The Whiteboard

TRiG

00:50

@YannisRizos That is an awesome phrase.

gnat

09:16

1

Q: Is it time to tighten up the quality filter at Programmers?

Some recent posts make me feel like these could be automatically rejected by quality filter, thus saving community efforts for better quality questions and answers. "I want To develope My Own linux Distro for Linux Beginners." "I want To Know How To prepare An understanding Doc To Track what I ...

Rachel

14:30

@GlenH7 Hey :) I don't know how I missed your comment up there, but I didn't mean to ignore it. I entered this room by mistake

user41796

@Rachel - no worries, my greetings and warm wishes are still intended. :-)

user41796

I'll happily take advantage of errant entry in order to ping someone... ;-)

Rachel

@GlenH7 :) I'm not active on Programmers anymore, so that's probably why you haven't seen me around much.

user41796

I had a feeling that was the case. I've noticed the occasional answer here and there, but definitely not active involvement.

Rachel

@GlenH7 Nope, I just come by to check out the 10k tools or meta site on occasion to see if things changed, and occasionally something on the main page catches my eye

Jimmy Hoffa

14:46

stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/execute

That's a tag...really...

and the top all-time users on the tag all have 1 answer in it, because it's nonsense. That's just funny.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - it's lacking tag info and a wiki entry. You could rectify that....

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 You're right, how's this sound for tag info:

The removal of digits or thorax impaction of appropriate perpetuity such that the tenacity of one's ventricles is relieved.

user41796

go for it. Let me know if it gets approved

Jimmy Hoffa

Done.

the tag actually has 3 followers... wth heh

user41796

@Rachel - you make my data exchange skills look so pathetic. I was trying to draw out a similar association earlier and gave up

user55340

14:58

@JimmyHoffa What oddities in the tags can one find with between 1 and 5 followers?

user41796

What I was curious to find was an association between the quantity of negatively scored questions and the age of the user account. My hypothesis is that both users-who-don't-care and trolls will drop in the max number of questions and then disappear

Jimmy Hoffa

Would be pretty great if somebody actually approves that tag wiki just because it's a dumb tag anyway

user55340

I remember seeing a cartoon in college -- a guillotine placed over the hand rest of a keyboard with the note attached "Be very careful when invoking the 'Execute Operator Immediately' opcode"

user41796

I don't know if deleted questions make their way into data explorer though. I checked two don't-care-users I know of and couldn't find anything

user55340

Gah... even on ELU we get odd referals...

user55340

15:02

Nah, it'll be nuked as off-topic. It belongs on programmers.SE. — bye Feb 22 '11 at 21:10

user55340

@GlenH7 re: new user limitation... I believe it is because those "3 and stop" are "3 downvoted and stop" where the question ban gets kicked in before the new user limit gets in.

gnat

@GlenH7 deleted questions don't make their way to SEDE...

37

Q: Can some metadata about deleted posts be included in Data.SE?

I like to use Data.SE to view usage stats for some of the sites, however deleted posts are not included on Data.SE and I think this skews the numbers quite a bit, particularly on sites with a lot of deletions. Would it be possible to include some limited data about deleted posts in Data.SE to ma...

feature-request data-explorer deleted-questions deleted-answers

user41796

@MichaelT - that actually makes a lot of sense

user41796

@gnat - cool, thanks! And now Rachel has 10 more rep on MSO

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I couldn't stop myself from writing an answer to that question on ELU.

user41796

15:14

And I'll give up playing with data explorer this morning as I can't answer my question.

Rachel

@GlenH7 I huge part of my job is writing SQL queries to get specific sets of data for reports >.< I'd rather be programming, but meh

user41796

@Rachel In my immediately prior life, I was responsible for installing a ridiculously over-sized BI environment. Ownership of that plus the likely risk of having to write convoluted queries across crap data stores prompted me to shop my resume around. :-)

user41796

And now I get to program every day. MUCH happier

Rachel

@GlenH7 Try this query. I haven't double-checked the numbers though

user41796

@Rachel - that one is interesting. I dropped the first three selections out to focus on the last two. What's interesting to me is the spike on the right side of the graph. I know that the most recent time slices aren't completely reliable so I'm tempering my conclusion.

Jimmy Hoffa

15:26

@MichaelT ack, you tricked me into adding activity to an old question, that thing is ANCIENT.

user41796

If I presume that bad questions within 30 days or so haven't been automatically purged, then that spike would indicate a pretty high volume of crap questions from new users. That volume of crud gets filtered out, but it could provide some evidence to restrict how many questions a brand new user can ask simply because of the crap cases

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Your answer is still better than most.

