The Whiteboard

gnat

10:39

comments of this guy already triggered two closed cross-posts (programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/216486/… and codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/33804/…) but he seems to still believe it's OK. What site will be the next victim?

@gnat, I read the codereview's FAQ before my comment (as well as programmers), by codereview FAQ : codereview.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic seems is reasonable to ask this question there, this code works (no running time exception and no compile time problem) so it should be suited there to ask for its correctness, but the reason they closed is actually they don't like it, like the way that we don't like it here (the reason of close in codereview is totally irrelevant), so please consider that if someone lefts a comment may be knows something. — Saeed Amiri 18 mins ago

user55340

14:59

Advice for single people - keep a screwdriver in the bathroom. So, took a shower this morning, the door swelled up just a bit and the handle came off when I tried to turn it enough to get the door open (bathroom on second floor, can't go out the window). So, I had a screwdriver in there from when I had to remove the drain cover on the bathtub to clean it... took the handle out with the screw driver and opened the door.

user55340

15:15

@gnat The part he missed was 5. To the best of my knowledge, does the code work? and the bits in the second paragraph: " But I am not able to get the right result, even though the code runs without errors. The result is not correct and I am always getting 0."

enderland

@MichaelT nice, never thought of this problem before

probably not going to worry about it though :)

user55340

@enderland If you have a roommate or spouse, or kids, or bathroom on the first floor (though embarrassing), these are potentially solvable issues.

user55340

I did have another way out, I had my iPad in there (had a timer), but the phone was outside. Thus, I could have voip'ed my parents to have them call someone here on a regular phone.

enderland

15:34

hmmm sounds like I need to get married or I will get trapped in the bathroom. that's the logical conclusion here right? ;)

gnat

15:57

@MichaelT wow. This bit about code has to be correct for CR.SE makes perfect sense now that you pointed to it, but it wasn't obvious to me. Tricky nuances like that are the reason why I always try to avoid recommending unfamiliar sites in comments

they do code review, don't troubleshoot, makes sense

user55340

While I'm not active there, I poked around our migrations to CR (both failed and successful) to see what the key to successful migrations was. That lead me to the points of what is necessary for a CR question.

user55340

In part it was because the design review is something that falls into a no-man's land between P.SE and CR.SE.

user55340

The design review doesn't have problems - so its a poll for advice. We don't like it. But its not working code, so CR doesn't like it.

user55340

16:18

Whee! git checkout -p --- you will have a happier day if you merge up to a more recent commit than doing something that's been apart for a bit.

gnat

16:36

@MichaelT maybe design review questions "in pure form" rightfully belong to nowhere, because these have no way to verify research effort. For CR, working code requirement does that - if it doesn't work, this means insufficient effort, reason to close crappy question. For design review, one could just thoughtlessly glue some TLAs and see how it sticks "I am considering SOA+ORM, any thoughts?"

I think at Programmers design reviews can fly when there's a research effort "embedded", ie if asker did a preliminary investigation of their design and discovered what they believe to be a problem in it. That, I can work with as an answerer / voter. I can check whether the problem is interesting or it is something that is answered in the top link of a google / wikipedia search...

...If it's lame, I have reason to vote down and close, if it interesting, it's perfectly OK to stay and gain answers, along with as much design review / advice as needed to solve it

gnat

16:51

OMG now that's some meta effect...

-16

Q: Why nobody tries to find out malicious voters

Today I've been the victim of downvotes out of spite, up until now I got these downvotes on the main site: Is this a normal behavior? All of them are correct answers or somehow good questions. I think this is downvoting out of spite, If I'm wrong I want someone clarify it. When I asked "Why no...

5

A: The Many Memes of Meta

Meme: Meta effect. Originator: Mat (?) Mentioned: MSO comments, Sep 8 2011 Background: Increase of voting activities observed in main site posts that have been exposed at meta. Most ironic when someone complaining to Meta about "unfair downvotes" on another site gets more downvotes. Also s...

> Often the opposite of the desired result for the user who came to Meta about the specific question...

user55340

wow. Thats... significant.

user55340

I'm fairly sure that the mods poked at the voting patterns to check if it was serial down voting, and noted the up votes. If it was done on one's self as a sock... I wonder if we'll see a "voting irregularities' suspension too.

Sohaib I

17:09

Hello, Are c++ questions allowed?

