The Whiteboard

@RobertHarvey before I could even vote, it was already closed

user20683

@RobertHarvey executed

psr

@JimmyHoffa I don't know Moq specifically. But one can call the tranparent proxy class, you just could never write your own. A DI container wouldn't necessarily need to use proxies though. I'm not sure what bit of Moq you are talking about.

12:21 AM

@JimmyHoffa I think it examines the original class via Reflection, and creates a proxy class using the CodeDOM. But I haven't actually looked at the source code yet.

1:19 AM

@RobertHarvey 'CodeDOM' -> Do elaborate?

3:38 AM

Hi

My Implementation of my code looks as follows pastebin.com/GeuUhd5i. It adds the day month and year of a date and find all kinds of neurologically significant number of the Occult using multiple processes, The process seen here is addition and addition of those additions., How can I automate this process to no longer continue this further process of having to do processes on simpler processes?

 Ive been unable to get to chat.SE all day and web client irc were blocking my proxy so now I finally got to a place to ask sigh relief

4:04 AM

@JimmyHoffa msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6(v=vs.110).aspx

@ChrisOkyen Your code doesn't make any sense to me.

@RobertHarvey It adds the Month and Day and the Tens and Ones place of both to see if the summation is a number in a set it Number = { 3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 32, 33 }

Months/Days.Tens/Ones is the Ones or Tens place of the Month or Day

Yes, but there's a bunch of conditional statements, but no code after them.

Oh that

What I am asking about is simply in the scope of the process of manually writing out these if statements of more and more complex summations.....

Without code that makes sense, I don't know how your question is answerable. I would simply store the conditions as data of some sort, and cycle through that data, rather than trying to encode every condition with if statements.

The implementation of each if statement prints out the date if the summation is a number in set Number

4:15 AM

That's fine. But you're here asking how you can get it to work correctly.

And I believe you when you say the code does what you say it does

But I don't understand how it does it.

And neither will anyone else here.

the unknown part is how it determines the summation or the print out part?

What I want to know is how to avoid the tedious task of coding out each if statement for more and more complex summation of summation etc... Especially when the years ones tens hundreds and thousands place is introduced and number that are concatenated are introduced as well....

The print out part. That, and none of the if statements have a "then" part.

^ The problem is in a scope outside of the "then" implementation I think.

@ChrisOkyen I already told you how to fix that. Encode your conditions in data, store that data in some sort of data structure or database (it can be in the form of an xml file), and use a reader to read that data back into a list. You can iterate through the list and check each condition against your target number.

Or simply encode your conditions into an array using a collection initializer.

What does each condition do? Do you have a number for greater than, and a number for less than, for each condition?

Hmm wouldn't that still mean having to have conditions so Add(DaysNumber.Ones,MonthsNumber) or Add(Add(DaysNumber,MonthsNumber.Tens),DaysNumber.Ones)

Like it isn't quite automated to the extent I was hoping

4:23 AM

What does Add() do? See you've made all sorts of assumptions that we cannot make, because we don't know what your program does.

This basically just takes out the if() part each time and you doo Loop: if(condition[N])

That's no small thing.

Lots of if conditions are hard to manage, as you are finding out.

And it is tedious repetitious work

I feel like I should be moved over in a place outsourced by america doing this lol

Figure out how to encode your conditions into a data structure. What are the common elements? What do you need to check against. Reduce the repetitive work into a loop, and execute it repeatedly, for each condition you've encoded into the array.

Break it down into steps. What is the first step you take now?

And Add() has two parameters of two numbers to add. In this case it a part of date: A Year Month or Day or the Tens or Ones place of Day and Month or Ones Tens Hundreds and Thousands place of Year

4:27 AM

Just tell me the first step.

Allright...

Finding Common elements

A: Community Promotion Ads - 2014

How do you find a common element? What is an element?

I am asking because, if you can explain your program in simple steps, in plain English, then I can tell you how to encode that into data.

Or better code.

And you will understand your own program better.

Yannis Rizos

4:44 AM

1

@Gilles has a point there...

@RobertHarvey Will you be on tommorow? I got to go

I apologize

user20683

Peter Norvig takes on XKCD's Regex AI thing

@ChrisOkyen Yeah, I'll be here tommorrow. Sometime.

is that last name Norvig scandinavian

@RobertHarvey allright ill see you then

@FrostEngineer Only a guy like Norvig would get embroiled in something like this. If I were the XKCD guy, I'd be honored.

user20683

4:59 AM

@ChrisOkyen He's an American of what I think is Norwegian descent. Probably the most famous AI researcher alive outside of Ray Kurzweil.

