The Whiteboard

12:10 AM

@JimmyHoffa A site should be designed around a reasonably coherent community of experts. Software people overlap a fair amount. All design in one site would be like having a site called "doing stuff" that merges woodworking, travel, aviation, bicycles, gardening, homebrewing, martial arts, and lego answers. Which come to think of it would be AWESOME. I endorse your proposal.

enderland

12:44 AM

design reviews are XY problems, nearly by definition

psr

@enderland Because you don't really want a design review, you want to solve the problem you don't know you have until you have a design review?

enderland

@psr Well, without the context of the problem/situation to design you're asking "please review this design/code" and lacking the context for the actual requirements/etc then it's... fairly pointless to "review"

I guess if enough of the requirements/problem are listed it's less XY-ish

psr

@enderland That does tend to be problematic. Code Review is pretty good at dealing with it, but I imagine a design review would have that problem in a bigger way.

enderland

@psr I think code review lends itself more to, "how can this code be better?" and it is assumed the code is meeting the right requirements?

psr

12:59 AM

:27009186 var eight=8; var nine=9;
Yep.

@enderland But how do you decide what better means without requirements?

enderland

magic :o

Kit Z. Fox

covers ears lalalalalala

Aaron Hall

Hey what's up?

Kit Z. Fox

Enderland is insulting my profession.

Aaron Hall

QA? I just grab people in the hallway and QA.

:D

enderland

1:07 AM

@KitZ.Fox ?

Kit Z. Fox

@enderland I was joking. About your stance on requirements.

enderland

oh, gotcha

Kit Z. Fox

I was having a hell of a time today, trying to explain my "user story" to the dev.

I gave up and started to explain to him that he needed to unhardcode the dataload part.

He didn't get that either.

Maybe tomorrow.

Aaron Hall

Did you try speaking de English?

Turn it off and on?

Kit Z. Fox

I tried speaking louder.

But it somehow blew out his rap.

supposedly.

Aaron Hall

1:12 AM

Try asking how the user was supposed to select their own data?

That might do get through the thickness.

Kit Z. Fox

I think I'm going to have to tell him to comment out these 25 lines of code. Just do that. And then we'll look at that other class in a minute.

"I'm going to change this data. You need to abandon the stupid, convoluted logic that has now been edited so many times that it is basically matching the labels as a key and then not really doing anything. You don't actually need that."

All this because we want to change the labels.

enderland

my reaction to that was to get a label maker and start shooting labels at him

Kit Z. Fox

This is work that was already done, tested, and signed off on in the last release.

Supposedly.

I guess my idea of hardcoded and his idea of hardcoded and QA's idea of how to test that are radically different.

Adding a new label to the case statement doesn't cut it.

But now it is drinking time.

enderland

1:28 AM

@KitZ.Fox that has inspired me to have a drink

Kit Z. Fox

@enderland What are you drinking?

enderland

@KitZ.Fox irish cream, on ice

Kit Z. Fox

I'm wondering if I can justify using my kid's juice box to mix with this rum.

There's something so depraved about that.

Deliciously depraved.

daOnlyBG

2:06 AM

Fun fact: the last 4 times I've logged into the chatroom, alcohol was being discussed; out of the past 8 times, 7 times beverages (alcohol+coffee) were being discussed (no, I am not complaining)

enderland

@daOnlyBG :-)

daOnlyBG

Does anyone here have experience with gawk 'n' awk?

MetaFight

2:24 AM

@daOnlyBG I had a beer tonight while ordering another aeropress coffee maker. It's important to enjoy the good things in life.

daOnlyBG

@MetaFight I just had a latte that featured ginger, anise, and a few other spices infused into a milk froth and single origin espresso, with a little bit of honey added

I wholeheartedly agree; hopefully there's a little bit of bourbon left over at home..

user15026

@KitZ.Fox Do it. :D

user15026

I am drinking plain old orange juice.

MetaFight

2:42 AM

@AshleyNunn some classics can't be improved upon. Though some would say that one is better with vodka. Not me, though.

(vodka = meh)

(vodka) => this.DontCareFor(vodka);

daOnlyBG

@MetaFight Ever had Effen?

