The Whiteboard

1:16 AM

@psr I'm sorry. You're stuck in MUMPS, knowing of Haskell and others... I should recognize my lucky stars that I (might) be allowed to use F# for something.

psr

@gnat - Can we campaign for S.E. to delay the hotness conflagration until a little before the new UTC day begins so that the rep cap doesn't prevent us from getting all the undeserved rep?

@JimmyHoffa Perhaps. I think I'd have a much easier time maintaining your parser (F# and all) than the "parsers" I've seen in MUMPS. (Either a bunch of if statements or the "each production rule is a label for a GOTO" pattern, which is actually more elegant, basically the interpreter pattern except the people that do things that way have a bunch of decoy GOTOs that take 30 minutes of code reading to distinguish).

@JimmyHoffa Actually, I doubt maintaining your parser would be that bad even without really knowing F#.

Jimmy Hoffa

It's not, things like:
let parseName = anyString 4
let parseId = anyString 2 |>> fun id -> toInt id
let parseWhole = parseName .>>. parseId |>> fun (name, id) -> { Name = name ; Id = id }:Whole

...to your average C# developer that probably looks like a crock, especially when they still believe the Almighty Object is the end all be all of abstractions and that just looks like symbol soup... I'm fearful this will be the reaction from my colleagues tomorrow.

We'll find out.

sure beats the hell out of the C# alternatives though

and that's because the protocol is all fixed-byte stuff

gnat

6:58 AM

15

Q: Are "Hail-Mary" questions on-topic for Stack Overflow?

For those of you who don't know, a Hail-Mary pass is a maneuver in American Football which is executed late in a losing game, in the desperate hope that a miracle will occur. On Stack Overflow, this often takes these forms (this is not a comprehensive list): I have this highly obscure/obsole...

gnat

7:09 AM

@psr I doubt they'll be interested. :) Look the way how collider formula works, is more targeted to steal your rep (by bumping your post into CW due to multiple answers from lemmings). "piling of garbage answers eventually turns things CW", why would they interested in opposite?

@GlenH7 well, regarding down-voting the crud answers, this could impact reputation in the opposite way than it looks at the surface. Did you notice how piling of garbage answers eventually turns things CW (more than 1700 answers scored 25+ turned community wiki)? This turns upvotes given to good answers into zero rep; if downvoting crap answers somehow tames that, this effectively means good answers will be bringing more rep to authors — gnat Jan 15 at 7:05

@GlenH7 ...I just checked: of your posts, 3 are CW, with total score 149. Of mine, 12 are CW, with total score 498. Rachel has 30 CW posts, with total score 479. If only half of these is "eaten" by CW, this makes something like 550 votes go into zero. This would make 5500 rep lost to just three of us. Wow. Just... wow. How much does downvoting a garbage answer cost? -1? just one point? compared to mentioned losses, this is nothing. — gnat Jan 15 at 7:51

btw I think you can disregard above advice wrt downvoting crap for hot questions, this likely won't help, due to, again, broken formula

@BenBrocka interesting that current system ignores downvotes in quite a brutal way. It kind of says we don't give a shit about your DVs; even if you put answer to -5, it will still be added to Qanswers and multiplied by Qscore - in highly popular questions this means almost any non-deleted answer will only add to "hotness", no matter how crappy it is — gnat Jan 26 at 9:21

Carthago delenda est

gnat

9:42 AM

this question is at top of collider, welcome crappy answers:

29

Q: Agile/Scrum - my manager is asking for a 40% increase in velocity

We have an average velocity of 50 story points. Recently my manager has really got into the idea of using velocity as a measure of productivity and as a target. I have been asked to increase it by 40% to 70 story points (with no increase in team members). If we don't achieve it he wants a full...

agile scrum

thorsten müller

Weird edit of question:

-4

Q: what is the purpose of Subversion svn Repository?

Is Git repository same as Subversion Repository ?

c ide gcc

Has nothing to do with initial question. Voted to keep closed of course, but what should we do about this kind of edit?

2

gnat

suggested correction to hotness formula would disqualify 5 0f 10 answers (64/10-1=5) but oh well

@thorstenmüller generally, hard to tell (user may be trying to salvage) but in this case, it feels way too bad for that. I'd rather flag for mod attention, referring them to revisions history (programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/211592/revisions) and asking to evaluate changes made in rev 2

thorsten müller

@gnat thank you, flagged it.

gnat

11:28 AM

@GlenH7 Agile/Scrum - my manager is asking for a 40% increase in velocity is now at top of collider: hotness 58, posted 17 hours ago, with 1523 views and answer scores at 72, 19, 9, 9, 5, 4, 2, 2, 0, -1, -1 - with question at +33, how would you estimate a relative effect of the answers count?

gnat

11:39 AM

@psr just noticed that you likely are thinking about your recent top answer here. Don't worry, the question now needs only 4 more meh answers to get CW and eat whatever rep you and other answerers would expect to gain. Per my past observations of this kind questions, it's not going to take long :(

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

wanna bet who's going to post gitisfantastic here?

Thanks - this recipe works awesome! Git makes me tingle. — psr Jan 18 at 0:18

Thomas Owens

@gnat I'd really recommend cooling it with that on Meta.SO. Especially on posts about other, more serious issues. Like regular users and moderators being harassed, on and off SE sites.

gnat

12:20 PM

@ThomasOwens all right, deleted my comments. Though I am genuinely puzzled as to how handling of infrequent "Goma-like" types can be considered more serious than permanent trolling of good questions from collider?

