The Whiteboard

user20683

12:03 AM

@MichaelT @GlenH7 @JimmyHoffa

user20683

Map of all U.S. Breweries

user20683

12:25 AM

►

user20683

►

user20683

lecture about Smalltalk from 1989

user20683

1:20 AM

Javascript Microcontroller

user20683

1:34 AM

@JimmyHoffa

user20683

Taking PHP seriously

user20683

Really interesting talk

user55340

2:33 AM

Now there's a name you don't see in the delete votes cast on P.SE often... programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/223082/… (10k link)

Matt D

already deleted

user55340

Yep. We don't get to see who cast delete votes until its deleted...

user55340

user20683

3:21 AM

He's been more active lately on Prog.SE

jmac

8:18 AM

@gnat, took a look at your edit and I've made a pretty significant edit as I now understand what you're trying to say and figure that short and pithy is better especially for duplicate info from other posts

gnat

10:05 AM

@MichaelT Bad Company...

►

@jmac looks good to me (I'll ask Michael and Glen to compare a bit later), except for the point that addressing only negative voted answers sort of misses the point; main idea is to discard even positive answers when their score is too low. This is because dropping only neg scored answers doesn't work because of spurious / sympathy upvotes. This is discussed in another answer, rioght near the one we're drafting...

...by the way my original idea was just like yours, to drop only neg-score answers (I thought community regulars DVs would suffice to make a difference). It's only after I studied data a little and re-checked my own observations that I changed my mind — gnat Jan 25 '13 at 18:41

This is really important...

I'll try to adjust - if you edit it to this effect, I wouldn't object :)

@MichaelT chatted about branching with ex-Google guy and was pointed to an interesting reference...

supplementary reading: Google's vs Facebook's Trunk Based Development "They [Google and Facebook] don’t have merge pain, because as a rule developers are not merging to/from branches. At least up to the central repo’s server they are not. On workstations, developers may be merging to/from local branches, and rebasing when the push something that’s “done” back to the central repo..." — gnat 52 secs ago

gnat

11:23 AM

revenge downvotes look pretty funny in my rep tab...

I think I "invest" 5-10 points daily into answers quality

uhh, above screen shot is outdated - I just had to undownvote one of the posts listed there. Not that I complain, I like it when stuff gets better :)

gnat

12:11 PM

hot list is now (ab)used by spammers...

4

A: A lot of sock puppet accounts on the Bitcoin Stack Exchange site

This has happened before, with a ring of users causing questions to hit the multicollider, reaching 200 rep, and then abusing the network bonus. I suggest everyone flag the answers as spam. Not sure if this is the right course of action, but this is best stopped before they reach 200 rep. I've...

Aug 1 '13 at 19:37, by gnat

> indication of issues with current formula is how easy it is to manipulate hotness score. In my recent experiments with a particular typical hot question, it looked like changing direction of a single question vote (up->down->up) has been causing changes in score by 10-15 points. This is because any question vote is leveraged by amount of answers. ..

gnat

12:37 PM

speaking of hotness formula... @GlenH7, @MichaelT - would you mind comparing two versions of draft request? "by gnat" -- "by jmac"

Yannis Rizos

1:09 PM

15

Q: Can we live without constructors?

Let's say in some reason all objects are created this way $obj = CLASS::getInstance(). Then we inject dependencies using setters and perform starting initialization using $obj->initInstance(); Are there any real troubles or situations, which can't be solved, if we won't use constructors at all? ...

This ^^^ is on reddit (my fault) and might explode during the day. Keep an eye for non-answers, etc, please.

gnat

1:40 PM

@YannisRizos first thing that comes to mind is to clarify "pop-corn" title to ask a real question - put essential stuff from question body there

I'd do it myself, but I know nothing of PHP

we've been through it before in "git" hot question, it has been attracting crap answers until title was clarified

-1

A: Why is the sudden increase in number of Git submitters on Debian popcon graph in 2010-01?

There is only one reason. Linus Torvalds. At the time, he had cobbled together git from a pile of shell scripts to more easily manage kernel patches in his email queue. Mat Mackall built Mercurial, and pitched it to Linus, but Linus was happy with his ball of shell scripts, which was working q...

above crap is at +7/-7, mostly because original title was prompting for crap: "Why did Git become so popular?"

Yannis Rizos

@gnat What?! The title is the best part! (publicity-wise)

gnat

@YannisRizos if we could do like MeFi, then that would be true :)

'my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.' (A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy) — gnat Jan 10 at 17:00

Yannis Rizos

On a more serious note, I just got Booster for it, about an hour after I shared it. It's trending fast...

Yannis Rizos

130

A: How much research effort is expected of Stack Overflow users?

A lot. An absurd amount. More than you think you are capable of. In fact, asking a question on Stack Overflow is the absolute last thing you ever want to do. You want to avoid it at all costs. You want to think of it as a horrible shame1 that will forever haunt you and pass down from you to your ...

