The Whiteboard

Q: Need Advice for Software Development Career

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs on Programmers. — Carey Gregory 1 min ago

user55340

12:13 AM

-4

Hello everyone i'm on my second year of college in software engineering, i'm fluide in C (3 years of experience prior to college) and currently learning C++ but i don't see a future for C development and i think the work opportunities for a C++ developer are far less than for a web developer or m...

c++

user55340

No, no it doesn't.

1:02 AM

@JimmyHoffa - for the past year or so, I actually have been back coding almost all of the day. Not day in and day out, but day here, day there, week here, week there. The companies haven't kept up.

I could never code more than 6 hours or so straight without it all going to poo.

user55340

1:29 AM

@Telastyn Getting up and going to the restroom can be that important part of incubation and illumination.

user55340

Incubation (psychology)

Incubation is one of the 4 proposed stages of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Incubation is defined as a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some later point in time. incubation is related to intuition and insight in that it is the unconscious part of a process whereby an intuition may become validated as an insight. Incubation substantially increases the odds of solving a problem, and benefits from long incubation periods with low cognitive workloads...

1:46 AM

I use my lengthy commute for that usually.

user55340

@Telastyn I try to avoid pooing in the car.

Do, or do not; there is no try (when it comes to pooing in the car).

@Telastyn yeah, my new job they actually took the reigns off, boss is all "We need a thing that does X" and I'm all "How about if I do it like this?" "Yeah great, lemme know when you're done!" and none of this telling him I'm done the next day followed by "Whoa whoa whoa, no you need to do a lot more than just spend one day on it, uhh just keep working on it...yeah...this is supposed to take 3 weeks"

user55340

Lisa Nowak

Lisa Marie Nowak (née Caputo) (born May 10, 1963) is an American former naval flight officer and NASA astronaut. Born in Washington, D.C., she was selected by NASA in 1996 and qualified as a mission specialist in robotics. Nowak flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-121 mission in July 2006, where she was responsible for operating the robotic arms of the shuttle and the International Space Station. Nowak gained international attention on February 5, 2007, when she was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and subsequently charged with the attempted kidnapping of U.S. Air Force Captain Colleen...

heh

user55340

1:50 AM

>
Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando, Florida, on February 4–5, 2007. She packed latex gloves, a black wig, a BB pistol and ammunition, pepper spray, a hooded tan trench coat, a 2-pound drilling hammer, black gloves, rubber tubing, plastic garbage bags, approximately $585 (USD) in cash, her computer, an 8-inch (20 cm) Gerber folding knife and several other items before driving the 900 miles (1,400 km) to Florida. Early police reports indicated she wore space diapers during the trip, but she later denied wearing them. On February 5, 2007, Nowak went to the Orlando International Airport, wai…

Maximum Absorbency Garment

also heh

user55340

A Maximum Absorbency Garment (MAG) is a piece of clothing NASA astronauts wear during liftoff, landing, and extra-vehicular activity (EVA) to absorb urine and feces. It is worn by both male and female astronauts. Astronauts can urinate into the MAG, and usually wait to defecate when they return to the spacecraft. However, the MAG is rarely used for this purpose, since the astronauts use the facilities of the station before EVA and also time the consumption of the in-suit water. Nonetheless, the garment provides peace of mind for the astronauts. The adult-sized diaper with extra absorption material...

2

@MichaelT yeah, normally I get up at least once an hour to go to the break room for a coffee or do something for a couple minutes just because the code starts scratching at my soul otherwise

user55340

Oh, heard the story of one dev leaking some test data into production (it was clearly test data) that had another dev's name on it. Again, remember where I work.

You might want to ask this question over at SE Programmers. — Derek 朕會功夫 41 secs ago

1:54 AM

That could be really bad

user55340

It was entirely an internal thing - wouldn't have gotten out at all. But he was really distressed (he laughs about it now).

user55340

Note that I'm in the process of building a test data layer with some fake data (I don't want to use real data to make sure that that doesn't accidentally cause a privacy breech). The dev that had that first data (not the one in the db) - his last day is in 2 weeks. He's going in my test data layer. The 'absconder' flag is going to be set on his data.

one company I worked at wrote stock trading software, engineering director was testing something one day only to find out at the end of the day the environment he was hooked up to was live. He had been buying/trading/selling hundreds of thousands all day on the live feed, and after the reconciliation all finished at the end of the day after he realized it was real- the company accidentally made like 50 grand in profit.

