The Whiteboard

4:30 AM

@Brant was it a 10 year day, a 15 year day, or a night-train-with-scotch-written-on day?

A: How do Jquery programmers write their for loops?

5:48 AM

wonder how this answer passed through quality filter

1

Any way they choose to write their loops.

not to mention how did it got 2 upvotes but oh well

Yannis Rizos

10:58 AM

You don't want missile control software writen in PHP + JavaScript. — user61852 17 hours ago

No you don't. You truly don't.

user55340

1:46 PM

@YannisRizos Now, the Greek economy...

This technology interacts with web servers, with some of the apps written in PHP and JavaScript.

> The interface was so large it was carried in a HMMWV

@Ampt Apparently, HMMWV = Humvee.

It does

I don't know how the hell that works, but OK.

1:51 PM

I thought that was common knowledge haha

try to pronounce HMMWV a lot

that is a fantastic shot

@ThomasOwens (The W is silent)

A little more bad *ss than your average hummer

user20683

@Ampt my favorite military vehicle video is of a German tank jumping a trench backwards.

2:28 PM

@GlenH7 Thanks, I should have used * i suppose, I opted for pipes delimiter... it was previously = delimited but base64 in it was getting thrashed because = is valid, # would possibly cause URLs in the string to get thrashed, but oh well pipes should be fine I guess

@YannisRizos nodecopter.com/#easy

anyone else heard of the term Too Complex, Will Leak?

TCWL (Too complex, will leak). The problem is distributed and emergent and your solution is static, centralized and pre-defined. TCWL. — user61852 59 mins ago

This guy is just sour about this whole question

2:50 PM

He's upset I stole his thunder yesterday and then some. Henceforth he will be known as User6 (which was actually someone else wasn't it? What was his name...)

@Ampt And he's referring to the leaky abstractions concept publicized by Spolsky if you haven't read the blog

user55340

@JimmyHoffa That may be the case, but searching google for "TCWL too complex will leak" didn't bring up any relevant results (and less than 1 page total results).

user55340

Though what is being mentioned is joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

user55340

Leaky abstraction

In software development, a leaky abstraction is any implemented abstraction, intended to reduce (or hide) complexity, which hides the underlying details incompletely. History The term "leaky abstraction" was popularized in 2002 by Joel Spolsky. An earlier paper by Kiczales describes some of the issues with imperfect abstractions and presents a potential solution to the problem by allowing for the customization of the abstraction itself. The Law of Leaky Abstractions As coined by Spolsky, the Law of Leaky Abstractions states: This statement highlights a particularly problematic cause o...

user55340

That said, the question is more about hypotheticals of Deer, Lion, and Food... idealized designs.

@user61852 where do you come up with all these terms? I feel like you're throwing some big words at a wall and seeing what sticks. How is this problem distributed and emergent? How is mine centralized? (I'll concede on the pre-defined part, as it is an architecture). Where did you come up with TCWL? I've never heard of it and apparently neither has google. — Ampt 20 mins ago

I asked him to see what he meant

doubt I'll get a reply

And I'm not sure about the hypotheticals

> Now we have have a problem because Lion can eat both Deer and Grass, but Deer is not Food it is Animal. With out using multiple inheritance, and using object oriented design, how do you solve this problem?

It didn't ask for N animal additions

just how can I allow a lion to eat a deer but not grass

the question is more interesting if you want to add more animals

I think the other answers may be better for the hypothetical, if OP only has to worry about lions, deer and grass, he shouldn't have to invent a system that works for N animals

user55340

3:09 PM

I'd try to point out that all of the classic "OO Design" questions are leaky when working at the basic understanding level. Vehicles, animals, etc... The issue is putting OO concepts into real world examples which will always be leaky. But understanding the concepts of interfaces, abstract and implementation classes is more important than the leakyness of the layer - that can be dealt with later when someone has a basic understanding of is a, has a, can do.

which is why Robert's answer was so fitting. It gets at the core issues which is "How do I use Interfaces, abstract classes and concrete classes in OO design"

that said, I don't think my answer is wrong in the sense of incorrect and deserving downvotes

@MichaelT Is it just me, or does wikipedia happen to be simultaneously a large resource for most, and a ridiculous resource for engineering of any sort? All of the math and engineering stuff is just got a depth which I don't suspect to see on a large portion of other areas

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, some of the articles are more intricate than my text books. It's kind of crazy how much access to all this knowledge we have is

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Its that mathematicians and engineers don't have anything better to do than update wikipedia.

