The Whiteboard

2:35 PM

Ugh, stupid TW rep

user55340

2:56 PM

►

user55340

Yea, its ruby... but the title of the talk is "Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming"

user55340

> One of the deepest mysteries in the functional programming world is the Y-Combinator. Many have heard of it, but few have mastered its mysteries. Although fairly useless in real world software, understanding how the Y-Combinator works and why it is important gives the student an important insight into the nature of functional programming.

Join with us on this journey of understanding. Be prepared to curry your functions and bind your lambdas as we delve into the whys and wherefores of this paragon of functional programming. Although you will probably never have a need for the combinator,…

user55340

(Working on localization issues... whee!)

4:39 PM

@maple_shaft Well said. I'm reminded of a web designer I used to work with who had a marketing degree I would always poke fun at him about. I actually asked him what kinds of things he they taught in classes specific for marketting one time, he flat out told me they taught him that he should make women feel fat and ugly to get them to buy things, make people scared and they'll buy your products, all of this consumer psychology stuff specifically focussed on techniques to make people feel terrible

The fact that we have teachers in universities teaching people this stuff is just dumbfounding to me

So much for the idea that education should better society

4:55 PM

eventually we'll just develop software to remove the need for managers and get the last laugh

user41796

@JimmyHoffa amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/…

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - that book will blow your mind then. The author is one of the "good guys" in that he's attempting to expose the techniques that are used so you can better prepare yourself for the inevitable sales tactic.

user41796

@enderland phase 1 of skynet

@GlenH7 wholeheartedly follow this recommendation! Click-whirr. Per my recollection, it was not an easy reading, but very well worth the effort

@GlenH7 Things like that just make me smoulder; I really wouldn't be able to tolerate it. I get terribly bothered by immorality

user41796

5:03 PM

@gnat The difficulty may have come from his research being "biased" or focused on US type trends and culture. The techniques will still work in other cultures but may not be as applicable.

even if the guy's a good guy, just the stories of what people do. I'd rather stick my head in the sand and think people aren't so totally terrible to eachother

or at least not hear about how terrible they are.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Give it a skim, you may change your mind. Whenever I'm stuck in a sales pitch, I frequently refer back to the lessons from that book to dissect the pitch and discover where the salesman is trying to lead me. Being able to do that has made it much easier to pull apart presentations and realize when I'm about to be scammed.

user41796

Cialdini teaches you how to spot the technique and then defend yourself against it by explaining why it works.

@GlenH7 my difficulty was rather that reading it required intense brain work. I couldn't skim it or thoughtlessly relax reading easy / entertaining parts... it was all study, high density study to me

user41796

@gnat ah, yes, that makes sense too. Not a casual read from that point of view. My martial arts background has prepped me to be a student of human behavior, so it was a little easier to digest in my case.

5:09 PM

@GlenH7 not a casual read, exactly

I pointed that out because to me it was somehow advertised opposite :) "easy, entertaining, blah blah"

user41796

His writing is approachable, but not casual...

@GlenH7 no; it really bothers me to hear about the terrible things people do. Not slightly annoying, no amount of clinicalness to it makes me less furious. One of the reasons I got into software is because I can't stand the idea of taking money from a person, at least knowing it's an entity and my money's just coming out of the pockets of immoral MBAs at the top makes me not feel bad, even if it's people's pockets eventually

user41796

@JimmyHoffa In that case, don't read it. As it will make you very, very upset.

user41796

Some of the stuff he describes is exceptionally commonplace, and you're just setting yourself up to be triggered every time you see it.

user41796

I hesitate to provide an example, lest I explode your brain.

5:15 PM

@GlenH7 agree. This stuff is difficult to me and he explains it well

@GlenH7 c'mon! mutual voting, vote up one of Jimmy's posts, tell him you did it, then wait for upvote to come at you. Click-whirr

user41796

3 mins ago, by GlenH7

I hesitate to provide an example, lest I explode your brain.

user41796

It wouldn't be good to have all of that Haskell stuff flying all over the place.

user41796

but in 50 more points we get another delete voter!

oh yeah how could I forget. Don't explode his brain, just upvote something serially (I meant silently, serially was just a freudian slip)

yesterday, by gnat

hey, you're less than 100 points off the 10K, good to see that

@GlenH7 I'm trying to decide if this means he successfully scared you into buying his product.

user41796

5:28 PM

@psr Yes. :-D It's been on my bookshelf for years now.

user41796

I had just finished reading:

user41796

amazon.com/48-Laws-Power-Robert-Greene/dp/0140280197/…

A: Is there an anti pattern for historically grown software?

