying to carve off a slice of the damage it can cause is worthwhile. I'll write up the MSO question at some point today.

user41796

@owleye are you equally comfortable with both OSs?

A: Are "what language...?" questions on-topic?

@owleye operating system, IDE, programming language etc are tools, asking to recommend these is explicitly off-topic both at Programmers and Stack Overflow

4

Assuming that programming language is a tool to get particular job done, questions asking to recommend a language match the canned close reason: Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opin...

I am just a beginner.. I am confortable with both linux and windows. I am now learning html and php in that case which is best to use..?

user41796

@owleye - familiarity with OS would be my primary decision factor. If you only know one OS, then I would stick with that. If you know both OSs reasonably well, then I would do HTML development in Windows and I would do PHP development in Linux. My impression is that there are more / better gui tools for viewing your HTML output on the windows platform. Likewise, PHP is better tackled on a linux platform.

user41796

2:39 PM

If you can only pick one, and you can find a good html visualization tool on linux then I would go with linux. But I'm biased towards coding (like php) more than I am towards html.

user41796

so the bulk of what I do would be in php (actually something else, but nevermind) and I would suffer the lesser tools on linux for html because I wouldn't be doing as much html.

user41796

flip that around if you think you're going to be doing a lot more html than php. If that's the case, then go with windows.

I will be doing more php than html because i am more into wordpress development..

thankyou sir.. your time really helped. :)

user41796

@owleye yw, glad it helped guide you. And thank you for double checking your question here in chat before asking on main.

I happened to read the FAQ..

LOL

user41796

2:45 PM

@owleye it's appreciated. :-)

thanks

have a good day sir.
Bye

@GlenH7 you can check this assumption on questions listed in SE twitter - twitter.com/StackExchange and Programmers one - twitter.com/StackProgrammer

user41796

@gnat At some point in life I should probably start paying attention to twitter...

user55340

I'm feeling a bit guilty about hitting the repcap before waking up in the morning.

user55340

@Ampt write a good answer so that I can give you a bounty and get you closer to 3k rep.

user41796

2:58 PM

@gnat Skimming over the programmers tweetings and I can't see a pattern yet. I don't think it's all that closely tied to the hotness formula since there are some that haven't been answered or took a long time to pull an answer

user20683

@GlenH7 I suspect Sam the Brand may have something to do with it.

A: How does the twitter bot work?

5

Looking at the Server Fault and Super User Twitter streams, it looks like each account is set up to automatically tweet a new status every 3 hours. According to this answer by Nick Craver there is a "hotness" algorithm based on views over a certain period of time. (This is probably similar to t...

51

Q: The Twitter bot should not Tweet posts that have flags on them

While reviewing the flags on a Programmers post I found this: You can clearly see that the post was flagged 5 minutes before the post was Tweeted. While in this case the post remains open, it might not have done and there would have been (another) closed question Tweeted to the world. Posts w...

feature-request twitter

11

Q: Should we be concerned that @StackProgrammer tweets lead to closed/deleted questions?

Like 634 others, I follow @StackProgrammer on Twitter to read and retweet hot questions. However, it's been nagging at me recently that I perceived "a lot" of these tweets -- tweets ostensibly meant to focus attention on those questions and bring both veteran and new users into the site -- were l...

discussion closed-questions twitter

SE twitter has 8K+ followers, matching an order of 5K views on two-problems question, especially assuming possible retweets

user41796

3:15 PM

@FrostEngineer Bleh. Human algorithms are harder to tweak.

user41796

@gnat Thanks for digging those up. I had been rummaging through MSO to find the same.

user55340

@gnat First answer on that question...

user55340

14

A: Should we be concerned that @StackProgrammer tweets lead to closed/deleted questions?

I am concerned as it seems to affect all sites, not just ours. I don't like the fact that questions that aren't the best advertisement for the site being Tweeted or posted to Google+. This has been raised by moderators several times in the past and we have be told that changes to the way questio...

user55340

3:43 PM

Btw, fun read if you like PCRE and CS theory - citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.154.6795

A: Should we be concerned that @StackProgrammer tweets lead to closed/deleted questions?

5

Yes it is a bit concerning, although 15% is not that much. I went through some of the questions and there is a minor pattern there, several of the closed questions that made it to Twitter were incorrectly migrated from Stack Overflow and they carried upvotes and upvoted answers from there. The p...