Epic meta answer.

user55340

3:20 PM

@gnat At my former employer, we did trunk based development for our team. It worked.

user55340

0

Q: What's a formal proof?

I was reading this question "How should one debug a PHP web application securely without exposing secrets to competitors?". The answer from MainMa has left me wondering what a formal proof is and how would you go about conducting one. What is a Formal Proof? How would you conduct one?

code-quality

user55340

Is that something for CS.SE? Its... hmm.

user55340

@WorldEngineer the octal thing - it dates back to B (or BCPL - I'd have to dig) where the implementation was on a PDP11 which was naturally octal in its notation of machine level things. After decimal, octal was the next most useful base - and thus the fewest keystrokes.

user41796

3:44 PM

@YannisRizos You're just reinforcing the fact that everything is your fault.

user41796

@MichaelT Might be better on CS, yes. Probably needs some work before it could be migrated though.

user41796

I have yet to meet a professional programmer who regularly uses formal proofs.

user55340

@GlenH7 Thing is, I'm not sure what work it does need to move there.

user55340

Speaking of people who do crazy things with proofs... haven't seen Joezf around (and I probably didn't spell that right because he's not in the at-expansion)

user41796

@MichaelT I think you meant @jozefg. :-)

user41796

3:49 PM

Gilles would probably be best to weigh in on whether the "what is a formal proof" is migrate worthy or not. They (CS) do have a number of Q's related to formal proofs.

user55340

That's it... I know it matched jo[zef]+

user20683

@MichaelT I figured but it's not directly relevant to the question from what my answer sits. C has it, doesn't matter where C got it from.

user55340

@WorldEngineer Well, the other answer had that bit of history in it...

user41796

@MichaelT I flagged it for mod review. Our mods can more easily get in contact with CS mods than you or I can since we don't have diamonds. :-)

user55340

And the bit in chat (now that I can search) that was about it the other day...

user55340

3:51 PM

Jan 3 at 21:39, by MichaelT

Back in the early days... octal was the 'preferred' numerical system rather than hex... you had things working with 3 and 6 bits at a time rather than 4 or 8 bits.

user55340

@GlenH7 Italics just isn't as much fun as blue...

user41796

@gnat - yes, I'll take a look at the two versions. The fact that spammers are abusing the hot list is a good thing. It adds more incentive to make sure quality stuff goes onto the hot list so the spam sticks out worse and is knocked down more quickly.

user41796

@MichaelT no kidding. At least we get a few fun things to mess with. :-)

user41796

Almost got the star in on that one

user55340

Starred deleted messages are funny.

user41796

3:58 PM

"Apparently it was really good"

user41796

Although I have noticed that World doesn't threaten us with diamonds anymore. I think we've called his bluff too often.

2

user55340

@GlenH7 What we really need is to get Meta.SE up and running and give a diamond to @gnat there...

user41796

@MichaelT oh the fits that would create. That would be epic to watch.

user55340

Heh - something my brother sent me - deeperdesign.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/is-iron-man-made-of-lego (yea, its a bit old... still amusing)

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT That is really cool

user41796

4:08 PM

all sorts of easter eggs within movies can be found courtesy of blu-ray and DVD....

gnat

@MichaelT I foresee labeling me as chairman Mao and claiming harassment all over the place

jozefg

@MichaelT Poof! I heard a mention of proofs

user55340

And its a proof that if you mention... well... enough puns. We hates them.

jozefg

Aww :( I'm great at bad puns..

user55340

(I mentioned this last night - 10k link: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/223082/… )

jozefg

4:20 PM

@JimmyHoffa Have you seen that the release candidate for GHC 7.8 is actually coming to fruition!

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg What do you think of my awesome idea I had yesterday: A SmallTalk Browser GUI with all the realtime fiddlybits for UI app development just like SmallTalk except inside the language is Haskell!

user55340

You're making my head hurt.

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Nah, but then it takes much older versions of GHC to have features that fly over my head, the newer version I'm sure is just more stuff that I'm years out on grasping

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Ahh that'd be great, I miss smalltalk style development, images are niiice

user55340

... smalltalk for photoshop? (joking)

enderland

4:22 PM

@GlenH7 I'll make sure he sees this and star it. Maybe he'll go all-in on this bluff

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg I really think that the purity would actually make it work really well

jozefg

Haha there's one really nice extension, overloaded lists, so you can write [1, 2, 3] and have it convert to arbitrary things, like a vector or sequence

enderland

@MichaelT I accidentally taught a photoshop class to 7th graders yesterday

user55340

@enderland Oops?

