The Whiteboard - 2015-08-14 (page 2 of 2)

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8:00 PM

hm well program director for my program was less than helpful, definitely the "not my problem, everyone advises their students differently" speech bascially

It's honestly really close for the ~9000 file dataset.

16% improvement nothing to sneeze at

What I'm going to do is make a test case and have someone bring it into the secure facility that I can't get into and run it over real data as a benchmark.

I think I'll do that on Monday, though.

8:20 PM

Time for a nice friday EOW huge-check-in-and-disappear so I (or someone else) can spend all of Monday and Tuesday trying to decipher what I did before the weekend gap and why nothing works

@JonEricson if you don't want to gather input from users, just blacklist feature-request and be done with it. Again, I'm fine with that, it's your website. But don't at the same time actively solicit them and give people the appearance that by having community support for an idea it's important to SE. The disconnect is the problem. The outcome is not, but clear expectations from SE about what the purpose of feature-request is would be very helpful... — enderland 22 secs ago

Should I deploy on a Friday afternoon, a handy flowchart http://t.co/ycvEcqlHs3

Tweeted by andrewducker on April 2, 2014 at 9:54 AM

LATER SUCKAS!

oh you're using SVN, nevermind, it's the same thing

this is just one of those days

now the online training I'm ~~taking~~ waiting for the site to be fixed

user41796

8:38 PM

Ain't that the best?

this week has been pretty awful

frankly :P

I think today is the first time my spirits have been really down about it though

user41796

The 2nd directors lack of response was not helpful

It was pretty good political damage control tbh :P

I think I'm going to respond to my advisor with my concerns, basically "need clarity on expectations and ability to get feedback this semester before I can assume this is reasonable approach"

Then whatever happens happens

user41796

If he's saying "needs more hours" then he should be able to define what is a reasonable framework to create that

user41796

It's fair to turn around and say "Okay, I'm fine with that. What would meet your expectations for that?"

8:42 PM

I also want to trap him based on his words, "you are saying that the easiest route is finishing the thesis for 9 credits, but suggest that a similar amount of work is required for a 4-credit independent study, does not compute" (this would be dumb, but really feel nice! :P)

user41796

And if you can turn it a bit more and propose specifics, that would be even better. "How about if I ... Would that be sufficient?"

@GlenH7 no, since ultimately I need his approval, and his only feedback on things to improve was too vague for me to confidently improve upon

user41796

@enderland Yeah, don't trap him that way. Trap him by making him define ahead of time the required level of effort.

@GlenH7 yeah. I won't. today was the first time in this mess I've really been frustrated and almost angry

user41796

Random question - do you play chess at all? Or do you at least understand how a knight moves?

user41796

8:46 PM

Reason being - this is one of those times where you have to move like a knight on a chess board does. A battle line was drawn in front of you. So you need to sidestep that line and then move things forward.

Yeah to both (I'd describe myself as a "better amateur" - I'll beat new people consistently, but lose to people who are remotely good)

Yeah

user41796

If this were jiu-jitsu, I'd look for a way to redirect your adviser's attack.

The problem is I know who my advisor is, and this is exactly how I expected him to respond - but there is nothing I knew of which could avoid that

@GlenH7 knights are the drunk ones, they start to move and then stumble a bit to the side.

user41796

So the idea here is you still have to play their game. That's a given. You ought to pretend to be cheerful about it to give a facade of compliance. But the end game is to get the adviser as close as possible to give you a specific list of "do X, Y, Z" in order to buy your ~~freedom~~ graduation.

8:49 PM

yeah. and again trust that it's even reasonable that he'll followthrough, which is where my problems lie

he almost assuredly won't get me that by next week

user41796

Ah, the one advantage you have is that his boss just pressured him. So if you send back a reply of "playing the game, what do I have to do?" and he doesn't respond to that then you have grounds to go back to the 2nd director again

I'm an old-school ORM guy, so I see ORM's as table-object mappers, and Entity Framework as ORM++. We use EF as a table-object mapper here, but there anything in EF that can map to more "functionally-complete" objects like, say, a complete invoice?

well but ultimately he had a "well everyone handles their relationship differently" which is basically a polite way to say "not my problem" attitude

but he DID say he would call him, so who knows

@enderland have you thought about just outright threats? Perhaps follow through with a few; make an escalation process out of it- you know, a well engineered system designed to meet your goals. I think this may be an effective approach. It works great for many! (truly, it does...:( )

(trying to give this guy some salient advice about his onion architecture.)