37

A: How did this user amass more than 2k worth of reputation?

The mods are privy to certain statistics about users that others do not have. Goma is an unusual case of somebody who goes above and beyond to continue spamming Programmers with garbage. He has used over 50 unique IP's most of them behind proxy servers located in Saudi Arabia. He has opened ...

Thomas Owens

@gnat One can be handled easily by high rep users and moderators now. The other can't.

Also, keeping people who are experts in their field is critical to the success of any SE site. I haven't seen anyone leave because a few questions became problematic. But people do leave if they are constantly harassed.

So right now, dealing with network wide spam and better ways to handle problematic users are a priority.

gnat

@ThomasOwens understood about harassment, all right

awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against event systems. I don’t argue because they’re bad; compared to batch processing or shared-state imperative concurrency, event systems (actors, vats, channels, etc.) solve many problems and are relatively easy to reason about. Rather, I argue against event systems because we can do even better. But my writings are scattered across many forums.

This article shall provide a place to consolidate my arguments against event-based modeling and control of systems. It does not promote any specific alternative – I leave that to other articles.

Thomas Owens

12:58 PM

"...solve many problems and are relatively easy to reason about...I argue against event systems because we can do even better...It does not promote any specific alternative..." - I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs.

You say that they provide benefits, but there are better things, but don't give specifics about what is better. It's like a giant bitchfest.

gnat

@ThomasOwens presentation there sucks indeed, author buried it deep at the bottom, after a large rant against events

When we do need events, we can recognize them as differences in state. This is valuable because we often seek complex ad-hoc events, just as we seek complex and ad-hoc conditions. (Usefully, some models may allow stateless event detection – i.e. by comparing present and future so we don’t depend on any estimate of the past.)

Of course, we do need to use declarative state models. The imperative state models with which you are most familiar are generally designed for event-driven manipulation and observation (mutual exclusion, isolation, transactions). Declarative state models must handle co…

as far as I can tell, article advertises "declarative state models" as the alternative awelonblue.wordpress.com/category/language-design/state

Thomas Owens

@gnat Needs better presentation, for sure. The first two paragraphs made me not want to read the rest. At all.

user41796

1:17 PM

@gnat why estimate when we have hard, cold numbers? :-) Currently, the QScore is 35, with 11 Answers. SumAnswers is 135. Views are meaningless in my opinion, especially on P.SE. We just don't get enough eyeballs to move that portion meaningfully. Score * Answers / 5 yields 77, so the QScore component is roughly 1:2 of SumAnswers. With the 10%+1 threshold, we'd be looking at 28 to 118 instead for a ~1:4 ratio.

user41796

The real question is which we want to emphasize - high quality answers or questions that attract lots and lots of answers.

user41796

@gnat collider vs. trolls is really a shark vs. gorilla argument in disguise. There are some similarities, but as Thomas points out, the differences are huge. IMO you're doing a disservice to the collider issue by bringing it up in other arenas. Yes, the collider issue needs more attention. But relentless pushing of the issue will alienate the people necessary to effect the change.

gnat

1:40 PM

@GlenH7 okay I can buy that. Just ping me when you feel it looks relentless, I'll tone down

@GlenH7 I think got it. Current formula: 35x11=385 against 135, answers quality brings like 3x less than their number. Corrected, it would cut all but 4-5 answers and be like 35x5=175vs 125 or 120, much closer contribution - and given that there's already a strong voting evidence, much more realistic

Jimmy Hoffa

2:17 PM

@ThomasOwens Crap, y'all are on to me :|

@gnat !! This is specifically why I wrote my monadic state machine library in JavaScript; a colleague of mine showed me an event-based state machine library in JavaScript that was getting all kinds of play around the internet as so innovative yadda yadda and I wanted to show you can declaratively compose machines far more effectively and easily than eventing

also partially because Node.JS is just a huge proposition that is getting everybody to think eventing is somehow the greatest thing ever when it really comes down to the guys who put Node.JS together didn't have the common sense to make non-blocking IO without using continuation passing style which is well-known to be counter-intuitive, and unnecessary as proven by other runtimes including Haskell, but even the runtime isn't the necessary part, just the declarative composition can give

the decoration to separate actions so they are placed in message pumps or whatever else under the scenes to ensure non-blocking

Jimmy Hoffa

3:11 PM

Heh this is pretty awesome:

> Insane Language
> def. A language where you can say the same thing over and over again and, each time, get different results.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Likely based on brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins133991.html

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Yeah I caught that, but the way he used it illustrates very well how I feel about impure coding

which was his intent

user41796

-2

Q: What's the best way to wirte comments for callback functions?

I always wonder why comments like this can be so ordinary in documents of libraries in dynamic languages: /** * cb: callback // where's the arguments & effects? */ func foo( cb ) Maybe the attitude like "you can look into source code on your own after all" push people leaving comments li...

programming-languages documentation comments documentation-generation dynamic-languages

user41796

^^^^ feedback please; did I completely miss something horrifically wrong with the OP's question?

user41796

seems like a legit question to me

user55340

3:16 PM

@GlenH7 what is the best way? I like the javadoc style - I'm familiar with it. Someone else may like version 2 - concise, don't get caught up in things the function should describe itself.

user55340

Follow the existing conventions, if there aren't any, ask your co workers. If there aren't any do what you like best.

user41796

yeah, to a degree "what is best" is poor / too subjective. It is a flag against the question. Two commenters were bashing the OP for using foo and cb to illustrate the various approaches. I thought they missed the forest for the tree right in front of them, but wasn't sure I was reading it correctly.

gnat

@GlenH7 did you consider editing the question to help others see that forest from behind the trees? I didn't CV yet but have been thinking about casting it as unclear or opinion-based

user41796

@gnat good point. Doing so now.

user41796

3:32 PM

Not sure I made it that much better, but at least I addressed the less-than-helpful comments whinging about using foo and cb.