Oh wow

Startled, but honored.

Better than Andre Lamothe and his Doom Jacket :P

user20683

He is (or was) Head of Research at Google

Way better than Andre Lamothe and his Doom Jacket

user20683

5:00 AM

Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig (born 1956) is an American computer scientist. He is a Director of Research (formerly Director of Search Quality) at Google Inc. Educational background He is a Fellow and Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, now the leading college text in the field . He previously was head of the Computational Sciences Division (now the [http://ti.arc.nasa.gov Intelligent Systems Division]) at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists perform...

user20683

He's mostly known for his AI textbook which is the standard in the field

Technological singularity

And Ray Kurzweil is good company. He's the guy who came up with the Technological Singularity.

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable. The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mat...

user20683

@RobertHarvey he's the guy who writes about it a bunch. Vernor Vinge coined the term.

Ah, I see.

user20683

I personally don't buy the whole brain uploading thing

5:02 AM

@FrostEngineer Or maybe John von Neumann

Wiki says Vernor merely popularized the term.

@FrostEngineer You must believe you have a soul, then.

user20683

@RobertHarvey von Neumann could sum infinite series in his head. I'd expect him to think of something like that

user20683

@RobertHarvey Anglican

[heads off to Wikipedia again]

Doesn't say much about the soul.

Anglicanism

Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising the Church of England and churches which are historically tied to it or have similar beliefs, worship practices and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English Church. Adherents of Anglicanism are called Anglicans. The great majority of Anglicans are members of churches which are part of the international Anglican Communion. There are, however, a number of churches outside of the Anglican Communion which also consider themselves to be...

yada yada.

@RobertHarvey How have I never known about this... that is pretty damned awesome, you can just arbitrarily construct an object graph of arbitrary objects??

user20683

@RobertHarvey It's more than just a question of religion though. I'm more concerned about the practicalities of such a thing. Quantum information is a tough thing

5:09 AM

@JimmyHoffa Yes, although there is more than one way to generate code in .NET.

The CodeDOM is just one way. As I understand it, you can create an abstract syntax tree, and then generate code in any language having a codedom provider.

Or you can execute it as a dynamic assembly at runtime. It's pretty cool stuff.

@RobertHarvey True, I know there are some major improvements incoming to make the compiler more available to C#, but Expressions were moved to the DLR in 4.0 because it was recognized that they are dynamic compilation effectively, and they are .NET's abstract syntax trees

But they're kind of well klunky as fuck so I've not super bothered with them and don't know that you could define an object using one though I could think of some contexts where you might make one behave like another object... that's probably how Moq does it because I know Moq uses expressions, though I don't know how an expression object could fake an interface or other type

it's probably all codedom I guess

Microsoft has at least three different models for code generation. There is one that preceded the CodeDOM, and if you think the CodeDOM is klunky, well...

@RobertHarvey I haven't touched the CodeDOM, I think Expressions are klunky

IL emit is obviously the worst offender

but there's something upcoming

what do they call it...rosario...something like that

Roslyn.

Compiler as a Service.

Mono's had that for years.

(their compiler was written in C# from the beginning)

Yeah it's supposed to be pretty first class though giving you the ability to effectively do like LISPs macros was the way it was sold to me

5:19 AM

Sort of. Kind of like a REPL on steroids.

aye well, in any event that'll be a far improvement over current techniques

The Boo Language has an extensible compiler pipeline.

It's designed to accomodate Domain-Specific Languages.

I've even seen C# code string.formatted before and handed to CSC then the resultant file reflection.load()ed

Yeah, people think Boo is really cool, I'm sure it is

Maybe I'm missing something, I played with macros and it was neat, but the whole meta-programming thing just doesn't really apeal to me such a great amount

Probably because in most cases, first-class functions do the job just as well, in a simpler way.

Even in Lisp and Scheme, there are only a handful of acknowledged cases where reaching for a macro is better.

My main focus and enjoyment with code is APIs - designing them to be intuitive and simple in such a way that code using them results in those same traits, while still being as maintainable as possible. Meta-programming is a tool that allows some of that sometimes which is cool and I'm glad to reach for it when I run across a scenario that it yields that benefit, but it doesn't really give any instructions towards the API design which is what interests me

5:25 AM

ORM's like Linq to SQL and EF are a form of metaprogramming.

You're basically transforming one API into another.