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg think about it, when you can real-time edit your live running application having it completely pure would mean that instead of editing object instances and such like in SmallTalk, you just walk the callstack to the expression you want to change

user55340

4:23 PM

At least you didn't go all open source on them... "And this program is the Gimp... ask your parents what that means..."

enderland

lol. I'm doing this STEM outreach program through work and I'm responsible for the "multimedia" group - all them wanted to do either photoshop or audio editing (I'll probably use audacity?)

@MichaelT LOL. yeah. the school has a computer lab with Creative Suite on it

Jimmy Hoffa

and the purity would make it all very safe to change bits live

the hosting environment would actually be pretty easy because of that I would think

it just needs the time machine monad

jozefg

Oh that parts easy, hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis-0.3.0.0

Just don't look at the implementation details, last time someone stared into the heart of the tardis the ripped apart a fleet of dalaks.

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg I know, I couldn't remember the name of it but I knew there was one :)

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Have you also seen Acme.RealWorld?

Jimmy Hoffa

4:28 PM

@jozefg but for realtime editing, that right there should make it simple to move from good state to good state

Ampt

@MichaelT thanks for the link to that article! Sounds interesting. I likely won't be working on that project unless they bring my business unit into it

they might, but it would be odd to throw your newest team onto your absolute biggest project lol

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg It sounds familiar

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa It sounds vaguely reactive, your various components depend on on each other and update according to how they mutate, think spreadsheet

user55340

@Ampt As a new hire, you'd be doing testing more than coding on an existing project... its something that doesn't require too much ramp up time beyond the use of the tools (its what we had our new hires start with when doing the point of sales software)

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Ah aye, yeah I see that, hypothetical etc. That might be a good basis for such an environment.

user55340

4:30 PM

And honestly, former employer... the new hire (coder) that we got was one of the best testers I saw. When he found a bug, he dug at it until he was able to draw a very tight circle around how to reproduce it (he's working elsewhere now).

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg so there you go, your mission should you choose to accept it, take Pharo and make a Haskell shell that can do it with Haskell. Instead of digging through browsing live instances you would just browse expressions by their sub-expressions.

Imagine just editing your entire programs live AST

user55340

"You need to have 3 or more discounts applied to the same object then the second one won't be shown on the receipt, or shown in the item cost, but the end total will be calculated correctly"

Ampt

@MichaelT I hope I'm not a part of the testing team, but we'll see

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Finally make those Lisp people be quiet :p

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg AND all those damned folks bitching Haskell can't do UI

user41796

4:32 PM

@jozefg GLWT

user55340

(never did get that one fixed... but its so rare for it to be an issue... basically requires an item level %off, and a transaction level %off, and another transaction level %off (employee discount)... and since the item level and transaction level are rarely done in the first place... especially the transaction level ones...)

user41796

They're still unwinding themselves from nth degrees of parenthesis.

user55340

@GlenH7 ]

user55340

(see gavilan.edu/csis/languages/parentheses.html - Lisp Super Parentheses)

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg different possible approach: Warp as hosting environment, embedded Firefox or Chromium application, the application is entirely rendered to HTML/JavaScript/CSS though the code is 100% Haskell and as you live edit expressions it just changes realtime what the Warp is fed. Deployment is merely a matter of deploying that application to a Warp server and then it's automatically public to anyone with a browser. Though that requires inventing a good Haskell->HTML/JavaScript/CSS compiler

user55340

4:35 PM

Back in AI class (taught in lisp when I took it), the TA sent a joke email to his section. Went something like this...

user41796

@MichaelT that looks to be a cool historical tidbit

Jimmy Hoffa

But you wouldn't have to create the UI shell for your SmallTalk browser

user55340

> I was able to break into super secret military code, and they code everything in lisp. Unfortunately, I was only able to send you the last 512 characters of their code:
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

user55340

(and so on)

gnat

@jozefg proofanity?

Jimmy Hoffa

4:37 PM

lol...

user55340

@GlenH7 Trade off of parse errors for "just close it" - if you're sure your code is correct, it becomes more readable (in theory). But if you've got something else mismatched, this now hides it.

user41796

@gnat I think proofs are a causality for profanity.

gnat

@GlenH7 causality casualty community.oracle.com/thread/1143025

> my name is gnat and I am threadaholic

jozefg

@gnat "Proof by angry hand waving"

2

user41796

@gnat I suspect you have a whole folder of bookmarks going back to gems like that

gnat

4:43 PM

@GlenH7 but of course! Though I got this one from main memory :)

Ampt

@jozefg that sounds like a lot of my lectures

user55340

@gnat thecodelesscode.com/case/126

user41796

@Ampt back when I was in grad school, I had a few neighbors / friends that were undergrads. One of them had to stop his professor in the middle of some animated and energetic lecture to ask "Would you please explain that in English?" The prof had reverted to his native polish and was just running around writing on the board and waving his hands all over the place.

