The Whiteboard

1:51 AM

can anyone over 10k see this post? programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/167384/…

if so the info there could be added to http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/170003/my-proposed-design-is-usually-worse-than-my-colleagues-how-do-i-get-better/170007#170007 to fix the dead link. Would be mighty helpful

maple_shaft

1:32 PM

> This is a branch to keep track of our extreme attempts to retrofit FFP into the hilariously antiquated "architecture" of what Oracle likes to call their Public Cloud.

Is this a good log message for subversion?

user55340

@maple_shaft Trying to make an extreme/agile joke for you that might make a future programmers smirk or scratch their heads.

maple_shaft

@MichaelT I don't want to spend that much time on the log message

I am leaving in a few weeks for a better job

and I doubt that anybody will ever read this or even see this code before too long

its that bad

err... the company ... not the code

All in all my last two years here were humbling. I thought that if I were just in charge of all technical decisions as well as being the primary business analyst that I would make management and sales peoples jobs so easy that the company would be an enormous success...

JC

was I wrong

you can't fix stupid

2

user55340

Change your organization or change your organization took option #2?

user55340

(thats a reference to a link I read from C2 awhile back...)

user55340

c2.com/cgi/wiki?ChangeYourOrganization

maple_shaft

1:47 PM

@MichaelT I did change things here immensely

but in the end... there just weren't enough hours in the day to do the sales peoples and managers jobs too

user55340

Yep... jamesshore.com/Change-Diary is a full diary version.

3

maple_shaft

2:14 PM

@MichaelT Wow... thats a great read!

I think the most important take away from this is that people have different skills and tools

and they choose to use a certain tool (Eg. scrum board, daily status meetings, etc...) based on what has worked for them in the past, or just based on that tool being the only thing they CAN use

People in an organization don't perform actions because they are proven to work or because they are the best action for a situation...

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft Good on ya for finally moving on, what're ya moving to if I might ask?

maple_shaft

they do it because they are there from 9 to 5 and they HAVE TO DO SOMETHING, even if the only thing they can do is hurting the project or the company

maybe if orgs put less focus on the 9 to 5 and more focus on the responsibilities and deadlines then things would be more efficient and less messy

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft many places do, just likely not the majority of places

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa I accepted a senior lead position at the parent organization

so technically its a transfer

Jimmy Hoffa

ah, hopefully decisions up there aren't so hair brained

maple_shaft

2:19 PM

they are

but

Jimmy Hoffa

and also hopefully they can't still access you as a technical resource since you're in the same org technically

user55340

@maple_shaft I'm glad you liked it. One of my cow-orkers quite enjoys the take aways from that.

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa They have a huge budget, job security, grand high level ambitions, and people on the ground who don't know how to make it reality

Jimmy Hoffa

I've been fired 0 times, and worked 8 different software company's now, guess we know which change of organization I prefer (or have been empowered to do anyway)

maple_shaft

I will be able to focus on middle tier and front-end architecture and software deisgn, and I will get to TEACH!

Jimmy Hoffa

2:21 PM

awesome

maple_shaft

less emphasis on coding, more on process, design, prototyping, documentation, and mentoring

its exactly what I want to do

Jimmy Hoffa

Sweet

Mentoring is fun

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa Yeah I like teaching others. There is a lot of politics though but I should be on the good side of things because my friend tells me I have a lion for a manager

she protects her people

Jimmy Hoffa

That's always good

maple_shaft

My friend is on that team and he has been there for 2.5 years without a complaint, and he is more cynical and disgruntled than I am

Jimmy Hoffa

2:24 PM

It's interesting there's a really clear distinction among managers I identified a long time ago: Managers who believe they are there to make people do things, and Managers who believe they are there to do things for people

maple_shaft

Amen to that...

Jimmy Hoffa

That core distinction makes a difference in how the managers do absolutely everything

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa The caveat is if the director/upper manager gets involved

this isn't a for profit company I am going to, and with directors they have a habit of flushing them more often than a toilet the day after burrito night

so there is a natural 2 year cycle of volatility here

everything you work on gets scrapped, ground people get readjusted and moved to different teams, then a new director comes in and makes huge sweeping proclamations and bold promises

everybody gets confused and nothing happens for a year

the next year people figure out what they need to do and make great progress

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat thanks for the edit! I would have done it but I didn't have rep to see the linked Q

maple_shaft

then pressure suddenly comes down on the people for a few months to show results until the CIO decides to lob heads again

but the ground people never get fired

just moved around, the cycle continues

Jimmy Hoffa

2:32 PM

@maple_shaft On the bright side you'll never be held to account for any code because a minimum of code ever actually get's released (most of it just scrapped) in those types of environment

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa I am okay with this.