Sometimes the most intuitive and simple to use API that results in the most intuitive and easy to maintain consuming code means you have to do some crazy shit underneath the API to make it portray that. More than sometimes even- ORM is a perfect example, LINQ's expression builder is surely insane on the complexity scale, but it generates an API that causes consuming code to have all the good traits you want your consumers to have

That's the tradeoff I enjoy looking at, how do I make an API that is both as good and usable as possible while having the least amount of insanity underneath the API to make it run. The interest in APIs is why I think I like Haskell so much; it speaks a ton to how APIs should be designed

Monads, Functors, Monoids, these are all just APIs that mathematicians found out about, ones that have nice symmetrical behaviours that make them easy to reason about and use

Since I've discovered that Haskell is derived from ML, I've gotten a renewed interest in learning F#.

@RobertHarvey Eh... F# is C# with window dressing...

Most instructionals on F# out there do not utilize any of the things that are worth paying attention to with it; the concept of expressions and purity, F# is an imperative programming language after all and many of the tutorials will show you how to code it that way

Plus it's klunky as fuck to use and it will get in your way if you try to learn the ML type system through it because it's broken type checker won't let you do proper ML types

I strongly suggest against F# as a portal to learning ML, go pick up SML if you want or just install the Haskell platform, it's a simple windows installer that works easy as pie

F# has a lot of buggy aspects to just using it that will distract you from the ML concepts you might otherwise learn from it

You just don't like objects. Bleaugh. :P

@RobertHarvey No no

my problem is with when you try learning ML stuff and in F# you type:
type Val = Str of string * Name | Int of int * Name
type Name = Name of Val

then think you have a bug because F# can't cope with mutually recursive types

while a proper ML has concepts like that at their core

user20683

5:36 AM

OCaml is a decent option

You do stuff like that constantly in MLs, F# however is incapable because it's got object types which have undecidable inference therefore they couldn't do proper terminating inference in F# over all the ML types etc and without guaranteed termination the compiler could just choke on your F# so they canned mutually recursive ML types

Then there's the whole "Why won't it find my type?" -> "Ohh it's because I defined it in a file I created after that file, and the compiler requires type definitions to be in files properly ordered in the project file for the compiler to parse them top-to-bottom..."

When you find yourself hand-editing the project files to reorder files since the compiler cannot accept the files out-of-order you know your compiler is just broken or it's maintainers didn't care (hint: the latter)

@RobertHarvey So grab OCaml or SML or a proper ML if you want to learn the ML type system, but F# is honestly just a research fun-project some folks at MS did to say "Look we have an FP language too! In your face Java!"

user20683

There's a version of "Think like a computer scientist" written in Ocaml

user20683

Scala > F#

user20683

even without true Hindley-Milner

Matt D

I should read tha tbook

user20683

5:45 AM

@MattD Since it's designed to teach basic CS, the examples are really basic for the most part

Matt D

ive been thinking about writing some blog posts on how to think like a programmer

if someone's already written a book about it. even better

Make sure you turn on your spelling/grammar checker first.

Matt D

touche!

I find that i often transpose letters, or translate spaces before the final letter of words. its all very odd. I'm not sure how my typing got so broken.

2:01 PM

@psr Simply proving that only two of us have actually been doing implementation and design doesn't matter. Our organization is split in such a way that we have one director in charge of "idea men" and charlatans who are located in a different building and have the VP's ear. My director is a plant, a shill, a powerless shell of an executive who basically is expected to shut up, don't dissent, always say yes, and whip up his engineers, sys admins and report writers to be all things ...

... for all people

Nobody in my directors position has been there longer than a year and a half. Whenever we have a director that stands up for us and proclaims how ridiculous and futile this madness is, he is accused of being "arrogant" and "hard to work with".

He either conveniently steps down or is fired

The problem goes all the way to the CIO

he has been CIO for over 25 years and his equally out of touch and incompetent VP's are all ass kissers and golf buddies

According to Sun Tzu's Art of War... this is a classic example of being in an unwinnable situation

the only option is retreat

They are the "dreamers", we are the "doers" of all things, even gathering requirements, architecting enterprise wide solutions, pulling together different technical groups, DOING OUR OWN QA...

it doesn't matter, they said "This is Product X", here is a project charter, a sham of a requirements document, and a project plan that is based around fantasy

user41796

3:55 PM

@YannisRizos That was absolutely hilarious. It's a shame we can't run that one for real.

user41796

@maple_shaft There can be great wisdom tucked within that book. Sounds like you've made excellent headway on the first two core requirements which is to thoroughly know your enemy and to know yourself.

@GlenH7 I just got out of a meeting with the "Project Manager"

I asked her, who is our technical contact for the Informatica MDM software...

