The Whiteboard

1:42 PM

Does anyone here have an inside view on the process of an Area 51 proposal going into private beta? e.g. how long does it take, what needs to be done internally, etc.

@durron597 No, but at one time it was a manual process.

I'm not sure if they have automated it more recently. But hitting the targets for going into private beta just trigger a process to get a new site created, and there is some level of human involvement in getting that site going.

@ThomasOwens Thanks. I'm committed and Vi/Vim; it was already over 200 when I saw it and committed, I was wondering how to ballpark how long it would take to launch (as I had a question just now ;) )

I also noticed that Turkish, Spanish and Russian SO each have over 500 committers; I imagine they must have been pending for quite some time now

Daenyth

2:53 PM

Are "Is foo a code smell" questions off topic?

Q: Is code ownership a code smell?

21

This is something I've been thinking about ever since I read this answer in the controversial programming opinions thread: Your job is to put yourself out of work. When you're writing software for your employer, any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be p...

4

Q: Do large test methods indicate a code smell?

I have a particular method called TranslateValues() (Cyclomatic-Complexity of 5) which I would like to test. The test requires a substantial number of mock objects which take up most of the method; The method being tested is fairly straightforward with this exceptional requirement. I am suspici...

c# unit-testing mocking complexity

Daenyth

Thanks

Q: Are #regions an antipattern or code smell?

One more :)

67

In C# code it allows the #region/#endregion keywords to made areas of code collapsible in the editor. Whenever I am doing this though I find it is to hide large chunks of code that could probably be refactored into other classes or methods. For example I have seen methods that contain 500 lines o...

c# code-smell

Daenyth

Seems clear ;)

3:33 PM

So I finally had it out with my boss, basically saying that I was going to work on what I wanted to work on instead of running everything by him

I was tired of being a cog in the machine

My client app had an issue that it took a couple of minutes to populate data from the server when you first started it up

It always bugged the crap out of me but I never fixed it because it was never "important"

Today I finally had enough and looked into it

Guess how long it took me to fix it.

MetaFight

4 days?

10 years?

@MetaFight s/days/minutes/

This bug has existed for 6 months.

user41796

Bah. 4 minute fixes can't be important.... :-)

"how often does the client start up anyway? we just turn it on once a day and it runs all day"

"not when i'm testing a development build, dips**t"

user41796

@durron597 Yeah, but we don't care about you. You're a cost center. Those customers are profit centers.

user41796

3:45 PM

See! Doesn't that make you feel better already?!

ratchet freak

@GlenH7 but having to spend 4 minutes testing a new version each time I make a change over 1 is a loss

@GlenH7 Except we don't have customers, this is an automated trading app. My qualify of life when doing testing doesn't matter because it doesn't directly translate to P&L

it's two steps away from P&L, not one

user41796

"Blah, blah, blah cost center; get back to work already." :-D

@GlenH7 lol

user41796

<--- I coulda been a great PHB

3:48 PM

In my boss's defense, I had no idea it would be such a simple fix

But in my new paradigm of "I'm going to work on whatever I feel like", I just couldn't stand it anymore

user41796

Everyone needs a degree of autonomy within their work

The problem is less a control freak boss and more "I didn't want to take the time to convince him why it would be a good use of my time"

because conversations where you have to convince your boss what to work on ALSO take time.

user41796

Time is infinite...

>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."

deals.slashdot.org/sales/…

I WANT

user41796

3:55 PM

@maple_shaft So what's holding you back?

its sold out

@maple_shaft Does it have a camera on it?

not yet ;)

My wife will yell at me about starting another hobby

thats the other thing holding me back

wives suck

user41796

@maple_shaft look herre

well, no... they don't suck actually... thats a different problem

user41796

3:57 PM

Gawd, that was an ugly one-box there...

lol

anyway... I would like to take the remote and wire it to a breadboard... hopefully create some kind of automated drone program for it from my Raspberry Pi

@GlenH7 Heh... if I am considering that over a toy then it is bound to happen anyway

user41796

One thing I've disliked with toy quad and helicopters is that they have a hard time hovering

:(

meeting

professional meeting attender

later

user41796

And they pay you for that?! Bueno! :-)

user41796

You can always revoke your room ownership and return to being happily oblivious... :-) Which is another way of saying, yes, yes they are.

4:24 PM

What is your all's take on "supplement answers"

user15026

@durron597 What do you mean?

Q: Is a 1 < 10 comparison less expensive than 1 < 1000000?