Jimmy Hoffa

Sucks when everything you work on get's scrapped, but it is nice knowing you'll never get that "O SHIT BUG IN PRODUCTION!" stressor

maple_shaft

exactly... I need less stress

and this is the best paying gig in town

user55340

@maple_shaft Back when Netapp had its layoff I had a great manager... she did protect her people. She saw the signs of a layoff looming months ahead and got a C?O approved open position on the team (we did need more people...). When the layoff came around, she laid off the open position instead of one of her people.

maple_shaft

@MichaelT It can go to the other extreme though

some people NEED TO BE LAID OFF

fresh blood and all that

there are a lot of grey beard programmers here that found a niche and desperately hold onto the responsibility of it to protect their cushy job

fortunately I am not beholden to them

they can be worked around

Jimmy Hoffa

2:39 PM

@maple_shaft Now you're short-timing, so go write some answers around P.SE, soon you'll be on the learning curve again and have no time for it

(Or learn Haskell so when you start mentoring people in a while, you'll be conflicted and try instructing them to do things they find terribly confusing ;)

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa I have been having trouble writing answers on P.SE lately

I either feel they are beyond my expertise or far too simple to deserve an answer

Jimmy Hoffa

There have been a lot of horribly simplistic Q's lately, that's true...

maple_shaft

maybe i'm just not a good programmer?

I have thought about that lately

user55340

"Good programmer" is an awkward term. People compare themselves to the superstar "10x" and "25x" programmers. They are the 0.0001%. Compare yourself to the median. You are likely a standard distribution above that.

user55340

(or more)

maple_shaft

2:51 PM

@MichaelT I have always been in the top 20% of every org I have worked for

but the internet constantly reminds me that I am a big fish in a small pond

Jimmy Hoffa

Eh, maybe you are maybe you aren't, doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the day becoming a good code monkey takes someone who understands the principles as you do no time at all; just requires the motivation to want that skill. It's a trivial skill compared to understanding design tradeoffs, how to analyze and improve the designs in a system

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa I feel that aspect is so damn easy though

user55340

@maple_shaft A look at the questions on SO should also remind you that there are a damn lot of minnows.

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft if you have trouble code-monkeying it's more likely because you just were never motivated by the concrete implementations much and so never bothered to put a lot of time into it

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa Yeah that about sums it up

user55340

2:53 PM

Poking at the perl tag I consider to be painful when people are asking things that are covered in the single digit chapters of Learning Perl... and they appear to be hired by biotech companies (a job I would quite like).

Jimmy Hoffa

I blame the Jon Skeet, Eric Lippert, Jon Harrop's of the world.

In reality this is a symptom of a larger cultural occurence though: The internet has so vastly changed what we consider to be ordinary through over-exposure to extraordinary people

and that's happening at a much grander cultural scale than just the programming pond around SO

It's like in physics, greater surface area belies greater conductive throughput, the internet gives our culture this enormous surface area, where those with greater energy are put in contact with so many more people

@maple_shaft ironically, I think my code monkey skills are significantly improved over what they otherwise would be due to years doing CM/deployment/environment management work, in that work you have to do a lot of tedious stuff quickly without making mistakes, you get into a practical hypnotic state of just subconciously repeating steps perfectly while keeping track of all the steps you already completed and knowing which are left. When I'm slinging code I find myself working exactly the same

Designing the approach is the actually hard part that requires skill, implementing is just an act of typing (and occasionally catching when the concrete starts to veer from it's design)

maple_shaft

3:11 PM

@JimmyHoffa I suppose you are right

user55340

3:28 PM

The set of witeboard avatars has @AnnaLear 's cat looking intently on at @maple_shaft 's bird.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Damnit, your jamesshore diary link is totally going to suck a grip of my time today. You're a jerk.

Luckily, as it stands; I'm a touch short on tasks after slinging a ton of code yesterday to get an instrumentation system stood up and pretty much done.

gnat

4:08 PM

@maple_shaft "far too simple" => most likely a dupe of something. 99.99% of far too simple questions have already been asked and answered, one only has to find a dupe and vote close (to keep site clean)

...with your binding votes this can be a bit more complicated though (if memory serves I've seen mods posting comments pointing to possible dupe, leaving decision to community members)

user55340

Is it possible for a mod to flag for closure, let it go into the review queue, and then let other people close it?

