The Whiteboard

Yannis Rizos

20:00

Can we please stop referring to Bachelor of Science as a BS? That acronym is taken, use BSc.

3

user55340

@YannisRizos All in all, they mean the same thing.

Shotgun Ninja

@MichaelT Nice!

Oh, I have a half-hour before I have to leave work.

I should probably test out the new AJAX script I wrote, huh...

Yannis Rizos

SO election just started, don't forget to vote (for @ChrisF)

Shotgun Ninja

@YannisRizos already did

user55340

@YannisRizos just saw the blue dot.

Shotgun Ninja

20:04

Voted, @ChrisF as my primary.

psr

@JimmyHoffa - Started fpcomplete.com/school last night. Like it so far. $ operator combined with binary operators is the only somewhat non-intuitive thing so far.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr you'll get over that, $ is not an operator, it's a function: ($) f1 f2 = f1(f2)

So, map (+1) $ map (+1) [1,2,3] is:
map (+1) (map (+1) [1,2,3])

there aren't really operators in haskell

they're all functions

Shotgun Ninja

functional programming, baaah

Lounge<C++> on SO seems to absolutely love Haskell, for whatever reason.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ShotgunNinja say bah now, but repeat it in 15 years when every processor has 300 cores

Yannis Rizos

@ShotgunNinja If there was reason in Lounge<C++>, then it'd be called Lounge<any-language-but-C++>

Shotgun Ninja

20:10

It's making a remarkable comeback due to the fact that it can dramatically simplify programming, and get us out of the implicit language gutter for complex programs.

user55340

@ShotgunNinja Jimmy has contorted his mind into a monad... the best approach is to let him not interact with the rest of the world or make any hidden state changes. ;-)

Jimmy Hoffa

It's true, I'll break your state.

:(

Shotgun Ninja

I'm in a C# course right now in college, but it's C# (and functional language concepts), since our professor is actually intelligent and wants to teach us useful things, rather than feeding us Java.

It's probably the most fun I've had in a course thus far, and it's only the first week. (Trimester system, btw)

Yannis Rizos

A perfect moment to say that when I was teaching, I mainly taught Java.

Shotgun Ninja

@YannisRizos I'm sorry.

psr

20:12

@JimmyHoffa - If they're all functions there isn't much confusion caused by calling them operators - but I might as well use the standard terminology.

Shotgun Ninja

I've been taught Java, after learning C and C++ (loosely) on my own, pre-C++0x

user55340

@ShotgunNinja Java isn't bad... its just that the majority of schools teaching java don't seem to explain how an ArrayList differs from a LinkedList and go into the performance implications of each... they just teach the interfaces, not the theory that implements the concrete implementations.

Shotgun Ninja

@MichaelT My school actually does, though.

Yannis Rizos

@ShotgunNinja Don't be. I was teaching in a technical school (I guess the US equivalent is community college?), and I didn't really have any control over the curriculum.

user55340

This failing isn't unique to any modern language... one can make the same mistake in teaching C# or C++ just as easily.

Shotgun Ninja

20:13

To be fair, all arguments I've seen place my school directly behind Carnegie Mellon or the MIT/Harvard level in terms of educational quality.

Yannis Rizos

They said Java, I taught Java. Life goes on.

psr

@JimmyHoffa - The non intuitive thing is just getting the syntax right with (to me) weird associativity. That is function application I'm with fine $as that something it is.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr And people call them operators sometimes, it's just that term creates a wall when people are starting haskell a lot of the time, they expect . or $ are language level constructs and that to do things like them you would need to alter the language

Yannis Rizos

Are we still pretending Haskell is not an evil scheme to make all programmers feel dumb?

psr

@YannisRizos - I've been lured in so far. The dumb making parts are coming up shortly.

Jimmy Hoffa

20:15

@YannisRizos it's an evil scheme to make programmers smart (smart programmers are the most dangerous kind after all)

user55340

Back when I took classes... 302 was pascal, 367 was C, 412 was Fortran or Matlab (took it multiple times - different language each time), and then I got around to the 500 level classes, C++ had taken hold. Except in 538 which was theory of programming languages where we wrote C, Java (1995!), ML, and prolog. Oh, and 540 (AI) was in Lisp.