@MichaelT I would be really distressed...

hah

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Yep. Here is is, testing the other dev's code... and there his name pops out.

1:57 AM

I can imagine that going really badly; I would stick to John Qs for all data...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa This is a class that mocks the data and returns four (rather than hundreds of thousands) of objects. I need very specific data.

At Employer^^^ we had a great scrubbing sql script that they would use to take live data and plunk it into the test environment with various Johns and Janes replacing all personal info, all user-entered comment data scrubbed, company names, etc etc

user55340

We don't have that yet. And I'm in the midst of a push to get testing in there hard (we don't have that either).

@MichaelT Still...2 years from now someones going to hook your mock up to a test database for some ETL process he's working on, and 2 years later somebody's accidentally going to push that test databases data with your old coworker into production

user55340

@JimmyHoffa its not a mock database.

user55340

2:00 AM

Its not even a database.

user55340

Its a auto wired data access layer that is available in the test environment only that implements the same methods as the one that goes to a database.

@MichaelT no I know, but someone's going to write an ETL process that reads data from the data layer you're mocking and transforms it into another database...and when the mock is used...

user55340

That layer can't get outside of JUnit.

You presume people won't write unit tests that write to real databases :P

Those people are the worst. Well, almost. Clients and Users are worse, but at least I don't have to see them.

2:03 AM

@Telastyn hah yes

user55340

Ok... John Q (actually, I knew a John Q at Employer^^)... though there there will still be an inside joke there.

user55340

Instead of Venkat (actual last name), Wencat Smith... he's still going to get an absconder flag though.

of course, fuckin' absconder.

user55340

Well, he got a job in a different state. That's absconding to me.

user55340

> escape, bolt, flee, make off, take flight, take off, decamp; make a break for it, take to one's heels, make a quick getaway, beat a hasty retreat, run for it, make a run for it; disappear, vanish, slip away, split, steal away, sneak away; clear out, duck out; informal cut and run, skedaddle, skip, skip town, head for the hills, do a disappearing act, fly the coop, take French leave, vamoose, take a powder.

2:06 AM

Isn't absconding involve taking something? I guess he's taking himself...

ah I guess not

user55340

Nope. Its used for three different types of things. Escapees. Probation who haven't reported in. Sex offenders who are not in compliance with mandatory dna samples.

I guess usually when I read the word it's in the form of <so and so> absconded with <something/someone important>

This might be better suited to Programmers.SE, it's more of a software process question than a programming question. — paisanco 14 secs ago

@Duga when I saw this question in The Queue, I've been wondering if some... hard to say it without being offensive... some... "user" will manage to sneak in with suggestion try-Programmers before it closes

I tried to vote to close and migrate, but the Programmers.SE is not one of the migration options (maybe because they have complained in the past about us Stack Overflowers using the Programmers site as our toilet bowl). I guess you can migrate it yourself. You can either delete this question if you want or wait for us to close it as off-topic. — Peter Olson 24 secs ago

2:23 AM

tangent-lang.blogspot.com/2015/07/generic-types.html

Q: Why do dynamic languages make it more difficult to maintain large codebases?

164

Large codebases are more difficult to maintain when they are written in dynamic languages. At least that's what Yevgeniy Brikman, lead developer bringing the Play Framework to LinkedIn says in a video presentation recorded at JaxConf 2013 (minute 44). Why does he say this? What are the reasons?

maintenance dynamic-languages

Q: What is a good metric for guiding a switch from a prototyping language to a production language?

woo, generics

user55340

0

By "prototyping language", I mean one which was chosen by virtue of it's relative ease of quickly accomplishing the sort of design changes common to prototyping in a particular context. (such as data visualisation, for example) By "production language", I mean one which, with a more solidified d...

language-agnostic efficiency prototyping language-choice

@MichaelT yeah, dupe

user55340

2:48 AM

Rum is more expensive than Coke in the Philippines. This make rum and coke prices interesting.

user55340

Whoot! MSE 10k!

user15026

You mean the Coke is more money?

3:11 AM

@Telastyn very cool; and if I'm not mistaken the issue you hit there of null having it's type be uninferrable is basically due to null being a bottom value; You know Haskell's response to a bottom value... error. OO systems make the bottom value something they actually have to deal with which is a bit odd.