@MichaelT Sure there are countless explanations for the correlation, I'm just curious if others have noticed the correlation as much as I

few use the internet as much as engineers and mathematicians

Wikipedia was created by engineers and mathematicians

and every other causal link you can think up

user55340

3:24 PM

Did you know... "Insider trading" is skill listed on Linked In?

That is so dissapointing

user55340

We're trying to figure out if we can endorse one of the guys here for "beard growing"

@MichaelT Last job I had we gave a fresh grad we hired a ton of crap because he grew a thick bushy beard; granted it wasn't gray but still, a beard should be earned.

@JimmyHoffa sound's like somebody was jealous of that think, bushy beard

@Ampt You're still in college, tell me at your work you don't get crap from your seniors all the time for their entertainment; if not, you might be at the wrong job

3:31 PM

@JimmyHoffa I only get crap from our Hardware Engineer, but I too grow a think, bushy beard. (Only because I look 12 without it and getting IDed all the time is a pain)

and I think it's just the air of professionalism we have to keep up

we are surrounded by sales, tech support, and some manufacturing in the same large room

ah, that doesn't sound fun

nah, I like it a lot

we are consistently ahead of schedule, have a manager that goes to bat for the team, and a fun work atmosphere

user55340

When dealing with beards, make sure you are in compliance with RFC 2323.

user55340

> Long-term versus short-term facial hair is a very important distinction as short-term facial hair, also known as the temporary illness "goatee universitis" (which symptoms range from full goatees to the less popular chin-goatee) is a common affliction for university-based males. Per capita (temporary) facial hair can go as high as 40%. However, among the males of the IETF the per capita long-term facial hair is as high as 60%

user55340

3:56 PM

Reading some Meta.SO today I have come to the conclusion that the reason that SO mods give @YannisRizos a hard time about P.SE at times is that they are jealous of how nice and easy we are over here.

A: Pre-screening coding test - How long is reasonable?

3

If it's a real life problem of their business, they should be paying you.

This answer alone made me close vote the question. If answers like that are feasible, the question is by definition terrible

4:15 PM

OK. Who's flagging things again?

user55340

I'd guess they are custom mod flags? None from me today.

@ThomasOwens No comment.

4:59 PM

18 flags from me today, spread more or less evenly over last 12 hours, business as usual (and no, I did not flag "they should be paying you" crap)

user41796

@ThomasOwens "not it." I have put in only 3 today and 6 yesterday

for the record, I didn't flag "Any way they choose" crap either. I am generally fairly happy with canned comment I've got for cases like that...

without an explanation, this answer may become useless in case if someone else posts an opposite opinion. For example, if someone posts a claim like "They don't have an option to choose the way to write their loops.", how would this answer help reader to pick of two opposing opinions? Consider editing it into a better shape — gnat 11 hours ago

user41796

@MichaelT P.SE appears to be pretty mild mannered compared to the other sites. Except for our already-decided-debate-that-shall-not-be-mentioned-because-it's-been-beaten-to-death-already, things are pretty calm here. And we have enough support from high rep users to keep the community flowing as it should.

user41796

@gnat I haven't even put in any snarky flags today either. <sighs heavily>

5:15 PM

@GlenH7 ...what debate is that? :D

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Oh, you know. that one (nice try)

user41796

"Minimum number of gray hairs in a beard (or regular hair) before you can call yourself a gray beard"

Q: Are you still confused about what Programmers is for?

I was on the fence about proper moderation here until...