Jimmy Hoffa

I hate when I start adding to a Q and don't notice the dates

user55340

Though the "Feb 22 '11 at 21:10" should have been a clue...

Jimmy Hoffa

Clues... I had those once, what a headache

Rachel

15:33

@GlenH7 The site probably got advertised somewhere, and that's responsible for the spike in new userse

@GlenH7 Don't forget that deleted posts also don't count, and last I checked a few months ago, we had over 10% of our questions being deleted

Based on the Recently Deleted Posts list 10K tools, frequent deletions are still going on

user41796

10% by itself doesn't sound too bad except that their negative impact is far greater than it would seem

Rachel

Which raises another concern - I think every single question-deletion I've seen has been from a moderator (or sometimes the owner), which means the community can never vote to undelete the post

Bah this is why I stopped participating in programmers... the site isn't for me anymore, it just makes me mad

I come back for an hour or two and meta/chat is already brining up old memories and making me mad

Jimmy Hoffa

@Rachel I identified a spike beginning of march, and was harping on it here until @YannisRizos identified he'd been seeing lots of new users from the same couple IP's, so he thinks a computer lab or two at some universities got P.SE sent out to them

@GlenH7 in my graph you don't have to ignore the edges of the graph, I accounted my end-dates with the latest data point in DE.SE

Rachel

@JimmyHoffa I will sometimes run the Data.SE queries found here to see trends

Jimmy Hoffa

@Rachel I was just pointing out, what you're saying about the site being advertised somewhere, there's good evidence that is exactly what has occurred very recently

Rachel

15:40

@JimmyHoffa Quancast is also good at seeing trends. The site's been getting more traffic, which usually translates into more users

(expand the timeframe to the past year or two, and set it to view by Week instead of by Day)

Jimmy Hoffa

Yeah, quantcast still creeps me out when I see the change in ratio of page views vs. visits which says each visitor is viewing less pages each over time

CodeJack

Hello guys ....

user41796

Howdy @CodeJack

CodeJack

can anybody tell me how to find a nearest palindrome given a very long integer of 1000000 digits

Jimmy Hoffa

what's a "nearest" palindrome?

CodeJack

15:46

i mean ... if a number is given ...then find a palindrome which is greater than that number ..ex : input : 809 ouput:- 818

Jimmy Hoffa

@CodeJack take the top half of your number, reverse it and replace the bottom half with it

that should do

I can't imagine a closer palindrome because any other palindrome would require changing higher ranking digits than the middle one

user41796

@CodeJack - I don't follow, sorry.

user41796

809 would be 908, right?

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 my rule would be take the top half (in that case 8) and replace the bottom half with it resulting in 808

CodeJack

consider the case 809 , top half : 8 after replacing it will 808 which is lower than 809 hence output is wrong

Jimmy Hoffa

15:47

that's the closest palindrome to 809

@CodeJack oh it has to be greater than

user55340

closest, but greater is the question.

CodeJack

Sorry friends , here i did a mistake , instead of closest it should be next

also , the condition is number can be 10000000 digits long

Jimmy Hoffa

@CodeJack then you look at your middle digit, and compare it or the upper neighbor to the ordinally opposite side of the middle digit, do this lexically if you have equalities until you reach a difference, if the upper one is higher then the method I mentioned will work, if it is lower then you will have to increase your middle digit by one and then apply my method

user41796

so 1011 would be 2101?

user41796

or would it be 1102?

Jimmy Hoffa

15:50

12345->
2<4 so increment the middle digit to 4 and apply my method:
12421

CodeJack

no . of 1011 it should be 1111

user55340

1011 would be 1111

Jimmy Hoffa

54321->
4>2 so no need to increment the middle digit:
54345

user55340

(palendromic numbers are a fairly standard early project Euler question... though I don't think this is one)

Jimmy Hoffa

655551->
5==5, move to next outter ordinals->
5==5, move to next outter ordinals->
6>1, upper side is great so don't need to increment middle digit

655556

in an even number of digits, you increment the upper digit from the middle, in an odd number there is a middle digit to increment

yay me, I think I solved it

CodeJack

15:53

This is the code I have written : pastebin.com/CKbf4rve

guys , i have used same approch why does spoj shoes it as a wrong answer ....

i dont know

Jimmy Hoffa

Shrug, maybe I'm dead wrong. I know next to nothing about numbers

user55340

@JimmyHoffa still think you should try some Project Euler in Haskell... you might like it (and learn something... ;-)

Jimmy Hoffa

alternatively, your code may be buggy. code structured such as yours is frequently problematic