2

Ampt

3:44 PM

@GlenH7 I'm not sure I disagree with the foo as a bad name argument. If you make your variable names sufficiently clear, you won't need documentation at all, which is a style of documentation in and of itself

This may actually be a shortcoming in what I've come to call SE notation (using foo and bar to replace anything that is considered too in depth for an actual question's example code)

although it's not necessarily limited to SE, it's where I see it the most

user41796

@Ampt right. foo is a bad name. So that's why I assumed it was for example purposes only. And I really didn't understand the comments since it should have been obvious it was just for example purposes.

user55340

Personally, I've got no problems with obvious metasyntactic variables being used (foo, bar, baz, qux - or other sequences) when discussing generic 'ideas' of code.

user55340

When foo is in actual code, then its a problem.

Ampt

But the example itself is about documenting code and variable names are a part of that documentation. I think that in this case, OP should have put actual variable and method names

user55340

Somewhere I've got a pmd ruleset that catches metasyntactic variables as an error.

user41796

3:48 PM

@Ampt I read it as "here's 5 approaches I've seen. I think they all have problems. What's the better way?"

user41796

OP didn't help themselves by using FP style syntax in a JavaScript example.

user41796

FP is the anti-matter to all that is good in this world

Ampt

I wish I could star that more than once...

user41796

And now I'm just waiting for my troll-bait to cause @JimmyHoffa to wrap me up in a monad and dump my body in a flooding river somewhere.

user41796

@Ampt I consider it poor form to pin my own comments. You'll need to get a MichaelT or a mod to do it. Jimmy's busy prepping my monad-bag.

Ampt

3:52 PM

There we go, right where it belongs

user55340

@GlenH7 Did you know that pinning and unpinning your own message gives you a star?

user41796

@MichaelT I did, and I've done that trick before for grins

user55340

I use it on the Futelisk to star builds... and I've done it here once when I needed something to be stared late at night with low activity to make sure any workplace types see it if it scrolls off the top.

user41796

starring my own obviously trolling comments is a step beyond fair play though

Ampt

workplace types? them there be fighting words

is @gnat back?

user41796

3:55 PM

@Ampt he's be in and out of the room today, yes

Ampt

Oh I just saw a lot of stuff get starred in rapid succession

user55340

There are some of Workplace.SE types that show up in the white board (because its so much better).

Ampt

a sign of the wild gnatus programus in it's natural habitat

Where is @JimmyHoffa anyway? Out trying to convince everyone to join the church of haskell? "Excuse me sir, do you have time to talk about our savior, the lazy monad?"

user41796

@Ampt now that's getting close to flame baiting... :-)

2

Ampt

@GlenH7 well we've gotta get his attention somehow.... I need some more articles to read

user41796

4:02 PM

http://thecodelesscode.com/contents
Rinse. Repeat.

Ampt

oooh there's a new one

gnat

4:15 PM

@GlenH7 I added yet another edit over yours. Let's see if this will help. I bookmarked the question, will try to reopen if it gets closed. Also,added LO vote at review: programmers.stackexchange.com/review/close/39853 (current split at review is 2:2)

user41796

@gnat good changes - ties the title into the question better

gnat

@GlenH7 iirc I learned that trick 3 or 4 months ago, still pulling my hairs why I didn't figure it earlier

user41796

I realize that English is the lingua franca for programming, but it's sad to see how much of an effects tricks of the language have an impact upon question and answer quality.

Ampt

true but I would be so doomed if I had to learn chinese

user41796

4:31 PM

@Ampt only marginally apropos: nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/news040830-5.html

user41796

disclosure: some of the kids that are friends of my kids have recently been diagnosed with dyslexia. Given that Chinese is a completely different language modality, I wondered if they suffered from dyslexia in the same way.

Ampt

That's really cool actually. The brain is pretty amazing

and we know so little about it. Just crazy.

user41796

@Ampt I used to study neuroscience. We know ridiculously little about the brain.

gnat

here's the post...

1

A: How can a Mac or Unix owner fix/develop webpages for IE6/IE7?

https://browserlab.adobe.com/ http://browsershots.org/

and here's review: programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/39856

review aborted at 4 deletion:1 looks good WTF?

psr

@gnat Yes, but the majority of highly upvoted questions are for silly stuff (sadly true for my own answers), so usually any complaint boils down to "I didn't get enough undeserved rep" because of rep cap, CW, whatever. Quite unfair to good answers to good questions though.

user41796

4:40 PM

@gnat some people can't make the hard call of calling link-only answers as crap. And / or they think the links are relevant but didn't bother to summarize the links to improve the quality of the answer

user41796

But in 4.9k of rep I'll be able to vote to delete on answers. :-)

user55340

I'm not sure exactly how the review works there.... if one "Looks good" finishes it? or if 4x flags are raised rather than 5x?

user41796

@MichaelT No flags in the 10k tools, but could be in the mod only versions

user55340

For example programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/38725 has 5x Recommend Deletion and one Looks Good.