8:51 PM

> (but realizing I forgot what salient means, and deciding to just take shots instead)

user41796

@enderland He has to back your adviser due to political reasons. But he can certainly be a thorn in your advisers side so you'll stop bugging him

"Relevant" is probably a better word.

@JimmyHoffa any semblance of a threat basically is the nuclear option, my advisor is, ah, volatile when it comes to taking things like that well, and I'm trying to play by the books so that if/when I have to actual escalate appropriately it's a bulletproof case

salient...like saline right? Salt-water? Like the salt on the rim of a margarita? TIL a pitcher of Margaritas is Salient.

the email I got today is the next piece in that chess game, very vague feedback which is not actionable - and both directors agreeing that clear expectations are important, so I can ask for them - and if he refuses, then well.

8:52 PM

@enderland no no, you misunderstood the meaning of the term "threat" such that I meant it there.... I wasn't talking chess, I was talking checkers. Tell him to move or you'll jump him.

I've already started the escalation process by talking with two directors

user41796

@enderland This, yes.

the problem is that the timeline is bad for me, though I do have a week I guess

because I need to have my plan decided by 1-week from today

or be willing to not finish this fall, but next spring instead

@GlenH7 I don't think I will get them, I highly doubt I can get a "this is the changes you need to make to be finished" answer

user41796

@enderland Take a walk and clear any residual anger that's in you. When you get back, craft a response that shows you're "cheerfully playing along" and lay out the next ~~round of the trap~~ request in order to get him to clarify those expectations.

since I expect the process will be, "you need to do X." then after doing X, "you need to doY"

@GlenH7 nah I'm going to respond tomorrow morning anyways - this afternoon won't be meaningful anyways

I want to more know who the f deployed code friday afternoon and broke this online training

user41796

8:55 PM

@enderland You still have to get him to say "you need to do X" because then his words come back to bite him when he says "you need to do Y"

"Almost angry" is not so bad.

@GlenH7 yeah

@GlenH7 pah! He should design a rube goldberg torture device and write the guy a detailed blueprint, with pictures, and the guys last 5 addresses. Maybe a picture of his dog.

@RobertHarvey I've had multiple people be astonished how I am not furious about this situation

user41796

@JimmyHoffa It's good that you didn't go to college. :-D

8:56 PM

@GlenH7 never did like games...

user41796

@JimmyHoffa Getting out of grad school frequently is

College is only good for teaching you how to navigate large piles of BS, that's... ~~not very useful in the real world~~ way too useful ;)

A little anger can be good, if you know how to channel it properly.

I'm living proof. Every day.

:)

user41796

@RobertHarvey < tries to duck the site wide suspension />

@GlenH7 I've heard; like everything else in academia, arbitrary hoops

8:58 PM

1 min ago, by enderland

College is only good for teaching you how to navigate large piles of BS, that's... ~~not very useful in the real world~~ way too useful ;)

the primary problem with graduate school is (for thesis based, at least) your experience 100% depends on your advisor, but you can't really evaluate that until you are already in graduate school

@enderland you could just pay him.

I've given a lot of thought to why academia is this way. My wife comes home with work stories from the college that make no sense to me at all. I think it derives from "no practical concerns;" i.e. you don't have to succeed in academia the same way you do in the private sector.

Welcome to your final lesson about being ready for and dealing with bullshit in the real world: Sometimes money is the only way to solve a problem. Ouch. :D

@JimmyHoffa he makes plenty... about 150k in a low cost of living state last year

@enderland I didn't say it would be cheap

user41796

9:00 PM

@RobertHarvey That's the same general conclusion I've come to. There aren't any real competitive threats, so artificial ones are invented instead.

lol

@RobertHarvey yeah, though imo the biggest problem causing colleges problems is that they are simultaneously providing education as they are being fundraising opportunities and research institutions (at least larger ones) - those are nearly always completely conflicting interests

@GlenH7 and when you use artifice as the root to derive a whole system from, you start rapidly growing further from the reality you're trying to mimic

user41796

@JimmyHoffa What's funny, is I distinctly remember wondering why industry disliked / disconnected from academia when I was in school. And now that I'm other other side of the fence, it's perfectly clear.