She said... "this is our responsibility" to find this out

My... mind... hurts...

from that statement

user41796

That's a brilliant first pass diversion

I

what is this... i don't even

user41796

You sir, are surrounded by masters of the art of political shuffling

4:01 PM

It is not the Project Managers responsibility to even know who the project resources are

WHAT THE FUCK

I have never seen so much office politics in my entire career

user41796

Of course it isn't. It's the team's responsibility to know who is responsible for what resources. And then report that to the project manager.

user41796

Doesn't that make perfect sense. 8-D

@maple_shaft The key is they have identified the enemy, and it is you

user41796

@JimmyHoffa au contraire!

THe enemy?!

I am their best fucking friend in the world... and they know it

user41796

4:03 PM

The key is that there is no enemy (except change)

user41796

Their goal is to maintain status quo while providing the appearance of making progress

@maple_shaft the one who see's through their devices is not their friend, whether helpful or not

user41796

Moving forward while standing still

She thinks because she is pretty and puts little smiley faces on the end of every other correspondence that she can "charm" her way through everything

but she is a snake

maybe thats why she doesn't like me... I don't flirt back

@maple_shaft I hear cutting off a snake's head is effective

user41796

4:04 PM

@JimmyHoffa again, not quite true. It's the one who sees through their devices and calls them on their machinations. That's the problem. Many of them are all too well aware of what they are doing.

@GlenH7 aye, all the same, @maple_shaft is plainly not one of their collective, rejection imminent. Which means the least helpful interactions possible are to be dealt him

user41796

@JimmyHoffa You fail to see how valuable of a tool they can be for their devices. So long as he doesn't stir the pot and point out how wickedly ineffective everything is, he'll be lauded as the hero for "getting things done."

She made it plainly clear... this sham of a requirements document is ALL that she will contribute in the ways of business analysis and project management

@maple_shaft Best friend? Are you telling their managers what spectacular jobs they're doing and how their next project is going to be mind-blowing and extremely productive?

That's all they want from anyone

Show that you incline to do anything other than play along with their charade, and you won't even be afforded platitudes anymore.

@JimmyHoffa No... I am keeping their projects from falling apart and keeping them from looking like charlatans

user41796

4:07 PM

@maple_shaft - you were correct earlier in your assessment that retreat is the only option.

user41796

If this PM is particularly onerous and you're willing to expend the political capital, you can complain that you're not getting enough project support.

@maple_shaft They don't see it that way, the way they see it if you make a mistake they'll go brutus on you and string you up on the CIOs door

keeping their projects from falling apart is your job in their eyes

Everything is my job in their eyes

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I disagree in that it can work out in other manners. I've been the darling before, and if I could have put up with it I would have been perfectly fine.

after all, if it weren't for you their projects wouldn't have even gotten off the ground

user41796

4:10 PM

@maple_shaft The safest vector to try is to suggest more PM support from the PMO since the existing PM is "obviously" overwhelmed and needs assistance in helping the project. Spin it as a positive though

user41796

"We all want this project to succeed and it looks like we could use some extra help at this juncture in identifying and gathering resources."

@GlenH7 alternatively he could just start playing along, put forth as much of a facade of work as everyone else is, collect his check, and invest his mental efforts on a really cool rPi project

Christ... we even tried to say that the architects need to come up with a solution for enterprise SSO which is one of the requirements... they said the portal should provide enterprise SSO to all of their vendor products they bought.

My suggestion, record yourself singing to the baby and make the rPi play that, baby will recognize your voice even recorded

My director just said, we are supposed to figure out which teams need engaged in that effort and organize it

user41796

4:12 PM

@maple_shaft That's epic

THe architecture team said... Uhhh... use Kerberos

and then washed their hands of it

Great... I am glad we are paying you $160k/yr to give us such sage advice

user41796

@maple_shaft - retreat can take several forms. In some cases, it may just mean mentally accepting that you cannot change the environment you're working within

THe last director who challenged the architects got fired, because he took one of their sham architecture documents in a meeting, crumpled it up, and threw it at the lead architect and said, "NOW make me a REAL technical design!"

It is just such a fucking mess

user41796

One tactic is to then consider "guerrilla warfare" via skunkworks

user41796

Another is to simply practice CYA while doing a reasonable attempt at maintaining the environment. Reasonable == no heroics.

4:16 PM

Heroic efforts are expected by my director

@maple_shaft To be fair, what tact he had in that approach...

user41796

@maple_shaft and how are those efforts measured?

user41796

As the adage goes - people do what you inspect, not what you expect.