Thomas Owens

17:19

@SohaibI If it's a question about algorithms or data structures, architecture and design, or conceptual things about unit testing, yes. If you are having trouble with an implementation, it belongs on Stack Overflow. If you want people to take a look at a reasonably-sized piece of working code and give feedback, check out Code Review.

Sohaib I

Umm its related to visual studio. Implementation no. Just setting up visual studio 2010.

@ThomasOwens

Thomas Owens

@SohaibI Then no. Programming tools questions also belong on Stack Overflow.

Sohaib I

@ThomasOwens Alright thanks.

Thomas Owens

Questions on Programmers are about conceptual things. The kind of things that you'd do at a whiteboard or in a conference room, not at a computer with editors and code.

Sohaib I

I understand. I'll try on stackoverflow.

Sparticus

17:25

@MichaelT Check the 30th

stackoverflow.com/users/416926/saeed-amiri?tab=reputation

if that's not serial upvoting, I don't know what is

user55340

@Sparticus That was reversed the next day.

Sparticus

not in entirety

85 points total and 55 reversed

but 800? holy crap

user55340

That's the one I was going 'wow' at.

Sparticus

yeah. But I mean its very clear that it was happening

from the day of the 30th

85 points in <2 minutes

the other ones... they must be some other info that we aren't seeing

user55340

I wonder if there's a tuning parameter on the 'serial voting' script for how large of a window to look at. And then they ran it with a wider window and it found more over time?

Sparticus

17:32

im guessing it was IP based

and that that day he went a little too crazy

and tipped a moderator's hat who then looked into the whole history of the second account

you just need to be able to create multiple new accounts and get them enough rep to upvote and downvote

then randomly upvote downvote other posts

while upvoting yours at random intervals....

not that I would do that.....

you could probably get some VPN services around the world to look like the traffic was coming from other places as well..

150

Q: Question title that doesn't describe the problem

Pre Edit 4: Pointing out that thread's popularity is a direct result of programming community interest in said subject, and that someone likely stands to become rich and/or famous by solving the problem none of the answers, save my own, came even close to resolving. Long salutation desc...

discussion meta fun

aaand there goes my lunch break

psr

19

Q: How to make a method cancelable without it becoming ugly?

I am currently in the process of retrofitting out long-running methods to be cancelable. I am planning on using System.Threading.Tasks.CancellationToken to implement that. Our methods generally perform a few long-running steps (sending commands to and then waiting for hardware mostly), e.g. voi...

c# multithreading cancel

No one has mentioned monads yet. @JimmyHoffa...?

Sparticus

69

A: Question title that doesn't describe the problem

A nicely worded, but pretty useless answer, which mainly gets its upvotes due to extensive use of Markdown formatting and by linking a lot of stuff, both related and unrelated to the problem in question. Useless title to draw more attention A lot of basic information about the questioner's prob...

damnit.... this is totally me

gnat

18:00

8

Q: Is 500 million lines of code even remotely possible?

The New York Times is reporting that the Healthcare.gov website contains "about 500 million lines of software code." This number, attributed to "one specialist", and widely repeated across the interwebs, seems incredibly far-fetched (even assuming a large fraction of that number includes standard...

loc

Assuming a programmer producing 10 to 100 production quality lines of code a day, 200 days in a year, and 10 year long project, it would take 2,500 to 25,000 programmers to write 500 million lines. What good can come of few thousands guys only adding that amount of code for 10 years (rewriting would only bring the 500 million number down)? Nothing I guess. If 80-90% of these crazy millions LOC were like generated test code, it could probably make some sense

user55340

Poke at the generated code from jaxb for a moderate schema... or axis for even a simple on. Its huge... with lots of generated documentation (at least for jaxb). If they are counting all of that, its very huge.

user55340

netbeans.dzone.com/news/5-techniques-create-web-servic

user55340

(the thing that Axis2 with ADB doesn't show is the bazillion (thats a technical term) inner classes that it stuffs in those 14 generated classes.

user55340

(netbeans wouldn't even let me bring the source into an editor... it was "nope, not gonna do it." Had to compile it (compiled down reasonably) and then let it handle the methods and inner classes that way.)