2

You refer to Technical Debt. We all accrue technical debt in the products we develop over time, refactoring is one of the very common and effective ways of reducing this technical debt, though many companies never pay down their technical debt. These companies tend to find their software extreme...

user41796

And someone I knew or an Amazon rec suggested the Cialdini book as a follow-up.

JimmyHoffa just answered a question with 1 tag - "antipatterns". The lure of 10,000 must be strong.

5:29 PM

Any other bullet points for "managing technical debt" you guys can think up?

@psr Yeah, suppose I should improve the tagging...

When he gets to 9990 I'll post a "name this pattern" question.

user41796

@psr Then gnat and I can race to VTC because it's a "name that thing" game while Jimmy tries to get his remaining 10 repz.

@GlenH7 Oh yeah, I forgot that Q is a name that thing...

Iduno, it sounded like a simple enough question asking for details and elaboration on a concept, not just "what's the name of this concept"

Perhaps I'm wrong

user41796

@JimmyHoffa It is. I'm trying to deal with other things at the moment, so I didn't drop a VTC on it

@GlenH7 It's hard to convince myself to VTC a name that thing when there is an obvious canonical name.

user41796

5:35 PM

The problem with name that thing is it's hard to find via search.

user41796

Not that it can't necessarily be answered.

@GlenH7 Ah, I guess that does make sense. But this will be easy to find via search, it's tagged with the name heh

(it is now anyway; I tagged it technical-debt which we already had a tag for)

user41796

That's the delicious irony of editing the tags

@GlenH7 yeah, kind of funny when a "What's that?" Q get's tagged with what it is

31 from 10k. I'm going to milk that 31. I wonder how long I can keep that 31 gap. I should go drop bounties.

I actually did drop a bounty a week or so ago, I would be over 10k by now if I didn't heh

user41796

@JimmyHoffa See, saying things like that just encourages folk to go through your answer history and find lots of answers worthy of being up voted.

user41796

5:40 PM

Which was perhaps your intent... Crafty reverse psychology there

user41796

Did you ever consider a career in marketing?

@GlenH7 No, it genuinely wasn't, and I am serious about dropping bounties. It's just funny to taunt 10k. Anywho doesn't look like I'll taunt it much longer, I think that answer is going to pop me over

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I'm teasing you based upon the earlier conversation.

@GlenH7 career in marketing...career in marketing...career in reducing people's free will....hmmm...... I wonder if room owners can ban other room owners from chat....

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Can't ban, but you could remove me from room ownership. You need a pretty diamond to ban someone from chat.

5:49 PM

◙

Damn, no diamond.

♦

Aha! You're going down now!

user41796

enjoy looking at /tools instead.

...everytime I hear the term brownfield, I just imagine a computer sitting in a portapotty.... — Jimmy Hoffa 10 secs ago

eesh... just looking at deleted stuff now

user41796

@JimmyHoffa welcome to the underbelly. Feel free to start casting delete votes where you see appropriate

user55340

6:08 PM

My former employer lost another programmer (his first week at the new company was this week)

how are they still alive

user55340

They keep hiring from out of town or people who are after a job and don't realize how bad it is.

Q: How should I tell a coworker their headphones are too loud?

so when can I apply!

user41796

Needz moah repz

user41796

0

I work in an open cubicle environment. We're no different than any other environment and things can get pretty noisy. Not all the time, but it's pretty standard for everyone to have a pair of headphones or ear-buds at their desk. I have an across-the-wall coworker who frequently listens to his...

professionalism work-environment communication colleagues health

user41796

6:20 PM

@enderland do you guys have a close vote of "if this is the worst problem you have to deal with then you're pretty dang lucky?"

user55340

@enderland A brief consensus at lunch suggested that they might start outsourcing by July or August given the rate of evaporation of the team.

user41796

@MichaelT Then they'll have 2 problems

user41796

outsourcing is the management equivalent of using regex

user55340

I'm sure they'll have more than 2 problems then.

user41796

I'm trying to decide if I would consider that a decision that would ultimately close the company down.

user55340

6:26 PM

They've basically exhausted the local developer pool (degrees of separation here in the tech community is somewhere between 1 and 2 - everyone knows someone who knows everyone) and they're getting newhires who are too lazy to move somewhere else or don't believe that its that bad.

user55340

If it didn't close it, it would essentially mean outsourcing the entire department. Its what they did before... but they'd have to acknowledge that they're going to pay through the nose for that.