@MichaelT I have, not a lot, but some hand full of the first 10. One of the things is lazy evaluation really wrecks number crunching algorithms that have to visit every element, I should have written my prime algorithms in the ST monad but I didn't know as much about that stuff when I was doing that

CodeJack

@JimmyHoffa : but why do u think it is problematic , it genearate correct output

Jimmy Hoffa

it's definitely fun. you have to think about the problems in a way different way (unless you just do it all in the IO monad, then you can do it just like writing C)

@CodeJack I said code structured like that is often problematic, I didn't say your code is problematic

CodeJack

16:01

Sorry sir .. but plz hellp

Jimmy Hoffa

the if/else-if structure you have there is what I like to call nested-nests-of-nesting, it's a commonly used structure as it's largely what colleges teach, and it's also trying to comprehensively account for every specific case and ends up having more code than you can get your head around all at once

and thus cases end up missed or one of the constraints combined by the nesting ends up poorly covering the necessary cases

user55340

The variables have... less than descriptive names.

Jimmy Hoffa

yeah that as well, between those two things I can't frankly read the code @CodeJack

user55340

You have breaks from deep within the code that complicate the comprehension of the code flow.

Jimmy Hoffa

not without a lot of effort

CodeJack

16:04

sir , i have spent two days on it...

user55340

The if blocks don't explain what cases they are attempting to detect.

CodeJack

i can post algo i have used

ok sir

Jimmy Hoffa

@CodeJack is this a homework problem?

user55340

Spacing (newlines, indendation) is inconsistent - not bad functionally, but distracting when trying to read and comprehend.

user55340

The entire code is broken up into two huge blocks that revolve around if the number is even or odd. These should be two separate functions or procedures rather than all in main().

CodeJack

16:07

no sir...its a spoj problem

Jimmy Hoffa

what's that?

CodeJack

sphere online judge

Jimmy Hoffa

...what's that?

CodeJack

portal for programs challenging

Jimmy Hoffa

Huh, just another euler thing. Curious.

@CodeJack think about doing this: Split it into 2 arrays of bytes, one being the upper half, the other being the lower half which you will have reversed. Then when you compare upperHalf[i] == lowerHalf[i] you'll be walking both of them away from the middle to find out what you need to do to the upper half. Should simplify your code.

setup those two arrays at the beginning, then think about what cases you need to check and how to check them from there. Keep the middle if it's odd length as a separate byte variable.

user55340

16:41

Hmm... that low quality filter seems to be catching a number of questions that people were asking... MSO has a number of the "why wasn't this allowed to be asked" type questions.

gnat

@gnat I respectfully disagree. The OP asked for a one-liner retort and that's exactly what I provided. I don't see what is unclear in that. — Branko Dimitrijevic 24 mins ago

wish that filter could catch stuff like this

> Not optimizing prematurely should not be an excuse for not optimizing at all!

user55340

Doesn't the low quality review queue catch that?

gnat

three _not- in one phrase, how nice

user55340

My only regret in doing that "what do you think" spree last night is not having any close votes today.

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat agh that guy revived an ages old terrible question to put a terrible answer on it..

gnat

16:49

@JimmyHoffa they say "looks good"...

programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/27560

user55340

@JimmyHoffa its your chance to make it so the font doesn't like the answer either.

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat what on earth is that low quality filter thing you just linked me to?

I'm hoping that Q is closed at which point I'll recommend deletion of the whole thing.

user55340

-5

Q: Why was "Get jar file from Android phone" blocked on SO?

How can i get jar file of my application that there is only on my phone, because i re import it in Eclipse and all my files was cleared (small description because i'm tired to describe one problem a couple of times )? I tried to ask this question on Stack Overflow, but it was blocked. I didn...

support stackoverflow quality-filter

user55340

-7

Q: Why could this question not be posted?

I tried to post the following question on Stack Overflow but it wouldn't allow me. Why not? i am tying to use p4 diff with c# , i think that we have to ways so what is the best: first we have in the p4api.net the class DepotFileDiff, problem... i can not understand how can i use this : Fil...

discussion

user55340

18

A: Is it time to tighten up the question quality filter?

I've bumped up the threshold below which questions will be blocked. The majority of recently-asked questions that fall below the new threshold do not fare well on Stack Overflow (i.e. they are closed, deleted, and/or down-voted). The down-side is that short questions will be harder to post (thi...