Shotgun Ninja

We don't really teach many alternative programming languages, though. We have some courses on embedded AVR assembly, C, C++, and C#... but not much else. I think we sometimes do a course in Python or Objective-C, but we don't do much other than that, except in other programs.

@MichaelT Where did you go? MIT?

That sounds like the MIT numbering system, and the courses that they offered around the mid-90's.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT MIT? Hah, you forgot already that he writes perl :P

user55340

@ShotgunNinja UW Madison.

Shotgun Ninja

@MichaelT Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like larger-school offerings.

user55340

20:17

They've changed over the years... but you can get an idea of them at courses.moodle.wisc.edu/prod/course/category.php?id=823

Shotgun Ninja

MSOE can't get the faculty to teach things like ML or Prolog.

Oh, we do a lot with database stuff as well.

user55340

I had 520, 537, 540, (I really regret dropping 564 - it was taught by a very well known prof that I didn't find out until years later)...

user55340

Ahh, better listing... cs.wisc.edu/academic-programs/courses/cs-course-descriptions

user55340

412 was numerical methods... thats the Fortran / matlab depending on professor.

Shotgun Ninja

lololol -- Contest-Level Programming?

578

Jimmy Hoffa

20:19

@psr You'll get better at precedence rules, adding extra parens all over is totally common to start, I still do it sometimes when I can't get ordering right. Pop stuff into hpaste.org and it'll give you notes of where you don't need the parents to help you notice as well

Shotgun Ninja

Interesting, though. I've got some good friends over at UW-Madison, didn't know it had so many computer science courses.

I know Parkside, in my hometown of Kenosha, has a surprisingly good-quality Computer Science program, according to the attestations of my friends.

user55340

Not all of them are offered at any given time... some are just "a professor offered this within the past 5 years as something that interested him or her for a semester and thought it would be fun to teach" - they were fun to take too.

Shotgun Ninja

I decided to go into Software Engineering, though, to get away of the common pitfall of missing out on practical software development experience.

user55340

I only saw 545 (natural language) offered once in the 3 years I was taking that level of classes... and it conflicted with something I had to have.

Shotgun Ninja

@MichaelT Yeah, MSOE is the same way. I've been trying to get into Advanced Computer Graphics, just because I really want to learn to work with OpenGL.

I'm one of those odd kids that just wants to make vidya gaems.

user55340

20:23

640 - Intro to computer networking was taught by Larry Landwebber...

user55340

Lawrence Landweber

Lawrence H. Landweber is John P. Morgridge Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his bachelor's degree in 1963 at Brooklyn College and his Ph.D. at Purdue University in 1967. His doctoral thesis was "A design algorithm for sequential machines and definability in monadic second-order arithmetic." He is best known for founding the CSNET project in 1979, which later developed into NSFNET. He is credited with having made the fundamental decision to use the TCP/IP protocol. Publications He is co-author of Brainerd, Walter S., and...

user55340

Note that "He is credited with having made the fundamental decision to use the TCP/IP protocol."

Jimmy Hoffa

dang, I'd heard madison was a decent school before but I never knew they had profs like that

Shotgun Ninja

But unlike so many others that I know, I'm actually poised very well in terms of background and self-education to go into game engine design.

user55340

On databases... there was a confrence where I read the people presenting... 2/3 were either: grad students at UW Madison, Profs at UW Madison, or people who were past grad students at UW Madison.

user55340

20:25

David DeWitt

David J. DeWitt is the John P. Morgridge Professor (Emeritus) of [http://www.cs.wisc.edu Computer Sciences] at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, which he led for more than 30 years. Professor DeWitt is known for his pioneering research in the areas of parallel databases, benchmarking, object-oriented databases, and XML databases. He is an elected member of the Natio...

user55340

And then in the math/science area... there's Carl de Boor... go look at any Matlab code on splines to find his name in there.