Sparticus

wooo meta programming

gnat

18:11

@MichaelT yeah I've seen insanely huge amounts of generated code (axis) in one of past projects. That's why I voted to close that question, without more details it only slips into speculation

user55340

The media likes to sensationalize things. They don't realize what a line of code actually is and so just does wc -l on it.

user55340

(or looks at the git repository and sums it up that way)

Sparticus

> The media likes to sensationalize things.

and our award for understatement of the century goes to....

psr

@MichaelT I sincerely doubt even that. I imagine the methodology is "keep asking programmers until one gives you a big enough number for your headline".

user55340

18:31

This is going to end well...

user55340

-2

Q: Limit down votes on met stack overflow

Meta stackoverflow is very unfriendly towards questions and people are down vote trigger happy.

feature-request

Sparticus

smells like a troll to me

how many downvotes does a Q need for auto delete?

enderland

79

A: Enable automatic deletion of old, unanswered zero-score questions after a year?

Just to formally document the exact policies we have in place to remove old abandoned / dead questions: If the question is more than 30 days old, and ... has −1 or lower score has no answers is not locked ...or... it was closed and migrated to a different site ... it will be automaticall...

user55340

@Sparticus He just got seriously down voted (and self deleted) when asking about why SO keeps all that junk around. (I have a guesstimate of it at 16 gb for about $0.80 worth of storage).

user55340

@Bart lol downvotes dont affect me in any way lol, theyre just fake pts ;-) plus this makes the time at work go by faster — Eduardo Dennis 21 secs ago

user55340

18:46

@Sparticus Yep... trolling to a degree.

enderland

People are unfriendly towards those who waste everyone else's time. — enderland 11 secs ago

user55340

@enderland It will be hard in the future...

user55340

@Eduardo - downvotes actually do mean something. They contribute to question bans, which, when they occur mean that you cannot post questions here anymore. We have this on all SE sites, but the threshold on meta sites is higher and more difficult to achieve. Sadly, you managed to do that. — Oded 2 mins ago

enderland

hah. nice. karma I guess?

psr

19:06

@enderland - You didn't tell maple_shaft to buy donuts. He literally has maple in his username. -1.

enderland

:(

2

user55340

@psr maple doughnuts are overrated. Vanilla icing with sprinkles or a fruit danish. Those are the only justifiable answers to doughnuts.

enderland

this is mind blowing but I just had a phone tree to confirm/update my healthcare options for next year that DIDNT PISS ME OFF

@psr pretty sure "maple shaft" refers to a tree, not a donut?

psr

@enderland - I can't respond. The cognitive dissonance from the smiley face making the frowny face hasn't worn off.

2

enderland

19:21

@psr :) ?

"hot questions" are always interesting to see that's for sure

Undo

Anyone here?

Sparticus

Nope

What's up @undo?

Undo

Eh. Not much. Have a question, though.

That I don't really want to ask on main.

user55340

19:37

Hmm?

user55340

It better not be anything work related... like "wants the best beer to have while coding." ;-)

Sparticus

although its clearly guiness

Undo

So I'm a fairly young iOS developer. As such, other kids' parents, think 'hey! If he can do it, then Jimmy can too!'

user55340

@Sparticus Filling for both spirit and body?

enderland

uh oh I see where this is going..

user55340

19:39

Ahh.. so the answer is "root beer" in this case.

Undo

...and I don't really know where to start teaching them.... The most recent occurrence was a seven year old.

Girl. Who's into Art.

user55340

7 is... very young. I remember playing Rocky's Boots at 7 and not completely getting it.

user55340

5

Q: How to interest my 8 yo child about programming?

I tried to make him interested, but he got bored very quickly and got back to his iPad games. I want to try again. Any idea how to approach this?

learning children

Undo

And my parents say that I can't tell them to 'Google iOS development'... So I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.

enderland

how about "bing iOS development?"

Undo

19:41

LOL!

Sparticus

You know man, I actually had a problem like that

user55340

Hmm... 10k link programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/364/…

Sparticus

when I was... Idk, 14? 15? I bit off more than I could chew

Undo

Ugh - nowhere near 10k here :(

user55340

iOS is a huge framework to get into. The key is to get into programming to start with.

user55340

19:42

basic logic and thinking - scratch.mit.edu is something that might be useful.

Undo

They also say I can't tell the 7 year old to learn C.... Because it would be too big of a task.

user55340

kogics.net/sf%3akojo and alice.org/index.php

Undo

And I kind of get it - if I was a seven year old, I would kind of prefer to touch things too instead of typing stuff into a command line.

Sparticus

family friend had a small part shop. Nuts, bolts, etc. They had an inventory management system built out of quickbooks, which I thought seemed simple. Ends up that I was way in over my head. I didn't really know what to do and was stressing out about it badly. Luckily my mother had more sense than I and saw that there was no way I could do it and she promptly told me that I should let the guy know that it was beyond me to accomplish it, and you know what? He accepted that.