Ampt

@GlenH7 lmfao. I've had professors slip into their native tongue for a word or two but never a full blown argument haha

user41796

@Ampt and it was a weed-out higher algebra (maybe calculus?) type class. So that really didn't help things.

gnat

4:47 PM

@MichaelT by this logic, me currently trying to abstain of using volatile at any cost means I know everything about it :)

> the less she knew about a thing, the more she wanted to try it

user55340

@gnat thecodelesscode.com/case/121 is the one that precedes it.

Ampt

the volatile keyword is the best!
"Sir, our compiler is optimizing out functions 1-3. What do we do?"
"Son... make them volatile."

user55340

thecodelesscode.com/case/108 is also about the same character (though before she was named as a re-occuring character)

Ampt

then you inevitably embark on a quest to figure out exactly how much of the program needs to be marked volatile and when you find that one place it fixes it, you never go back and get rid of the rest of them

Thomas Owens

@WorldEngineer I was hoping I could call it out for missing some brew pubs. It has the one in NH and both in the Boston area that I go to. Damn. And...I'm wrong. It's missing both Boston Beer Works brew pubs. Assuming that "Boston" is "Boston Beer Company", the maker of Sam Adams.

gnat

4:49 PM

@MichaelT Banzen replied: “When you no longer wish to use them.”

user55340

@gnat I slipped a link to that one in my regex answer recently.

gnat

@MichaelT I recognized (I've read your answer there, just didn't follow the link back then)

Jimmy Hoffa

Fun tiny Haskell introduction I just stumbled across. pragprog.com/magazines/2012-08/…

user41796

@gnat - I much prefer revision 18 over revision 10. I think your question (and answer) will get a more favorable response from the broader community with rev 18.

Jimmy Hoffa

neat little FP intro anywho, worth a skim for anybody who feels an occasional nag about "Maybe I should think about FP..."

user41796

4:51 PM

It's important to remember than many / most / all aren't as involved in the issue as we are.

user41796

@ThomasOwens Isn't that an epic chart though?!

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 Yes. I'm surprised they got Martha's and CBC but missed Boston Beer Works.

user41796

Perhaps it was intentional?

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 I don't see how. Beer Works is much bigger. In fact, the one labelled "Lowell" is actually a Boston Beer Works. But it's in Lowell.

It's just called Lowell Beer Works since it's not in Boston

user41796

@ThomasOwens intentional meaning they knew of it but are angry or whatever with that brewery, so they chose to "forget" it

user55340

4:56 PM

> Update: reviewer had too much coffee, tried to morse-code the comment using the delete button.

user55340

5

A: Reasonable SO newbie question deleted - can undelete?

I've restored it. As Bart noted in the comments here, your friend could've flagged the answer for moderator attention and requested a review of the deletion that way as well - this is always a good idea when you've corrected a problem or feel a mistake was made. I'll also see if I can figure ou...

user41796

@MichaelT too much or not enough?

gnat

@GlenH7 thanks! Somehow, I am not surprised - @jmac is known for the mastery in cardinal edits...

@jmac thanks, I will try to edit to your points (A) and (B). Point (C) looks worth adding, too. By the way, please feel free to directly edit - as opposed to some, I am huge fan of your aggressive edits :) — gnat 14 hours ago

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT @ThomasOwens they made a nice go at Colorado, but it was hopeless to begin with. Though I am impressed they got Yak and Yeti- doesn't get much smaller than a single restaurant that brews their own whose beer isn't even in stores. Problem is there's a lot of those here, they couldn't possibly get them all

Funny thing about Yak and Yeti, it's not a brew pub, it's actually really good indian-nepali food. No brew pub vibe about it at all or anything, they just happen to make their own beer because it's awesome.

user55340

The've got the ones in my area.

Jimmy Hoffa

5:04 PM

I expected a better showing from Millwaukee for as much as they're said to be a beer town

Though I suspect the map for them would look the same in the 70s as now, whereas in Colorado there would have been one sole dot back then heh

user55340

Millwaukee is big beer rather than lots of little beer.

user41796

@MichaelT And the big breweries there tend to buy up the little breweries pretty quickly.

user55340

Part of it is also the distance to distribute back in the day. Thats why there are so many.

Jimmy Hoffa

Phablet

A phablet (, a portmanteau of the words phone and tablet) is a class of mobile device designed to combine or straddle the functions of a smartphone and tablet. Phablets are characterized by the use of large screens, typically with a diagonal size between 5 to 6.9 inches (130 to 180 mm), which complement screen-intensive activity such as mobile web browsing and multimedia viewing. Phablets may also include software optimized for an integral self-storing stylus to facilitate sketching, note-taking and annotation. While Samsung's Galaxy Note (2011) is largely credited with pioneering th...