That's odd that your ADT allows a naked generic if I understand (T)? :> T | Nothing; remember in Haskell it would always require a constructor so it would need to be (T)? :> Just T | Nothing;

Not sure how I like the constructorless choice; how would you match that case? default case?

reading your posts about developing your language makes me want to try writing my own...then I remember I'm lazy...I think I'll have a rhum and coke instead... Good on ya for getting Generics to work - is awesome

if I bought two monitors and set them up like I have at work; I might actually code at home sometimes...

coding with non-vertical monitors annoys me after having vertical monitors at work for years

@JimmyHoffa Now he makes 10 million per year as a trader?

no idea what anyone from that job does anymore... that was almost 10 years ago now, but there were actually a lot of ex-traders who spent a lot of time making a lot of money on trading floors and such working there

3:35 AM

@JimmyHoffa By the way, I've been working some with mercury.js. Which meant getting browserify set up and working. I haven't had much time with it yet beyond reading about it and getting a test page working. But the reading showed how fast the node.js community has been moving. And it was weird reading good code.

yeah, Node.js really has a lot of great stuff out there, people bitch about JS but that's just the hangover from what people wrote with JS for so many years.. There's a lot of really nice JS code out there these days. Mercury looks like a server side rendering framework?

Has a strong focus on self-containment I see which is awesome and so rare in applications frameworks as they usually want to do everything in the whole app for you

oh, it's client side?

If you start using it for stuff you'll have to tell me how it goes; looks interesting but not super clear from the examples

3:50 AM

A lot of the node stuff works server or client, as does this, but it's intended primarily for client. Browserify pre-processes node.js code into a single file semantically equivalent to all the requires, so you can use that on the client.

ah cool, yeah I actually used grunt and wrote my own module format/requires thingy at one point to do precisely that

Having it altogether in one file just makes sense, I wish I'd known about browserify

@JimmyHoffa The author has a lot of npm packages with a very strong focus on being minimal. It's interesting - the browserify page talks about how with npm you don't want to write a math library, you want to write a single useful math function and make that a package. I'm not totally sold, but it's an interesting mindset.

hmm, yeah I'm not sold either. It's classic normalization/denormalization; where do you set the boundaries? Where do you put vertical segments in any architecture? People spent years with no vertical segmentation, and I think going overboard segmenting your verticals down to a single function is a bit of an extreme reaction to how bad it is when you put everything in one monolithic bundle... There's a middle ground, and finding it is where design becomes more art than engineering

@JimmyHoffa I'm trying to rewrite a page in our app that really needs performance on initial render. Currently in angular. Mercury does rather well in benchmarks, so I'm hopeful. I also like being able to use code rather than a template when you want to.

@JimmyHoffa Yes. The theory they have is that with low enough friction on the package management the optimum is very normalized. Probably some truth to that.

@psr yeah, I'm all for the coded option, though this stuff gives me pause:

var state = hg.state({
    todos: hg.varhash(opts.todos || {}, TodoItem),
    route: Router(),
    field: hg.struct({
        text: hg.value(opts.field && opts.field.text || '')
    }),

the hg.this, hg.that, hg. wrapper you have to embed on all your stuff is one of the JS library smells I've seen a lot of and I don't like. It indicates to me they're relying on custom behaviours being attached to your stuff rather than just using your data directly and keeping their custom functionality out of your code

That sort of stuff starts getting in the way of integration or switching to other libraries 'n things, when you've littered your code with their decorations, how easy is it to just hand your objects off to other libraries?

If you jigger with your objects yourself, is it going to interrupt the libraries data flow since they clearly need their hands in these objects..

3:59 AM

@JimmyHoffa I haven't looked at hg.state. Where did you find that code?

the todo example

the whole thing looks a touch onerous to me...

but perhaps that's just the state piece and since it's a modular framework, you can work totally independently of that

@psr optimum is a hard thing to quantify though, just like in DBs if you normalize every little thing, it takes 10 joins to query anything, and before you know it you've just shifted the brunt of your code from customizing the results of low-cohesion packages that do stuff you don't need/want and not the things you do, to endless reams of code integrating tons of high-cohesion modules

@JimmyHoffa All those h(blah,blah,blah) functions are slightly onerous compared to just using a template. So far that's the main drawback - the easy stuff is harder.