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT Not 100% sure, but I don't think possible. We can flag for mod attention and have our fellow mods check something out for us, but mod attention flags go straight to mods.

gnat

@MichaelT I don't think so. Given that for close-voters flags like that automagically convert to votes, it would be only natural that mod flags auto-convert that way too

user55340

4:26 PM

Well... maybe another feature request for a mod checkbox on that window (flag, don't vote)...

gnat

4:38 PM

@MichaelT if memory serves, that has been discussed (and declined) at MSO as well (every simple question is a dupe, once again:)...

Yannis Rizos

@MichaelT Why would we need that?

gnat

...decline justification was something like that you're the mod, you're supposed to know what you're doing. if you feel this is better left to community, don't cheat with flags; if you're confident, just bind your freaking vote. Fair enough to me...

Yannis Rizos

I've ranted about this on Meta history recently.

7

A: Should we have "three vote" moderators from the community?

Closing questions unilaterally is the least powerful action available to moderators. In no particular order, here's a brief and incomplete list of more powerful and/or more dangerous actions: Account suspensions (can't be reviewed and of course can't be reversed by the community) Account deleti...

Unilateral close votes are the least powerful action available to moderators. If we are uncertain, we should simply move on, the world won't stop spinning if we don't close a question. I do miss having normal close votes, but that doesn't mean we actually need them.

@gnat There's another side to that argument: You don't really want to give mods "softer" options, because you are also essentially giving them an easy way out of making tough decisions. And the whole point of having mods in the first place is for someone (from within the community) to make the tough decisions.

gnat

@YannisRizos thanks for reminding, yes I recall this idea now. And yes, it also feels fair to close a way out like this

IOW, it got to be yes or no. You must make up your mind, you gotta commit yourself...

►

maple_shaft

4:58 PM

@gnat @YannisRizos Then how does it work in conjunction with regular close votes? 3 super close votes / 5 close votes?

History has taught us the danger of judging a question as 3/5ths worthy of being closed

;-)

Yannis Rizos

@maple_shaft Yeah that's kind of the problem right there. Lots and lots of non binding close voters go for the close vote without being absolutely certain, thinking that if they made a mistake, it's no big deal as the responsibility is shared. I don't want to encourage mods to think like that, not so much for close votes (who cares?), but because some of our other super powers can really hurt.

Either you are certain a question doesn't belong (and fully prepared to accept all responsibility if you get it wrong) or you are not. It's the mod way.

gnat

@maple_shaft I think it doesn't work, three-votes half-mod sounds too complicated to me. as a regular user, I can leverage my power through flagging to "borrow" a part of mod power; OTOH if I need some power against particular mod decision, I go to meta and get it. The power spectrum is filled already, I see no need to invent half-mods since there are no gaps to fill...

...it got to be yes or no...

►

either regular user (with regular means to leverage / balance power through flags and meta) or normal moderator

maple_shaft

@gnat Your super limited mod power is the ability to post relevant Youtube songs to back up your argument

@gnat on a serious note, I agree with you. You are devoted to this site and I get the feeling that if you felt that you didn't already have the power to make the site a better place then you would have run for moderator in the last election

gnat

6:06 PM

@maple_shaft yeah recent election. Gave me some good food for thought...

in Programmers 2013 Moderator Elections, Feb 22 at 8:10, by Manishearth

And on Physics we try not to binding-close (we're moving towards a hands-off approach for closing wrt mods), we wait for a few votes. Caused a problem :P

Power, Power, Power, Lord...

►

Jimmy Hoffa

6:23 PM

Someone should link the change your organization or change your organization and jamesshore articles in comments here programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/194765/…

maple_shaft

@JimmyHoffa Sounds like you are electing yourself ;-)

Yannis Rizos

MetaFight, Oxford, United Kingdom

19 1

I want to close his question just so it would lead to a meta fight. Meta fighting MetaFight would be awesome!

maple_shaft

@YannisRizos If I create a sock called DestroyUser... I would delete it, just to annoy you

Yannis Rizos

6:40 PM

@maple_shaft Why would destroying a user, any user, annoy me? I love it!

thorsten müller

can we have a little explosion for the fifth user to vote close on a question? maybe different colors depending on reason for closing...

gnat

it feels like some answerers just can't pass a reading comprehension test. Question asks about patterns and paradigms, but answerer simply pushes through books and frameworks, what gives?