> Why are you here? Is it to talk about one of the bullet points above? Or is it to help people find books? Is it to help people design, architect and test their programs, or is it to talk about why end users are so unreasonable? Do you really think the experts care why c languages use curly braces?

58

I'm going to try and keep this short, because a lot of it has already been discussed. If you are interested in the history, you can find it here on Programmers Meta, but here's a very brief recap: Programmers started out life as "Not Programming Related." It was supposed to be a haven for all...

...because that should all totally be rehashed right now. Yeah, I'm certain that's what you all want.

user41796

Is there a way to find out how many days in a row someone has maxed out their close queue review votes?

user41796

or just how many days? so ignoring the "in a row" aspect.

5:30 PM

✰

I don't need you to give me a star, I've got my own.

@GlenH7 SEDE would be the only way if you could

user41796

playing in SEDE now. Not sure if the queues are exposed there though

user41796

it has raw vote counts, but looking to associate with the queues

@GlenH7 You don't need to associate with the queues, just reconstruct the queue limit rules in your query

see how many days 20 close votes occurred

count(1) and group by date

user41796

but you can vote to close outside of the queues, and I think it counts the same.

Ahh true

user41796

5:35 PM

In addition, not every vote in the queue is a vote to close

that's possible, but you can view queue reviews of others can't you?

user41796

from the review history page, yes

I think others queue review decisions are segregated

There ya go, there is some data identifier for if it was from a review and not a random close

user41796

I know the data exists, I just don't know if SE exposes that data through SEDE. I'm thinking they don't.

5:49 PM

@GlenH7 I'm thinking... ok I'm lying.

user55340

There are two parts to the queue being stale at the end of the day. One is more <3k people appear to be flagging posts. I often see an unvoted non-audit in the queue indicating it comes from flags. This is good. On the other side, I am not seeing a diverse group doing close review audits at all. There is a core group of >3k reviewers who do 20/day (unless they used all their votes adding to the queue), but outside that I don't see too many new faces in the today's reviews.

I admit I hardly do reviews. Instead I tend to close and flag as I wander around the site

The monotony of the review process is just...bla... seriously, if there were fireworks or iduno, every 3rd review I got a 10 second game of pacman...

Hell, give one rep point per completed review, SO's ridiculous queue would be empty in a day.

(You would have to add more review audits but it would get the reviews done in a hurry)

user41796

negatively voted questions should get fireworks to display on 5th close vote.

Anyone here want to be a guinea pig for a beta iOS SE client?

@Undo Is the source available?

5:57 PM

@JimmyHoffa Not currently.

user41796

@Undo is that a standing offer for a period of time? We can pin your message and have them ping you here if so. The room is actually kind of quiet at the moment.

@Undo I don't have iOS, but if I did I wouldn't guinea pig some phone app I didn't get to audit the codebase of first

Presumably there's been no security audit already commited by Apple like stuff in their store has

@GlenH7 Yep. Shiny site at erwaysoftware.com/stackboard/beta

@JimmyHoffa I'm not smart enough to make something that circumvents Apple's sandboxing :)

user41796

pinned

@GlenH7 Awesome. I'll try to tell you when I'm done accepting new testers :)

user41796

5:59 PM

I generally leave wifi off on my ipod because I'm a troglodyte in hiding.

@Undo shrug, just saying, no third party security audit available = no guinea pig on the device that has access to bill me

user41796

@Undo YW. Can't guarantee anyone will click through, but at least it will stay up for a bit

@JimmyHoffa Understood :)

Any reason you aren't open sourcing it?

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I do believe you're almost as paranoid as me. :-)

6:01 PM

@JimmyHoffa I'm planning to release it at some point for-pay :)

Does open-source prevent that on Apple? I thought with apple you could stop people from releasing identical apps to yours

user55340

(ohh! question in blue... perl!)

@MichaelT /gets out close hammer

@JimmyHoffa I'll think about open-sourcing it.

@Undo I understand your concern if you wish to make money off it

6:02 PM

@JimmyHoffa I've never had experience with open source before. Is it a real danger for paid apps?

user55340

@Undo There are some licensing issues that were issues at one time... I am not sure if they remain.