If every package does one thing, eventually they'll be broken down to such an atomic level that you're writing all the code you wanted a package to write for you, and using functions in packages to do it

As far as hg this and hg that - that file actually has a comment recommending you don't do that, but require hg.state (etc.) directly.

@psr that stuff doesn't seem so bad, that's coded DOM UI instead of templates - markup is just as verbose and onerous

'ev-event': [
            hg.sendChange(channels.setTodoField),
            hg.sendSubmit(channels.add)
        ]

^-- that I'm not altogether sure of though, why does it need to own the events? Is it limited in the number and types of events it can do? If you want to trigger an event that's not on hg., do you need to implement some custom event that meets an hg convention?

4:08 AM

@JimmyHoffa So far it's slightly more verbose and onerous. I expect to make that up by being able to write code to eliminate some of that, in a way a template doesn't allow.

@psr certainly, which is why coded DOM UI is really cool for a variety of things. I really liked seeing libraries that did both templates and coded DOM like that

I think they're both good for different things and should probably both be used

@JimmyHoffa No, all hg does is put the event you want on the top element it has jurisdiction over, then forward it to your handler. It just puts an attribute in the HTML matching your event, without worrying if such a thing exists.

It lets all the events bubble up and dispatches them for you (a little faster at run-time apparently).

@JimmyHoffa That was a huge reason why I went with Mercury for this.

@psr probably queues them and executes them in periodic bulk, perhaps does some comparisons to cull events that it doesn't need? Who knows, bubbling them up it will have the ability to do optimizations on their execution in a variety of ways so that makes seomse sense

@psr it does markup templates too?

this is cool, github.com/Raynos/mercury/blob/master/examples/login-form/… the way it writes then reuses the labeledInput function throughout is prime example of how coded DOM UI like that can be really handy and cool letting you just construct and stuff nodes in wheresoever you please

@JimmyHoffa Oh, I guess not really. That hg.h stuff is really a builder, and I've been thinking of it as sort of a template, but it isn't. It can parse HTML into its virtual DOM though. Or maybe it can just make the real DOM into it's virtual DOM. I suppose one could work something up that takes an angularish template and converts it into code to generate a virtual DOM. But nobody has done so that I know of.

@JimmyHoffa That's the approach I'll be taking, actually. It should work well for the page I'm doing.

Time to call it a day. Bye whiteboard.

10:02 AM

In Visual Studio I just tried to do Ctrl+G 347 to "Go To line 347" in my class. I accidentally typed 3347 and was horrified to find that that line number actually existed :(

2

11:17 AM

@JimmyHoffa - the issue isn't with null, it would happen with any type that did not consume the generic.

The type declaration foo :> A|B generates a variant/union with two constructors, A -> foo and B -> foo.

in that example, null isn't even a bottom type, it's just a symbol.

As for he constructorless case, it can be conceptually thought of as an implicit conversion, no different from ’Nothing -> int?`.

1:10 PM

Might be more appropriate for programmers.stackexchange.com . — Felix Kling 31 secs ago

@DenysSéguret: Not to programmers.SE — Felix Kling 56 secs ago

2:30 PM

this getting up at 5:45 every day thing is painful

@JimmyHoffa ಠ_ಠ

@RobertHarvey is it safe to say the Lounge is given... err... a wide berth?

@JimmyHoffa why do you need to get up so early?

@ThomasOwens agreed. New job's in town though which means gotta beat the traffic, or live with hour+ drives...

@JimmyHoffa I wake up at 4:30 every morning. Take the dog out, exercise, have breakfast, shower, and go to work.

leave between 6 and 7, and my drive's 25 minutes, leave work between 3 and 4 same

Office Space - Michael Bolton Rapping

2:33 PM

►

@ThomasOwens That's ok, you're clearly a broken human then

when do you go to bed?

@JimmyHoffa Usually around 10, 10:30.

I do sleep in on the weekends (wake up around 7ish).