Thomas Owens

I don't think any famous people taught at my school. :(

user55340

Carl R. de Boor

Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor (born 3 December 1937) is a German-American mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early life Born in Stolp, Germany (now, as part of Poland, called Słupsk), as the 7th of 8 children born to Werner (an anti-Nazi Lutheran minister) and Toni de Boor in 1937, he fled in 1945 with his family, settling eventually in Schwerin, then part of East Germany. As a child, he was often ill, suffering from a variety of conditions. In 1955, young Carl took advantage of the temporary political thaw following Joseph Stalin's death in 19...

Shotgun Ninja

informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/pers/hd/u/Urbain:Jay.html

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT and yet somehow you came out and wrote perl... a good education gone to waste.. :P

user55340

20:29

@JimmyHoffa I like to get stuff done... I had a more sysadmin bend when I started the professional world. I got cured of that.

user55340

groups.google.com/group/alt.sysadmin.recovery/browse_thread/…

user55340

>Michael Turner ([email protected]) wrote:
>: Yes, recovery is imminent. I will be leaving the world of contracting
>: and tech support, and heading to the world of engineering, specficaly
>: web programmer. Not IS. Not tech support. Not sysadmin. Not even
>: testing. Nope... writing code.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr which of the two tutorials are you following?

Jimmy Hoffa

20:51

It's funny what happens when so many people try to explain something; the explanations end up getting stranger and stranger as people try to explain it in their own words where so many other words are already there. Funniest functor explanation I've ever seen:
If you will give me a blueberry for each apple I give you (a -> b), and I have a box of apples (f a), then I can get a box of blueberries (f b).

psr

@JimmyHoffa - If we had bread then we could have turkey sandwiches if we had turkey.

I did "Basics of Haskel" and started "Introduction to Haskel", which I'm sure is entirely different.

Jimmy Hoffa

Or in haskell:
psr :: Bread -> Turkey -> [TurkeySandwich]

So you read all the way through the monad explanation from Bartosz?

The other one is going to go back over the same info as Bartosz' 3, what I read said they created the 2 separate sets of introductory tutorials presuming one would work better than the other for different people given the same content

user20683

World_Engineer:: [Work] -> [Kroger] -> [Home]

user20683

map(+ food) [stomach]

psr

@JimmyHoffa - Yes. The language is supposed to be hard, the reading was pretty easy, I'm fine reading both.

user55340

21:04

"ftp" means "Food Transfer Protocol".. right?

user20683

@MichaelT that or something I can't utter here

user55340

% ftp pizza.hut
mode food
GET pizza.tar
BYE
% tar xvf pizza.tar
% mv pizza /dev/oven

user20683

user20683

95% of bad questions could be solved with a rubber duck

user55340

21:28

How about a RITA? Reliable Internet Troubleshooting Agent - tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2321

user20683

@MichaelT too overengineered

user20683

:P

user55340

@WorldEngineer Go read it... it isn't.

user20683

@MichaelT was making a joke :P

user55340

It has applications for all layers of the network... physical layer, network layer, transport layer, application layer, political layer, and religious layer.

user55340

21:32

Political Layer: Strike advocates of disruptive or obstructive policies with RITA, preferably on the top of the skull. In extreme cases insertion of RITA into bodily apertures may become necessary. WARNING: subsequent failure to remove RITA may cause further problems.

Jimmy Hoffa

21:47

@psr don't be afraid of the "Advanced" section on SoH, the "Functor, Applicative, Monad" bit by snoyman is a pretty direct continuation from the 3rd article by Bartosz

@psr actually I'd read the data types part from Brent's intro stuff before that one, didn't notice Bartosz never talked about algebraic data types

psr

I'm reading top to bottom, depth first, so that should work out.

Jimmy Hoffa

@psr I wouldn't do that quite; you'll want to push Yesod to the last.

after the advanced stuff, if you are even interested in yesod to begin with

Yesod relies on a lot of very advanced techniques that you can parrot back to the compiler per a tutorial but won't really make any sense until you know how many different things are at play

ironic that Bartosz wrote the Yesod stuff when Snoyman created Yesod

Stack Exchange

22:13

Blog - Stack Exchange: VOTE NOW in the 2013 Stack Overflow Moderator Election

Shog9 on March 08, 2013

It’s time once again to cast your vote for the next Stack Overflow moderators. The primaries have just ended, and the top ten candidates can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/election.