Jimmy Hoffa

16:53

@MichaelT I was referring to the link @gnat just posted

It looks like the review queue, except that I can't do any actions in it and it's something that's already been processed out of the review queue

@gnat I 100% disagree with Karl's claims of dupe closure being the most helpful also, I'm of the opinion the only time you should close as dupe is when the Q is one you want people to be aware are on-topic good questions. If it's a bad question closed as dupe it just tells people the question has been asked twice, so it's definitely in scope and good quality

I think it's more educational that people get bad Q's closed as bad so they don't continue asking bad questions

a dupe closure doesn't tell them their question was bad to begin with

gnat

@JimmyHoffa that's an item from so called low quality review queue: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/27560

23

Q: What are the review queues?

I see a "review" link on the top of the page, which takes me to a few "review queues". What is a "review queue"? What are the various queues for? What can I do in each queue? Return to FAQ index

support faq review

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat right, I've reviewed stuff in that queue, but I don't understand how you linked me to something that was already reviewed?

Or was it open in review when you linked it?

user55340

All reviews are open... if you know how to link them, everyone can see anything anyone has reviewed.

Jimmy Hoffa

voodoo magic

user55340

For example, I believe that programmers.stackexchange.com/users/40980/… will show all of my reviews done.

Jimmy Hoffa

17:06

ahh, interesting

user55340

Note that those are things done from the review queue... if you find a question in the wild with close votes on it, and close vote, that doesn't go through the review, and thus isn't a review.

user41796

Well, that particular question won't be picking up one-liner answers for a little bit. :-D

user55340

17:22

@JimmyHoffa btw, if you want to do a "I did a three digit Euler Problem!" - consider projecteuler.net/problem=315

Jimmy Hoffa

uhh, why would I consider that one? lol

user55340

Because it doesn't involve any deep math. The only math operation you are likely to do is "+"

user55340

And its a fun problem.

Scootaloo

Hello.

Jimmy Hoffa

Gotcha, yeah it is interesting

hello @Scootaloo

user55340

17:25

Well, given that you've got that list of primes or prime generator monad.

user55340

Btw, the Sieve of Sundarm is kind of neat...

user55340

Sieve of Sundaram

In mathematics, the sieve of Sundaram is a simple deterministic algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to a specified integer. It was discovered in 1934 by S. P. Sundaram, an Indian student from Sathyamangalam. Algorithm Start with a list of the integers from 1 to n. From this list, remove all numbers of the form i + j + 2ij where: *i,j\in\mathbb{N},\ 1 \le i \le j *i + j + 2ij \le n The remaining numbers are doubled and incremented by one, giving a list of the odd prime numbers (i.e., all primes except 2) below 2n + 2. The sieve of Sundaram sieves out the composite numbers just as s...

Scootaloo

@JimmyHoffa I haven't on this branch of SE yet. I've mainly been on the gaming area (arqade) so I figured I would actually try a new site for a change.

I know QBasic (yep that's it for now) and I'm in the process of learning Java.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I might try that sieve in haskell later, that's actually a great fit because it has a limit on it

I tried writing the sieve of eratosthenes at one point and because of it's growth pattern, found it confusing trying to think through a proper implementation. Note I'm always trying to do this stuff purely, working in an IO or ST monad would make any of those things just like writing them in imperative code

Scootaloo

I'm surprised how smooth Stack Exchange runs.

Chat specifically.

user55340

17:31

The thing I like about Sundaram is that it doesn't use any previous information to eliminate a non-prime. That may make it slower, but its also much simpler.

Jimmy Hoffa

Yeah, and having previous information on hand get's tricky with haskell

user55340

@Scootaloo There is quite a bit of social site theory tucked away in it - Jeff looked at a lot of sites that didn't work and looked at why.

Scootaloo

@MichaelT Well usually when I go onto a forums "chat" or a sites chat. It is IRC though it works fine it is horribly dated and generally annoying for me.

user55340

@Scootaloo if you look at some old Podcasts, you can see Jeff talking about Clay Shirky and the discussions that they have had. Shirky wrote an article on social sites - shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - its a good read.

Jimmy Hoffa

though on the other hand, with STM it could be interesting to write a parallelized eratosthenes

Scootaloo

17:34

In comparison Stack Exchange runs silky smooth and really it has no huge issues that I can see.

@MichaelT Is Jeff the owner of SE?

user55340

Co founder...

user55340

Jeff Atwood

Jeff Atwood is an American software developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He is mainly known for the programming blog Coding Horror, and as the co-founder of the question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. Early life As a teenager, Atwood got into trouble with the law when he hacked into a bulletin board system. Career In 2008, together with Joel Spolsky, Atwood founded Stack Overflow, a programming question-and-answer website. The site quickly became very popular, and was followed by Server Fault for system administrators, and Super User for gener...