> The problem is in the "hot questions" algorithm and as ChrisF mentioned it affects all sites, not just Programmers

this stuff is broken long ago

MadScientist complained about it at MSO since 2010 or 2011, but SE team didn't give a shit

7

A: Don't let questions stick to the top of the hot questions list forever

I agree that two weeks was extreme for that question, but as you can see, it is no longer present. That is also a very, very rare event. Can you think of another time that has happened since we introduced the MultiCollider? I don't think we need to rearchitect the entire se.com cross-site hotne...

user41796

@gnat I'm arguing semantics, but it can't be declared broken if it never worked. :-) It's a visible example of what happens when you prototype with the expectation of repeated iteration and then not iterate.

user55340

Mod types - have there been any flags on the "two problems" - just wondering if ChrisF's MSO feature request would have slowed down this one at all.

user41796

@MichaelT my guess would be no. I tried to think of a reasonable reason to throw a close vote on it but couldn't. As I mentioned earlier, it was a tolerable "meh" question that got too much publicity.

@GlenH7 my understanding is, it worked more or less okay between 2008 and 2010-mid 2011. It just failed to scale

user41796

3:52 PM

@gnat oh, so back when the site tried to start clean up the crap it fell apart? :-)

user55340

@GlenH7 nods - I don't recall seeing any CV's on it when I wrote my answer, nor any flags in the 10k handling. If there was one, it was a mod message.

user41796

@gnat - don't bother replying to that last one. I was jokingly backing you into a corner I knew you wouldn't defend. :-D

@MichaelT there was my flag ("Other" kind, bypassing 10k tools), and it has been quickly declined...

11 hours ago, by gnat

to moderator who handled my recent flag on this question: I don't mind decline but next time, please consider that my estimates for stuff like that tend to be quite accurate. It did hit hot list (#8 as of now) and it picked some lemmings crap just as I warned — gnat 10 secs ago

@FrostEngineer Wise. This is a good approach to a great many things; this is how I feel about Yegge and Graham, the experiences and causal relationships they walk the reader through are really good resources to munge, but the advice always ends up a little suspect heh

user55340

Idea - a new privledge for Nk to approve / reject tweets? Or auto protect tweets?

user55340

3:56 PM

And while this one has blown up, we have prevented it from being too bad (it was contained relatively quickly)... it only has 8 answers and 2 deleted ones.

user41796

@MichaelT I'm writing up an MSO request for that now

user55340

Its a meh question, that got popular, but its not doing the "OMGWTFBBQ CW!" path.

@maple_shaft The bucket needs to be bigger on the inside!

user55340

(to toot my own horn), one of the things that may help stifle the poor answers is to give a good one. If a good answer is given fast enough, people are less likely (though not completely) to post a meh answer. Its having really poor meh answers that inspires others to add another meh answer thats slightly better than the existing ones.

user55340

In essence, set the bar high early.

user41796

4:02 PM

@MichaelT That's what happened with Frost's answer to the licensing question.

@gnat @GlenH7 @maple_shaft @MichaelT -> MSO Feature Request: Mod tool allows moderators to remove question from hotness list; make it ineligible for hotness but not closed/deleted. This way site moderators can ensure their sites only get the best advertising in the hotness list that they can. Good tool for moderators because then they can ensure people visiting their site through hotness list only see the best quality content which will drive increased participation across all sites.

Good idea for feature request?

Worth a shot.

user55340

Its certainly worth it. Maybe not remove but "give it a mod penalty" as an alternative too.

@MichaelT the manual intervention concept here just made me think of this. Would solve the tweet problem as well

user55340

Heh...

user55340

37

A: Largest Number Printable

Windows 2000 - Windows 8 (3907172 / 23³ = 321) NOTE: DON'T F'ING RUN THIS! Save the following to a batch file and run it as Administrator. CD|Format D:/FS:FAT/V/Q Output when run on a 4TB drive with the first printed number in bold. Insert new disk for drive D: and press ENTER when rea...

user55340

4:09 PM

There's some neat math in other answers trying to calculate their score.

user55340

@amon this might be something you'd enjoy...

user55340

8

A: Largest Number Printable

Final Score: 10↑↑↑↑210 Javascript, in exactly 100 characters, again: z=~~Math.E+'';o={get f(){for(i=z;i--;)z+=i}};o.f;for(i=z;i--;)for(j=z;j--;)for(k=z;k--;)o.f;alert(z) Based on the observation that maximally iterating f is the optimal way to go, I replaced the 13 calls to f with 3 levels of...