Ampt

@gnat I just saw that and snorted a little bit. "Nope! All good, carry on"

user41796

4:43 PM

@MichaelT To be fair, the "Looks Good" reviewer did leave a comment in that case. So they were attempting to educate the poor quality answerer.

gnat

@MichaelT per my observations, this works in the worst possible way - single LG aborts the whole thing, no matter what

Sep 11 at 7:50, by gnat

5 voters recommend deletion, 1 says looks good, post is kept staying, WTF?

user55340

It looks like 6x kick it out though - programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/36585

user55340

However, this can be 'solved' - programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/210543/… is canidate for deletion.

gnat

I think I understand the theory behind this: it is expected to sort of "complement" VLQ flags which are intended for stuff "unsalvageable through editing". From this perspective, one user seeing it salvageable is sufficient to abort. Still, seeing how this theoretical approach makes the queue practically useless is sort of WTF

user41796

@gnat It is kind of a useless queue for P.SE. I wish there were another option besides "looks good" or "nuke it"

user55340

4:48 PM

If I was a mod or 20k user, I'd be pursuing that history list just to find things to delete.

user41796

something to the effect of "this is pretty poor, but could be salvaged if someone tried"

gnat

right could be salvaged applies. Purely in theory, since LG-voters usually don't give a shit

user55340

The Low Quality queue is different than VLQ flag. VLQ is about "this isn't salvageable, mods, please delete it quickly" while /review/LQ is more along the lines of "this just looks broken and ugly - should it be saved"?

user41796

@gnat honey badger don't care. honey badger wants badges. Obligatory NSFW youtube link on honey badgers

user41796

it's not bad-bad, just make sure you're listening through headphones and not on speakers.

user55340

4:52 PM

Ever browse the channel of the guy who did 'sad cat diary'?

user55340

youtube.com/user/zefrank1

user41796

@MichaelT The preview video on that channel is hilarious

user55340

Things like "True Facts about Morgan Freeman" almost reads like John Skeet. True facts of the dung beetle is wonderful. True facts of the tapier is quite amusing.

gnat

@MichaelT if I was a mod I'd be pursuing it to find reviewers deserving manual suspension. Recently introduced "history" makes it fairly easy: programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/history

17

A: Review ban after skipping a review

I actually banned you manually. Looking through your history a little more thorougly, I suppose you’re not robo-reviewing, but you were on the list for this suggested edit, and then this happened too. So you’re unbanned now. But keep in mind that suggested edits that format random words as code ...

Ampt

Wait, if we have a class name and put it in back ticks to separate it from regular text, that's wrong?

user55340

5:08 PM

Part of its the 'just editing to do it'

user55340

Also 'javascrit/jquery' doesn't need to get seperated from regular text.

user55340

And the person didn't even know what they were doing correctly - they didn't backtick the '.' in '.m-active'

user55340

Look also at stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/2513964 -- "courselink" isn't a code name. Nor should php, or JSON get 'coded'.

gnat

@GlenH7 as far as I can tell, LG-reviewer made no comments. Here's review, and here's the post, am I missing something?

user55340

In stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/2513943 - "view" isn't code, and holy cow, bolding those questions is ugly.

Ampt

5:13 PM

Who was it that recommended the online Planning Poker tool? @MichaelT?

@GlenH7 possibly?

user55340

@Ampt The one I used once was monopoly money.

Ampt

Oh I was just going to give feedback and say that the tool wasn't that great. Not that intuitive and kept breaking

jozefg

5:25 PM

Hi

Ampt

howdy

jozefg

I'm writing non-functional code (hiissss)

Ampt

like non FP? You must be actually trying to do something useful then.

gnat

@jozefg so you got to be that poor Cobol guy who recently posted here?

-2

Q: Is there any life for fresher as a cobol developer in his future or is it better to slide to java or .net instead of wasting his experience..????

will cobol be a leading programming language in the future as of now or better to shift into java or .net for a fresher..??? I am a B.tech fresher and joined as a cobol developer 15 days back, sometimes I feel like I made a mistake and sometimes feel like exciting cause working for a very standar...

cobol

jozefg

@gnat Once A question has more than 2 question marks I don't even click on it. It just makes me sad

user55340

5:37 PM

@jozefg I wonder if 2 question marks is legal in ruby...

user41796

@gnat In that case, the LG reviewer could have done better. Link-only answers, even if it's 2 links, are by definition low quality. Making it worse is the OP of the question even said one of the links was worthless.

user55340

Hmm... it didn't give me a syntax error on the ??, but it was expecting something I didn't know.

user41796

@jozefg All I an say is: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/11266497#11266497

jozefg

@MichaelT Will you can always have names like wtf????

user55340

-2

Q: What are your thoughts on this interview question?

Your company has decided to port an on-premise application to a new web-based platform. As the lead developer, what would you consider the most important technical area of consideration for this porting effort? a) What is the programming language(s)? b) Does the platform run on UNIX and Windows?...

management planning migration porting

user55340

5:40 PM

o_O

user55340

@jozefg there's a perl module for you somewhere...

gnat

oh I just discovered official guidelines for LQ review at MSO!

5

A: What are the guidelines for reviewing?