@maple_shaft Then put on a cape and work normal days but tell them you're working tons of overtime and can't possibly fit their extra requests in because you're oh so busy

Heroic efforts generally dont equate to overtime

they just equate to doing other peoples work because they either did it wrong or wont do it at all

4:18 PM

@maple_shaft haha what are heroic efforts? Actually trying to do your fucking job at all? That would be heroic for your coworkers...

user41796

@maple_shaft that's not too onerous, to be honest. Just document why your work fell behind because of doing someone else's work.

@maple_shaft new tactic: Progress at a snails pace, after a week or so exclaim you think there's no way it'll get done on time without extra resources. Get more asses on this and then you have a way out - find another thing which really requires you and you can say "well these dudes will handle the rest of this... so I can go work on that over there which nobody else here can help with"

@JimmyHoffa No we have tried that

Things just fall apart before we get more resources

Director gets blamed and fired, or a bunch of PM's "step down"

same madness continues

You could try to make some NP-hard task routing document to get the whole thing canned: I have N objects and K tasks each, it will therefore require N^K tasks total at 1 day each, this is now a 7 man-year project.

@maple_shaft This is exactly what I'm looking for, this gets you out of this instance, and from your description at no harm to you

plus perhaps the next PM will be better

@maple_shaft This is inherently the plan here - it's supposed to cause it to fall apart through no fault of your own

Generally developers don't get blamed for stuff so that would work

4:22 PM

after all it isn't your fault when other people aren't doing their work, so it should fall apart due to no fault of yours

I've actually done the N^K thing before, came up with a project plan for a "quick job to verify this thing here should only take like a month for you...." - made a solid document proving it would take 4-5 manyears (probably reality is closer to 5 or 6 months but it would have been totally wrong to even do it anyway) got the project immediately canned.

just had to dig in detail by detail to expand the N objects to have every little tiny spec of anything, and made sure the tasks were as narrow as possible so the K was as large as possible...

~3 pages of documentation -> project ded.

God... we support an old home grown nosql db before that was even a term. There is nobody left on that team that understands the C code that runs it. This software is the single most complete universal repository of medical documents in the organization so it became critical source of data feeds for our EHR systems

They stripped it down to one junior developer

if it goes down... literally the entire 55k employee health system EHR systems will just stop getting basic patient information

@maple_shaft that would be scarier if I didn't already expect about as much

They have tried on three seperate occasions to replace this system

all failed

So...

instead of actually address the deep leadership issues that caused these projects to fail, they decided if they just cut the legacy team to nothing then they would be "forced" to succeed on the fourth try

(I should request all my wife and kids medical documents from out there to get hard copies before that all falls down...they probably have a metric ton of docs in that DB and frankly it's important for us to have their medical docs available...)

There is a web app where you can request your documents

actually wait

it used to exist because it integrated with Google Health, but then they scrapped Google Health so the web app had to be taken down

4:34 PM

@maple_shaft I had only ever heard that place was braindamaged horrible from many people who'd been through their ranks, tech and PM and management...

...if it's about to make you insane which is no good for maple_leaf I can still get you in touch with a couple other places there... one place does Ruby and has now a head manager who is a really really good guy, extremely smart no-nonsense dude (from a .NET background but mostly MSSQL DBA so he wouldn't disrespect you for not knowing Ruby)

@JimmyHoffa I appreciate it... I think what I am going to do is survive for a couple more months until I get my 1 yr anniversary in this dept... then I am going to transfer to their commercial software dept

I heard it is MUCH better there... they model themselves after Google so it is a very developer centric environment

a lot of CMU grads there

Ahh well there's a good model

Google actually has an office right above them

Ah so you'd be working in east liberty? (Am I remembering the name right...)

yes

the interview is extremely difficult, several people on my team interviewed there and didnt make it

smart people

Not sure if I will do fine

4:40 PM

Ah, well good luck with that, keep me in mind if that doesn't fly for ya. I can assure you the places out there I know don't have near the madness you speak of...

I don't have a computer science background... I am mostly self taught

@maple_shaft Same here, anytime I'm poking my head into one of those more formal rigorous places like that I'm always leery...

Never do very well in those interviews historically :/ perhaps that will change as I've studied a lot more rigor and formality in recent years... but I've no inclination to start looking again for a while so I won't know.