In other words, you think there's already an answer that is 90% adequate, but there's 10% - which is too long to explain in a comment - but you don't want to rehash the first 90% because someone else already did a good job

Example: my answer is a supplement to Robert's answer

3

I just used ~1 billion as the count for a z-index in css, and was thinking about the comparisons that must go on. Is there a difference in performance on the ALU level in comparisons between very large numbers vs very small ones? For example, would one these two snippets be more expensive than ...

performance cpu

user41796

@durron597 tolerable

user41796

not necessarily up vote worthy, but not delete material either

@GlenH7 s/delete/downvote/

user41796

4:34 PM

if you insist. :-)

I created a case with my 3rd party vendor in September 2013 - choose installation directory in install script

(I have never actually used their install script because they don't let me choose the directory. I just copy the files by hand and modify their internal links using vim)

They just pushed it out ANOTHER month... to feb 2015 now

Can it really be that hard? 18 months?

user41796

"How often do people install? They can just do something else while it loads."

@GlenH7 Indeed

user41796

I think I've found today's recurring theme.... :-)

I think they only have, maybe, three customers that have purchased this product, they spent all this effort releasing version 1.5...

and I haven't installed it yet to give them any feedback. can you guess why?

user41796

4:43 PM

They'd probably write you off as being too picky about install locations anyway. :-) I mean, c'mon, who doesn't always install to the `C:\` root directory for the machine?

@GlenH7 It's actually a linux installer

user41796

Oh! Just stick it in ~ then.... :-)

I want their app to be in /opt/<vendor name>/<appname> is that so unreasonable

I also spent a good chunk of effort hacking their scripts so it doesn't have to run as root

because, it doesn't.

which is the other reason i don't want to upgrade, i don't feel like doing that again

user41796

I hate when I can't find the video clip I'm looking for

@GlenH7 FIFY

►

user41796

4:47 PM

@durron597 sure it does! everything's easier when you're root, right?

@GlenH7 sure is!

They also want to have all their logs and things inside their own directory

is it wrong to want logs in /var/log

is it wrong to want .pid files in /var/run

is it wrong to want configuration files in /etc

user41796

Cut to 47 seconds in this clip:

user41796

►

user41796

I wanted a clip of him saying just "chaw". Couldn't find it.

user41796

And it's hilarious someone flagged TRiG's chat comment

4:50 PM

ha

you could just put #t=47 at the end of the url fyi

user55340

Whee... The 4 day week of the cycle

user41796

@durron597 I did not know that, thanks!

user41796

@MichaelT - if you need some delete vote therapy, I've been putting a lot of the tools stuff in there

5:34 PM

So the price of gold is something like 1270.5 right now

and the price of soybeans is something like 977.25

when i submit a gold order, the exchange wants me to send 12705

but when i submit a soybeans order, they want me to send 977.25

WTF exchange

user41796

5:57 PM

@durron597 Don't they want 127050?

protip: marry someone who cares about finances and will compete with you for being more frugal

user41796

@enderland There's a lot to be said regarding being on the same page with money.

@GlenH7 no. but for palladium they want 78050 for 780.5

@enderland I just hope you guys aren't washing and reusing plastic straws

user41796

@durron597 Is gold always priced on the whole or half dollar then? ie. how do they know 12705 vs. 127051

@durron597 ha. frugality is figuring out what actually matters and optimizing it, not being cheap :P

6:00 PM

gold is always to the nearest 10 cents

palladium to the nearest 5 cents

soybeans to the nearest .25 cents. psst you may be able to figure out why I was asking this now

user41796

okay, so you can put rules in place to determine the appropriate decimal place

yeah but soybeans wants a decimal point to be sent in a new order submission, so does corn and wheat

but gold and palladium never get a decimal point

it's just stupid and pointless.

user41796

@durron597 A friend of mine from a long time ago found being able to rapidly add by 1/8ths a valuable skill in at least two venues.

user41796

@durron597 every picosecond matters. :-)

user41796

But I'm willing to bet each exchange has different rules too

6:05 PM

@GlenH7 how can it be hard to add by 1/8ths? There's only 8 of them and that's a nice common number to work with anyway, adding by 1/42nds frequently would be quite painful to get used to, but not 1/8ths I don't suspect

user41796

@JimmyHoffa I think most get thrown off a bit when you're adding mixed fractions

user41796

So a quarter plus 3/8th's plus whatever....