Guidelines for reviewing Low Quality Posts Questions appear in the low quality post queue both by algorithm and by flags from users. Basic workflow Check if the post can be improved. If it can, by all means Edit it. A typical example are code-only answers, which can benefit from additional ex...

user55340

@jozefg Found it search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Crap-0.001002/lib/Acme/Crap.pm

user55340

And to that interview question...

user55340

a) What is the programming language(s)?
b) Does the platform run on UNIX and Windows?
c) What is the security model of the platform and which objects are exposed via APIs?
d) Will the application reside in the cloud? If so whose cloud?
e) Will the client be Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome?

jozefg

5:41 PM

f) What coffee will be provided to developers

gnat

> If the post looks good, choose Looks Good. If you are unsure, Skip it.

looks like some of reviewers don't get it

user41796

@gnat Honey badger wants badges

gnat

it's that simple

Ampt

@jozefg hopefully the free kind. That's my favorite

user41796

> Check if the post can be improved. If it can, by all means Edit it.

gnat

5:43 PM

@GlenH7 yeah fantastic video. I saw it when I posted my "badger" comment MSO guys were so much complaining about

Honey badger

The honey badger (Mellivora capensis), also known as the ratel ( or ), is a species of mustelid native to Africa, Southwest Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent. Despite its name, the honey badger does not closely resemble other badger species; instead, it bears more anatomical similarities to weasels. It is classed as Least Concern by the IUCN owing to its extensive range and general environmental adaptations. It is primarily a carnivorous species and has few natural predators because of its thick skin and ferocious defensive abilities. Etymology Ratel is an Afrikaans word, possibly der...

jozefg

@Ampt They had that at MIT, I went through waaaay too much

gnat

> The viral video Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger became a popular Internet meme in 2011, attaining over 60 million views on YouTube as of April 2013...

Ampt

@jozefg they have that where I'm at now and it makes me a happy honey badger

user55340

Tuesday is free coffee at Holiday (local gas station chain)... and we have free Kureg coffee here...

user41796

@gnat It's the voice that makes that video

Ampt

5:45 PM

@MichaelT free kureg? spoiled...

ours is folgers or maxwell house

user55340

@Ampt Alas, I'm not a coffee/tea person. There's an entire shelf of personal teas here though.

user41796

@Ampt you get free coffee? spoiled....

user55340

Previous employer, coffee was vending machine coffee and was $1/cup.

Ampt

@GlenH7 I guess everything is relative haha

user41796

@MichaelT And you should be GRATEFUL they allowed an outside vendor to take up space in their building so you could have coffee.

2

user55340

5:48 PM

the vending machine was outside the men's room. The people who drank it occasionally wondered which pipes went into the vending machine.

user41796

Color me bitter; just like the over-priced, nasty tasting coffee from the vending machine.

jozefg

Now I want coffee... dammit

Ampt

did I mention we have soda for 40 cents a can...

one of the guys here in engineering stocks the fridge and handles the money and we buy stuff with it like 3d printers

user55340

@GlenH7 In the main building (IT wasn't in it), they actually had a coffee shop.

gnat

@GlenH7 no it's cello music in the background that makes it! :) If memory serves, this is one of Bach's suites, there was a time when I was listening to these for hours non-stop

user55340

5:54 PM

@Ampt $1/can. One guy was running a 'cube store' for awhile - stocked candy bars and soda (blue ice in a cooler every day) for $0.50. Made out quite well for awhile (until they shut him down - "competing with vendors"). Another guy sells bottled water on the down low for $0.25/bottle... he's far enough away from people with title like 'director' that its ignored.

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat new sound for the day

►

user55340

Gah... why am I out of close votes?! (cry)

user41796

@MichaelT because of people venting about bad interview questions.... <sigh>

Ampt

@MichaelT This is all on the up and up with management because most of the time we re-invest the money in to cool stuff for engineering that the money trackers won't allow

user55340

@Ampt Given the vending machines are from an external company, it doesn't get reinvested.

user55340

5:58 PM

Related - dailytech.com/…

gnat

►

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat not available in my country

user55340

@GlenH7 I'm thinking about intelligent agents now...

user55340

I don't have the votes to do a migrate to SO either.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT What're they worried about, Minnesota?

gnat

6:00 PM

@JimmyHoffa in cases like this, I just copy the artist and title back into youtube search and look for one that's available in mine :)

►

user41796

I wish close votes were proportional to rep just like delete votes

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I said intelligent.

user55340

0

Q: Create prototype system with intelligent agents

I am involved with a prototype that will wrap Web services and Web-enabled devices (e.g. Web cams) with agents. The goal is to give the appearance that these services and devices have some intelligence; that they can access environment state variables and initiate simple actions. This is my fir...

architecture functional-programming artificial-intelligence automation

user41796

@MichaelT It's got 2 close votes on it now

user55340

Q: Why doesn't Iowa have a professional football team? A: Because then Minnesota would want one too.

jozefg

6:03 PM

@MichaelT The Minnesotan winces

gnat

@JimmyHoffa back to Vanessa Mae, I think I fell in love to her with Storm,

►

user55340

There's an IT vendor event going on at Lambeau Field today. Our IT department is there.

user55340

@gnat ever consider giving your listening data to last.fm?