The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.

gizmodo.com/…

> A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC's net neutrality rules that would've made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework.

user55340

5:21 PM

Poor Ali...

user55340

1

A: How has an increase in the complexity of systems affected successive generations of programmers?

I feel that high level programming has many advantages and is an essential part of a programming language. One of the reasons why Java become successful was that it has a comprehensive library. You achieve more with less code - just call a predefined function. We can now distinguish programming ...

user55340

Then look at who else weighed in.

user41796

@MichaelT almost deserving of sympathy up votes. Talk about getting squashed between two titans of thought on the site.

user41796

If I thought he would get the joke, I would be tempted to repeat Andy's last comment about performance under Lippert's answer.

Jimmy Hoffa

+1 fun citation: Dunbars Number is a good example (there are others) of studied cognitive capacity quotients that can be seen across many people showing that we do have a fixed mental space. Abstracting multiple things into singular generalizations is the only way we can cohesively increase the number of things in our mental space, and that's what higher level programming seeks to take advantage of. — Jimmy Hoffa 50 secs ago

@MichaelT Poor @RobertHarvey, he actually put a nice answer together that probably took some effort, all in vain.

processing.org/examples/scale.html

(had to follow up on the Processing.JS from Eric...)

Ampt

6:01 PM

@MichaelT EEEEEEERRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT what would this regexp do if you have to guess? /^\/\s*/

user55340

Start of line, slash, whitespace 0 or more times.

user55340

You're likely working in a language where the regex is denoted by /regex/ and thus the slashes need to be escaped within the regex.

Jimmy Hoffa

what's s*?

whitespaces 0 or more times?

user55340

\s is whitespace. x* is x, 0 or more times.

user55340

6:11 PM

Kleene star

In mathematical logic and computer science, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) is a unary operation, either on sets of strings or on sets of symbols or characters. In mathematics it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction. The application of the Kleene star to a set V is written as V*. It is widely used for regular expressions, which is the context in which it was introduced by Stephen Kleene to characterise certain automata, where it means "zero or more". # If V is a set of strings then V* is defined as the smallest superset of V that contains the empty...

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa come on jimmy, Regex is simple. It's practically bug free and writes itself! /s

user55340

@Ampt My thing on "now you have two problems" was that essentially regex is a DSL for writing/creating a particular type of finite state automata. If you can make that link from the regex to the DSL to the 'program' it runs, its easy... if you can't, its hard.

user55340

When working on a 'regular' machine, we see the instructions. We know how, at the lowest level, "a = b + 1" works.

user55340

But understanding how /^a[bc]*d+.?*e/ becomes a particular machine is an entirely different language that most people aren't familiar with.

Jimmy Hoffa

I gotta say, it's pretty fun reading the comments where some college student is trying to argue with Eric Lippert

Ampt

6:16 PM

link?

@MichaelT That's essentially the problem, that Regex is a whole other language to be dropped into current ones. It's great if you already know it, but if you don't then you've now got two languages to contend with

user55340

I'm gonna say something before I stop arguing. Do we really need more "decent" programmers? I think no. We need great programmers. And if starting with C scares them away, then good. We don't need programmers who will make games in 8 hours in javascript+some library. We need programmers who understand the code they write and possible ramifications of it. And possibly being able to make the javascript interpreter itself. I believe starting with high-level language is not going to help this. — Euphoric 5 mins ago

user55340

@Ampt And two problems...

Ampt

It's essentially the same argument as "When should I write my program in a different language"

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT For my part I can make the connection, it's just that I've never had enough problems to solve with regexp to fit any of it into my head consistently. Or if I have it's been so long that what each of the symbols means has fallen out of it, and finding comprehensive references for any given regexp implementation is a huge pain because each one is so large that usually references just give a subset

I don't know how many times I've tried to find a reference for a regexp only to have the regexp in front of me using operators that aren't listed in the reference

user55340

And when you get greedy vs non-greedy mixed in with zero width negative lookahead assertions...

Jimmy Hoffa

6:20 PM

Lippert must be bored at his new post that he's bothering to respond to that guy heh

Then again perhaps he's habitted this much participation on SO and he has migrated over here

I know he participated in SO but didn't figure that much

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Someone is wrong on the internet...

user55340

@Euphoric: The short answer is GOOD HEAVENS YES we need more decent programmers! We need more programmers at every level of ability and experience. The world runs on software. The more people who have any understanding of how to make their world work, the better. — Eric Lippert 2 mins ago

user55340

I also like...

user55340

@Euphoric: Would you make the same argument to, say, accounting? We don't need more people who can keep the simple books for a new small business; we need GREAT, world-class accountants. If introductory accounting courses are so difficult that they scare away people who merely aspire to be productive, workmanlike accountants, GOOD. We don't need those people in the accounting industry! How about pianists? If introductory piano lessons scare away people who are not going to be GREAT pianists, that's good; we only want great pianists in the world. Does something seem wrong with this argument? — Eric Lippert 5 mins ago

gnat

figured an even more efficient way to troll hot list with lemming upvotes. Pick SO questions to attack from the full list. Let them feel the pain of smaller sites. Thanks to brainless formula, there's even no need to upvote crappy answers (found that I can't force self to do so no matter how I try) - +1 on the question does the job