user41796

@MichaelT better to pay through the nose to foreign nationals than pay for local talent

user55340

Before the latest software, they had a rather tight C on DOS program that worked. They were able to do the hacks to keep it running while another company did the heavy lifting of features.

user55340

They got tired of paying that other company and having the other company not put them always at the top of the priority list.

user41796

goes back to earlier in chat with the Louisville slugger analogy in the MBA class

user55340

6:29 PM

So they bought other software (full source) and then first had the vendor try to customize it and then had us customize it. It bears little resemblance to the original source in many places.

user55340

This other source was all in Java and they thought "we can hire Java programmers - finding C on DOS programmers is a bit hard now".

user55340

Well, they're having trouble hiring Java programmers and keeping them.

user55340

The thing with outsourcing to India is there is (1) always someone willing to bid cheaper and (2) always someone who is trying to make it big (large retail company POS system - if we get it working we'll have it made!)

user55340

(meanwhile, none of the local (250 mile radius) consulting companies are going to touch this with a 10 foot pole - they've all got burned in the past)

user41796

The only outsourcing ventures that I have seen work have had an architect on the inside of the firm who directed all of the outsourcing work.

user55340

6:33 PM

The professional services group from the vendor worked that way originally. The code was still crap.

@JimmyHoffa I'm 600 from 10k, if you're dropping pointless bounties.

user55340

The business can't specify the requirements well enough for things to work, and... well... gtThVryLngFldNm type code.

user41796

perhaps I should rephrase that to "the first requirement to make it work is ..."

user55340

It works. But its slowly rotting as bugs are found and need to be fixed. You can't handle 1.5M SLOC in your head - it just doesn't fit. And the only guy who knew the structure of all the code left 1.5 months ago.

user55340

And so the bug fixes introduce new bugs... sometimes more subtle, sometimes not. But they all create bugs. And then those bugs are fixed introducing new bugs...

user41796

6:36 PM

@psr I think he's enthralled with seeing the underbelly of the site now. Probably won't be back for a bit.

user41796

@MichaelT I'm going to pretend to feel bad for them.

user55340

@GlenH7 oh, and the legal department sent out correspondence to one group of former employees who all went to work for the same company. "Don't recruit" - they handed that over to their own legal department. Might be some fun there in a month or two.

user55340

"Its not recruiting if you are sucking so hard that you're chasing away anyone with half a skill set to a company where you can be more than 6 min late back from lunch"

user41796

Poaching can be bad for a host of reasons. But it's not poaching if you can't retain.

user55340

Poaching also tends to imply that you have influence with hiring or are actively recruiting. If everyone in the department is polishing resumes on a weekly basis...

user55340

6:43 PM

Its a "who is hiring?" - Oh, I know some guys who work there - (at interview: HR to others, 'good guy?' - 'Yep!') - Hired.

user41796

@MichaelT That's the upside of a small community

6:59 PM

forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html

that's pretty interesting

user41796

Happy 3.1415... day everyone

user41796

Of course, depending upon your timezone, my well wishes may already be too late. :-)

@GlenH7 no, though I think when I get a bit I'm going to copy @MichaelT's close vote formatting

user41796

@enderland I want my question to hit the collider list for TW. Just for grins.

hah, I should answer it this afternoon

and then farm the rep over vacation next week!

user41796

7:03 PM

@enderland I approve of your plan. :-)

user55340

@GlenH7 𝞃 > π

is your purpose in talking with the coworker purely their own benefit or is it annoying?

"isnt' that distracting" could mean a lot of things ;)

user55340

user55340

latimes.com/science/sciencenow/…

user55340

Heh - look at the pictures at the top of usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/03/14/pi-day-tau-math/…

user41796

7:07 PM

@enderland honestly, it's a non-issue from my point of view since I have my own headphones

user55340

user41796

But I over heard her (it's not really a him, but I didn't want to bother with gender issues in the question) jamming away earlier today. And I've often wondered if she knows how loud it really is.

user41796

@MichaelT I haven't been persuasively convinced of the merits of Tau over Pi.

7:21 PM

answer is pretty bad I guess whatever

I think we work ourselves up a lot about things like this when most of the time it doesn't really matter

user41796

Whee, and I made it to the collider with my TW question. :-)

really?

user41796

tail end of page 2

current limits feel good enough already (FWIW I am currently top voter at Programmers, Workplace, MSO and in top 200 at SO) — gnat 1 min ago

^^^ fun fact

user41796

@gnat That's a lot of work.....