-1

A: Design Patterns for Javascript

From a practical standpoint, take a good look at AngularJS and KnockoutJS. These frameworks solve real problems that you encounter when building JS heavy applications. Angular is a more "all inclusive" solution with many advanced freatures, whereas Knockout only tackles the problem of realtime ...

user20683

@gnat at least it's not one of those "word salad" answers

maple_shaft

PLZ SUGGEST ME!!!!

Yannis Rizos

@thorstenmüller Heh, that would be an interesting userscript. Reminds me of the unicorn voting script...

Vegar

6:55 PM

Which site is better for feedback on nosql data model - codereview or programmers ?

user55340

Hmm... Data Exploder query to write... "All answers that have been changed since I (down) voted on them" to see if they are better now...

user55340

@Vegar or DBA.SE?

Vegar

Is there a DBA too? It's getting harder and harder to find the right site... :-/

user55340

General feedback is likely CR, though I'm not sure if they do schemas rather than code. DBA might do reviews, one would have to check the FAQ. Here, I think it would be poorly received unless you identify a problem to be solved with the existing schema.

gnat

@WorldEngineer Yeah. and spelling is OK. And there are no taglines / salutations. And... it's well-intentioned isn't it...

42

Q: Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers

In episode 42 of the Stack Exchange podcast Joel Spolsky mentioned something along the lines that some sites (for example, Travel Answers) suffer a little from questions that don't always get useful answers - even when someone has good intentions. So, for example, someone asks a question about g...

discussion stackexchange podcast answer-quality community-standards

Yannis Rizos

6:58 PM

@Vegar Code Review is for getting feedback on working code, so unless you have a chunk of code you want people to critique, it's not the site you are looking for.

user20683

Now there's an idea, an autosuggestion mechanism that checks whether or not your question might be applicable somewhere else...

Yannis Rizos

@Vegar So... that leaves us with Programmers and DBA. Programmers is more focused on design / architecture questions, DBA is more focused on... db stuff I guess ;)

Vegar

No working code yet, so that rules out code review. Even though this will be stored in some kind of nosql database eventually, my feeling is that it's more a design / architecture question for programmers then for dba guys.

At work I would ask a programmer-college not a dba-college.. :-)

user55340

Yea, those dba guys are jerks... ;-)

user20683

@Vegar post a question on their meta?

user20683

7:03 PM

dba.stackexchange.com/faq

user20683

their FAQ on Line 3

user55340

You can always also ask in chat... it gets a different set of people, but avoids all problems of topicality, locality, and constructiveness.

user20683

NoSQL is listed as being on-topic

user20683

worst they can do is migrate it to us

Vegar

That, and yell at me for posting at the wrong site... :-)

user55340

7:05 PM

@Vegar Yea, but then you flag it for migration, they're glad to get it off their site, then flag the wrong site comments as obsolete.

Vegar

I'll try the dba chat. Thanks for feedback.

user55340

@Vegar Toss a link in over here to the question over there so that any who are interested in it here know where to go. There are several people who enjoy the data design thoughts.

user55340

I've seen Yannis, Jimmy, and Thomas be quite active and helpful in such discussions.

Vegar

Nice. I will.

thorsten müller

some freelance asked us if he can have some "real" frontend for some server maintenance he has to do with a website he wrote for us (seems real to him equals gui). what's a nice way to tell him that he's an idiot and shall learn to use the command line?

chibro2

7:19 PM

Does anyone know whats the best functional reactive programming tutorial for haskell out there?

user20683

@chibro2 wait for Jimmy Hoffa to show up and ask him

user20683

or Jon Purdy but he's rarely in chat

chibro2

Ah ok thanks a lot, does Jimmy Hoffa tend to show up at a certain time

user55340

@JimmyHoffa is often here.

user55340

If you glance at chat.stackexchange.com/users/22076/jimmy-hoffa you can see a histogram of when he is often here.

chibro2

7:25 PM

ok thanks a lot, had no idea this site had these features!

user20683

@chibro2 I know a bit of Haskell myself but I don't know what the best "reactive" programming tutorial for it is.

user20683

or is that a fancy way of saying "event driven"?