Ampt

6:24 PM

@JimmyHoffa @MichaelT I really like the logic where programmers are either meh or they are great from the outset. Practice and diligence has no place in this fantasy land.

user55340

@Ampt Its also whats flawed with (I think its) Netflix's "best coders only" thing that was recently news.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt He's just predicating his belief on the magical rockstar software ninjaneer which isn't real, there aren't programmers out there that churn out 10 times the productive code of the rest of us chugging jolt

user55340

slashdot.org/story/13/12/25/0242207/…

user41796

@gnat You're potentially missing the other major scalar there - add an answer if it doesn't already have 10 answers.

user55340

The super programmer is real... however, one can't be all super programmers because of the type of thing they want to do. I've rarely seen a super maintenance programmer because its not the fun, exciting, cutting edge where that type thrives.

Jimmy Hoffa

6:27 PM

all knowledge work has levels and nuance, and in all knowledge work a horrible employee can have negative productivity, but the problem is people try to multiple the negative productivity and continually get negative and decide there's no way to scale those people up to the best employee, truth is there's a small number of people who are that damaging to productivity

@MichaelT Iduno.. I used to think so but I'm not convinced. I think the ultra programmer spins stuff out more quickly than others but still... the stories wayyy overexagerate it

Ampt

@Euphoric How do you suggest a programmer gets to being "Great" without being "Decent" at some point? — Ampt 1 min ago

gnat

@GlenH7 wow, how could I miss the trick I just "advertized" myself :)

"Yet another indication of issues with current formula is how easy it is to manipulate hotness score... This is because any question vote is leveraged by amount of answers. Consolidated, 2-3 voters can "swing" the score by 30-50... Similarly, adding / removing an answer (any answer) in a highly voted question offers even more possibilities for cheating, because of it being leveraged by question score. If it was a game, I would call this somewhat boring because of poor game balance." (Once you know the mechanics it's quite easy to manipulate) — gnat 6 hours ago

user41796

@MichaelT And even the super programmers need some breaks. Life happens to them too.

user55340

The stories do exaggerate... but its not just code they are spinning out... its the ideas and new ways of approaching a problem.

Jimmy Hoffa

and even ignoring roles, one or two rockstars still can't do all of your innovation, it takes more coders than that and the best design in the world still has an amount of tedium and detailed work to it that requires the plying of engineers for hours

user41796

6:30 PM

@gnat If you're gonna go guerilla, then go guerilla all the way!

user55340

@JimmyHoffa And I happen to enjoy reports...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT haha ;P

Ampt

@MichaelT Wow. What a great incentive to keep good talent around "We'll keep you as long as you're useful. After that, you're out"

user55340

@gnat: You want to remove the protection after it has been reddited? — Robert Harvey 21 mins ago

gnat

@GlenH7 you mean, until I am answer banned (since were talking SO here0?

@djechlin the difficulty is that no other site is SO. No other site has the number of active moderators to protect questions quickly, 20k+ users to delete bad answers, and the shear volume of other posts to cover up some of the damage on the front page. On smaller sites, we may be lucky if there's a mod on at that time, or a 20k+ user (much less three) and the front page moves at a glacial pace compared to SO. What works for SO doesn't necessarily work for the other, smaller sites. — MichaelT Jan 10 at 17:28

user55340

6:31 PM

@RobertHarvey Sure, otherwise they reditters will have a harder time providing their valuable feedback. — Servy 18 mins ago

user41796

@gnat - If you were really feeling evil, then you'd drop links in here asking us to help nudge questions fully on to the collider. But that's crossing a line IMO. Definitely slimey to go to that level.

Ampt

I mean sure you shouldn't be forced to keep every single person who helped along the way, but that seems like a pretty extreme place to draw the line.

user55340

I think Servy needs a sarcasm tag there.

user41796

@MichaelT erm, no I think that one came through perfectly clear...

user55340

@GlenH7 I needed a sarcasm tag too... (is the use of the sarcasm tag sarcastic? Is there meta-sarcasm? recursive-sarcasm?)

gnat

6:34 PM

@GlenH7 I'll probably proceed with link feed upvote-pls after I'm done with my hotness crusade at MSO (have this scheduled to complete in 2-3 months from now) - assuming of course that it will remain broken at this time, ie with about 99,999% probability

user41796

0

A: How has an increase in the complexity of systems affected successive generations of programmers?