7:27 PM

8

A: Vote Early, Vote Often

Active voter tips Voting is easy. Unless you vote a lot. Practice makes you faster Active voting is a skill and you get better at it with practice. As you practice, you'll get faster at reading posts and making voting decisions. Civic duty badge is a convenient checkpoint. Amount of votes req...

user41796

@enderland - would it hurt my TW question if I pointed out I'm frequently sighing and asking WTF? when I look over bug reports? :-)

Resist pack mentality

You may find that highly voted posts have a certain appeal that kind of makes you compulsory follow the "majority vote". Resist that appeal, because making a habit of blindly following the score may damage your ability to evaluate content.

When you see a highly voted post, don't just click the up or down arrow - don't even limit yourself to quickly skimming it. Stop, take a deep breath, carefully study the post, form your own opinion - and only after that, vote as you find appropriate.

^^^ my favorite part

@GlenH7 nah you just need lemming upvotes now to hit the hot questinos

user41796

C'mon lemmings!

I always wonder, should I upvote all the other answers so it's more likely to hit "hot questions?" or just not care :)

7:32 PM

@GlenH7 Lemming here which cliff?

Q: How should I tell a coworker their headphones are too loud?

in The Water Cooler, 6 mins ago, by CMW

4 Answers. Already on the hot list

user41796

3

I work in an open cubicle environment. We're no different than any other environment and things can get pretty noisy. Not all the time, but it's pretty standard for everyone to have a pair of headphones or ear-buds at their desk. I have an across-the-wall coworker who frequently listens to his...

professionalism work-environment communication colleagues health

@enderland I do unless its really bad

user41796

@enderland FWIW, I up voted all of the answers there. So that's why they are (were?) at +1

No lemming activity on TWP please we get enough of that

7:34 PM

@Chad but i've not hit the rep cap in forever!

user41796

I thought each of the answers was decent enough and had a unique viewpoint. So they got repz lovez

@GlenH7 Maybe he doesnt want to listen to his wife drone on and on and on

This message has been deleted

user41796

:14290566 No, but if it will get me more rep should I say that it happened that way?

man sometimes @GlenH7.... hah

7:36 PM

thoss are the top 2 questions i think

user41796

@enderland sorry, just mentioned a few of the old memes that have blown up on TW. And said I was going to mix them in.

the one must have been deleted

user41796

As it's a real co-worker, I didn't want the thread and my jesting comment to get mixed together

in The Water Cooler, 2 mins ago, by gnat

@CMW solution to prevent the issues is known. There are 5 or 6 nice fat SO questions in hot list now, all literally begging for upvotes to redirect lemmings there...

in The Water Cooler, 2 mins ago, by gnat

yesterday, by gnat

...no need to waste time convincing Shog or whoever there. No need to invest effort into lengthy meta posts. No rep points to loose. Not much time to spend. Just make it a habit to open hot list once or twice a day, pick SO stuff from there and do the lemming ride. Every upvote you cast doing it, makes a step towards educating people about the pain we feel here...

@GlenH7 that's fair

user41796

7:39 PM

@gnat - but I want my TW question on the collider. :-D

user41796

@enderland Otherwise I would likely end up with another TW question asking how to unentangle myself from the mess.

user55340

@GlenH7 I look at it more as a joke. Its kind of serious, but its more a "you need to think about this" and the thinking is important.

user41796

@MichaelT I have looked at it seriously before. The practical implications of swapping out Pi are pretty enormous.

user55340

Its not that I want them to feel pain, but rather that various people appear to listen to them a bit more.

@GlenH7 nope, if you're in it for repz you want to keep it moderately there. Otherwise, it'll get 15 answers in one hour and you'll get void CW points instead of repz. We know this from Programmers already, don't we?

@JimG. while it looked merely somewhat worrying when originally posted, the more I learn about it (see updated question), the less "normal" it looks... Just for the record, your personal "CW-damage index" is currently 12 posts with total score 281, pretty much in line with that of three other users sampled so far :( — gnat Jan 16 '13 at 9:39

@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 '13 at 7:51

user55340

8:01 PM

I'm an all time top person for faq-proposed on meta!

user55340

(thinking how much more I need until I get a tag-badge on meta)

I am slowly becoming all time link-commenter

Why then the tags career developmeent and career transition ? — Dev Junior 2 mins ago

programmers.stackexchange.com/tags/career-development/info "99% of questions with this tag are off-topic and will be closed. Study other questions under this tag closely that aren't closed before asking your question, if you want any chance of it not being closed. Closed questions add up to a possible question-ban disallowing you to ask further questions. Questions about steps one can take to develop one's programming career that require the unique insights of other programmers..." — gnat 2 mins ago