user20683

as in I/O

user20683

which is a nontrivial monster in that language

thorsten müller

@WorldEngineer no it is not, it's more like if in some language you declare a=b+5 then a has a value that does not change anymore. in reactive programming if you change b, a will reflect this

chibro2

7:27 PM

@Wor

thorsten müller

like an excel sheet somehow

user20683

@thorstenmüller ah

user20683

makes sense

chibro2

@WorldEngineer to be very hones I just got started on this topic myself, and pretty much everything I know I learned from reading this answer: stackoverflow.com/questions/1028250/…

Sparr

@thorstenmüller what languages allow that sort of behavior without dealing with eval() semantics?

thorsten müller

7:37 PM

wouldn't be aware of one where this is natively implemented. in oop you can get something on that line with the observer pattern. maybe some functional languages have it. Lisp has something called Cells (a library i think). Excel and other Spreadsheets do this, but more on the line of event handling.

user20683

@thorstenmüller falcon's Tabular Programming might be similar

user20683

you could answer Yannis Rizos' question

thorsten müller

I think at a whole it's more like a paradigm. You should be able to get a "reactive" environment easy enough with any language where functions are first class and can be used like variables (mostly).

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft Eh, I was on my phone, didn't feel inclined to jigger about all of that work from that interface.

@YannisRizos no, it would be MetaAwesome

@chibro2 Google immediately gives me this haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Programming which identifies netwire which in it's examples there appear to do that job pleasantly. I try to avoid FRP personally as event-driven systems in my mind very much violate the tell-don't-ask approach. That said, sometimes they're necessary, I been designing an interactive phone system for past couple weeks which must be event-driven because it has to respond to users dialing things

@chibro2 Though if I had to do something like that in haskell I would actually begin thinking about conduit where you create data-streams that you feed data in one side, and they can follow decision trees you build in the stream, time-based stuff though could be a touch interesting in something like that

the conduit approach is more tell-don't-ask than observer patterns are. What you're asking about is very IO based though where haskell by and large you wouldn't structure your program like that, you would have a = b * 5 and not worry about changing a when b changes, because neither of them can change

(which is an over-simplification, but still more idiomatic to think about haskell in that way)

Yannis Rizos

7:57 PM

@JimmyHoffa That Google fellow is an obnoxious know it all, isn't he?

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos total prick that one.

user55340

@chibro2 See, we told you that you just need mention haskell and Jimmy will show up and regale you with lots of thoughts.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I show up with lots of thoughts in response to anything, some might say I think too much, but if you actually read the things I say, you would likely disagree

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa Don't worry about it, the minute we get bored of you, I'll just suspend you from chat.

chibro2

LOL@JimmyHoffa I dont know nearly enough to diasgree with you, reading your answer got me going: images.wikia.com/victorious/images/2/23/Oh-boy.gif I'm ignorant

user55340

7:59 PM

@JimmyHoffa But its the haskell trigger to your thoughts....

user55340

If you say ruby, you'll get me ranting. If you start talking about how great php is, you'll get yannis ranting...

Jimmy Hoffa

Actually Yannis tends to keep quiet about PHP, I think he just bottles it all up and one day we're going to check P.SE first time of the day this side of the pond and see everything's deleted, we're all suspended, and the only Q on the site is titled "PHP WINS."

2

user55340

I think that Yannis is actually Goma... just a split personality that keeps trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of asp and php.

chibro2

@JimmyHoffa If I could ask you one more question, I'm not actually committed to learning FRP or anything, but I am committed to take on a medium sized project to push my knowelge of Haskell to the next level. What in you opinion is best for my case?

Jimmy Hoffa

Let me know when you find out, I want to push my haskell knowledge to the next level too... ;)

Is it just something you're doing for yourself for learning and not to be productive?

Yannis Rizos

8:05 PM

@JimmyHoffa Is there a next level? I thought haskell was like nirvana, once you reach it you're done.

chibro2

Yup just to stretch my thoughts, it's actually my 2nd language after Javascript, so still a noob all around kind of

oh I meant next level within haskell

so far I've been implementing some machine learning algorithms in Haskell, so more math stuff. No IO, though I have used monad transformers

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos that's the scariest part about Haskell: After you actually start to grok it, you realize how bloody tall the mountain really is, it's like cresting the first foot hill on a ski-lift only to realize the top is another 30 minutes riding on the lift

user55340

@YannisRizos I'd suggest more along the lines of "The Inferno"

chibro2

@YannisRizos yeah the language has been a series of rabbit holes for me, I had to stop myself from reading about all the peripheral stuff just so I can write one line of code

user55340

"This is the circle of those who use primitives instead of objects", "This is the circle of those who write impure functions"...