Scootaloo

@MichaelT Sorry I'm fairly new here, but I haven't really looked up the sites history.

user55340

He's also stepped away from SE to work on other projects... Shoj is running the show now.

Scootaloo

@MichaelT So far so good I suppose. When I first saw SE it reminded me of Yahoo! Answers, but greatly improved upon. SE has a good quality system in place to prevent spam or useless garbage.

user55340

17:37

@maple_shaft I'm nearly tempted to claim you have a sock account... ;-)

user55340

0

Q: How to deal with management staff (company owner) that minimize specs changes impacts?

I work in a small web development company (3 programmers) for a while. During the last year the company had hard times (less projects) and a few co-workers were fired, including our Production Manager. Having this person out of our team mean to us that we have to deal more and more with the compa...

web-development project-management work-environment teamwork

Scootaloo

Plus SE was built as a question and answer site from the ground up from my understanding.

user55340

@Scootaloo Another important (but underrealized) aspect is the intentional awkwardness of comments.

user55340

> With one programmer co-worker we joked about that, saying that it's not by adding two wings on a car that you will make plane, it has major impact on the whole design of the vehicle, time required is not the same, so is the same with software.

user55340

I will absolutely be using that.

Scootaloo

17:40

Does "The Whiteboard" have an RSS bot like "Lazers"?

I don't know why, but I really liked that little bot. All he (or it I should say) did was post new questions in the chat every so often. It has it's own profile page and everything.

user55340

I don't believe so. The only one that shows up is for the SE network blog posts / podcasts.

user55340

yesterday, by Stack Exchange

Blog - Stack Exchange: Introducing our Careers 2.0 Employer Resource Center

Bethany Marzewski on April 15, 2013

When we launched Careers 2.0 back in 2011, we set out with a goal: make the job search process better for the millions of programmers who visit our site every month. Part of achieving this goal is educating employers about what you want from them. In the past, our annual user survey helped us help companies change the way they found and hired programmers, while Joel’s book on how to find the best technical talent and his talk on how to stand out and attract top talent are a few other examples of how we’ve worked to educate tech companies on what you really want. …

Scootaloo

@MichaelT Too bad. "Lazers" even had a meta version of itself.

user55340

The Whiteboard is low enough traffic compared other sites that such a bot may be more active than the regulars at times.

Scootaloo

@MichaelT Ya I noticed that the chat here is a bit slower, but higher quantity doesn't always mean higher quality.

user55340

17:43

We have 1/20th of the activity of The Bridge.

Scootaloo

@MichaelT Speaking of "The Bridge" I'm taking a break from that. I've gotten myself mixed in to far too much drama over there.

user55340

We've heard things on occasion about it... the chat flags go to all mods, and there have been comments made that its refreshing to come back here after sorting that out.

Scootaloo

@MichaelT So then you or someone else here may have heard of me? oh dear.

user55340

Look for people with a diamond after their name... I'm not one.

Jimmy Hoffa

Chat flags go to everyone over 10k in chat

@MichaelT you are, aren't you?

user55340

17:47

6406.

Scootaloo

Anna does.

I think.

user55340

Anna is a diamond and a SE employee.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Oh, I so don't understand the chat rep thing. At one point my chat rep said like over 10k somehow, and now when I look at my user profile it says 8.8k

@MichaelT and your profile says 7.4k not 6406

user55340

Oh, chat rep... 7.4k there.

Scootaloo

Earlier this morning I was dealing with something related to my account (I'm assuming it was an "SE Employee"). I kind of wonder who it is now. I would send an e-mail asking whom it was, but I doubt they would tell me.

user55340

17:49

stackexchange.com/about/team

Scootaloo

@AnnaLear I don't mean to sound rude, but are you a male or female (nothing personal btw)? I can't tell from your employee picture.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Aside from P.SE, I've only got about 1k between SO and Arcade.SE. Fastest Gun thing... I tend to avoid trying to get in "how fast can you answer" sites.

Jimmy Hoffa

hmmm maybe I need to think about the list monad for this.. I did a hack of the continuation monad which is for asynchrony which I'm dealing with in this phone system, but realistically the reason I couldn't write a compositional monad is because the phone system is non-deterministic, but the list monad exists exactly for non-determinism... Hrmm... I've always had trouble wrapping my head around the list monad.. maybe this is the opportunity

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Sundaram or Erastophasomethinges?