@JimmyHoffa playing devil advocate - are mods expected to carry 24x7 watch? Because questions often rocket-jump to the hot list and get tweeted in a matter of 2-3 hours. If no mods are around at the moment, damage can't be stopped by that tool

that's actually my major pain with hotness formula. The way it is designed requires super-fast actions to control the damage. Doesn't look practically doable

@gnat I think fixing the hotness algo is the best solution, but a solution rejected is no solution at all, so this is a hope to at least help make it less bad

user41796

@gnat we could always add more mods... :-)

2

A: Is it possible on MSO to question something that people hold dear without getting "disagreement downvoted"?

4:23 PM

@JimmyHoffa I see, that makes sense. You just need to be prepared to address the point I mentioned - to avoid usual brainless MSO downvotes piling on it. Also...

5

Below recipe will likely be heavily downvoted by the same group it is intended to work against, but somehow, I don't give a shit. A solid way to ensure unbiased evaluation of your question is to build a support group prior to posting it. If you convince handful of users that your ideas are wort...

user41796

0

Q: Allow high-rep users to recommend posts for tweeting

I would like for high rep users to be able to recommend posts for tweeting through the site's twitter account. Call this a "positive recommendation" if you will. I would also like for high rep users to "flag" a question to prevent it from being tweeted. And we could call this a "negative recom...

feature-request twitter

user41796

I have to step out shortly, so I would appreciate anyone riding herd on the comments and helping out

@MichaelT According to the hive-mind all my answers suck. Keep your rep.

user41796

And thanks for the up votes if they came from here. Hopefully that will push the question in the right direction for voting

user55340

@Ampt That second scaling one was good...

user55340

4:32 PM

@GlenH7 you get meme upvotes if you use a freehand red circle on your illustration.

@Ampt Let's be honest here, somebody who doesn't even know SQL is bound to just write terrible answers and terrible answers only...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa at least he believes in assignment statements... ;-)

@JimmyHoffa It's my Achilles heel.

@MichaelT I believe in assignment....it's just reassignment I'm not convinced exists (it's clearly a fable)

@MichaelT I just had the basics of it. Jimmy did the heavy lifting.

4:36 PM

@Ampt I'll leave it alone then, my sister cut through her achilles tendon once, that was a bad situation.

user55340

Don't worry @Ampt unless you get converted by the cult of NoSQL, you'll find your way to St. Codd and the NF Commandments eventually.

@MichaelT He's already converted. You know what that means? Doomed to write joins in code for the rest of his days. Poor unfortunate sod...

unpleasant and obnoxious? I'm almost hurt jimmy

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Well, the alternative is writing javascript to do things with json documents... I'll take join any day.

"if it's not closeworthy it's not doing any damage" -- study I did about a year ago suggests that this assumption is flawed — gnat 25 secs ago

4:51 PM

@MichaelT Was a joke at a previous job I had because every so often you'd be digging through some code and find somebody looping two lists to get an aggregate or joined collection of elements, colloquially the "C# join" code for "Some engineer who had no idea what they were doing", but as @Ampt pointed out, there truly are vast portions of the industry that never touch relational data in a way that would require performance or persistence...

@Ampt though let's be entirely clear on this point: You are headed directly for an enterprise CRUD career.

This isn't about discouraging people from visiting the site; it's about stopping the site being advertised as something it's not. — Yannis 1 min ago

@Yannis I will vote up your comment tomorrow (hit the limit today)

user55340

What this is asking is the ability to put on delay the tweet, let things that shouldn't get tweeted from getting tweeted, and allow the site to prepare (protecting the question, notices, deleting existing poor answers to avoid setting a poor example for others). Significant focused viewership can do significant damage to the site (mod flags, meta posts, "why did my answer get deleted", etc...). This is further increased when the mod count is lower on the site... (and we haven't been able to persuade Yannis to carry a pager hooked up to the twitter feed yet.) — MichaelT 1 min ago

A: Allow high-rep users to recommend posts for tweeting

How would this feature discourage readership? The way I see it, if the quality of the posts that are tweeted goes up, that will increase engagement from people with the twitter account- and by proxy increase engagement with the sites that get tweeted. Imagine if more of what the twitter account spits out are posts that are of a sincerely high quality, that will attract people who have interest in that content and are more likely going to generate similarly high quality content. There's no way this could be bad other than possibly the technical implementation which I know nothing about — Jimmy Hoffa 28 secs ago

user55340

0

Given the community's record with bikeshed votes, I think recommending questions for tweeting is going to have an adverse effect on the site overall. Every question that is tweeted will get views and votes out of proportion to the actual quality of the answer. I can see how this could be game...

user55340

@RobertHarvey consider if this was a 10k or 15k or 20k privilege... something in that range...