Stack Exchange uses Trello?

@GlenH7 :) yeah... it's pretty easy to see when you try to do REAL WORK, academia revolves around all the BS'y meeting stuff we were discussing yesterday (if you think meetings in industry are wastes of time... lol!)

9:04 PM

@RobertHarvey lots and lots of folks seem to use Trello; it's not clear to me that it provides any highly important service, I suspect it's something companies use like they use Notepad++ - it's a tool for a simple thing but not a solution to a problem

(I have never used Trello. Ignorance level: High.)

@JimmyHoffa trello is a simple way to do agile like things

it works easily and simply (though I'm not sure it scales the way Rally does for a huge company)

This shop uses Trello. The customer service people seem to like it. The technical group does not.

They're doing everything they can to replace it.

Though Rally isn't exactly a shining example of a great tool either

I don't think I'd want to use Trello if I had more than maybe 5-10 people using it

I should really go look up what trello is

user image

that's basically it (which is why it doesn't scale well imo...)

9:09 PM

It scales up to about 50 cards, at which point it sort of falls down because there's no workflow.

oh, it's just showing all the cards on that main page? not a subset or anything?

You can have multiple boards, but that doesn't help much.

Feels like playing Solitaire.

that was my first thought when I looked at the screenshots

it just looks like a game of solitaire

I think that's why people like it. They don't even know why.

Someone hacked a solitaire game and put editable descriptions on the cards.

lol

9:13 PM

oddly enough I recently started using an app for my to-do list, but it's because I came up with a very specific feature that a simple .txt file can't do very well: tasks that automatically reappear every day/week/month

and I found not many todo list apps support that...

user55340

@RobertHarvey trello for stack exchange is a form of dogfooding

@MichaelT I am impressed at the length of some of your answers, are you on mobile writing them?

user55340

joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html

user55340

@enderland on site, I use desktop. It's only chat through mobile.

@GlenH7 Why did so many questions from the collapsed Embedded.SE end up on Engineering.SE? Some of them are way off-topic for Engineering.SE, and way on-topic on StackOverflow.

9:20 PM

An interesting approach would be for this room to just not close questions for a while - that might be a better way to encourage SE to ah, recognize how important that is (if they care? :P)

user55340

@enderland we are but a small fraction of the site.

user41796

@NickAlexeev I have a feeling there was a sense of urgency regarding getting questions migrated. And I don't know that the CMs felt they were in a good position to review exactly "where" those questions ought to go.

@MichaelT but what percentage of close votes?

user41796

That's why I put this together for the engineering community. Flags are welcome as we have to sort everything out.

user55340

Amagedon involved the flagship subedit (Ama) and a number of front page subedit.

user55340

9:24 PM

@enderland it's more a "why care? Just have oded close the worst each day..."

user55340

P.se just isn't big enough to be noticeable for more than an hour or two of mod close votes if non-diamonds went on cv strike.

user55340

Outside of S[OFU], all moderation for all sites is probably able to be handled entirely by CMs and interested devs over lunch.

user55340

They might miss things, but a look at newest 50 on one page twice a day will catch most.

user41796

@NickAlexeev, @enderland, @RobertHarvey - I can't migrate a question to another site that was migrated to my site, right?

I think you only get one bite at the apple, but I'm not sure.

9:29 PM

@GlenH7 You can clear migration history, no?

user41796

@RobertHarvey That's what it appears to be, but I wanted to confirm

Is the question really that good? As in Academy Award good?

That it justifies a migration adjustment?

@GlenH7 Yes. Once you clear the migration history, you can migrate further.

user41796

@RobertHarvey It's okay.

You can reject the migration and then to that site's mod to migrate it for you.

9:30 PM

@durron597 The origin site is no more: collapsed beta.

user41796

@NickAlexeev, @durron597 ty. Now I can migrate

user55340

The migration restriction is so 3k votes don't endlessly bounce.