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat Yeah, she's amazing.

user55340

There was a graph research project that is based on last fm listening habits - leebyron.com/what/lastfm

Thomas Owens

6:07 PM

@gnat violin techno-acoustic fusion?

gnat

@MichaelT nope. Actually, I don't listen while working. Tried it, couldn't focus on anything else. Only when doing dumbest, simplest of debugging / testing, only then I sometimes turn it on - that happens infrequently (not that i object:)

@ThomasOwens that sounds like a good description

Thomas Owens

I can't YouTube at work, but how does it compare to Lindsey Stirling?

gnat

@ThomasOwens pretty similar. what I heard of Lindsey was tad more to pop than Vanessa

Ampt

@MichaelT funny, my company was there last week for a snow plow competition/vendor fair

gnat

and Lindsey's clips are much more fun

Thomas Owens

6:09 PM

@gnat Pop? Only her collabs. Her solo work is totally either dubstep or trance.

gnat

@ThomasOwens pop is how her clips make me feel like (and I frankly like it). sound wise, I think she's got more acid than Vanessa

Thomas Owens

@gnat More...acid? Like...tripping balls?

gnat

►

@ThomasOwens if you wish :)

Thomas Owens

Also, Lindsey Stirling live = instant win.

Ampt

my reaction when our stakeholder suggest VIM for our senior design project

Thomas Owens

6:15 PM

@Ampt You should just deliver a vim executable.

Maybe that's what they want?

Ampt

Its just a disconnect between school and the real world I guess. School is all IDE IDE IDE and work is all plain text editor and compiler GO

I'm comfortable doing either but I guess I feel silly now for asking if they had a recommended IDE and they shot back VIM

Thomas Owens

You shouldn't rely on an IDE. Everything I work on is independent of IDE. I use Eclipse, usually, but I make sure that you can build in anything.

Ampt

Like I said, I'm comfortable without an IDE, but that's not at all from anything I learned in school

every class had an IDE (usually eclipse with plugins for that particular classes needs like android or what have you)

maybe I'm just naive though

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Right? Something that important should be done with EMACS, duh.

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa you're not dead? Phew. I thought I was going to have to dig through the depths of the internet to find my own articles to read

user41796

6:23 PM

@Ampt start with the glories of emacs over the pathetic attempts of vi.

user55340

@ThomasOwens If you set up your build environment right, one can make it build the proper environment for the IDE.

Ampt

anyone use sublimetext/

user41796

@Ampt nah, just use emacs. It can do everything

user55340

I like maven for that reason (trying to get my head around gradle)... mvn eclipse and it ~~downloads the internet~~ fetches the proper classes and dependencies, sets up the class path, etc...

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT What is this "it" that does the building?

Ampt

6:25 PM

@GlenH7 technically you can do everything in assembly but I don't see you busting out the punch cards...

user55340

maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-eclipse-plugin

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Gah, academia is so far behind industry... they still write all their assembly on punch cards? Yeesh..

at that rate you'll learn to program a loom in grad classes

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT Eh. I'm not a fan of Maven. It seems too cumbersome to set up. For Java, I use Ant. For C and C++, Make.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens Ah, another loom enthusiast I see

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa no, I was referring to the fact that being able to do everything on one medium doesn't mean that it's the most efficient one

I, thankfully, had 0 punch cards in my classes

besides profs joking about making the final project a punch card based program

thankfully that didn't pan out

user55340

6:29 PM

@ThomasOwens there is certainly a learning curve. But once you get it set up and can build a basic .pom for it - it does really nice things for you. "I need these jars for testing, these jars are part of the container, so use them, but don't compile them in... this lib requires that lib requires another lib, download them all."

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT That "download them all" and auto-dependency stuff doesn't work well here, where we need to be incredibly careful what libraries we pull in.

Which is why I don't really like Maven - half of what it's good at doesn't make sense.

user55340

Set up a nexus repository that acts as a proxy. Put only the approved artifacts in there. Configure maven to use the nexus repository and it won't go to the internet to fetch anything else.

Ampt

@ThomasOwens sounds awfully familiar. Are you in the next cube over?

user55340

sonatype.org/nexus

user55340

That said, I'm still intrigued by gradel though haven't done anything with it yet. gradle.org

Jimmy Hoffa

6:33 PM

@MichaelT Alternatively manage your dependencies by hand and enjoy the time someone accidentally copies the wrong version somewhere

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT And then teach everyone how to use it. And find someone to maintain it. The costs add up. Maybe someday, but I've got bigger things to worry about first. Like getting rid of ClearCase?

user55340

> Gradle combines the power and flexibility of Ant with the dependency management and conventions of Maven into a more effective way to build. Powered by a Groovy DSL and packed with innovation, Gradle provides a declarative way to describe all kinds of builds through sensible defaults. Gradle is quickly becoming the build system of choice for many open source projects, leading edge enterprises and legacy automation challenges.

user41796

@Ampt yes, yes, we know. That's why we recommended emacs.

user55340

@ThomasOwens Quite understandable. Infrastructure is one of the hardest things to move - it has a lot of inertia to it. And if it works... hey.

user55340

(looking at a 2k line long build.xml file now)

Thomas Owens

6:35 PM

@MichaelT Yeah, I don't like how it is now. But everyone's comfortable with getting things done. I'm going to worry about the bigger barriers to productivity first.

Or the things that will save money. Like migrating away from ClearCase and ClearQuest to git and...something else.

user41796

@ThomasOwens the savings from license fees alone should be pretty substantial

user55340

We're a 100% github shop.

gnat

@ThomasOwens at one of my past projects, there were similar limitations for auto-dependency stuff but I had no problems with that. One of the guys established a company-local repo for 3rd party artifacts and documented a policy related to it and things went fairly smooth from there

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens The unfortunate fact about infrastructure is that while it's one of the hardest things to change, it's also is the place with the greatest overhead often times

Ampt

@GlenH7 are you competing with @JimmyHoffa for title of saltiest programmer around?