@JimmyHoffa If you telecommute, pants are optional

4

I've been hitting the sack between 11 and 1 for the past few years, so this is rough

user114359

I get up at 5 AM on days I have to go into the office

2:35 PM

I hate all of you

shutup. This is a serious issue. 545 is unacceptable. You're all terrible human beings.

user114359

on "pants optional" days, more like 7 AM

@JimmyHoffa I get up at 6:45

I think the alarm goes off at 5:45, but I don't roll out of bed until 6:30 at the earliest (my morning routine is shorter than the wife's)

@durron597 The café I telecommute from told me that wasn't true.

it'd be later if my commute wasn't so far and I needed to avoid the worst of rushhour

2:36 PM

at my last job I would get up around 8-9...my coworkers were terrible bums who would show up ~10-1030 every day, so I still looked like a stellar employee

stupid repcap.

user114359

@JimmyHoffa I am not a morning person. I hate waking up before the crack of noon.

The key to happiness is a 10 minute commute.

André

I'm happy then

user114359

Today's commute was walking across the hallway from my bedroom.

ratchet freak

2:38 PM

@durron597 key to happiness is a commute that doesn't involve the daily traffic jam

@Snowman ah yeah, that sounds far more pleasant

André

I commute with a bike, it's nice unless it's raining

@durron597 but happiness doesn't commute.

@durron597 I had that for years...now I'm missing it, but this job beats my recent ones hands down so, worth it.

@MetaFight fox happiness food != food happiness fox holy crap you're right!

@MetaFight ☺+☻!=☻+☺ ?

@JimmyHoffa Do you own a house?

2:40 PM

@durron597 if you're next question is "are their stairs in your house?" I'm going to start having flashbacks

@JimmyHoffa What if my next question is "are there stairs in your house?"

@Ampt we should try to finish more of Portal 2 sometime, since I replaced my PSU I've been actually gaming a bit again

@JimmyHoffa yes we should!

@JimmyHoffa Portal 2 co-op is awesome

user114359

I never finished Portal 1

2:42 PM

@durron597 This is never not funny.

user114359

Once the levels got so ridiculous I needed Youtube I gave up

@durron597 I invoke the clause of halfacup. I've only had halfacup of coffee, so the rules of grammar are still insubstantiated.

my morning telecommute requires me to drop the GF off at work :(

pants are definitely not optional, despite my protests.

2:44 PM

@Snowman ah but it was so hilarious and fun. Portal 2 is definitely considerably harder than 1

@Snowman I recently beat it again to see how long I could do it in. Took 3 hours

user114359

I hate both of you

user114359

I must suck at Portal, then

in your defense, it's considerably harder when you've got sticks for hands.

@Snowman nah, it wasn't super easy when you get later in unless you are still well practiced in gaming

2:45 PM

me, I just open my mouth really large and wrap it around the controller.

I struggled with portal 1 in the later bit, never finished portal 2 because...it got bananas...

In the final level you have to portal out of a room full of fire. It's hard to do that when you melt so easily

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, it does that.

user114359

I should go back and try again

I would play Portal 2 with either of you on xbox 360 but I don't have a PC edition

@Snowman You are such a good test subject.

3

2:46 PM

@Snowman you should, you're probably almost done, or might be in a hump part- some portions get more difficult until you beat a certain level then they go back down

There's that one level kinda early on where you have to make two portals quickly to get the energy ball through the force field

around a two corners

I imagine that level would be discouraging to many

I actually gave away a copy of portal I had sitting in my gift inventory for some reason just last night... still have another... they've been sitting there for who knows how long from some humble bundles

speaking of...wonder what's on the bundle now (I totally bought the last bundle with untold reams of borderlands 1/2 content)

Game maker bundle

for those wanna be game devs

Portal Walk-Through ~ Level 15

►

@durron597 the best is, someone made a youtube video at one point that just showed, beginning to end, all of the GladOS interactions in sequence sans all the puzzles. Hilarious.

user114359

2:53 PM

Humble Game-Making Bundle

user114359

Has anyone bought that particular HB yet? Is there a good synopsis of what all it contains and why I might want to buy it?

All GLaDOS Quotes from Portal In Order Part 1

►

Reading the CAN spec for fun... man I am desperate for some development work.

wow, thats not a good sign... CAN spec for fun? Have you started accepting recruiters calls yet?

no, but I start drafting up replies on linked in that I later delete...

in my defense, the CAN spec is friggin sweet.

3:01 PM

You've easily found the third or fourth level of hell...

Total residual error probability for undetected corrupted messages: less than
message error rate · 4.7 ·10^-11

question californians of the room - how hard is it to find housing near deer creek? looking at a map, it's kind out between san jose and SF, so it's going to be packed, but better than Down town, no?