@Undo I don't have a lot of experience with it either but anecdotally what I've seen is not so much

@MichaelT As in use of the API without open-sourcing it?

yet another example why link-only answers suck. Link the guy referred to, without even a slight effort to quote, appears to state opposite to what they write in the "answer"...

what does it mean "differently"? The link you use, says: "JavaFX is available under the same license and business model as Java SE" - that doesn't sound different — gnat 1 min ago

user55340

@Undo More on the lines of open source licenses conflicting with the license for something. Its been a bit.

Q: Which open source licenses are compatible with the Apple's iPhone and its official App Store ?

6:05 PM

Should be able to do a "Here's the source, but pay for the app if you want to get it from the store", just have to be super careful how the source released is licensed

user55340

28

I'm writing an iPhone app, and I would like to use a 3rd party library for part of its functionality. I intend on selling it through the App Store and my code will not be open sourced. Which open source licenses allow to make derivate works and publish them under apple's own conditions ?

iphone open-source apple licensing app-store

I didn't realize that P.SE was so people oriented to begin with

@MichaelT I'll read that. I'd rather not step in a licensing mine right now :)

Off to read that...

user41796

@gnat that one annoyed me too. it's a crap answer on a poorly asked question by a confused OP

user41796

@Ampt It's all about The People.

user55340

6:08 PM

It appears its an issue with using other software that is licensed in a way that requires everything else be open sourced and modifiable... but the nature of the app store prevents people from being able to modify it. If it is something you wrote and open sourcing, you could probably dual license it. But don't ask me... I'm not someone who delves into licensing too much.

@MichaelT Sounds like just the viral portion means if you release an iOS app under LGPL you are required to release the related dependant iOS system code as well

(which is obviously unavailable)

but all the GPLs stink in my book anyway because of that, when apache, bsd, MIT, and MS-PL are available for more or less similar purposes, sans the annoying viral carp

user55340

If you release something that uses something LGPL (viral part) you would then be required to allow someone who downloads your software to modify it... which isn't possible.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa you just need better connections.

@GlenH7 You're right, if only I knew some haskellers who could just decompile it for me... that's what you meant right? :)

user41796

"of course!"

6:30 PM

@gnat Uh...what?

6:45 PM

@ThomasOwens what?

wrong flag? :)

@gnat I just don't know what you expect a mod to do about it.

@ThomasOwens let me see...

@ThomasOwens if you ask about "pointless" case well one think that comes to mind is to remove slippery comment (if you prefer to play it soft)

No, the answer that makes absolutely no sense.

It was discussed up there, somewhere.

I just...I don't even know what to do with it.

@ThomasOwens ahh that one, "bolded" - right?

Yeah. I get the flag, but I'm not sure if that's a "wrong answer" that should just be down voted.

6:53 PM

@ThomasOwens I see. Well if you can make sense of it, this means I misread and decline is in order. :) that bolded part...

...it makes the whole thing senseless, any idea where does it apply?

what does it refer to?

I would think I am alone misreading (in cases like that I try to abstain from flagging), but alas, I am not, as I pointed

you see, I let it hang with comment for a while before flagging, hoping OP will address the comment, but it appears ignored

7:15 PM

hmm... I think I broke Stack overflow

nevermind, it's my browser

user20683

@Ampt Breaking Stack Overflow is non-trivial.

user20683

Stack Overflow breaking you is a daily occurance.

user20683

at least for me anyway

@WorldEngineer Breaking SO is easy; add a second Jon Skeet. Boom. Universe -> Nulliverse

user20683

@JimmyHoffa or an Anti-Skeet, Woman, French, master of Objective-C...

user55340

7:24 PM

@WorldEngineer You'd get integer overflow in profile views in a short period of time.

user20683

7:37 PM

placeit.breezi.com/productshots

user20683

CC commerical licensed easy product shots...

user20683

huh

@WorldEngineer convenient

and I just crammed two tasks to completion this morning. woo. Ok so it took more than just the morning, but I'm going to eat lunch now because I deserve it.

user20683

@JimmyHoffa You always deserve lunch.