I was told the interview is nothing like working there... they just have to be picky because everybody wants to work for them

their hiring manager told me that they have "tapped out" the qualified software developers in the Pittsburgh job market

@maple_shaft Makes sense. To be fair, keep in mind the competition though stiff is still against 'burghers... it's a tiny minority of people out their who can even code their way out of a paper bag

I took that as a personal challenge

4:45 PM

@maple_shaft Just go hang out in that coffee shop right there for a few days listening in on conversations to get study topics, I remember being in line there for a coffee one time and just having a weird sense as I heard 2 or 3 different groups having separate conversations around me on stupidly high-level tech stuff. I was at the time assuming they were from the google office right there

@JimmyHoffa THere is a creepy dirty bearded guy that hangs out there smoking cigarettes throughout the day. I thought it was a homeless guy then somebody told me that he was in charge of the search algo team in Pittsburgh

haha

he is always staring off into space probably solving ridiculous problems in his head

@maple_shaft alternatively maybe that's just what a bearded homeless guy told the coffee shop so they let him hang out there

lol!

4:48 PM

he's probably sauced on listerine

user41796

@JimmyHoffa gotta get the stench of the cigs off of his breath somehow...

@GlenH7 Yeah but why does he dip the cigs in the listerine before smoking them?? I'm pretty sure that's an inappropriate technique for creating menthols...

user55340

> Passwords require the following requirements:
2 Uppercase
2 Lowercase
2 Numeric
2 Special characters
Must start with an uppercase or lowercase letter.
Cannot contain four consecutive alphabetic characters in any order (EEee or ThAt).
Cannot contain repetitive characters (AA, ==, bb, 44).
Do not use a dash - as the last character of the password.
Do not use 3 or more characters from your userid or your name.
Do not use your District Code (MVR, SPD, LRC)
Do not use any of your prior 10 passwords.

user55340

o_O

> Only contains these special characters - _ = ^ | :

What??

user41796

4:50 PM

@JimmyHoffa oh! that. Um, that's not listerine....

user41796

@MichaelT icing on the cake would be passwords must be 4 - 7 chars long.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I see a face in there that you can read left to right or right to left...

user55340

I like the "3 or more characters from your username" part

@MichaelT I just don't get it, your whole pasword needs uppercase, lowercase, and numerics, but can only be constructed from those characters??

user41796

@MichaelT because no one ever just repeats their userid as the password...

user55340

4:53 PM

@GlenH7 I couldn't use "h1A3m_C=" as a password with that.

@MichaelT I'm imagining an arabic person with a large name that has all of the alphabets letters...

He'd probably have x free

that's really the only guarantee

user55340

An old favorite of mine for passwords was "cannot contain a dictionary word"... and it used a dictionary used for scrabble + regular. So all those funky 2 character words... and 'I' and 'A'

5:07 PM

Hello.

user41796

Hola

I was talking with someone last night about programming. I asked this he would be around and the person said yeah sometime. What is the most polite and socially accepted way of contacting the person on SE? Invite him to WhiteBoard?

user41796

@ChrisOkyen you can ping them with an @ sign.

user41796

@ChrisOkyen it was @RobertHarvey that you were chatting with last night.

user41796

@KarlBielefeldt - welcome to chat, good to see you!

5:15 PM

Thanks. I'm a new mod on parenting.SE, so I'll probably be on chat more often now.

user41796

@KarlBielefeldt Congratulations!

user41796

Ah, and your name shows up in blue! :-)

Is that what that means? I'm still learning the intricacies of chat. I understand we're a mod on all the chat rooms for some reason.

user41796

Yes, mod on any site means mod for all of chat

user41796

so you'll see annoying blue notifications pop up over your picture in the lower left of this window. Those are chat messages that have been flagged. I would ignore them unless they are in your parenting.se rooms

user41796

5:19 PM

You also have the ability to see deleted posts by looking at their history

user41796

you can also freely edit / delete any chat messages, even those that have expired past their timer

user41796

mere mortals have to make edits and deletes within a certain amount of time

user41796

folks whose name shows up in italics (like mine) are room owners. I can see deleted messages, but I can't edit past the timer. I can also pin / unpin things. But that's only for this room, it's not chat-site wide. Your granted chat-site wide permissions.

Seems a little counterproductive to edit old chats, anyway. Will anyone actually see the edits?

user41796

Chat suspensions don't work on mods, afaik, and you can't be banned from a room. Well, you can be banned but since you're a mod you can undo it. :-) See the pencil mark?

user41796

5:22 PM

so I just edited my previous message and you can see a pencil mark; that shows it was edited. Feel free to try and edit this message. hover on the left side of the message to see the drop down, click the arrow and edit

user41796

I haven't seen a message edited by someone other than the author, so I'm curious to see what it looks like. It looks like this :-)

user41796

Use the @ sign to ping someone in the room. Use the @@ sign to super-ping someone. Only mods can super-ping

user41796

And that's really sneaky with the edit. But I approve of the words you put in to my message. :-)

user41796

If your cursor is in the chat window, you can use the up arrow to bring back your previous message to edit it.