5:03 PM

@JimmyHoffa haha I know. I do know SQL, and have a great resource at hand: my roommate is a really really good SQL dev

his summer internship was all about re-writing queries for a large manufacturer to make it more efficient

@Ampt Nice. Tuning SQL is actually good fun and you learn a fucking lot about how all of it works when you have to do that and get creative about what structural organization might be more efficient for what usecases vs whether a use cases joins or where clauses can be improved etc

There's a lot of tradeoffs you have to think through to really tune SQL

@Servy That would be a happily accepted alternative, but due to the hotness formula algorithm improvements that have been suggested multiple times being rejected, this is an attempt to improve something without requesting the algorithm change as the sounds from SE are that the technicals of how the algorithms work makes changing them extremely onerous. — Jimmy Hoffa 52 secs ago

Publically tying the two requests together like that "We want the algorithm changed" and "Add this feature" might give people cause to downvote the feature by association... sorry if that's so

Also in your answer here you're missing one fact in your thoughts about just downvoting fixes this - it doesn't. Getting downvotes respected by the hotness algorithm has been requested but rejected, as it stands they hardly have any effect on the ranking of a question that gets many low/no-quality/me-too answers. If simply down voting balanced against the algorithmic ranking of these posts then this feature wouldn't be requested because the automated tweets would likely choose quality content. This feature speaks about giving a manual lever to allow choosing quality content instead. — Jimmy Hoffa 1 min ago

5:30 PM

analysis in this post suggests that stable increase in visits happens only when site strongly focuses on providing high quality content — gnat 19 secs ago

@Yannis FWIW, you've only got two closed questions out of 25. I suspect this is a better ratio than the tweet bot. (Alternate suggestion: give Yannis the twitter feed? ... but then, this is kind of what is being suggested) — MichaelT 3 mins ago

@MichaelT real alternative would be to feed the bot with tequila (that would make it work like Yannis... I think)

user55340

@gnat Need better than 100 proof in order to burn it for energy easily. I'd suggest Bacardi 151.

@MichaelT only after it is tested on Yannis!

Actually I'm probably not articulating myself properly. Providing a manual lever where trusted members of the community can endorse high-quality questions actually sounds like a good idea in principle, but I can't think clearly due to my revulsion for Twitter. — Robert Harvey 7 secs ago

5:46 PM

@RobertHarvey you need to consult with Yannis about how much tequila could help

It would take an awful lot.

@gnat Yes. ;) — Yannis 40 mins ago

user55340

@RobertHarvey Its a question of do you trust 1?k+ with the twitter lever more than a bot that is in bed with the hotness formula?

Marginally more.

While I've already seen the problems with Redditting, I also acknowledge that those problems arise from folks who, for the most part, are not invested in Stack Overflow's success. Presumably 1?k users are.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Exactly the theory behind the suggestion...

user55340

5:51 PM

btw, I'm thinking of adding the twitter feed for P.SE to the room, so that we get a better heads up on what is going on.

Does anyone ever see those tweets? How does an ordinary Twitter user stumble across the "these are the questions that high-rep users believe are interesting on Stack Overflow" feed?

user55340

@RobertHarvey Lots of people apparently see the tweets...

@MichaelT Do it.

@RobertHarvey we just got about 5K views from SE twitter in a day

3 hours ago, by gnat

SE twitter has 8K+ followers, matching an order of 5K views on two-problems question, especially assuming possible retweets

@RobertHarvey It's amplified when the Stack Exchange retweets a Programmers tweet.

5:53 PM

You gotta be kidding me. That's probably more followers than the site even gets visitors in a single day.

user55340

Here's the feed - twitter.com/stackprogrammer

That says 1792 followers, not 8K.

@RobertHarvey And survey says...that can't be right.

user55340

And that gets retweeted...

@RobertHarvey twitter.com/StackExchange says "8434 FOLLOWERS" (plus some of them retweet)

5:55 PM

Umm... So the SE feed for the entire network has 8 thousand followers. That makes a bit more sense.

user55340

the Two problems then got rewtweeted by StackExchange - twitter.com/StackExchange

user55340

What is meant by "Now you have two problems"? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/223634?atw=1 #regularexpressions

Tweeted by StackProgrammer on January 9, 2014 at 8:32 PM

That's got hot questions for every SE site, in one list. Why would anyone follow that, when they can get tools like email notifications?

user55340

Because some people like twitter more.