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I did fastest gun on SO for a while when I first started answering Q's, learned stuff being wrong here and there as well as just thinking about what I know to be able to communicate it, then I did stuff on Code Review for a while when I got tired of the fastest gun crap, then settled in here

maple_shaft

17:53

@Scootaloo What difference does it make.... thats rude man

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT no, I'm referring to this phone system I've been developing... it's asynchronous because I make it talk, then wait for input, so i did a continuation monad which makes sense for asynchrony, but doesn't help me with the non-determinism of the input

Scootaloo

@maple_shaft I was just wondering and like I didn't ask it with the intent of sounding rude.

Jimmy Hoffa

they say the list monad's entire purpose is non-determinism, but I've always had a mental block understanding that monad... all I see it ever do is cartesian products

and general combinatorial problems

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I still get Leibniz (philos classes) flashbacks whenever I hear about monads.

user55340

And cartesian stuff... those were right after each other in the philos class.

Scootaloo

17:57

I feel out of place here. Perhaps if I knew something other than QBasic and [a tiny bit of] Java that would help?

maple_shaft

@Scootaloo Its not like a typical forum for sure

Jimmy Hoffa

> ghci> (*) <$> [1,2,3] <*> [10,100,1000]
> [10,100,1000,20,200,2000,30,300,3000]

I fail block quotes

maple_shaft

its geared towards conceptual questions and answers for expert and professional software developers

If anything I hope you are able to read and learn a few things

Jimmy Hoffa

see, list monad for combinatorial problem, takes the one list, and the multiplication function (*) and another list, and applies the function for each member of listA against each member of list B

Scootaloo

@maple_shaft Well I'm by no means an expert, but at least I know QBasic fairly well. QBasic is a very a basic programming language, but it still is one at least.

@maple_shaft I'll try to learn while I'm around :).

maple_shaft

18:00

@Scootalo that is ... old

really old

Jimmy Hoffa

@Scootaloo why did you learn QBasic?

Scootaloo

@maple_shaft I know. It helps though well a little bit anyway.

maple_shaft

I don't even think its possibly to run QBasic on a modern PC without emulation or a VM

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft you underestimate the open-source community! or well, I'm guessing you do anyway heh

Scootaloo

@JimmyHoffa When I was 16 or 17.

Jimmy Hoffa

18:02

I said why, I mean, that's a loooong since dead language

Scootaloo

@JimmyHoffa What does it matter anyway? I learned it because I wanted to and it was actually fun to learn.

maple_shaft

@Scootaloo For sure, when I was still a kid I would mess around with the Gorrilla game

changing colors and modifying the calculations

Scootaloo

I know it's a dead language. So I know that it won't help much. Hence the reason I am learning Java and eventually move onto something like C++.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Scootaloo I'm just curious how someone who doesn't know programming comes upon QBasic anymore, if someone tried to look online for information about learning to program they'd likely come up with a bunch of stuff about python, javascript, and ruby

Scootaloo

@JimmyHoffa My cousin (he's in his 30's and knows C++ and far more than I) showed it to me when I was 15 or 16. He said start with that and move onto something new when you're ready.

Jimmy Hoffa

18:05

Ah ok

maple_shaft

@Scootaloo Did you see the GORILLAS.BAS program for QBasic?

Scootaloo

@maple_shaft Ya. It kind of reminds me of the Rampage games.

maple_shaft

ftp.microsoft.com/services/technet/windows/msdos/RESKIT/…

^^^ LOL MS still has the code on their FTP!

Jimmy Hoffa

@maple_shaft I miss those days of browsing software company's FTP sites, you'd find all sorts of things

ftp.microsoft.com/services/Museum

Scootaloo

I wonder what Team Fortress 2 would look like revamped and on CryEngine.

Jimmy Hoffa

18:08

what fun

Scootaloo

Why do they keep it around and not just delete it?

maple_shaft

I just nostalgia'd in my pants

Scootaloo

"Internet Eplorer Starter Kit Included Free" lol who would want that?!

maple_shaft

Scootaloo

@maple_shaft Are they trying to say they make their computers out of wood?

maple_shaft

18:11

The punch tape copy of Basic 1.0

its beautiful

Jimmy Hoffa

Great fine print at the bottom of that heh

maple_shaft

Scootaloo

CodeJack

PLEASE have a look at my code ... ideone.com/N4NUVD

spoj problem : next palindrome

it shows wrong answer ... why ??

user55340

18:26

@CodeJack when asking someone to review your code, please take the time to make it readable - useful variable names, comments, consistent spacing of indent level. I believe it will take me longer to figure out what you are trying to do than it took you to write it - that isn't... polite.

CodeJack

Sir , actually we earlier also , i spent 2 hours on removing redundant code...but i was unable to...right now..my goal is to make it give correct output...