8:04 PM

@WorldEngineer That gives me a spectacular idea for a feature request...

user20683

@JimmyHoffa o_o

Q: Meaningless points? I've an idea: Meaninful points!

0

I've written a lot of good (and bad) content for you guys, because of an addiction. You did this to me. The least you could do is say, buy me a lunch? Eh? Is that too much to ask? Feature request: Every 5000 points you get on any one SE site, or maybe just for the first one, SE should send you a...

feature-request

That is going to hit the ground like a dead bird

But I stand by my request. SE owes me lunch.

user55340

Jon Skeet will never buy food again!

@MichaelT Yeah I was thinking about that

@GlenH7 I genuinely don't know what you are referring to.

8:13 PM

@psr I presume he just meant the endless programmING vs programmERS "We want NPR back!" crup

Huh? This already exists, it's not our fault we can't reach you Mr. Hoffa... — Yannis 52 secs ago

@YannisRizos I had no idea, is it kind of like the secret menu effect?

they don't want people to know otherwise they'd game it, but it does happen for the genuinely really high content creators?

user20683

Have you ever wondered what exactly being a mod gets you?

user20683

aside from the endless scorn of the Internet

user55340

You might get better reception if you suggested "free lunch at the stack exchange cafeteria... transportation not included" ?

SO has already secretly created a new fast food chain in the UK specifically to feed John Skeet.

Q: British royal succession algorithm

@psr I bet Jon Skeet's pretty pissed about that.

user55340

8:35 PM

2

I was reading about the rules for royal succession of the British monarchy and thought the easiest way I could understand it is with code (or pseudo-code). I came up with this (in a C# like pseudo-code): EventHandler CurrentMonarch_Died { CurrentMonarch = SuccessorRootedAt(Person.Electress_...

algorithms

user55340

38

A: Comprehensive Rules for Game of Thrones Lines of Succession

Except for the Dornish, Westerosi succession goes like this: Succession goes to the King's eldest male child's line, meaning that even if the eldest male child is dead the succession passed through to his heirs, and only after that line is explored do we go to the next step. When a King has no ...

user55340

With pseudo code even! and fun comments to boot.

user20683

@MichaelT Crusader Kings II has a GoT mod

user55340

@WorldEngineer I saw that... I'm trying to get my mind into CKII, but I keep getting back to Space Pirates And Zombies or some other game.

user20683

@MichaelT EUIV will have save game transfers built in.

user55340

8:42 PM

(I've been Dredmoring recently... trying to get a rogue scientist or clockwork knight build that works well)

user20683

from CKII

A: British royal succession algorithm

8:56 PM

0

I don't have enough rep to leave this as a comment, so it will have to be an answer. The current rules of succession no longer have male children taking precedence over females (see here).

I don't have enough rep to leave this as a comment, so I'll pollute answers, how smart

user20683

@gnat downsized

sorting haskell quicksort

9:11 PM

@WorldEngineer thanks!

user20683

9:36 PM

@JimmyHoffa

user20683

6

Q: Fast sorting in Haskell

After reading Stack Overflow question Using vectors for performance improvement in Haskell describing a fast in-place quicksort in Haskell, I set myself two goals: Implementing the same algorithm with a median of three to avoid bad performances on pre-sorted vectors; Making a parallel version. ...

user20683

Think you're up to the task?

user55340

9:57 PM

@Undo Thoughts (based on thoughts talking with another guy who had similar problems - an iOS portal to Kingdom of Loathing - people and passwords type thing). The best thing would be to get SE to allow me to get an API key after I've logged in, from which I could then paste it into your app and get access to the site.

10:15 PM

@MichaelT What kind of access to the site?

10:48 PM

@WorldEngineer Not likely, there's haskellers on SO that make it clear I'm actually stupid

user20683

@JimmyHoffa more along the lines of making it clear that you don't have a PhD in Math. You're not stupid.