I had ideas on this subject, and I put them into a book 20 years ago. It's long out of print, but you can still get used copies on Amazon. One simple answer to your question is as old as Aristotle: Nature abhors a vacuum. As much as machines have gotten faster and bigger, software has gotten slo...

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Talent. While you can learn a lot with effort, different people have different limits. In this discussion, I assume we are talking about "maximum" what person can achieve. By great programmer, I mean someone who understands it's craft. By decent I mean someone who can code, but will never create code of complexity great programmer can. — Euphoric 2 mins ago

@Euphoric is a great programmer still a great programmer if none of his code is complex? — Jimmy Hoffa 15 secs ago

user41796

Dunlavey isn't as well known, but he's got some solid thoughts too

Jimmy Hoffa

...I couldn't help myself

Ampt

@JimmyHoffa Troll in the dungeon!

user41796

6:37 PM

@Ampt, @JimmyHoffa - fo' shame. You should know to invite him into chat at this point.

user55340

That question is getting some fairly heavy hitters - very interesting thoughts in the posts.

user41796

@Euphoric (and others) - we're kind of hitting the limit regarding constructiveness of comments. Please join us in Programmers Chat if you would like to continue this conversation. — GlenH7 37 secs ago

Ampt

I just have yet to come across someone whos talent has brought them to the top outside the confines of high school

dedication plays such a larger role in the real world

Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Also, burnination. Don't underestimate burnination.

user55340

@Ampt One important bit to remember for people who bring up Gates and Jobs as counter examples - college level CS was quite different then... and things that are game changers have difficulty in the academic structure. Note that for every 1 game changer there are multitudes of people who have tried and just didn't have the fundamentals.

gnat

6:40 PM

user41796

@MichaelT It's one of those questions where it would be interesting to see a few more of the heavy hitters weigh in to provide a range of thoughts.

Ampt

@MichaelT Anyone who cites 2 people as a trend is, in my humble opinion, a blabbering idiot.

hell those two are more about "Right spot, right time" than anything else

not that I think they lack talent, but they are by no means completely unique

jozefg

Has anyone here poked at Rust?

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Very true.. though it genuinely annoys me that people ignore the fact that the counter-examples people rely on so much are in the top tenth of the top tenth of the top tenth of the top percentile of people as far as intelligence goes to begin with. So yeah, if you're absolutely convinced your smarter than the next 100k people go for it, but if you're convinced of that you're unlikely to be so because someone that smart would be able to recognize the probability is that they're fucked.

@jozefg looked cool, haven't tried it though. Lots of good statements about it though as a cool up and comer

user41796

@jozefg Usually I scrape it away with a wire brush

gnat

6:45 PM

-2

A: Could we have proper casing in the question title watermark?

I'm sympathetic to the official trademark being proper case, but otherwise the use of lower case in the textbox hints is 100% intentional. it's a fragment, not a sentence we're trying to de-emphasize this text, that's also why it is a dimmed gray note that the field titles are black, bold and ...

let's change it to "whats ur lego bricks doubt?" — gnat 1 min ago

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Yeah that's what I've seen as well, /r/programming loves it at least

user41796

The system complexity question has hit the collider. Now we just need to publish it on reddit to watch the explosion

user55340

I'm going to have to go over Mike's answer a few times... there is much thought on there that is backed by huge ideas.

user41796

although it's a question I wouldn't mind seeing get lots of views. Very solid answers on there

user55340

> For example, the big-O behavior of algorithms can be very neatly and intuitively understood if you think of a program as a Shannon-type information channel, with input symbols, output symbols, noise, redundancy, and bandwidth.

On the other hand, the productivity of a programmer can be understood in similar terms using Kolmogorov information theory.
...

user41796

6:52 PM

He has mentioned his book before. I looked it over before - it looks interesting enough. I wish the used copies on AMZN weren't $137 though

user55340

@GlenH7 Alas... not in Safari.

user41796

> Van Nostrand Reinhold; Pap/Dis edition (June 1994)

user41796

That's the publisher

user55340

Safari has more than just ORA things in there... so it was a hope.

user41796

@MichaelT I knew they were closely bound; didn't know if it was absolute

user55340

7:01 PM

Looking at my "Code Quality" folder on there...

user55340

Three Addison Westly, one Prentice Hall.

user55340

Another has Micrsoft Press, Jossey-Bass, Prentice Hall, Addison-Westly.

gnat

7:23 PM

some monster editing in that request draft - 20 revisions since yesterday - meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/5542/revisions

since per-site metas don't have rep, bump hardly qualifies as abuse — gnat 8 hours ago

user41796

7:34 PM

blech. I hate when people cross-post.

user20683

7:50 PM

@RobertHarvey Interview on Real World Ocaml

user20683

8:06 PM

Functional Programming in Clojure MOOC

user55340

One thing that confuses me is why SO seems to be so hesitant to use custom close reasons. "What close reason should I use for "debug my code" questions?" -- well, just write one.