Thomas Owens

6:37 PM

Plus, dealing with people who resist change is hard enough.

user55340

@gnat Our incentive at previous employer was that the interns couldn't get to the maven repo on the internet. So we set up one internal that was a mirror / proxy. If you asked for something it would pull it out of its mirror or proxy the request (and mirror it).

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens People resisting change? No.. never.. Well if you are in that theoretical situation, I'd have to ask; have you tried putting something in the water?

user55340

It also acted as the central repo for our built artifacts - build and deploy them there.

user55340

(aside, everyone who worked with that system has left in the past 3 months)

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa People who resist change, a micromanaging manager two levels up, and needing to explain things in engineering terms to other engineers since most of the things that flow down from corporate are in business-speak are my three biggest timesinks right now.

user41796

6:40 PM

@MichaelT - did you already flag the cross-posting at both sites with the SQL question?

user55340

Its not cross posting. Its a "if this is migrated to SO, it would be a dup of this other question"

gnat

@MichaelT right, that's the approach I am talking about. IIRC settings.xml had something like <mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf> and we were all set. The only thing worth keeping in mind was never hesitate to request (demand) adding whatever libs we needed to that mirror - as long as we're serving business needs, this is justified by default

user55340

He's asking how to do intersect in mysql, but doesn't know of intersect being what he wants.

user41796

@MichaelT sorry, I misunderstood.

user55340

@gnat Yep. We just set up nexus to proxy also so it automatically mirrored.

user55340

6:42 PM

But still... gradle... I'm curious about it.

user55340

@ThomasOwens while I'm not 100% sure, I think that intellij can convert a maven .pom into an ant build.

user55340

(not even a intellij thing... 'mvn ant:ant' mkyong.com/maven/… )

Thomas Owens

My biggest problem with Maven is my general dislike of convention-over-configuration.

Honestly. I hate being told how to do things.

Especially by tools.

How would you like it if your car told you how to drive it? Or your hammer told you how to hit that nail?

Or your chair told you how to sit in it? That's C-over-C.

user55340

Certainly agree.

Thomas Owens

Plus, when you have a lot of legacy applications, it's a killer.

gnat

6:53 PM

8

A: Java Developers: Is Ant still in the "main stream" for builds? Do we push new developers to learn it?

I've been working with Ant and with Maven. In my experience, Maven has a very strong edge over Ant. All the projects I've seen last 2 or 3 years seem to be using maven. About 3 years ago this made me wonder because maven versions used then (2.0.something) seemed to be quite unreliable and buggy...

user55340

Ant is still the core under the covers. If you read maven docs, it compares itself to ant and has the ant task to do what you really want sometimes. If you read gradle, it compares itself to ant (and maven).

user55340

So knowing ant is useful, especially when you come across an old ant project.

user55340

It isn't going away anytime soon.

user55340

And you'll see some ivy in there at times too.

gnat

@MichaelT I would probably disagree. Last year, I came across an old ant project once or twice, and it turned out knowing ant wasn't needed, because I was able to understand (and which is most important, debug) ant build without knowing much of it. Compared to Maven, ant is so much easier to understand. :) Still, I am somehow forced to prefer maven because it's everywhere around...

Ampt

7:01 PM

@MichaelT If you're finding ants under your covers you should try ant traps. Those things tend to spread faster than one would think

user55340

@gnat Absolutely, maven has a much steeper learning curve and much of it is "which plugin do I download?". And then you have to go look up the plugin to see how its used. Toss it all in xml and hope that you did it right.

user55340

@Ampt I've got a Terro bait trap in my cabinet.

user55340

When I started, there was a bit of an ant infestation... it got cleared up.

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat Surely you can listen to Blind Lemon Jefferson while working, that's one of the least distracting things ever. I actually work better on anything short of really mentally strenuous tasks (think debugging a memory leak or concurrency bug) with music than without as it helps drown out my environment so I can focus

user55340

7:27 PM

@GlenH7 the sad part about 'vote to delete answer' here is I think that it is just you and gnat who have those votes and would use 'em... now, if you were to bounty me with a few k rep and toss one of my answers into the collider again...

user55340

github is sad right now. We're sad too.

user55340

Ampt

idk, he looks pretty happy in the picture

user55340

status.github.com

user55340

Thats messing up their graphs.

Ampt

7:35 PM

@MichaelT better go home for the afternoon then

user55340

@Ampt Ahh, but with dvcs, I've got a full repo locally.

Ampt

@MichaelT but does your manager know that?

user55340

@Ampt Yep... though its not an issue. If I wanted to leave now, I could without any problems.

user55340

> We are currently recovering from a database failure and have successfully failed over to a backup server.

user55340

That sounds like fun.