Sir, if u want to know about a variable , ask me , i can tell about it

gnat

@JimmyHoffa well I used to think like you, closing crappy questions with "deserved" NC/NARQ, not bothering about dupes (dupe of crap = crap, why worry). I changed my mind...

...when I noticed that at MSO, they get and close a lot of crap, but there's much less tension around closures compared to Programmers. Upon digging into their practices closer I noticed that they mostly close crap as dupes. the more I thought about it, the more sense it made....

...I mean, yeah one can close NC/NARQ with minimal effort, but that has an implicit overhead of much whining - as opposed to dupes, which work exactly as Karl descibes,

4

A: What does it take for a question to be a duplicate?

That particular question fit multiple close reasons at once, but people can't select multiple reasons. I personally think it wasn't adequately similar to the dup, but duplicate is the most helpful close reason, because it points you to a question where you might get at least part of your questio...

...that's sort of a compromize. One doesn't insist on the question being crapp NC / NARQ, invests some effort into finding a dupe, and in return one gets a "civil peace" - much less whining...

...Of course this works only on simple, low effort questions - finding a dupe for these is typically a low effort as well. Try it yourself

user55340

@gnat I would love to be able to go back and adjust a close vote reason... sometimes I cast a vote (the second one), and then the third one is a dup vote that I agree with but didn't find.

CodeJack

Sir , i can give different cases , have a look

Jimmy Hoffa

@gnat yeah, I can see it would get less whining, but would it have as strong of a mitigating effect on the future as a NC/NARQ closure? NC/NARQ amortizes the effort the way I see it

CodeJack

18:31

odd : 38147

34187 , 38947 , 38947 , 34987 , 39987 , 38997 , 39999 , 99999

even :497653 , 496753 , 497753 , 499953

gnat

@JimmyHoffa all reviews have fixed links. The trick is how to find these. One can for example, go to stats page (programmers.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/stats), then proceed to profile of reviewers, and look through their activity -> Reviews tab. It is public (by design), your tab for example is programmers.stackexchange.com/users/35276/…

user55340

@CodeJack When I look at that code, I see a wall of code with two comments (aside from the banner) in the entire nearly 200 lines. The variable names are 't', 'i', 'l', 'x', 'y', and 'mid'. There are 6 levels of indents and no functions other than main(). Why should I look at it more deeply than that?

Jimmy Hoffa

@CodeJack we gave you some good advice earlier. I can appreciate that you just want it to work, but until you apply some of the advice we gave you earlier there's nothing further anyone's likely to do for you around here.

Anna Lear

@Scootaloo @MichaelT Lazers is just an RSS feed pumped into the Bridge. ProgSE here has a question feed, but it's configured to show up as a ticker in the top left rather than in the chatroom itself.

user55340

@AnnaLear that makes sense. Such a feed pump could spam this chat during the "last message 7 hours ago" periods of time.

Anna Lear

18:36

@JimmyHoffa For the purposes of flags and chat access, chat looks at your rep network-wide (so a sum of all your rep on every site) rather than just a specific site. The exceptions to this are chat.SO and chat.meta.SO because those are separate chat servers and they only take into account Stack Overflow and MSO rep, respectively.

gnat

@JimmyHoffa well just hang for a while at MSO, learn how they close crappy stuff and see how less whining about closures is there. As far as I can tell, this stuff works

CodeJack

@JimmyHoffa : Sir , plz repeat the advice

Anna Lear

@Scootaloo My name doesn't give it away? :) Female.

gnat

@MichaelT happens to me too... I really hate it, especially when it's a good match :(

user55340

Advice for Codejack's palindromes

3 hours ago, 23 minutes total – 31 messages, 3 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked 10 secs ago by MichaelT

CodeJack

18:39

thanx

Scootaloo

@AnnaLear I still like to think of Lazers as a human even though I'm [sadly] aware of the fact that he's not.

@AnnaLear I honestly couldn't tell, because of the haircut. I was 60% sure that you were a girl, but now the 40% is gone at least. As for the name thing ya that should have done it :p.

user55340

@AnnaLear On Kingdom of Loathing, I recall it being said that all moderators (of chat) were asexual hermaphrodites. I just assume that that extends to all other people in chat until proven otherwise... and I really don't have any interest in having the stereotypical gender balance of programmers to be proven to me. ;-)

CodeJack

19:01

@MichaelT , some readable updated for even numbers ideone.com/qlP4eL

user55340

32 mins ago, by MichaelT

@CodeJack When I look at that code, I see a wall of code with two comments (aside from the banner) in the entire nearly 200 lines. The variable names are 't', 'i', 'l', 'x', 'y', and 'mid'. There are 6 levels of indents and no functions other than main(). Why should I look at it more deeply than that?