user55340

8:23 PM

@GlenH7 putting one in before the question closes?

user41796

@MichaelT yep

user41796

Did I hit the VLQ queue already?!

user55340

Just saw the activity... didn't look at the queue.

user55340

'ello @AshleyNunn hows the writing hunt?

user41796

@MichaelT And that's about as much work as I'm going to put into a question that's likely to get closed & deleted.

user55340

8:32 PM

Oh, one of my favorite books came out in epub. Bad Magic

user55340

amazon.com/Bad-Magic-Stephan-Zielinski/dp/0312878621

user15026

@MichaelT Not so awesome, but I decided to start applying to whatever pays money, figure I will then stop stressing about money, and then I can work with a clearer head towards doing all the things to make myself look more awesome to employers, like documentation work and learning LaTex and the coding stuff I am working on and all of that :)

user55340

> A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.

user55340

> Whitlomb’s engine is still running. As the dog leaps for Rider, he points his finger at the engine block and his staff at the dog. It lands, and tries to figure out why the world seems to be spinning at several thousand rpm. Rider two-hands his staff across its back. The dog is no longer wondering about much of anything.

user55340

(its a zombie dog... so don't feel too bad)

user41796

8:34 PM

@AshleyNunn Whether you're rich or poor, having a positive cash flow is a good thing.

user55340

> “Got anything to call a jaguar?”
Rider purses his lips. “Well … there is one incantation. But I’m not sure it’ll work. Even the most skilled thaumaturges can’t pull it off more than a quarter of the time.”
Sturgeon shrugs. “May as well try it, Al.”
Rider nods. “Okay. Be quiet, everybody.” He rolls his head on his neck, holds up his arms. Takes several deep breaths. Opens his mouth. Intones, “Here, kitty kitty kitty … here, kitty…”

user15026

@GlenH7 Yeah, I kinda like being able to feed me and my cat, and keep us warm and dry

user15026

@MichaelT snorts That is awesome.

user41796

@AshleyNunn I know that feeling.

user41796

@RobertHarvey - thanks for the fast close on that SO / GPL question.

Robert Harvey

8:37 PM

It is an odd thing that the completely uninteresting questions never get closed, because they don't get the necessary attention. Reminds me of the guy who said, "It's OK to write your own blog. Nobody will ever read it anyway."

user55340

Its the awkwardness of P.SE, we can see all the questions in the day... even the uninteresting ones. Its the old uninteresting ones that are awkward.

user55340

(thus the sometimes "pick a word, search for open questions with less than N answers and views" and start casting close votes... close those old broken windows before some well meaning new user tries to answer it)

user20683

@MichaelT The old uninteresting ones that get cited are the most awkward.

user55340

@AshleyNunn The book is not short, but only four... parts. Everything else is broken up in short 'scenes' but is rather just a constant flow of words.

user55340

And its written matter of factly... as if magic was real (and it is)... that these things shouldn't be surprising.

user55340

8:49 PM

Its a team thats made up of a mage (kind of the main character if there is one) who works in metaphors. An old Van Helsing / Miskatonic university academic, an elementalist, an alchemist, a really creepy guy with prophecy, a small Haitian(?) voodoo based kung fu, a cultist from seattle (totem: the clam), and the leader who is the most mundane of them and is in the army (the navy is run by the undead). Very mixed group.

user55340

They are in San Francisco... which is the midpoint between the Opposition (good guys up in Seattle) and the Incumbents (bad guys down in San Diego), trying to keep the bad guy influence down.

user15026

Iiiinteresting. :D

user55340

That sea urchin bit... more context...

user55340

> “Creedon, we’ve got to get out of here!” Rider scrabbles toward the cockpit. “The keys! Where are the damn keys! Who turned off the f*ing engine?!” Rider dithers and waves his hands. “Right. Don’t panic. Not a patrol. Just a scout.”
“Duck.”
Rider is something of a chowderhead, but he and his friends train for many hours to acquire the “duck” conditioned reflex. A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.
“Keys! Keys! Wait; I’m a thaumaturge … I don’t need keys…” Rider whirls like a dervish and the engine turns over. The boat blunders ahead. Rider heaves the wheel over and they t…

user55340

(I starred that bit... there's quite a bit of... well... don't read it if you have a sensitive vocabulary)

user15026

8:56 PM

@MichaelT I am far from sensitive, in that sense. :D

user55340

@AshleyNunn Its more a warning to anyone who pokes at the transcript.

user15026

@MichaelT Makes sense :)

user41796

@AshleyNunn Sometimes we'll delete comments just to help keep them out of the public transcript. Every now and then something will be said that just won't make sense out of context.

user55340

Because its always fun to watch the mods go through and try to follow the conversation through deleted messages.

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