Ampt

7:44 PM

@MichaelT we clearly have different definitions of fun.

user55340

fun is related to things being interesting

user41796

@MichaelT vote-to-delete-answers comes at 20k, so I have to wait a bit too. All I have is more delete-question votes than you do because of the additional vote per 1k rep past 10k

user41796

@MichaelT Try doing that with an energy management system.

user55340

@GlenH7 Its a "when you do get there, you'll have to wait for a third to make it useful"

user55340

@GlenH7 Nope... not gonna. I'm not an "engineer".

user41796

7:55 PM

@MichaelT true. And I'm not sure that delete votes ever expire

user55340

@GlenH7 They don't appear to. The only way to clear them is to delete the question and then reopen it (I think).

user41796

@MichaelT it's a bit nerve wracking the first time you do it live on a brand new system. Doesn't matter how many times you tried it when you were in listening mode

user55340

Tangentially related (nerve wracking) I've heard stories of the quench the magnet in an NMR...

user55340

everything2.com/title/Catastrophic+quenching

user41796

@MichaelT had never heard of that before. I knew of the absolutely no metal rules around MRIs but not that issue

user55340

8:00 PM

Its raining, its pouring... its AIR?!

user41796

Yeah, that would freak me out

user55340

@GlenH7 Its the small ones you'd worry about. The ones designed for human interaction have lots of safety things. Its things like the one in a chemistry lab that you'd worry about. But you're not sticking your head in that can.

user41796

8:17 PM

apropos of nothing. It seems like we're seeing more activity from high rep SO users on Programmers. Perhaps Programmers is losing its reputation as SO's dumping ground.

user55340

Too bad can't data.SE to fetch the current rep on multiple sites of people who have asked questions in the past month.

user41796

I'm seeing it in the answers and comments more than the questions

user55340

There are certainly some showing up.

user55340

For example...

user55340

Virtlink

681 5 17

c# coding-style .net design design-patterns enum game-development

user55340

8:23 PM

Virtlink

9.6k 2 24 56

c# .net linq generics java algorithm winforms

user41796

So you want everything? — JeffO 30 mins ago

user41796

But why didn't he vote to close?

user55340

@GlenH7 There are some people who don't close vote anything.

user41796

@MichaelT picture me stammering while trying to express my incredulity

user55340

Whoa... new close voter in the review queue! (whee!)

user55340

8:28 PM

Newly 3k rep.

user55340

Did his first review last Friday. Did 18 reviews today. programmers.stackexchange.com/users/8924/…

user41796

woo hoo. More voters. :-)

user55340

As I've said before, I'm always pleased to see increased participation by the community.

user41796

Oh, what to do with this one:

user41796

0

Q: Programmitcallly create XML-based component structure for Tridium controls-software

I am a co-op at a company that provides HVAC retrofitting and, more relevantly, controls solutions for those new HVAC systems. They use java-based Tridium workbench software to control the (also java-based) "NiagaraAX framework" that provides the underlying structure for their control system. Rec...

xml scripting control-structures vba

user55340

8:33 PM

Under the old close reasons, it would likely be a 'too localized'

user55340

> They have introduced me to this problem and asked me to start working on it, but I am from a Mechanical Engineering focus with only three introductory CS classes. How should I be approaching both this specific development problem, as well as giving myself the necessary additional programming education so I can at least produce any sort of solution that addresses their initial need?

user41796

So I guess we'll go for the opposite. "too broad" :-)

user55340

Its probably the right choice, with a dash of 'career education' too.

user41796

and now I'm out of close votes.

user55340

That "Can a JRE, Java Runtime Environment using for Java over the web, be used on the Android OS?" question - I'm sure I've seen that name before. Is there a way for 10k users to search for deleted questions on meta?

user55340

8:42 PM

Something about a "why do machine code questions keep getting deleted" or something like that.

user41796

@MichaelT afaik, only mod can search with deleted:yes.

user41796

there was a jacked up shard that let me search that way for a bit, but they fixed it.

user55340

There it is!

user55340

Andy Harglesis, Canada

9

user55340

Andy Harglesis, Canada

1 1

android java

user41796

8:43 PM

@MichaelT I thought his name looked familiar too.

user55340

If you do the appropriate searches on google, you can get to the cached version of his meta page.

user41796

duplicate accounts. Cute.

user55340

I've flagged his new question for mod glancing - his profile contains an email address.

user55340

@GlenH7 By extension, emacs is lisp based... does that mean emacs is the anti good too?

user41796

I flagged both for duplicate accounts. I don't believe that putting an email address in the profile is verboten, but I could be wrong.

user41796

8:47 PM

@MichaelT emacs is so amazing it makes anti-matter stable. That's just how awesome it really is.

user55340

SE doesn't appear to like it... and whats more, that assumes that he is 13 and not younger which gets into problems.

user41796

@MichaelT There's a line the company has to draw short of evidence to the contrary. Otherwise their burden of proof goes much higher in having to perform extra validation on every account.

user55340

(there is a mod about (just got a flag for migration handled))

user41796

look at the other SE accounts: programmers.stackexchange.com/users/102491/andy-harglesis

user41796

Dollar bet says it's Leslar. P.SE, EE and Physics are his calling card accounts

user55340

8:52 PM

its ChrisF, and he's fairly close to to SE... so if anything is to be done, he's likely the one to do it.

user55340

@GlenH7 Its likely. When I get home (can't hit through google cache here), the cached version of his Meta page has him admitting multiple accounts.

Ampt

> I am a widely known physicist, computer engineer, actor, filmmaker, equal right's advocate, activist, promoter, internet marketer and advertiser, CEO, and powerlifter.

quite the resume he's got there

user41796

@Ampt my 15 y.o. karate padawan has a similar BS FB profile, so that didn't nudge the radar

Ampt

back in my day we didn't use our real name when we made stuff up for internet points haha

hell, I still don't use my real name.

user41796

@MichaelT I'm backing off my comment and going back to assuming dumb teen. And yes, I realize that's generally redundant. But seriously, get off my lawn.

user41796

8:59 PM

@MichaelT - I think this declined message was for you: "declined - If the user wants to put their e-mail address in their profile then that's up to them. Even if they are still a teenager. "

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