Undo

@Mich Ooh, nice links. Thanks!

user55340

19:43

squeakland.org too (that one apparently had Alan Kay give a TED talk about - sciencestage.com/v/428/… )

enderland

I've been impressed with Scratch as a "get interesting in programming" (though it's not really "programming" at all)

Undo

Any opinions on Codecademy?

enderland

I'd be more concerned that someone is trying to get me to teach their 7 year old programming honestly

user55340

To my understanding of child development, code academy is... boring.

user55340

@enderland I was working on Apple ][+ basic back in the day... and logo... and playing Rocky's Boots.

Undo

19:46

@enderland I am... But I can't get out of it.

enderland

how old are you?

that might be good context too

Undo

@enderland What's the minimum age to be here without COPPA getting me? Add one to that.

enderland

@Undo :-)

user55340

The thing to do is to work with one of the more basic visual languages (those links above) to create something that engages the person for a bit.

enderland

usfirst.org

Undo

19:47

What are your opinions on Mindstorms?

enderland

specifically usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/jr.fll

user55340

If you like lego, excellent.

enderland

those events have always gotten me excited as an adult (I've volunteered at a few)

user55340

Mindstorms have the advantage that its also physical - something you can touch and feel and it does things.

enderland

@MichaelT plus it's legos. What 7 year old DOESN'T like legos?

not one who will enjoy programming at all :)

Undo

19:48

I'm afraid this one might not :(.

user55340

(I remember having a toy that had a bunch of motors that got plugged into an expansion card on the Apple... and you could say "motor 1 on 0.2 seconds forward")

Undo

Oooh! Fun!

user55340

Something like this...

user55340

Armatron

The Armatron was a toy robot from the 1980s made by TOMY and distributed by Radio Shack in the United States. It consisted of a crane-like arm with two attached joysticks which could be manipulated to pick up small objects. It was essentially similar to industrial robots of the 1980s, though it was strictly user-controlled, with no automation built in. The Armatron existed in both the original fixed version and a mobile version with a wired remote. It included an "energy level" indicator (actually a countdown timer) and a series of objects such as boxes and spheres designed to be manip...

Undo

I need to get me one of those. And an Apple ][ to plug it in to.

user55340

19:51

One of the nice things with the Apple ][ was that a hobbiest could create a card for it and sold them (my father also did that back in the day).

user55340

Ah ha! found it...

user55340

Thats what it was.

Undo

That's... Absolutely awesome.

user55340

Yep. It had 8 motors on it (note the '2' on the one there) that then ran back to a controller. The big thing at the base was a pack of 8 D cell batteries.

Undo

19:53

Wow - it must have been pretty big.

user55340

There...

Undo

Built on top of LEGO?

Looks LEGOy

user55340

Nope it was its own system.

Undo

Okay.

user55340

19:55

Used hexagonal plugs to connect pieces together. Mostly struts, joins, motors.

Undo

Neato.

user55340

So, the thing is to get the person interested in some part of programming as a process.

Undo

Yep.

user55340

Be it "make pictures with logo" or the modern equivalent or "make a mindstorm that does something".

Undo

I guess that's an NXT, right? You have to bridge the art-science gap.

user55340

19:56

Trying to do the text only approach of code academy (or just jump into the code) is only that useful for the ones who will be geeks...

user55340

(My first programs were compute pi and prime numbers... my father gave me $20 to write each of those... and then $5 for each enhancement. Pretty big amounts in $1980s)

Undo

Wow.

user55340

(how do you think I afforded the Robotix? ;-)

Undo

:D

So do you believe in the programmers-or-nonprogrammers-by-nature idea?

user55340

It had no sensors... so could only do pre-programmed sequences. But it worked. Thats were Mindstorms are much better.

user55340

20:00

@Undo There is a certain mental model about how a computer works that is necessary to working with one. If you don't have this, all coding will be frustrating.

enderland

@Undo I think there are people who naturally think in such a way to understand how programming works considerably better than others, but you can definitely learn

user55340

codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/…

user55340

The associated linked paper - web.archive.org/web/20120523180409/http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/…

Undo

Nice talking with you guys - I've got to go now. Bye! I'll probably point the 7 yr old to Mindstorms and leave it there.

user55340

@Undo Also try scratch and the other graphical ones linked - as an art influenced person, those might also work.

enderland

20:06

@MichaelT that's fascinating. I should show that to some of the folks at my company who have a "we can teach anyone anything" attitude

probably get myself fired. lol

user55340

Note the consistent model is the bit that was important... not that they got the right answer.