O_O you thinking of moving to California? From the midwest? Are you touched? Fuck management really has gotten to you, you've clearly lost several hundred IQ points...I'm sorry to hear about your untimely demise...

Tesla has some interesting positions opened around their automatic driving firmware...

chc.tbe.taleo.net/chc01/ats/careers/…

I don't meet some of those reqs, but I'm pretty damn close

@Ampt tons of interesting companies have tons of interesting positions around California, but you'd be walking away from a liveable cost of living, for a squalorable cost of living, and unless you're taking a C-level position, The Rent Is Too Damn High

ugh.. I know... that's the one thing that I'm really not looking forward to

but.... fuck me if that doesn't sound really, really cool

it's kind of like what I did with the snow plows but on steroids.

3:10 PM

@Ampt Keep their feet warm in winter?

if you really want to do the silly valley squalor thing for a while, get rid of any plans for family, fun, or well anything other than work and being treated shitty (you're just the help), you'll walk out of there in a few years with a far above average set of technical skills but those 3 years are just a write-off in terms of enjoying your experience as a human

user114359

@Ampt there are much nicer and affordable places to live that have a similar climate. Austin, TX for example has the highest ratio of income to cost of living for our profession in the whole U.S. last time I checked.

I don't remember a deer creek between SJ and SF

@Snowman Plus, everything's bigger in Texas.

@Telastyn I think it's a subset of palo alto?

3:12 PM

define housing then

user114359

@durron597 That is not always a good thing. Would my wife be bigger in Texas? Blleaararaghhh

it will be easy to find an apartment. A house will be crappy and have no yard and still be $500k+

@Snowman Only the good parts

user114359

I think I would like that

oops

3:15 PM

Denver's booming and it's getting crazier and crazier here... I'm just glad I'm already entrenched with a house 'n such. More and more it's looking like the kind of place I cannot even begin to imagine starting out young in. Rents here went up more year over year than every metro in the nation except SF and SJ last year

did I say $500k? That was incorrect:

zillow.com/palo-alto-ca

@Telastyn Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounded low.

user114359

@Telastyn You missed a zero

Jesus Christ, even rent is ridiculous.

3k+ for like a 700sq ft studio

I had an apartment in Sunnyvale back during the boom, nice place for $1200/mo

townhouse in SJ for ~$2k

3:17 PM

is SJ much cheaper?\

palo alto and menlo park are the worst as far as prices.

oh, and don't go to East Palo Alto.

sketchy?

or expensive

beyond sketchy.

I sort of wonder if that's why Google didn't hire me. I told them in the beginning that I would require a large salary bump to move from Texas to NY or CA and they were willing to pay me like, what I'm currently making, but not double that.

everywhere else from SJ to SF is pretty nice.

3:19 PM

so rent should be cheap ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

hey, if you want to get stabbed/shot to save some cash, that's on you :P

Mountain View is a little cheaper than palo alto.

oh man... you can use fiber optics to do CAN buses... why didn't I think of that!

3:37 PM

...were you by chance blocked at Stack Overflow for trying to use word 'problems' in question title? — gnat 44 mins ago

^^^ got a sensible flag decline when requested deletion of this. Flag message was focusing on how crappy it is but instead should just have pointed that asker simply tries to circumvent a block at SO. Wonder how 'problem' askers often appear to lack SO accounts to bump into that block over there...

...I tested, ask-question over there first requires you to login, and only after that you can dump your garbage. Hard to believe that they try and delete accounts (too lazy for that), maybe accounts link between SO and Programmers fails somehow

user55340

Mountain view in boom: $1.5k for one bed room.

that's not.... awful I guess.

user55340

You can make quite a bit not being in ca if you take cost of living into account.

user114359

@MichaelT This is one reason I do not live in CA despite tons of tech jobs there.

user55340

I'm making 50% more now than I did in ca with col adjusted. $1500 for a large three bedroom house.

"Questions about how to pronounce technical terms... are always opinion-based (and the stuff of endless discussion and back-and-forth arguing that goes nowhere)..." — gnat 31 secs ago

3:42 PM

user114359

The other issues I have with CA all stem from the political climate there.

afraid you might be melted down for the water?

Newest pic of Pluto and Charon

Q: What do you call "=>" , "::" , ":=", "->" operators?