@MichaelT yeah I guess... :(

I've felt the "why care" feeling a few too many times today lol

But the clear migration history trick doesn't send the question back.

user41796

@NickAlexeev There's no where to send it back to... :-(

9:31 PM

@enderland We have an internal dashboard that pulls all [bug] and/or [feature-request] posts from all metas. There is no separate internal bug tracker that things are "entered" into. — Anna Lear ♦ 3 mins ago

hey that's neat

user55340

And yet we still aren't getting feedback.

user55340

(Aside, I will be amused if I have the top answers on that question)

@GlenH7 Wholesale migration to EE.SE or SO would have made more sense. There is a general guideline "don't migrate to betas [at least not to the relatively young ones like Engineering.SE]." Yes, there were a lot of exceptions to this guideline, but a bulk migration like this should not have been an exception to "don't migrate to betas."

I wonder if a separate vote count for SE employees on meta posts is at all useful...

user41796

@NickAlexeev I think it's safe to state that neither I nor any of the Engineering mods have anywhere near full knowledge of the motivations behind the transfer.

9:41 PM

I wonder what the breakdown of SE employees is, for careers vs Q/A

@GlenH7 Neither anyone asked EE.SE folks if we wanted the material.

user41796

@NickAlexeev Are you in TL at the moment?

@GlenH7 I am now.

user55340

@GlenH7 my name is the only non-blue I see on this mobile screen. Are you sure this isn't the TL?

@MichaelT ping

user41796

9:48 PM

@MichaelT I've been having to double check what room I'm in all afternoon.

user55340

@durron597 pong

user41796

Had a lot of conversations going on all at once that needed to stay focused to particular rooms.

I wonder how different the last few months would have been if I had gotten a Mythology diamond.

user55340

ES.SE and Sex.SE are myths. Migrate all to there.

user41796

@MichaelT Some of the ES -> Engineering migrations made sense. I'm glad they didn't do any Sex.SE -> Engineering migrations!

user55340

9:54 PM

I have this idea for a... Machine. Does it have not enough torque? Or too much?

user55340

@GlenH7 what is the strength of 0.070mm thick latex?

@MichaelT I didn't know text markup software could be 0.07 mm thick

user41796

@MichaelT Oh, I can devise plenty of questions. I just don't want to see that done to the site....

user55340

You know that Java was originally intended for embedded systems? Could you imagine fully programable devices and the questions that would be on topic for both closed sites?

@MichaelT how were they planning on fitting a VM onto embedded devices?

user55340

10:00 PM

Java on a chip.

user55340

A Java processor is the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in hardware. In other words the bytecodes that make up the instruction set of the abstract machine become the instruction set of a concrete machine. These are today the most popular form of a high-level language computer architecture. == Implementations == There are many Java processors available, including: picoJava was the first attempt by Sun Microsystems to build a Java processor aJ102 and aJ200 from aJile Systems, Inc.. Available on boards from Systronix Cjip from Imsys Technologies. Available on boards and with wireless...

user55340

(Still wonder about how to phrase a "homeopathic oil engineering" question since petroleum engineer questions are on topic...)

0

A: Can we have a guaranteed pipeline for responses from Stack Exchange?

status-brainstorming One potential way to do this would be to create a feed/dashboard which displays the top 5 upvoted (3 on smaller metas) feature-request and bug posts for each metathat do not have a Stack Exchange specific tags (completed, rejected, etc). This can be either internal to SE ...

10:15 PM

that's been an interesting question to follow

user41796

@Ixrec is there a tl;dr response from SE yet?

there's an answer and several comments from SE employees, which in my somewhat cynical view boil down to "bug tracking is hard and we aren't very good at it", or as enderland put it:

Honestly, this sounds like "we're not going to give any visibility into which features are queued. We are only going to give feedback when either rejected or when they are completed." Is that your intent here? — enderland 3 hours ago

user55340

I suspect they are caught a bit off guard on a Friday afternoon.

user55340

@Ixrec they wrote the software.

user41796

@MichaelT I suspect a lot of the CMs are scrambling at the moment, yes.

user55340

10:18 PM

Trello and fogbugz are sibling companies to SE. There is no excuse for "bug tracking is hard"

@GlenH7 they may not have any answer, either, realistically SE is good enough and all of us still contribute inspite of bugs/wants/desires, what incentive is there realistically?