Yannis Rizos

8:08 PM

@chibro2 What language? Are we still talking about haskell? That's not a language, it's an elaborate prank mathematicians played on software developers.

chibro2

LOL @YannisRizos Mathmaticians got too annoyed by programmers and created this language to undermine the software industry

user55340

@YannisRizos steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/…

Jimmy Hoffa

@chibro2 If you haven't used parsec or attoparsec yet, that's a necessary and fun stop for anyone learning haskell. Write a parser for javascript with it that tells you some basic information about javascript, doesn't have to parse everything but generates an abstract syntax tree identifying different parts of a given javascript file

(Everyone uses attoparsec now because it does everything parsec does but faster, but for learning parsec is far more well documented)

chibro2

@JimmyHoffa I more or less implemented a little parser following these lectures: seas.upenn.edu/~cis552/12fa/schedule.html. Though I agree going out and making one on my own is a different game alltogether

Jimmy Hoffa

@chibro2 was it monadic?

chibro2

8:18 PM

@JimmyHoffa like using monads? then yes using monads and then monad transformers.

Like specific concepts that Iknow that are out there but I don't know are arrows, comonads, lenses

I just figured if I learn them in context of a project then the knowlege would be less fragile.

Jimmy Hoffa

It sounds like you're pretty much as far along in Haskell as I am... writing some network software using STM is good practice of standard IO activities (STM/threading/file+network streams) but may come easily to you at this point. Start reading the typeclassopedia learn all the rules of the various magmas etc, start studying up on Lens, learn generic algebraic data types (a GHC extension) and start learning AGDA next to understand existential types, that's pretty much my learning list :P

chibro2

@JimmyHoffa Ok sweet! I was looking for just such a list of progression, thanks a lot!

Jimmy Hoffa

@chibro2 comonads are good! I implemented some in C# at work the other day and it finally clicked why they always say those are better in imperative code than monads

EdwardK's comonad library on hackage is hailed as being quite good, that's another thing I been meaning to tackle. All of EdwardK's presentation powerpoints (you've probably seen some of them) are great too

he did Lenses

he has a comonad powerpoint that does well to explain the relationship to monads

The thing about finding practical uses for these concepts where it feels like actually doing something with them will make the knowledge feel more stable, it's hard because until you envelope yourself reading about the stuff and studying it for a while, you just can't even begin to use any of it I've found... but that's me

I've always learned code-first until Haskell, with Haskell you have to learn by reading/research first in my experience

chibro2

@JimmyHoffa I'll take a look at his comonad library too! Thanks for pointing me to good resources

yeah very true, I mean this stuff is actually really fascinating and it's nice to see how some people frame common problems

Jimmy Hoffa

@chibro2 the real key where I learned anything at all is #haskell on freenode. Those guys make me realize as @maple_shaft pointed out earlier today "I'm a little fish in a big pond", they are literal geniuses near as I can tell

Whenever I'm not sure how to do something or whether what I did seems right or what to do next I prod into the knowledge in there...

chibro2

8:29 PM

@JimmyHoffa ok I'll take a look at that too. Man you're like a store of knowlege!

:)

Yannis Rizos

@chibro2 Don't encourage him.

user55340

@chibro2 Knowledge stores are DBA issues... ;-)

chibro2

:X LOLz

@JimmyHoffa "I'm a little fish in a big pond", they are literal geniuses near as I can tell" - story of my life

user55340

6 hours ago, by Jimmy Hoffa

I blame the Jon Skeet, Eric Lippert, Jon Harrop's of the world.

In reality this is a symptom of a larger cultural occurence though: The internet has so vastly changed what we consider to be ordinary through over-exposure to extraordinary people

chibro2

Works the other way too, expemplified by youtube et al

or commentators on youtube rather

user55340

8:35 PM

@chibro2 As long as you stay smarter than the comments on news blogs and youtube, you are well above the median.

chibro2

haha the naked truth in text form right there

ok that's it from me. @JimmyHoffa thanks again for the pointers, have a good evening y'all

:D

user20683

hmm, it would appear my mac power supply has kicked it

user20683

f***

user55340

@WorldEngineer Desktop or laptop?

user20683

@MichaelT laptop

user20683

8:42 PM

just the charger I think

user20683

doesn't light up

user55340

@WorldEngineer Bleh... thats an ugly fix.

user20683

troubleshot but nothing so far

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer I know how to fix that

user20683

@JimmyHoffa okay

user55340

8:43 PM

@JimmyHoffa I will NOT lick the power feed again.