Ask in programmers.stackexchange.com — Andy Lester 42 secs ago

Don't ask in programmers.stackexchange.com. It will be closed as off topic: Career Advice, and is specifically called out in the Programmers.SE FAQ. — Ampt 44 secs ago

user114359

4:00 PM

Could we please bury this question in the dustbin of history?

user114359

-1

I was just wondering what do you call "=>" , "::" , ":=", "->" operators when you want to explain it to your co-workers/friends ? People here read them like this: => a "nail" operator (seems funny) :: four point operator := 2-point equal operator -> arrow operator Wanted to know what's the...

operators spelling

what you want is insignificant. What matters is what you write in the question. And the question is written in such a way that opinion would be a totally legitimate answer (didn't you just suggest a commenter to repost their opinion as an answer). People will dump their opinions and these will be legitimate answers in the context of a question like that, no matter if you want it or not — gnat 12 mins ago

^^ one answer already dumped, who's next

talk about bikeshedding

user114359

Calling all 20k users... we need your DVs

@Snowman how about we just burninate spelling? only 8 questions in there, no locked ones

oh wait there are reasonable uses, it needs a bit thinking, not stright close and deletion

user114359

4:22 PM

@gnat "Spelling" is clearly off-topic, it should be possible to CV and retag to clean it up.

@Snowman maybe. I was just scared by 2 or 3 questions in there that looked legitimate. Retag is probably the way to go for these

Q: What's the bound of the following recurrence?

So noted. Most of my answers on Programmers.SE have been on career-related topics (job interview questions, "How do I disagree with a senior dev?", etc), but maybe things have been changing over the past few years. — Andy Lester 34 secs ago

user114359

4:42 PM

I am trying to help this guy and he keeps arguing with me:

user114359

-2

Given the following recurrence: T(n) = T(n-1) + n^2 How can I prove it to be O(n^3) with the substitution method? The O(n^3) guess derives from the fact that at every step of the recursion we pay n^2 and we have n steps of recursion therefore having: n * n^2 = n*3. I would even expect this to...

recursion

Gave an upvote to counter a down vote... All smiles now! :) Btw, => in logic often read "implies". — Erik Eidt 40 mins ago

^^^ that's... sooo cuuuuute

yesterday, by gnat

Upvoters: really? By upvoting, you're effectively telling this new user "keep asking questions like this". — Andres F. Jun 30 at 16:27

user114359

@gnat I am shocked that enough people upvoted the Q and the A to get a net of zero.

The Trouble With Popularity

4:59 PM

Jeff Atwood on January 31, 2012

Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content from the very beginning.

132

Q: What's the difference between Programmers and Stack Overflow?

What's the difference between Programmers and Stack Overflow?

discussion faq site-definition

^^^ our meta faq looks outdated

refers to "FAQ" instead of Help Center etc

user114359

What about this one?

user114359

185

A: Which computer science / programming Stack Exchange do I post in?

Stack Overflow Implementation problems, and questions on software tools commonly used by programmers. If your code or your IDE doesn't work, ask on Stack Overflow. Does not welcome subjective questions (anymore). Programmers The main focus is whiteboard questions, problems that you face while...

Q: Choosing between Stack Overflow and Programmers Stack Exchange

@Snowman that's much better but it is on MSE. Funny thing is, even MSO version looks better than ours:

243

Suppose you have a "borderline subjective" question, and you're not sure if you should post it to Stack Overflow or Programmers Stack Exchange. How do you decide? What's the best default option if you really can't decide? Return to FAQ index

support faq site-recommendation

version on our meta is really dusty

main answer says "edited Sep 14 '11 at 20:59 "

user114359

At this point it might be better to write up a new question, with one answer per related site.

Q: What goes on Programmers.SE? A guide for Stack Overflow

@gnat That's not the most recent one. This is:

56

You're on Stack Overflow and you've found a question that isn't about coding. It's about design or something squishy like that. You are trying to be helpful, and you put a comment in the question: You should try asking on Programmers.SE instead. --YourName 2 minutes ago ... and suddenly, ou...

discussion faq migration scope site-rec

user114359

5:13 PM

@durron597 That question is specifically designed to be a signpost for people at SO who tell people to ask here

user114359

We need proper meta-guidance: I have a technical question, and compared to five years ago, we now have eight different sites. Where should I ask?

user114359

Being on Prog.Meta it should of course be centered around the idea of "I thought I should ask here, but someone said otherwise or I had second thoughts."