MetaFight

nope. Is that a good vodka?

daOnlyBG

I hate to speak in superlatives, but with the exception of some pricey single malt scotches, Effen vodka is the smoothest liquor I've ever had... and for $21, it's amazing

MetaFight

@daOnlyBG I don't buy liquor that often anymore, but I'll try to remember to give that one a try.

daOnlyBG

you might like it, if you get the chance to try it. the stuff is sold in most liquor stores

Sure

user55340

2:48 AM

@daOnlyBG It has been many years, but some. Best bit of advice though is if it becomes too complicated, get perl.

daOnlyBG

@MichaelT Thanks. I'll definitely have to pick up this conversation where we left off later- the coffee shop I'm at is about to close.

enderland

@daOnlyBG my brother in law got a really fancy latte maker (like $200) and it's awesome. just way too much money :D

user55340

@daOnlyBG See? Coffee and booze.

user15026

@MetaFight I have vodka, so I could have it in my OJ but tonight I am content with just the OJ

daOnlyBG

@enderland Nice. I hope to get one of these someday: espressounplugged.com/media/catalog/product/cache/3/image/…

enderland

2:53 AM

@daOnlyBG that's the exact one!

this reminds me, I haven't roasted coffee in forever

I should do that tonight

daOnlyBG

Nice!

Yeah I want one, but I need to save up $$$ to propose to this girl I've been seeing for a while now

well, that, and scotch

alright folks. I'm out. peace

user55340

@daOnlyBG bunch of crazy men folk in this room. Bachelor is the way to be. Care free...

user55340

The only expenses are my own... or my cat. And he accepts having a $0.50/night dinner and some cat treats put in a frustrating thing he has to push around to get anything out of.

user15026

@MichaelT and some lady folk! But I so far am not that particular kind of crazy.

user55340

@AshleyNunn you are a cat?

user15026

3:01 AM

@MichaelT Not last I checked

user55340

Just wait... my cat is crazy... he just knocked off a small tub of BBQ sauce on the floor... for no more reason than "it was on the table."

user15026

but I meant more the "marrying" bit, but I guess I'm dating @WorldEngineer so that disqualifies me even if he is too far away right now so I am mostly rocking the lady and her cat life

user55340

user55340

Number of single men for every 100 single women by county in California... and in the .com boom, it was even more skewed.

user55340

And that doesn't even tell the whole story... because thats all adult ages. The 20-29 age bracket is even more skewed.

user55340

3:08 AM

Start multiplying that ratio out by the population of the county (SF is 837,000, Santa Clara is 1.8 million) and there are a lot of single men.

user55340

So, I'm a bachelor.

enderland

@MichaelT yeah I was going to say, that's surprisingly close to 1:1 - and it's even more weird to see places where there are 10 men for every 9 women

And some of us are happily married :-)

user55340

Because you know I like charts.

user55340

The only place with a more skewed raw "50,000 more single men than women" type stat was Alaska.

enderland

3:10 AM

Wow, that's crazy to show how different the coasts are

user55340

enderland

though without a scale for numbers and... ratios :-)

also freshly roasted coffee smells so bad. crazy how much that changes in 12 hours

@MichaelT it's interesting that even in SF area it's still only ~5% more men

I wonder how much of the rural difference is the fact that men die earlier on average

so statistically there should be more women than men, I assume

user55340

age | male | female | all
0 to 4 | 18250 people | 17561 people | 35811 people
5 to 17 | 36878 people | 35664 people | 72542 people
18 to 64 | 306303 people | 282082 people | 588385 people
65+ | 48372 people | 62645 people | 111017 people
all | 409803 people | 397952 people | 807755 people

daOnlyBG

...I'm back

enderland

3:16 AM

so I have a bunch of these:

amazon.com/Star-Micro-Machines-Collectors-Edition/dp/B0009J4GC0

user55340

@enderland yea, and 5% is 20k.

enderland

I wonder what a good way to make a display case type of thing for them would be

wow they are retailing for $30 on amazon?