user41796

@KarlBielefeldt and you can link to a message by clicking on the little arrow on the right side of the message like this

user41796

5:26 PM

When you link, you'll see the message post ID. Hover over my previous message or yours and you'll see the linked thread. It shows up with a contrasting highlight

user41796

So welcome to chat. Congrats on becoming a mod! Please don't chat-ban me. :-D

user41796

One other trick - you can pin your own message to automatically star it. Normally you can't star your own messages. Once you remove the pin, the star remains.

user41796

You can also create rooms, including private rooms that only you + invited others + mods can participate in / look into. But I don't know how to do those things.

Thanks for the tutorial. What's up with the tags in the top right? Are those relatively fixed per-room, or do they update according to what has recently been discussed?

user41796

@KarlBielefeldt Loosely fixed per room. Room owners + mods can change them. Click on "info" and then click on edit within the room description to modify the tags

user41796

5:30 PM

Making a change is then broadcast to the rest of the room. We don't change the tags all that often here in the Whiteboard. I have no idea what's the norm for other rooms.

user41796

Whiteboard also has a weird tendency to be going along full steam and then completely stop for hours at a time. I think that means all of our compilers finished up at about the same time. :-)

user41796

Oh, and there are ways to change the notifications about new questions being posted on main. We have ours set to do that drop-down thing. Other rooms have it inserted as a chat message. General consensus here is we prefer the drop-down as it's easier to ignore or dismiss.

Do you still get the drop-down if you're in a room, but not in it?

user41796

I don't think so, no.

user55340

(breaking away from some code for a bit) welcome to chat... and we do have a number of other feeds set up that do post messages (for example, ars technica)

user41796

5:33 PM

I have seen them accumulate when I leave the tab here open but am looking at other tabs.

user41796

@RobertHarvey - your coding protege already dropped out of the room

Probably just as well. He needs to do a little more homework first.

user55340

(wondering what else Yannis told us when he made us room owners)

user41796

@RobertHarvey That was going to be my comment if he started asking for more help. You gave him some pretty clear direction to follow.

user41796

@MichaelT Don't screw things up too badly?

Thomas Owens

5:35 PM

@MichaelT Drink more tequila?

user55340

Well, there's the types of access.. public vs gallery (don't set it to gallery)

user55340

And the always read access and always write access (even if the rep is too low... that seems newish)

Ok I am back

user41796

@MichaelT Yeah, he said not to jack with the access. That was an important one.

@RobertHarvey Computer was blocking ajax.googleapis.com / sstatic.net

user55340

5:37 PM

There's also the schedule, but we don't do anything with that.

user41796

@KarlBielefeldt - you can also mute people too. Click their gravatar and then select "ignore this user (everywhere)". Dunno if it's kosher for mods to do that or not

user55340

Looking at the events ( chat.stackexchange.com/rooms?tab=site&sort=event ) there are some neat ones people do.

user41796

@ThomasOwens - I wasn't able to explain to Karl how to create rooms and how to set up private rooms as I'm not a mod. Is it easy enough to explain?

So I know the Months Day Year and Months Day Year Ones Tens Hundreds Thousands are common elements repeated

@ChrisOkyen Did you think about how you can describe what your program does, in plain English, step by step? You really need that before you can properly write code.

user55340

5:39 PM

SX.SE (space) has some neat feeds and events. chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/9682/the-pod-bay?tab=feeds chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/9682/the-pod-bay?tab=schedule

@GlenH7 You just click on their name and under Actions menu click Start a new room with this user

Like without leaving any unknowns? i know so far how I have it. but everytime I add on, the implementation changes as I add sumations or add concatenated digits

user55340

There's also conversations... for where you want to save a specific range of messages for perpetuity (anyone can do that - just something of use to remeber)

user41796

@maple_shaft <looks sheepish> Oh. That's ... um .... really hard. I never would have guessed that.... :-) <face palm>

user55340

If in doubt, onebox things (paste it as a link by itself)

user55340

5:41 PM

On mandatory 50h weeks

Nov 18 '13 at 20:02, 4 minutes total – 8 messages, 3 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked Nov 18 '13 at 20:08 by MichaelT

user41796

oh yes. I hadn't talked about oneboxing yet.

user55340

Parent

A parent (from Latin: parēns = parent) is a caretaker of the offspring in their own species. In humans, a parent is of a child (where "child" refers to offspring, not necessarily age). A biological parent consists of a person whose gamete resulted in a child, a male through his sperm, and a woman through her ovum. Parents are first-degree relatives and have 50% genetic overlap. A woman can also become a parent through surrogacy. However, some parents may not be biologically related to their children. An adoptive parent is one who nurtures and raises the offspring of the biological paren...