Seriously, I just don't get it.

5:56 PM

Like me. That's one of the things I'd prefer to be in Twitter.

If I miss a message, no big deal. Email should be for things that I want to read or handle.

For the entire network? For the love of God, why?

user55340

I'm not a tweet person, but if I was, I'd rather get a retweet than an email forward.

It's actually not very active.

user55340

@RobertHarvey Something interesting to read at work?

user55340

off to lunch... I'll hook up the feed later.

5:58 PM

Completely uninteresting to me. Probably because it is push. I'm a pull guy.

I prefer to pull things that I need or want to see, have things that may be interesting pushed (and ignored, if I don't have time/resources).

@MichaelT Just the Programmers feed, right? Don't we already get that in the upper left hand corner anyway?

@RobertHarvey He's referring to the things that get posted to Twitter.

Not every question on Programmers gets tweeted.

Let's don't. If we want to see what's happening on that Twit, we can always open a web page.

6:11 PM

@RobertHarvey might be appealing for guys with mobile phones. Twitter format is made for them after all

@RobertHarvey what the hell was your edit on your answer?? I look at the revision and see nothing

@JimmyHoffa I was going to fold my last comment into the answer, but since someone upvoted the comment (and it now has some visibility) I changed my mind.

@gnat Does it show up here, in the chat room?

@RobertHarvey some tweets show up here, I've seen these. But I am not sure that all of them go to chat

found it!

chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/21/the-whiteboard?tab=feeds

New items from these feeds will be posted into the room like regular chat messages.
Programmers Stack Exchange Blog posted by Programmers Blog
Newset questions tagged featured - Programmers Meta Stack Exchange posted by Stack Exchange
Blog - Stack Exchange posted by Stack Exchange
Ars Technica » Stack Exchange posted by Stack Exchange

@RobertHarvey I'm just confused -> How did it record a revision with nothing in it? Can you ninja-edit edits so it looks like revision 2 when it's revision 3?

I know you can ninja-edit the initial post but assumed all revisions afterwards were persistent

user41796

7:13 PM

It's probably just as well that I was AFK after launching my MSO question. @gnat, @JimmyHoffa, @MichaelT, @RobertHarvey, @YannisRizos -- thanks for weighing in on that MSO question!

user41796

I'm tempted to steal @servy's comments and wrap them into an alternative answer

Thanks for convincing me to close vote, I was on the edge but you make a very strong and good argument for your opinion which I couldn't disagree with more, I could post an answer that totally disagrees with you and backs up my point and my opinion with a logical explanation, which would be a fine thing to do. The problem with this question is neither "yes" or "no" can be anything but wishy-washy opinion so I'm voting to close as opinion based. I won't -1 even though I think you're wrong just because...it's your opinion, and rightness or wrongness doesn't play into that — Jimmy Hoffa 39 secs ago

user55340

Woe! Woe! Curse the repcap... I hit at 7am or so for me... and I'm getting upvotes on other questions. Woe! Woe is me...

@MichaelT am I unfounded in that close-vote stance?

user55340

(that said, 2x days of 200 rep gets me much closer to 20k... only a tad over 2k more rep needed)

7:22 PM

@GlenH7 only as an answer, because you can delete it if it gets downvoted. His tweak is neat but... slippery

@Servy with all due respect, I prefer to stick with "overloading" term - simply because I am not aware of any other use cases when up/down voting data was ever "filtered by rep" for whatever purposes. By the way, maybe this is because of concerns about keeping voting anonymous - if this is the case, "additional icons" approach could actually turn out a path of smaller resistance. Voting anonymity is a delicate matter — gnat 41 mins ago

user41796

@JimmyHoffa You know what we need? We need some close / reopen wars to go on. Seriously - think of how it would make the high rep users more active...

haha

user41796

@gnat I'm not going to quibble over some of the semantics. He's essentially saying "forget additional levers, use the info you've already got from high-rep users' votes"

@GlenH7 here's your war 5Close:3Leave Open. Guess who won? programmers.stackexchange.com/review/close/47942

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I believe its reasonable... just got back from lunch and have a meeting in... <10 min that I'm preping for. Didn't read through it completely.

user41796

7:23 PM

Honestly, I think that's a harder approach to take technically, but that doesn't concern me. SE is the one that has to decide the technical way to implement.

user41796

@gnat Yay! my team won!

user41796

And I think the anonymity with the voting would be preserved. We'll never see the values, only SE bots would see them.