@durron597 yes!!!!!

possible duplicate of What goes on Programmers.SE? A guide for Stack Overflow — gnat 24 secs ago

leave historical content (not a bad one btw) intact, redirecting readers to up-to-date one

5:44 PM

@durron597 TLDR I'll post anyway and let the paid mods sort it out.

/me ducks

6:09 PM

How hard would it be to make a tool that ingests an XML schema and craps out permutations of XML files that are valid?

user114359

@ThomasOwens Depends on the schema complexity.

@Snowman I mean generically. Input .XSD file(s), output .XML files.

user114359

Could be a single XML file, could be an infinite amount.

Yeah. I know. So, how hard do you think it would be?

probably easy to make it technically work, but there'd be lots of corner cases where it failed to produce any "interesting" or "realistic" output

6:11 PM

I'm not necessarily interested in realistic. Although configurable parameters for the fields may be nice.

That way, you can set various realistic bounds. I suspect r1 would be dumb as rocks, though. If it's an integer, use 1. A string uses "testString", etc.

user114359

I think I need more detail. Right now the way I understand it, it is equivalent to "given a grammar for a programming language, how could I generate all programs that are valid in that language?"

xsd restrictions can cover quite a bit of that already

@Ixrec Indeed they can.

user114359

An XML schema essentially defines a grammar, and as long as there is a single element that is "unbounded" in how many times it can appear, there are an infinite number of strings in that language.

Although more realistically, sometimes a message that is valid per a schema may be meaningless.

6:13 PM

by corner cases I'm thinking of things like you have an array of Foos, and each Foo can be either an A or a B, but your generator always produces all As or all Bs, so you miss the case where it's a random mix of As and Bs

Iterative development, yo.

It doesn't need to do everything in r1.

@Snowman I think in principle just having a single string element already gives you infinite possibilities

user114359

@Ixrec Not necessarily, as long as we are talking about the structure of the document.

@Snowman Initially, I'd focus on just the structure of the document and all valid structures.

a single string element with no explicit restriction on its length?

user114359

6:16 PM

@ThomasOwens would it be accurate to say you need a large number of valid XML documents per an arbitrary XSD schema to test something?

@Ixrec From a structure perspective, there's no difference between the empty string, "test", and "bob".

@Snowman Yes.

for a super-simple version that's not concerned about these problems, I'd expect it to be fairly easy if your language has an xsd parser lying around somewhere

Java lives for XML.

It's the only thing that Java makes easy.

user114359

I would either capture real-world examples and customize them, or hand-craft valid (and invalid) XML that covers common cases, edge cases, and stuff that should break.

@Snowman I'm just looking at the sheer number of permutations now...

It's at about 25.

user114359

6:20 PM

Depending on what you are trying to do with this, maybe look at Apache JMeter.

I'm looking at CAM Editor now.

But it's on sourceforge.

@Snowman I need to publish them into an OpenMQ queue. Doesn't look like JMeter does what I want, considering I just want a directory of .xml files.

camprocessor.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

for a stress test or something?

Q: UnsupportedOperationException in java collections framework interfaces

No. Acceptance testing.

user114359

6:59 PM

Searching is not helping. Anyone have a link to a good question that explains why we don't have separate interfaces for mutable and immutable collections in Java? That is what the core of this question is about, even if the author did not realize it when he wrote it:

user114359

4

Looking through the Java Collections Framework, I've noticed quite a few of the interfaces have the comment (optional operation). These methods allow implementing classes to through an UnsupportedOperationException if they just don't want to implement that method. An example of this is the addAl...

java interfaces methods

user114359

I know I have seen the question I am looking for but I can't seem to find it.

maybe I'm good at puzzle games or something, but I found nothing in Portal 1 or 2 hugely challenging; I often had to stop and think for a minute, but I never got stumped on anything (which is exactly the difficulty level I want)

@Ixrec Some of the dexterity based levels required quite a few tries

7:14 PM

that's true

@Ixrec In particular that stupid level where you have to build up your vertical momentum then bounce between the two platforms and then shoot at exactly the right moment

didn't the levels like that have non-portal surfaces everywhere but the target?

user114359

Or the timing levels where platforms are moving back and forth and you need to move between them while placing portals in just the right spots to hit the next platform.