Jimmy Hoffa

1 step solution:
1. Go back in time and don't waste money on over-priced products

It solves your problem because you have enough money left over to just buy a new laptop :)

user20683

@JimmyHoffa ha ha

user20683

given that my mac is the last computer standing and is as old as my now dead desktop...

user55340

The question of "over priced" is highly debatable... good thing we're in chat... its a question of how much you value your not work time at and the actual specs of the machines. When you get up to high end laptops, they get similar prices.

user20683

the power converters do suck balls

user20683

8:45 PM

the power supply itself is like a $30 fix if that's what's burned out but I think it's the adapter

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Nothing wrong with batting the hornets nest occasionally. The most money I've spent on any machine, desktop or laptop was $600, and every machine I buy lasts ~3-4 years. I just don't care about the speed that much personally, but then I hardly use a computer outside of work, I could probably live on a chromebook outside of work

user55340

The new displays play very nice with the laptops... they include a power feed.

user55340

Personally, I tend to buy a mac and then use it for a decade. My current tower I got in '10. The one before that was a Power PC system that I replaced in '10 (my father has it now... and its still running).

user20683

I don't personally care too much as far as needed to code goes, the rest of my semester is written in Javascript but I do need the Mac for using Blender

user20683

my Netbook might work

user20683

8:49 PM

but it's unlikely

user55340

@WorldEngineer btw, have you looked at Expresso (formally one compoent was CSS Edit) macrabbit.com/espresso

user20683

@MichaelT I'm trying not to get sucked into an IDE system too early

user20683

Sublime is nice because it runs across multiple OSes

user55340

Its more a web based thing, though given your UX focus you may like it. Its the best CSS editor I've seen (and what I got it for)... it does quite a bit more web stuff now as they combined it and raised the price to more than it was for a single (old) part.

user20683

oh fault yes

user20683

8:53 PM

the homework that I needed that power supply for has been pushed back

user20683

by like 2 weeks

user20683

:D

user20683

:D

user20683

:D

user55340

@WorldEngineer Watch it... you might get flagged for spamming there... and we all know how much fun chat flags are... ;-)

user20683

8:55 PM

@MichaelT fixed

user20683

kind of used to the Bridge, things get a bit vulgar in there

user55340

(the story of the power feed thing... I wasn't sure if there was power from an adapter... so I licked it. There was - the LED light had burnt out or something)

user20683

@MichaelT I once plugged a arcade machine into a wall at the local game shop...it was old and frayed. I was a mit surprised...so was my heart.

user20683

adapter is plugged into a known active socket

user20683

it's stone cold

user55340

8:58 PM

I once saw a network adapter that removed all the windows machines from the network (thinwire coax...)... It was a "thin2wall" connector.

user20683

I spent about 5 years on a Performa

user20683

It was...quirky

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT of all the things you could have done to find out if it was live, licking it is really not the first one that would have come to mind for me lol

If it's a 9-volt battery ok, but power adapter? whoa.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa 5 volts, 12 volts...

user20683

@JimmyHoffa some people get off on that kind of thing. Don't judge.

Jimmy Hoffa

9:02 PM

@WorldEngineer I don't think anyone get's off on zapping themselves from a wall-socket.. that juice is not for playing

user20683

@JimmyHoffa true

user55340

The current mac one is 16.5 volt... though with no load its only 6.8 volts.

user55340

Laptop power adapter.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT plugged into a wall-socket?

I just remember as a kid being taught by my pops whenever jiggering with electronic devices you are to double and triple check that there are no plugs connected to anything with a current before even starting, perhaps I'm a bit overly-skiddish about electricity as a result.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Yea, but if wall power ever got through to the laptop power adapter feed, I wouldn't be checking to see if it wasn't charging or not and instead looking for a fire extinguisher as the lithium battery overheated.

user20683

9:05 PM

Those old TV capacitors were no joke

user20683

Crispified is the word

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer when I was a kid our neighbor was killed by one, I was always confused when my parents would say he was shocked by a vaccuum tube I thought meant vaccuum's were very dangerous electrical devices