@MichaelT I'm not saying I agree with their answers. That's just what their answers sound like to me.

@MichaelT They should hire @enderland to just be in charge of it.

bug and feature request community liaison

your point is one of many reasons I'm not quite happy with said answers

but this one's definitely worth waiting a few days to see if we get a more serious response

I actually think my idea is a pretty good idea

10:19 PM

@enderland worse is better

user55340

@enderland unless it is better, September will crush is again.

user41796

@MichaelT Not really looking forward to it.

user41796

Having another diamond on our side would help though...

@enderland iirc there was an MSO thread recently which showed there's a recent statistically significant drop in super-contributors contributing

user55340

@TimPost Its been another couple months and September is right around the corner (with all the student homework that brings). Have you thought about this any more? — MichaelT 1 hour ago

10:22 PM

@MichaelT that's likely to happen regardless though, let's be realistic

user41796

@MichaelT And it wasn't so long ago (even SE's 6-8 weeks, anyone?) that additional changes to the close system were coming.

user55340

@Ixrec super contributers dropping off isn't a big deal and to be expected. No one moving into their place is.

@MichaelT that's what I meant, a drop in net contributions, not individual contributors

ok folks I'm off

cya

user55340

10:25 PM

SO also has significant finding material and community moderation issues that also appears to stem from differing goals at different levels of the community structure.

@MichaelT which differing goals do you have in mind?

user55340

New users, ~5k+, moderators, and SE have different goals for the site.

on the plus side, the image in the SE employee's answer has led me to an amusing blog

headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/… "Put each slide on trial for its life. Ask it to defend itself. Show no mercy."

10:48 PM

Is that Headrush blog in the feeds for this room? That's a pretty cool site.

7

Q: Additional RSS feeds

This is based on a few other posts here, such as 1, 2, 3, and 4. User Answers: A particular user's newly posted answers to questions. Every answer posted by the user gets published. Edits to answers would be published as well. Ideally, it would be nice to differentiate somehow between new answe...

feature-request rss feed data-analysis

Please pound SE over the head until I get my feeds, please.

user55340

11:34 PM

@RobertHarvey They don't have a simple rss feed that I can easily spot.

MichaelT has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

MichaelT has stopped a feed from being posted into this room

user55340

Ok... maybe they do. Lets try that link (and I also removed the ars technica feed which hasn't had a post in a LONG time)

Creating Passionate Users: Is your app an ass-kisser?

posted on March 21, 2007 by Kathy

If your app was an employee, what kind of employee would it be? When it's employee performance review time, how would you rate it? These are just a few of the apps I've worked with recently... What other app/product employee-types...

Creating Passionate Users: User Community and ROI

posted on March 22, 2007 by Kathy

Every time I give a talk, someone always asks, "That's all good and nice that helping users learn is the key to creating passionate users... but who's going to do all that extra work? Who's going to make the extra...

Creating Passionate Users: Update/Joint Statement with Chris Locke

posted on April 02, 2007 by Kathy

Chris Locke and I agreed to publish a statement, together (both in our own words) in advance of the story which will appear tomorrow (Monday, April 2) on CNN, at 7:20 AM (EST) on "CNN American Morning", and throughout the...

Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)

posted on April 06, 2007 by Kathy

Update: I could not bear to leave this post up on the site, as one of the last things people will see and remember about this blog -- and especially with that horrible photo. So, I have moved the post...

Creating Passionate Users: My Favorite Graphs... and the future

posted on April 06, 2007 by Kathy

This blog has always been about optimism, creating better user experiences, helping users spend more time in flow, and learning. There are 405 posts here. More importantly, there are nearly 10,000 comments from y'all that add so much more to...

user55340

Ok, so that was a good link. @RobertHarvey enjoy.

11:59 PM

> On my previous job, our software went into maintenance mode, which meant no new features. We certainly aren't ready to do that with Stack Exchange, but I do think that would be a rational decision.

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