@GlenH7 unlikely, inconsistency creates inequality which can make one market vastly more popular because fractions of a cent of a better deal means enormous gains.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Don't underestimate the idea of exchange lock-in

@GlenH7 Don't underestimate the amount of money people interacting with exchanges have available to just blow to switch exchanges, or the fact that most of them are accessing multiple exchanges already (to continue their gains throughout more than just one exchanges business hours)

6:10 PM

@JimmyHoffa Try adding and subtracting by 1/32nds

in most ways I'll bet all the markets have settled upon consistency when it comes to anything even remotely related to valuation, selling, buying, or trading costs. From rates to costs to distance acceptable SLAs to the SLA for precision of all said things, all variables are controlled in places where billions upon billions of dollars are moving at any given time, because there's enough money to ensure they're controlled.

that's more practical and yet still pretty tough

@durron597 like I said, 1/8ths is gotta be pretty easy, higher numbers would be considerably trickier

the way I see it, I would think about it just the exact same way I think about doing arithmetic with percentages, except 32 is the top of your percent instead of 100.

@JimmyHoffa cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/deliverable-swaps/…

I guess that's how I do math with fractions altogether in my head though... I suppose that's a fair explanation of it.

user41796

6:14 PM

The context of the first and then subsequent venues is what made the comment hilarious at the time.

Lollipop guys.

Lollipop!

@ThomasOwens this is by far the best way to do fractions in your head

@enderland ???

you think of fractions like the concentric cirlces on a lollipop

user41796

►

6:16 PM

No videos at work. :(

and if you color them differently they make it very visually easy to add fractinos

But Android 5.0 is here, it seems.

like 1/32 + 1/8

5/32.

you convert those to color rings, and then add hem together

user41796

6:17 PM

The lil wayne version of that song is not quite SFW

Please tell me it's cooking by the book with the rapper.

eventually you get so used to doing it you can not even need a lollipop (especially for common ones like 1/32 or 1/8 but if you have something like 1/7 + 1/35 or something

I just make them have the same bottom and add the tops.

I can't tell if you two are joking or not

2

@enderland 1/7 + 2/35 is pretty simple

6:20 PM

I don't even know what the hell is happening here anymore.

user41796

@ThomasOwens Is that a Whiteboard reference or a work reference?

Yes.

lol

@ThomasOwens Just watch this video you'll figure it out: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/19853133#19853133

@durron597 Can't watch it at work.

user41796

6:21 PM

@ThomasOwens parsing-errors

user41796

The one I linked was the Chordettes signing Lollipop.

Oh.

Yeah. That song was in my head when I got the notification about the update.

user41796

@ThomasOwens - did you just get lollipop today? It's been on my 7 for quite a while now...

@JimmyHoffa: Isn't a singleton a big bag of global state? Never heard the term used with static classes and static methods; advocating holding global, mutable state in a static class would get you lynched in some circles.

@GlenH7 Yep. Downloading and installing on my S5 now.

user41796

6:30 PM

Cool.

user41796

They tweaked the app scroller, and I think I preferred the old way better. But no biggie

@RobertHarvey not recognizing there's no difference between a singleton and a static class is what should get you lynched but most circles prefer not to think rationally about things with so much historical stigma associated with them.

the only difference is a singleton requires you to write a bunch of code that you could get wrong and even if you get it right now you just have more code to maintain. We had this conversation before: I suggest no one ever use a singleton, ever, in a language that allows a static class.

A: Difference between static class and singleton pattern?

447

What makes you say that either a singleton or a static method isn't thread-safe? Usually both should be implemented to be thread-safe. The big difference between a singleton and a bunch of static methods is that singletons can implement interfaces (or derive from useful base classes, although th...

@RobertHarvey if you're passing the instance around you're transitioning a global class to a local which is dangerous and bad form, furthermore if it's something to be passed around it really oughtn't be static/singleton/global etc.

Jon knows all the softball answers that get the repz.

6:39 PM

@RobertHarvey Jon is actually Chuck Norris in disguise

Anytime you have something that's either global or threadglobal, passing it as an instance is now removing it's access from the safety of its accessor which ensures access occurs to most-likely-current version of the instance. So if someone changes the instance in the global you will then be accessing that different instance. Handing around the global as an instance allows it to become a local reused by various methods though possibly an out of date version.

(this is especially true of thread locals because now you make it available to other threads by handing out instance handles rather than requiring all access to go through the controlled accessor)

user41796

FWIW, Engineering is now in public beta.

@GlenH7 you get teh modz?

7:01 PM

@enderland There aren't any yet, but @GlenH7 has the #2 rep and the #2 most votes in the "who should mods be" thread. And the #1 in both of those categories isn't the same person.