CodeJack

sorry

user55340

@CodeJack you really need to look at that 6 level of indents and no functions.

CodeJack

ok

user55340

The code itself is poorly structured. I appreciate that you are trying to get the right answer, however unless you learn something from it, the exercise's real goal isn't accomplished - code that is structured well is easier to debug.

user55340

19:08

I can't keep the entirety of what is going on in the code in my head... having loops and logic that are more than a vertical screen height in size makes it difficult for someone to trace through it and identify bugs by looking at it.

user55340

Having code that is indented 24 spaces (sometimes having braces, sometimes not), makes it difficult to line up the scope of a particular block of code.

Anonymous

102

Q: What does "coalgebra" mean in the context of programming?

I have heard the term "coalgebras" several times in functional programming and PLT circles, especially when the discussion is about objects, comonads, lenses, and such. Googling this term gives pages that give mathematical description of these structures which is pretty much incomprehensible to m...

scala haskell functional-programming programming-languages category-theory

Anonymous

Might this question be more appropriate here than on Stack Overflow?

user55340

Btw, @maple_shaft thank you for cleaning up the C#/C++ comments.

user55340

@JeremyBanks Would we be able to do anything more with it than has already been done? Its got a +161 accepted answer... that does a really good job.

Anonymous

19:12

@MichaelT No, probably not. I guess I am slightly concerned that it may be closed on Stack Overflow for being too high-level/abstract, which might make it more suitable here.

user55340

@JeremyBanks If it gets closed on SO, I (not a mod) see no reason why it shouldn't be migrated here (and remain open)... but then, I'm not a mod and am not completely aware of the implications of doing so... (rep, votes, politics, etc...) so please don't take my answer the answer.

user41796

19:39

@JeremyBanks, @MichaelT - I don't think it's a good candidate for migration because of the solid response it's already received. P.SE wouldn't necessarily have anything to add to that question; especially since it already has two apparently stellar answers. Jeremy, there's a degree of overlap between SO and P.SE and it's not always clear where a question belongs. Sometimes the answer is "both." If it hadn't be received well at SO, yes it would have been on-topic for P.SE.

gnat

20:01

@JeremyBanks are you ready to deal with turmoil that may be involved in migrating a good question? Last time I saw such a migration at WP, this involved quite a wave of complaints at the "source" site ("target" site guys were naturally happy to get 'em good stuff)...

5

A: Curious migration to Programmers.SE

I'm not sure I would have migrated this question, unless it actually received all 5 close votes. While Jim, and others, bring up a great point that we have a site for Programmers, we shouldn't be so quick to kick out great content that fits our site, just because it happens to also fit another s...

user55340

20:41

(Ghah) - closing old questions should not impact one's ego any more than having someone refactor your code as the requirements change. It is not a commentary on the asker/coder but rather the question/code.

Jimmy Hoffa

uhh... wha?

user55340

5

Q: Why close a 2 year old question?

Okay, I'm very confused now. A question of mine from 2 years ago with multiple upvoted answers and upvoted to ten was just closed as not constructive. I'm assuming that someone stumbled across it and voted to close putting it in the review queue. If anything maybe it should be locked, but there...

discussion

user55340

The impression of "we feel strongly about these old questions should remain open even though they don't meet today's standards" is disappointing.

Jimmy Hoffa

Yeah, realistically if all of those old questions that would have been closed now were deleted, there'd be no complaining and a lot less sense that those types of things are acceptable

user55340

I'm not even trying to delete them... and I don't think any of those will be deleted... I just don't want people answering them when the answer is not going to be constructive.

Jimmy Hoffa

20:47

I don't like the pollution, it confused the crap out of me when I came here for a long time

now I've a better sense of what's acceptable and not, but I know new users come all the time and are confronted with the dichotomy of it and don't understand

user55340

Pardon my bluntness gnat, but you strike me as a man who has never done any research in the domain in which you now find yourself passing judgement. Just do a search here (or on other Stack sites): programmers.stackexchange.com/search?q=suggest — user43855 Feb 16 at 22:31

user55340

People do use the "its still open" as a justification.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT what an easy way to find questions to close..

user55340

My search was... "What do you" think is:question closed:no

user55340

I'm still slowly (very slowly) trying to do a Data.SE query that tells me what the median length and score of answers in a question that has more than 5 answers is.

user55340

20:53

The theory being "questions that have many short answers are likely to be poor questions" and either need a culling of answers or closure of the question.

Anonymous

@gnat No, I'm not. :P I don't even know what the expectation is for migrations anymore.

Advice for Codejack's palindromes

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