user55340

The thing is, look at that population pyramid - the women aged 65+ are where they make it all up.

user55340

( wolframalpha.com/input/?i=men+in+san+francisco )

enderland

@MichaelT yeah, that's what I was curious about - I know in Iowa some crazy percentage of land is owned by women, mainly because farmer wives end up with it

user55340

3:17 AM

@enderland The thing to realize there is also "san francisco" meant "hour drive each way" because of the traffic.

user55340

So, look at Santa Clara instead.

user55340

age | male | female | all
0 to 4 | 63861 people | 60836 people | 124697 people
5 to 17 | 155712 people | 148659 people | 304371 people
18 to 64 | 591368 people | 568749 people | 1.16 million people
65+ | 87072 people | 112136 people | 199208 people
all | 898013 people | 890380 people | 1.788 million people

enderland

crazy how close those demographics are still

user55340

It was worse 15 years ago.

user55340

3:20 AM

Go to the city I was living in... heh.

user55340

daOnlyBG

So, here's a question for you fine programmers (who I have, as you all know, a ton to learn from): I am trying to automate a lot of the stuff I have to do at work. A lot of our statistical reports run on macros, using a joint effort between Microsoft Excel and a proprietary statistical analysis software.

Well, I don't want to have to manually enter in values from PDFs (who would?) into an .xlsm file, so I thought I'd build a package that would (1) read the PDFs (sadly, the data isn't in tables), (2) place the values into a table, (3) export it to MS Excel... and then let the preexisting macros do the work.

user55340

You can see all the people moving there... that 25-29 bracket spikes

daOnlyBG

The question: should I use a scripting language, or should I build a C# app?

enderland

@MichaelT but interestingly for both genders pretty easily

user55340

3:21 AM

@daOnlyBG PDFs are a major pain to read.

enderland

+1

daOnlyBG

@MichaelT I don't doubt it

enderland

where do the PDFs come from?

you might have better luck changing that

user55340

@enderland There are jobs there... but there are ~3500 women to ~4500 men in that age bracket.

daOnlyBG

labs and plants from a collection of large companies :|

user55340

3:23 AM

58

Q: How to extract text from a PDF?

Can anyone recommend a library/API for extracting the text and images from a PDF? We need to be able to get at text that is contained in pre-known regions of the document, so the API will need to give us positional information of each element on the page. We would like that data to be output i...

daOnlyBG

@MichaelT That's a pretty cool link. Thanks for the reference

I fear that most of the PDFs aren't text embedded

(i.e., I'd be working with images)

enderland

I wonder if my wife would let me hang up a foamcore shadow box type of thing with these micro machines. :D

something like that

user55340

@daOnlyBG Then you're looking at OCR... or mechanical turk.

daOnlyBG

yeah

user55340

(mechanical turk: mturk.com/mturk/welcome )

daOnlyBG

3:27 AM

lol, "Artificial Artificial Intelligence"

user55340

mturk.com/mturk/…

user55340

That's the OCR ones currently paying out.

daOnlyBG

Hmm

wow

Yeah, I could have this done for a fraction of my cost...

user55340

That's one of the "do this" hits.

daOnlyBG

3:30 AM

I think it'd be more impressive to my boss if I built some sort of software package that did everything though

No doubt, I'd probably have to use an OCR, like you said

but I'm unsure if I should build a small app using C#, or just a script that can run

user55340

@daOnlyBG Yep... but take into account the "how much time are you going to waste trying to do this" and "how much does this cost while you can be doing other things"

daOnlyBG

you know, I just realized the obvious

I can't really let others see the PDFs

(i.e., people who aren't employed by my company)

as is, it takes my team quite some time to "transcribe" the data in these PDFs

building a small program to automate most of it would, in my opinion, save us a ton of time

user55340

The flip side - it is probably less time than trying to OCR and verify it.

daOnlyBG

Perhaps, sure

Duga

4:43 AM

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about software engineering more broadly and not programming specifically. It would probably do well on programmers.stackexchange. — sclv 34 secs ago

Duga

6:07 AM

I think this belongs more to programmers site than to SOF. — Alexei 1 min ago

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