@MichaelT @MichaelT I get that, I would still be way creeped out by it. I'd go find some steel wool long before ever licking anything plugged into a wall

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I didn't say it was a good idea. And I am not doing it again.

user20683

Pity I don't have a 64 bit system handy, I could run "FatDog64" linux

Jimmy Hoffa

10:13 PM

> Previous article: Perl Community Debating Adding Monads The Perl lists are brimming with discussions about the value of adding monads to Perl. "We don't really know what they do, but it doesn't make sense not to have something in Perl," said Perl hacker Landon Ricketts. Read more

@MichaelT ironically the read more links to a node on perlmonks where they're honestly debating using monads in perl

user55340

10:26 PM

@JimmyHoffa Perl doesn't reject functional concepts... map, grep, sort - those all take a function as an argument. When working in the perl 6 world with parrot, haskell has been an influence.

user55340

And I'm still trying to get my head around that a joke package is now part of the core design philosophy.

user55340

search.cpan.org/~dconway/Quantum-Superpositions-1.03/lib/…

user55340

And then en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6#Junctions

user55340

> A Perl 5 module released in 2000 by Damian Conway called Quantum::Superpositions provided an initial proof of concept. While at first such superpositional values seemed like merely a programmatic curiosity, over time their utility and intuitiveness became widely recognized, and junctions now occupy a central place in Perl 6's design.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT hah that is pretty funny. Sounds very much on initial glance like just lazy evaluation ala haskell. and yeah I know Perl is functiony, the ironic part is you posted the link to that blog from yegge to poke fun at haskell, and at the end of it he pokes fun at perl with a link to your beloved perlmonks heh

@MichaelT Perl's a dead language now though aint it? Seriously; is there any real active development that still occurs in Perl these days outside of sys admin scripts and legacy maintenance? Just seems you hardly hear anything about it anymore..

@MichaelT ahh looking closer "any" and "all" are perfect examples of combinators. Also the whole thing is really cool, it's like it creates a multi-path decision tree as you go. It's a bit monadic it seems where any is like bind, and all behaves like the comonadic inverse (extend? extract? I can never remember)

or rather any is like fmap and all is like join..or something...

user55340

11:03 PM

@JimmyHoffa Yep... and he pokes quite a bit fun at perl being a language you can get stuff done in... though not as elegant...

user55340

> MacFarlane concluded, "Our elegant approach didn't work, so we hired a Perl hacker to go dig up the personal details on all 38 accounts that had ever upvoted a Haskell post, and the only one we didn't know was Seth Briars. So we reached out to him, and thankfully so far he hasn't threatened to sue us."

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Perl 6 is still being worked on... they haven't gotten an implementation that fully implements it yet though. See perl6.org/compilers/features and perl6.org/archive/status.html

user55340

One can do perl6 if you don't want to dive into the new collection structures or threading without hitting things that don't work according to spec.

Yannis Rizos

> Is there any two headed people going to jail in US? What does the law says when only one brain have the criminal mind, but the another Head don't?

Heh, searching for deleted:1 on Politics is almost as much fun as it is on Programmers.

psr

11:31 PM

@YannisRizos Political cover-up! Polyheads unite! Further evidence of SE's CryptoStalinist agenda!

Yannis Rizos

"Comrade" would be a good gender-neutral way to address fellow users on the SE network. — Monolo yesterday

@Monolo I dare you to try that on Politics.SE ;) — Yannis yesterday

@psr You are certainly on to something, a Politics mod inviting people to refer to each other as "comrade" does smell of CryptoStalinist agenda!

user41796

11:46 PM

@WorldEngineer, @thorstenmüller - reactive programming sounds like something an HDL (hardware description language) would handle. Verilog has blocks where all changes within a given block are handled at the same time.

user41796

Comrade @YannisRizos - I salute your proposal to change our salutation!

Yannis Rizos

I wonder what will happen if I edit all my Politics answers to end with "Hope that helps, comrade".

user41796

Comrade @YannisRizos, you're a mod there, right? Then as you once wisely said, act and update the FAQ accordingly.

user41796

Comrade @YannisRizos - TRUE loyalty would be demonstrated by an auto-suspension for anyone who fails to address a peer with the proper honorific of Comrade.

user20683

σύντροφος

user20683

11:56 PM

if you want to be really kissing the feet

Yannis Rizos

σύντροφος is also used for a sexual partner, so... let's not do that.

user20683

rofl

user20683

@YannisRizos sorry

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