@GlenH7 That was basically my stance towards Servy -> let SE decide what's technically good or bad for them, all we can do is speak about application mechanics but not implementation

user55340

>
API v1.1 will support JSON only. We've been hinting at this for some time now, first dropping XML support on the Streaming API and more recently on the trends API. We've chosen to throw our support behind the JSON format shared across the platform. Consequently, we've decided to discontinue support for XML, Atom, and RSS, which are infrequently used today. For historical context, when we originally built the API all major languages did not have performant, well vetted libraries supporting JSON — today they do.

user55340

No support for Atom or RSS - no chat.SE integration doable. sigh

7:29 PM

@MichaelT What is that for?

user55340

dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview

Oh. JSON sucks, XML forever.

@ThomasOwens What do you think about IBON?

user55340

XML is verbose, but its also nicely structured.

Or GORD?

7:30 PM

@GlenH7 nope, lost. Check the question status against your vote there. (I was in your team, too, so we eventually lost at 6Close:3Open)

I don't know with either of those are.

I like XML because I can check what I'm given against a schema easily. It's the same reason why I'm not a fan of dynamically-typed languages.

I'm afraid of the unknown.

@ThomasOwens Engineer? You sure you're not an MBA?

@JimmyHoffa I'm a Software Philosopher now. I made that up. I hope.

@ThomasOwens steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/…

@ThomasOwens savas.me/2008/06/ldquosoftware-philosopherrdquo

Closer to the second link, I think. Some combination of an architect, a developer, a tester, a user, and a process engineer.

7:37 PM

@ThomasOwens Oh, I was just trying to dash your hope that you mentioned above...

What good is being a cynical bastard if you don't get to destroy other people's dreams?

I'm kind of surprised that it exists. But also pleased that I came up with this idea without knowing about it before hand and having it validated.

@ThomasOwens You gotta remember people get into software from many different directions, software folks tend to have a mind good at many different things which is why we come from philosophy, math, linguistics, music, that's why we have occasionally off the wall titles like software theologian

I wanted to study social and organizational psych at one point. Software engineering process and methodology is very similar. It also doesn't require a ton of schooling and pays better. Not to mention I learned how to design and build software, which makes for a fun hobby (when I'm not doing much development at work, anyway).

@ThomasOwens Though it also has a lot more work than talking to people who sit in your chair

@JimmyHoffa I'm not so sure. I probably would have gone into consulting at businesses or university research into organizations. Still I probably have busier days.

I love it, though. Wouldn't change it for anything.

user20683

7:48 PM

@JimmyHoffa I, for instance, tend to come at computing from an informal linguistic angle with an artsy bend.

Major life decisions should come with an explanatory game card:
Social psych:
+2 to money after 5 years
+2 to energy at the end of each day
Suffer penalty to everything for the next 6 years

Software engineering:
+1 to money immediately
+1 to money again after 2 years
-1 to energy at the end of conversations with classes having a negative affinity (PM, MBA, QA)
Suffer penalty to motivation in 5 years
Suffer penalty to everything for every cup of coffee not drank

user20683

@JimmyHoffa CS?

user15026

@JimmyHoffa I could have used one of those, because I am pretty sure my English degree has some major penalties to it :P

user20683

English:
+1 to grammar immediately
+1 to knowledge of the canon after 2 years.
+1 to desire to write novels
-2 to likelyhood of writing novels rather than teaching apathetic students
-2 to money unless Masters

user15026

@FrostEngineer This makes me wanna go to library school....

user15026

8:01 PM

Also, yeah, want to write stuff, likely never will. :P

user20683

Religious Studies:
+1 to tolerance immediately
+1 to historiography after 2 years
+1 to foreign languages
-2 to money unless PhD and lucky.
-2 to people understanding that you aren't going into ministry

user15026

@FrostEngineer oh, the last one especially.

A: Allow high-rep users to recommend posts for and against tweeting

By convention, knowledge in your head is knowledge in the world, by configuration, knowledge in the world is knowledge in your head. — psr 5 mins ago

user41796

8:24 PM

I'm a thief. But I was given permission.

user41796

0

An alternative approach...1 Short version just change the tweeting algorithm to only incorporate votes from high rep users Long version The proposed approach has at least a few problems with it: Not everyone who can use it will use it because it requires additional steps outside of nor...