enderland

yeah. I think honestly the abstractness is what I LIKE about programming stuff - I love the theoretical world anyways (INTJ here, haha) - which means I LOVE building the mental model for what my code is doing in my head

user55340

If they started out with a consistent way of thinking how it works (wrongly), they could figure out how it works correctly and everything just clicks.

enderland

yup

I was explaining pointers to someone the other day (well what happens when you pass arguments by reference) and realized that it's really complicated to try to explain but I just "get it"

user55340

(pervious employer thought they could just bring cashiers into the point of sales programming department... and couldn't figure out why people weren't applying)

user55340

20:13

My first experience with pointers was on the 6502 processor (apple ][) and the "indirect" option for lookups.

user55340

And I actually learned MIPS assembly before I learned C++ (or C).

enderland

I suspect being good at programming requires a strong curiousity too

user55340

@Undo btw, statico.github.io/jsrobowar might be fun to poke at.

Robert Harvey

20:38

0

Q: Ternary and Artificial Intelligence

Not much of a programmer myself, however I have been thinking about the future of AI. If a fully functional AI is programmed in a binary environment as is used in current computing, would that create a bit of a black and white personality? As in just yes/no, on/off, 1/0? I will use the Skynet c...

artificial-intelligence

user55340

20:49

@RobertHarvey Glen put an answer on it... though the question itself is difficult in that its one of the "ohh, idea!" from a person who has no idea what they are talking about.

user55340

The cast of Breaking Bad is going to do a christmas album singing all your favorite hits. They're going to call it Breaking Windows.{/joke}

Robert Harvey

user55340

@RobertHarvey Which was that in response to?

enderland

21:09

0

Q: cross functional vs product teams

We're a mid size (2000) person company with a half billion in revenue. We've probably tripled in size over the last seven years, and our growth project has us doing that same level for the next decade. I'm the director of software development and my boss (the CIO) would like us to switch to from...

software-industry team

do you guys want this?

Robert Harvey

@enderland Seems very chatty. "Primarily opinion-based?"

enderland

it's not really asking a questino yet but Ithink it's more p.se than workplace

user55340

The two comments still need to be addressed before a migration would succeed.

Robert Harvey

Traditionally, "Help me convince my boss/coworker" questions haven't fared well here.

enderland

k

Robert Harvey

21:13

Cool. I posted a couple of very well-received answers on The Workplace, and now I have close-vote privileges.

enderland

@RobertHarvey beta sites ftw

though I'm close to 20k there anyways, I guess I'll primarily lose the extra close/delete votes

user55340

"Maybe" has been implemented for decades, in the form of Artificial Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and other techniques. It's more than just "maybe;" it's "how much maybe," or "to what degree maybe." In any case, despite the binary nature of computer circuitry, nothing is ever completely black and white, as the existence of 32 bit color with millions of shades of grey proves. — Robert Harvey 45 mins ago

user55340

Modern literary works are so behind the times with only 50 shades.

gnat

21:58

0

Q: looking for a short explanation of fuzzy logic

I got the idea that basics of fuzzy logic are not that hard to grasp. And I got the feeling that someone might explain it to me in like 30 minutes. Just like I understand neural networks and am able to re-create the famous Xor problem. And go just beyond it and create 3 layer networks of x nodes....

c#

15

Q: Would you see any use of a Trilean (True, False, ??)

Sometimes I have a function that should return true or false. But sometimes three possible values would make more sense. In some language theses cases would be handled with integers or with exceptions. For exemple you want to handle the age of a user if he is over 18 years old. And you have a ...

syntax

52

A: Is there an alternative to bits?

Of course it is possible, both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, there are two classes of alternatives: digital number systems with a base other than 2 (in fact, the decimal system as we know it is one such system); and non-digital number systems. Mathematically speaking, we're talki...

user55340

-11

Q: add jquery .one() method to jquery function

could someone add the .one() method to this jquery function so it only runs once $(document).ready(function(){ $(".header > ul > li").click(function(){ $(".header").toggleClass("header-transition"); return false; }); });

javascript jquery

user55340

This question should be closed because it is a request for work. — Travis J 1 hour ago

user55340

didnt know how to do it thats why i requested it — rob1994 1 hour ago

user55340

22:11

I want to make a programming language where 'turning' is something that is done. And 'return' would then be 'turn again'. I wonder how many people would get messed up with that.

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