I'm about to go to bed, so no analysis right now, just what jumps out. When you're forking on every recursive call, you're creating a great lot of threads, the thread scheduling overhead overwhelms the actual work to be done. If there is even synchronisation between the different threads accessing the array involved, that would totally kill performance even for fewer threads. If you want a speedup, fork only for the first few recursive calls to not have more threads running than you have cores. — Daniel Fischer Jul 28 at 21:30

I thought the same thing, and if Daniel Fischer says so then there it is. He's forking wayyyy too much.

@JimmyHoffa At first read it seemed like there were SO haskellers who said "@JimmyHoffa You are actually stupid". I hate those stupid frat boy haskellers.

When you want to work in parallelism there's almost no value in going over your core count(-1) when you aren't doing any blocking calls

user20683

yeah

user20683

10:53 PM

You generally want as many processes or threads (we shall call them...minions) as you've got cores.

user20683

you generally want one minion for I/O and messaging, the rest are working

Also depending on how he's using haskell it may actually be doing cooperative multithreading rather than actual multi-threaded parallelism

user20683

just depends

@WorldEngineer If you've got blocking calls going on in the block you want to run in paralell, more than the number of cores can actually increase throughput

but still, his problem isn't even the number of threads so much as the number of thread creations. he's just blowing time creating threads all through his algorithm rather than pre-initializing them and then booting the parallel run

(plus creating tons more than he needs)

user20683

@JimmyHoffa oh yeah, that's a big no-no

user20683

10:57 PM

I didn't do all that well in the coding portion of Parallels but I remember the theory.

and the -1 I mentioned is for OS; you generally always go at least 1 if not more under your max for OS/rest of the systems tasks otherwise the OS will just be interrupting those cores anyway

@JimmyHoffa - You like to check out a lot of different languages. I'm thinking I could fairly quickly write my own superset of MUMPS (for my own productivity) if I have a "switch to MUMPS now" token and a "done with MUMPS now" token, and I trans-compile into MUMPS by just passing that through. I badly want higher order functions, closures and lambdas. What else to I want that isn't that hard?

For closures, since I'm not writing a MUMPS parser, I probably have to manually list the variables to close over, but it's still an improvement.

@psr atomic message passing

(Do you even do multithreading in MUMPS or is it a non-issue?)

@JimmyHoffa Multithreading is rare. Usually by the time your MUMPS runs you have narrowed it down to a single thread.

Generally proper closures will get you 95% of the way, presuming you don't want to start working out a type system too but algebraic data types are pretty awesome, having generics so you can say function takes a and returns b for any a and b that has X characteristics is always nice but type systems are a lot of work

using maybe or either for exceptions instead of bottom (read here if you'r thinking about doing some language stuff anyway) is preferable in my opinion because it's more obvious

You could just do it all in lisp and use macros to transcompile it to MUMPS, Paul Graham's smarter than me and that's what he'd do heh

11:14 PM

@JimmyHoffa Yes, and the plan is really for just me to use it, so it can't possibly pay off if it's a lot of work. And proper closures will be debatable - I'll still have to tell it what to close over, but I can make the notation as pain free as I can manage. I'll put the types in comments.

@JimmyHoffa You could just as well use Haskell. Since the execution environment for MUMPS doesn't have either lisp or haskell. The problem is that either way you are doing a trans-compiler, so you only leverage the language features at compile time.

Static extensions / infix operator

Most language features are artifacts of the type system or runtime, runtime stuff is largely around cross-boundary communication and parallelism

Adding operators would be ugly because the operators need to be surrounded by the "You're in a new language now" tokens. Static extensions are sort of already there - all your code must be in a database, and you can search the database and shove some static methods on in a build step.

@JimmyHoffa Interesting point. My list - closures, first class functions, and lambdas doesn't really fit into either category though.

They can be represented in either but yeah, they're kind of there own magic thing, an artifact of sugar. You don't want to meddle with a type system or the runtime so maybe sugar is what you're looking for.

Sugar does a lot less, but it can do code generation and expansion

Good for avoiding boilerplate