9:13 PM

Tons, good luck and god speed. Voting to close, this isn't a question unfortunately, have a look at the faq, questions need to really have an authoritative answer and you have here a discussion topic / request for resources / poll. Sorry mate, if I knew how to get more people to buy my Haskelling I wouldn't still kind of suck at it from lack of use... Would love to see you succeed but this question is not the way to do it. — Jimmy Hoffa 48 secs ago

user55340

@AshleyNunn English degrees are great stepping stones for a barista. (ok... joking... mostly.)

Rhotic and non-rhotic accents

@MichaelT Stop being so cynical, an English degree will at least get you bartender status

user15026

@MichaelT haha thanks :(

user55340

Seriously though, when I was at netapp, 3 of my immediate co-workers were english majors (one was almost a HS english teacher)... not sure what education path the knowledge base team had... but then two of them were british.

user55340

(had some fun discussions about accents with them - the rhotic 'r' and the distribution of it in England and the US, and the historical professions associated with those locales)

user55340

9:19 PM

In linguistic terms, non-rhotic accents are said to exclude the sound from the syllable coda before a consonant or prosodic break. This is commonly (if misleadingly) referred to as "post-vocalic R". Rhotic and non-rhotic accents in English English pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic (, sometimes ) speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard and butter; a non-rhotic speaker does not. That is, rhotic speakers pronounce (English R) in nearly all positions of a word, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce only if it is followed by a vowel sound in...

@MichaelT My boss here is an old silicon valley hand of the bubble, he told a cool story last Friday, you have heard of X-Drive right?

user55340

Thats the area where one would pronounce an 'r'. A non-rhotic speaker saying "car park" sounds (to my ear) more like "ca pak"

user55340

(oddly, this next one is flipped - the non-rhotic is in pink)

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I recall it vaugely....

user55340

9:22 PM

The classic pirate accent is a very strong rhotic accent. The area in the US that doesn't have it corresponds to the upper class (see London doesn't have it) settlements in the early colonial days.

@MichaelT I don't know a lot about all the stories of those times but I do recall having heard of XDrive as a well known high-profile .com bubble flameout back then, boss apparently was brought on as their VP of engineering back then, apparently it was no surprise the bubble burst based on what was going on their and knowing the same was happening at companies all over..

user55340

@AshleyNunn the point I was kind of trying to make it there was that I tended to work with more english majors in tech jobs than CS majors.

user15026

@MichaelT iiiinteresting :D

user15026

I mean so far no one finds me awesome enough, but hopefully if I just keep banging my head against things something will stick

user55340

There was one point that on the team the english majors outnumbered the programmers 3:2 (team of 5, one other programmer... manager and two tech writers were both english majors)

A: How to "dispose" of this particular wall-of-code, self-resolved question

9:27 PM

@AshleyNunn It's a hard industry to crack, you just kind of have to do that until someone takes a chance, after someone does that and you put that on your background, so long as you don't fuck up you'll basically be set from then on. Company's are so afraid of giving the first chance, but dying to get people who showed somebody else they could do the job.

user15026

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, I just need that chance like whoa

user55340

2

Use the new custom close reason: "This question was caused by a problem that can't be reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was solved in a manner unlikely to help future readers. This can often be avoided by identifying and c...

user55340

@RobertHarvey I like that close reason... should be very useful on SO.

@GlenH7 consider somehow... "retweeting" in your feature request that study by Yannis - to further back it up and, additionally, to denigrate statements like any publicity is good

analysis in this post suggests that stable increase in visits happens only when site strongly focuses on providing high quality content — gnat 4 hours ago

> you can't overlook the fact that it only started growing when it became a serious Q&A site

user41796

@gnat no strike-through for you! :-)

A: Improving "demonstrate a minimal understanding" close reason

9:36 PM

@MichaelT Shog added it...

"This question was caused by a problem that can't be reproduced or a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic here, this one was solved in a manner unlikely to help future readers. This can often be avoided by identifying and closely inspecting the shortest program necessary to reproduce the problem before posting." (too localized v. 2.0) — gnat 2 hours ago

20

Take #3: Catching camels, not gnats First off, a big thanks to everyone who pitched in here - trying to distill a broad class of (often ill-defined) problems into a clear, helpful bit of guidance is quite a challenge - I'm happy to see so many folks willing to take a crack at it. In particular,...