Medical / Healthcare Devices

7:27 PM

@JimmyHoffa I think Jon sees it as a testing issue. Having a Singleton conform to an interface means you can substitute a mock implementation, and I don't view things like Context objects as being all that different.

user33944

6

Proposed Q&A site for engineers, Professional or Healthcare startups in Healthcare/Medical device/instruments domain. Relevance to Diagnostics, Assistance tools, Mobile based interventions, etc.

Currently in definition.

8:15 PM

folks, can we please take care of career-transition tag? Of 69 questions, only 4 are not closed. Lots of closed questions in this tag look worthy of deletion

@gnat That's like a tag that defines off topic questions

user41796

Oy! They took away being able to see vote counts when Engineering went public. Grrrr... :-)

@GlenH7 Need 750. Better get cracking

user41796

Yep. :-(

@durron597 yeas. Lots of historic content in there make me think it deserves a career tag tip like four other troublesome historical tags. Can't understand how I could miss this tag when making tag tip request... but I really did. I checked lots of other tags but this one somehow slipped...

...for the sake of completeness, initially I considered more tags to list: employment, hiring, jobs, new-job, job-hunting, job-searching, job-advancement, job-title... But upon further thinking decided to limit pilot list to those that seem to be most troublesome, assuming that we will be able to add more to the list later if needed — gnat Oct 21 '14 at 12:14

^^^ "most troublesome" - career transition fits

8:32 PM

@gnat Why is the blogging one not closed?

Honestly all of them except the Java -> Ruby one should be closed, and that one should be edited

@durron597 well, most of the remaining open questions in this tag have my close vote expired long ago

@gnat I suggested edit burninated the tag in the Java -> Ruby one

@gnat programmers.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/92267

@GlenH7 Danke. TWO WHOLE REP CLOSER TO 3k

user41796

yw

user41796

@durron597 Engineering is teaching me to appreciate the chase for repz again

user41796

I'm finding that coming up with good questions is hard

8:49 PM

@GlenH7 Coming up with good non-duplicate questions in Programmers is hard

user41796

Just bribe gnat to look the other way with them. :-)

I'd have to bribe @GlenH7 too ;)

user41796

Engineering is where I need the repz... :-)

Q: Java logging dependency for a low-level library

@GlenH7 For some reason I can't imagine why you'd have trouble with non-duplicates in Engineering.

Speaking of getting repz, I'm stunned I got no upvotes here:

2

I inherited a lower-level open source Java network library. The library is intended to be used by higher-level application protocol libraries which are in turn used by application code. My library, as left by the previous maintainer, has no dependencies and is built via Ant. The build artifact...

java dependencies

user41796

I just realized I should part out a "sewer bot" that I want to build in order to clear out roots from the drain line at my house. I should break that up into lots of individual questions.

user41796

8:54 PM

@durron597 Low views - only 49.

9:07 PM

@RobertHarvey this is an agreeable difference, statics screw up your testability a touch.

but that's rarely a worthwhile argument and it's one that can be worked around a touch

Q: Auto-flag duplicates of deleted questions for reopening / deletion

30

Update: This has been implemented according to the slightly more aggressive manner proposed in this answer below. OK, so this is the second time I've come across a perfectly valid bug report here on meta.SO that was closed as a duplicate, and the question it was closed as a duplicate of then d...

feature-request status-completed exact-duplicates deleted-questions

user41796

Delete 'em all!!!

@GlenH7 in a Brave New World starting today, this sounds like a viable approach :)

Is there a bug in an older version of java 7 that prevents locks from working correctly

I swear to god half the time it's like my code doesn't have any locks at all

9:23 PM

FWIW career-transition does have a tag tip, kudos to Shog

I anticipated this, @gnat - did you happen to try adding career-transition (or career-anyotherword) to a question? — Shog9 ♦ 5 mins ago

@durron597 Only that concurrency via locks is hard, AFAIK.

@durron597 blog.whiteinternet.com/general/select-isnt-broken

@gnat Yeah I know

THIS multithreading bug actually is my code

@durron597 ...Java 6-7 are pretty reliable in this regard. There is some craziness in lock-free utils introduced in Java 7 (Phaser) but that's again not because of them being buggy but because using 'em is hard. "For a developer used to traditional queries-and-locks, coding for a new approach might feel like riding the wild horse..."

A: Write a program that makes 2 + 2 = 5

9:44 PM

Nah this one is definitely my bug. The other one I still haven't figured out, but the one that just happened is entirely my fault

user55340

10:38 PM

500

Java Reflection is indeed the right way to go with abusing Java... but you need to go deeper than just tweaking some values. import java.lang.reflect.Field; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { Class cache = Integer.class.getDeclaredClasses...

user55340

500!