@ChrisOkyen That's why you need a clear understanding of what your program is supposed to do.

user41796

All main SE links onebox as do wikipedia, amazon and a few others. xkcd ought to onebox but doesn't.

user55340

I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.

5:42 PM

Do you want an answer of what may be an incomplete detail of the final version?

user55340

@GlenH7 It oneboxes fine.

user41796

@MichaelT when did that change?!

user55340

oneboxing doesn't like https which some people do by default.

user55340

Sites:

user55340

5:43 PM

I can give you what it is supposed to do and how I did it with the current working code but there are features unimplemented and thus I don't know how the code will be in the vey end

user41796

and you can create tags by using the same markup as you would on main

Q: Seeking advice on web design startup

@ChrisOkyen Software Specifications are always incomplete. :)

user41796

@ChrisOkyen erm, how would any of us be able to help with that if even you (the inventor) don't know what it would look like?

user55340

Oh, the freelancing question about clients and contracts appears to have been self-deleted and reposted at freelancing (it looks like it will be a reasonable fit with the questions there)

user55340

1

Can anyone with experience in running a start-up software/web design business give me a few solid recommendations on how your general client experience works? I'm interested in what sort of communication takes place up front after a client contacts you desiring a website for their group/organiza...

client business-plan freelance client-support

5:45 PM

Yeah I see what you mean @GlenH7. @RobertHarvey yeah.

user41796

@MichaelT Too big / too broad for programmers main. Good it found a reasonable home.

user41796

@ChrisOkyen Code for what you have now with an eye towards what you can reasonably expect in the future. Otherwise you get lost in a trap of analysis paralysis.

So My code know for Feature A,B and C can change when Feature D, E, and F are implemented making the whole future implementation unseeing

user55340

@GlenH7 I glanced at the client tag, quite a few answered questions that appear at a quick glance to be in a similar vein.

So my earlier code changing because of new implementation isn't a sign of bad code design from the start?

user41796

5:48 PM

@ChrisOkyen nah, that's perfectly normal. It's what keeps us employed.

HAHA

user55340

@ChrisOkyen 80% Working code is better than designed code (of any %age). The only way to figure out if something will work as a design is work from experience. You will fail sometimes, and that is important information.

user55340

thecodelesscode.com/case/83

Would some people who write and teach on good code design beg to differ on how the code changes in relation to codes integrity?

user41796

@ChrisOkyen meh, depends. The world of programming has quite a few .... opinions floating around. The pragmatic approach is to accept the code has to be written before you can futz with its elegance.

5:51 PM

Allrighty

user41796

That's not to say there isn't a wide spectrum of quality of design. But there's lots of opinions out there too. MichaelT's and my comments reflect mainstream. But you'll always find extreme opinions.

user55340

thecodelesscode.com/case/118 is another good read on the subject.

user41796

Of course, they're wrong because they disagree with me. But I'll forgive them for their stance. :-D

user55340

@GlenH7 You can't sell designed code. Its the working code, even if buggy that is getting sold. At the end of the day, that sold is our paycheck.

ok thanks @MichaelT and true @GlenH7 lots of opinions

haha forgive em

Yeah sounds like Clean Code can get overrated

user55340

5:53 PM

(another good one to read - thecodelesscode.com/case/111 )

user41796

@ChrisOkyen erm, McConnell would agree with what we're saying. He's a fairly good author IMO

Andre Lamothe and his Doom Suit disagrees because well its the doom suit that makes or breaks the code!

user55340

Clean code is superb. By realizing how things will interact you can make it so that you have as little to do in the future when changing something. Right now, I'm changing a Map<String,Foo> to a Map<Bar,Foo>` because the String was getting sorted... and that made me sad that "120" came before "30".

user41796

@ChrisOkyen He does embedded work. Generally speaking, he only gets one chance to make it right. Once the product ships, updates almost never happen

oh wow

user41796

5:56 PM

You have to understand the context the author is coming from. Things that Andre will recommend are specific to his domain of embedded. McConnell does enterprise system software and has a different approach. You gotta know what you're coding for.

Hmm

user41796

a web app is NOT an embedded app and they have wildly different constraints to them

True

user55340

Webapps have the freedom of being able to be deployed at any time and everyone using it is updated. This is even more than desktop apps and their updates which stagger in.