"unlikely to help future readers" -- welcome back Too Localized? Upvoted for "Take #3" - sounds quite a relief to me — gnat yesterday

user41796

@gnat I kind of have the feeling the request is dead in the water until SE gets a chance to look it over. Servy's request may actually be the best route to enabling the request, but I don't know how much of a pain point carp tweets are for them.

user41796

The benefit of Servy's idea is that it would be very easy to apply that to the hotness / collider formula.

user41796

Just sayin' ...

user55340

@GlenH7 Its another "impacts smaller sites occasionally" - likely low on the radar.

user41796

@MichaelT ding! and while I think it's appealing to make the tweets be more influenced by humans, I don't think it's a high priority for them.

user55340

9:40 PM

Though if you wanted to... you could do some rather neat theoretical things with weighting votes based on active voters for the previous {time}.

user55340

Fit all voters to a curve of some shape, use that curve to weight hotness.

user55340

ie: votes from 0 .. 200 rep would be weighted to 0 for calculating hotness.

user55340

Or something like that.

user55340

One could then scale that question's hotness on the site against other questions in time period to get a network wide hotness metric that is... more fair?

user41796

@MichaelT most likely, yes. Only problem is we don't have access to that data since voting is anonymous (to us)

user55340

9:44 PM

However, one could pose that as an approach to look at with fabricated numbers.

user41796

I wonder if we could argue for a "Thor's hammer" on the hotness formula instead. High rep user down vote counts heavily against collider score.

user41796

So leave all the lemming up vote score contributors in place, but allow for Thor's hammer to bring the score down dramatically based upon high rep downvote.

user55340

The only thing that gets this to be... possibly problematic would be the use of weighted hotness votes would allow high rep users to collude to get disproportionate attention to certain questions.

user55340

Thor's hammer would be a solution to that concern too.

@MichaelT That's a feature

user41796

9:45 PM

I'm thinking down only, not up, with Thor's hammer. High rep user up votes collider question is treated no differently than now.

user55340

@psr We get enough... collusion as it is with our own understanding of the system and being able to tweak things to hit it at times.

user55340

(the I know gnat will hate me for this, but I'm pushing it t'wards the collider...)

user55340

What we really need to do is join Pets.SE and get every cat question on the collider, because cats are great.

user41796

@MichaelT ... It's been demonstrated that it is trivial to game that particular system with a very small set of users ...

user41796

@MichaelT dogs. Gotta be for the doggies.

user55340

9:49 PM

@GlenH7 dailycaller.com/2013/04/08/…

@GlenH7 agree. Nevertheless I'd prefer it to be fully equipped, for the (okay, unlikely) case if it "gets a chance" as you say

user55340

Image on the right is actually a ferret.

Pretty funny looking ferret.

user41796

@MichaelT epic

user55340

9:50 PM

> The ferrets had been given steroids to make them appear larger and were groomed to look like fluffy white toy poodles. The small poodles usually sell for around $1000, and the man paid $150 for each of the large ferrets. He was not the only dog buyer duped however. Local news in Buenos Aires discovered a woman had been sold a ferret passed off as a chihuahua as well.

Wow. That's awesome.

user41796

@gnat I'm comfortable playing a "long game" with that particular request. I think it got enough attention that it will eventually be reviewed or will tickle someone in SE's ear. So I can pretend to be patient.

user41796

But I am intrigued about pushing another MSO question regarding the collider and offering up Thor's hammer as the solution.

@GlenH7 that would be nice bounty target to pump my excessive MSO rep

user41796

Some day I want to hit 10k rep on MSO so I can laugh at all the stuff that's been deleted. But I'm still scared of MSO...

2

9:56 PM

@GlenH7 you got lucky this time to get 11 upvotes - this suffices to offset usual gang-DVs. I made a climbing from -10 once there, don't want to repeat...

11 upvotes - not bad for the post that has been initially voted down to -10 — gnat Nov 22 '13 at 17:39

user41796

@gnat Someone wise said the way to game MSO is to make sure you have a support group to upvote the question the moment you post it. Which is exactly what I did today.

user41796

(I would have quoted your answer to that effect, but I didn't want to go digging)

@GlenH7 hey I know that guy and he's not wise I swear :)

Neat easter egg of the day I just stumbled across: Go to MDN and open up your javascript debug console

A: Is it possible on MSO to question something that people hold dear without getting "disagreement downvoted"?

6 hours ago, by gnat

5

Below recipe will likely be heavily downvoted by the same group it is intended to work against, but somehow, I don't give a shit. A solid way to ensure unbiased evaluation of your question is to build a support group prior to posting it. If you convince handful of users that your ideas are wort...

user41796

9:59 PM

@gnat ding! that's the one.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa MDN?