We’re running the election now (rather than a year from the last election in June) because veteran moderator Tim Post is stepping down in order to work with us as a Community Manager! While we’re extremely lucky to have his hard-working brilliance brought to bear on the problems we face managing all these sites, his transition does create an immediate need for a replacement on the SO mod team. …

gnat

22:53

@JimmyHoffa that's an idea worth thinking about. And your justification makes a lot of sense

yesterday, by Jimmy Hoffa

Result: less garbage on front-page = less confusion to new users thinking the site isn't for high-quality Q's. I guess the hypothesis is: Emperically we have seen front-page full of closures doesn't discourage bad Qs, so maybe a front-page full of only high quality open Qs would encourage good Qs

user55340

People would like it - there is a meta post about filtering closed.

gnat

by the way SE acknowledges that question closure itself is worth some er "rehab". One of recent examples at MSO:

35

Q: Help us make "Off-Topic" close reasons clearer to the OP

Boring Background As many of you know, we’ve been spending a lot of time working on how to improve the closing process network-wide. We’ve rolled out some changes to how duplicates work already, and we’ve been working with the mods on some sites to get input on what’s working and what’s causing ...

user55340

5

Q: Can closed questions be automatically tagged as 'closed'?

Mainly so I can add 'closed' as an ignored topic in my prefs and hide them from the page. It's very frustrating to see tons of closed questions all over the place.

feature-request closed-questions

Jimmy Hoffa

23:09

@MichaelT Where have you learned about these RFCs from?

psr

@JimmyHoffa - All right. Yesod last.

Jimmy Hoffa

more importantly, where do I acquire a RITA?

(I wish to test the RITA's validity for RFC1149, so technically I should get one as a research donation)

user55340

@JimmyHoffa A list on everything2. Note the similarity of the author's name to mine. everything2.com/title/April+Fools%2527+RFCs

user55340

And, if you read the RFC...

user55340

> RITA, the Reliable Internet Troubleshooting Agent, was developed initially at The Leftbank Operation (now known as Cohesive Network Systems, New England Division) based on a hardware platform supplied by Archie McPhee (Reference [1]).

user55340

23:16

Apparently, there's a typo in there... its reference #2.

user55340

> [2] McPhee, A., mcphee.com

Jimmy Hoffa

Yeah, I actually noticed that and was confused for a moment before following the link to a website that appeared to sell oddities for no intelligible use or purpose

user55340

Like... say... rubber chickens?

user55340

They also have wonderful candies... back in the days of the atkins diet fad... I got some larvets from them and put them in the break room with the sign "Free - Carb Free Candy"

user55340

(Now a different company sells them... larvets)

user20683

23:21

@MichaelT reminds me of TNG's conspiracy

Jimmy Hoffa

I wonder if anyone has ever implemented RFC 748

user55340

@WorldEngineer I do remember that, though I more think "Gak is a dish best served live"

user20683

@MichaelT gagh is larger

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Intentionally or not? Seriously though, kind of... iptables can simulate network outages and similar packet loss.

user55340

60

Q: Simulate delayed and dropped packets on Linux

I would like to simulate packet delay and loss for UDP and TCP on Linux to measure the performance of an application. Is there a simple way to do this?

linux tcp throttling

user20683

23:24

@MichaelT if you want the closest thing to Klingon Cuisine, go to Cambodia or Laos

user20683

they cook all kinds of bugs there

user20683

I'm told silkworm moth pupae are tasty

user55340

@WorldEngineer There were some restaurants in the east bay that I was taken to that had some very odd cuisine.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I'm just thinking about a telnet server that you can tell not to randomly-lose, which of course always responds do randomly-lose, and has facility to be told to randomly lose at which point starts munging arbitrary files

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I have a fondness for the "12 networking truths" RFC - its just too much for some people to handle. Especially that part about pigs flying.

user55340

23:30

And then there's the Christmas one... tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1882

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