@GlenH7 already picking up steam on your question I think

user41796

@enderland needz MOAH viewz!

user41796

@enderland You could have totally sniped me with a comment in your answer by saying Quit being such an engineer. It's not really your responsibility to "fix" the "problem."

user41796

8:08 PM

Don't know if that level of snark will buy you more up votes or not though

HAHAHAHAHA

i.... suspect it depends on the gender of the viewer

men? probably a downvote. women? probably a +1000

user55340

@GlenH7 The proper answer is "Just quit.... being such an engineer"

user41796

"You must be an engineer since you're trying to fix problems that aren't your own"

G'day folks

Anybody familiar with a lot of data structures? I'm looking for some ideas for data structures that keep things sorted. A heap is the first and only thing that comes to mind. I'd like to implement a custom collection that makes use of such an underlying data structure.

user41796

@agent154 language of choice?

8:22 PM

C#... but I'm not opposed to writing my own.

user41796

@agent154 have a look at: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…

user41796

There are a few sorted generic collections that you could use "out of the box"

user55340

@agent154 people.ksp.sk/~kuko/gnarley-trees

user41796

Looks like there is a sorted dictionary, list, and set already available

Well, the Set is no good to me here because it's 4.0 and above, and I'm trying to make use of a sorted set in as low as 2.0. So I've decided to write my own sorted set data structure. Problem is deciding on what to use to store the actual data

user55340

8:25 PM

SkipList. Its a nice easy one to code.

user55340

Skip list

In computer science, a skip list is a data structure that allows fast search within an ordered sequence of elements. Fast search is made possible by maintaining a linked hierarchy of subsequences, each skipping over fewer elements. Searching starts in the sparsest subsequence until two consecutive elements have been found, one smaller and one larger than the element searched for. Via the linked hierarchy these two elements link to elements of the next sparsest subsequence where searching is continued until finally we are searching in the full sequence. The elements that are skipped over...

I'll definitely look into that. Thanks @MichaelT

user55340

And then some code for you: codeproject.com/Articles/4897/A-Skip-List-in-C

in other news, my coworker just discovered the bus factor

"what happens when you leave and everything blows up"

"ummm.... "

user55340

@enderland You get on a bus...

user55340

8:27 PM

And get a job at my former employer where the bus factor < 1.

no I'm not really worried about me, it's them, realizing their entire department is going to be dependent and running on this tool

user41796

You'll still be with the company

user55340

@enderland You tell your co-workers that they'd either need to figure it out, or get hired by my former employer... where they'll be even more afraid.

@GlenH7 I guess this is something I thought was self evident about any development project, maybe the full implications as we get closer to releasing this full scale are becoming more apparent

user41796

@enderland Never underestimate the power of burying your head in the sand

8:30 PM

yeah be some interesting conversations when I'm back from vacation that's for sure

"oh shit, this is going to run a multimillion dollar business with... no one tasked/skilled enough to support it"

"yeah"

"hrrrm."

user41796

So lets talk about my annual review.....

user41796

Remember, get the leverage over 'em before you ask about the review.

hahah. well speaking of vacation, I'm out of here for a week and a half, have fun holding down the fort everyone :-)

Hmm.. I've never heard of this "bus factor" before. That's quite amusing

I'm still a student, so I've got an excuse

user41796

@agent154 short version is: how does the company recover when the employee is struck by a bus?

user55340

8:32 PM

@agent154 are you acquainting yourself with it now?

user55340

A bus can be "getting hit by a bus" or "getting married and moving away" or "having a kid" or "found greener pa$$tures"

@MichaelT Yeah. I read it on Wikipedia and had a good laugh. "The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would need to be incapacitated (for example, by getting hit by a bus/truck) to send the project into such disarray that it would not be able to proceed."

user55340

At C2 they called it the Truck Number: c2.com/cgi/wiki/wikibase?TruckNumber

user55340

I assert that bus factor < 1 means "I've got two people on a team, either of whom leave it goes down bad = 0.5"

Also good to know about: the snowplow factor, which is how many developers can @Ampt take out from one organization if he has a bad enough bug in his snowplow software.

2

user55340

8:35 PM

@JimmyHoffa won't drive next to a snow plow anymore because of that.

user55340

9:04 PM

english / spanish localization where the word order is different and you've got fixed things in there is not fun.

user55340

average foo $unit/thing --> promedio de $unit de foo de la thing

user55340

The 'foo' moved to the other side of the $unit.