The Whiteboard

user20683

2:45 AM

@JimmyHoffa burning through the MIT course notes for Database Systems, it's actually a decent overview of Data Modeling in general from what I can tell.

Yannis Rizos

5:38 AM

@gnat I deleted the questions, but I don't care enough to suspend. In all likelihood the automatic question ban has already kicked in, or will if they post another off topic question. Also, he's 13. Being immature is... normal at his age.

Yannis Rizos

Community, I've overruled you.

Yannis Rizos

6:05 AM

@GlenH7 Check under the question, the answer was converted to a comment. It's relevant, but not really an answer.

karthi

9:11 AM

hii

thorsten müller

Hi karthi

0

Q: Technology to be used on a new project

Hi all am not sure if this question should be posted here or some other site on stack exchange let me know if this need to be moved. and i know the title is wierd We have a new project in our company and i ll be developing the whole project.Its a small project and may take 1+ months. Its normall...

karthi

hi thorsten came here looking for some suggestions

thorsten müller

It seems Dominic just gave an interesting answer (but question will most likely be closed as off topic)

karthi

hmm yes but some recommendations will help me for sure

thorsten müller

As in my comment, for a one month project it seems a bit overhead to go to deep into new stuff. Though some basic jQuery would most likely not hurt

karthi

9:16 AM

yes i understand that..i thought of spending a bit more time in this cause its a small poject

thorsten müller

I can't tell much about the C# part, since I'm a Ruby on Rails developer. But jQuery is worth learning if you haven't used it yet. Plus if nothing else it will just replace ugly javascript code with something more simple, so no big risk to waste too much time.

karthi

thanks thorsten

gnat

10:15 AM

@YannisRizos good edit in rev 3. I suspected it's salvageable, just couldn't figure how to tweak. bTW consider adding "Long answers" notice to set quality expectations straight; part of the question may mis-read as invitation for one-liner answers...

> example of the kind of applications I'm looking for is the parallel PageRank algorithm

someone may read it as just give the name, no explanation needed

StuperUser

12:03 PM

A few of my old link only answers (before I knew any better) are getting downvoted. Is there a push on these in the review queue at the moment? Shall I purge my old answers with explanatory text and downvote similar historical answers?

user41796

12:35 PM

@StuperUser - push would imply a significant concerted effort. That's going a bit far. However, there are at least a few high rep users who are searching through old posts for lower-quality answers and voting them down. Purging would be one option; yes. A better option would be to add some explanatory text around the link. Show why the link was relevant and answered the question. That protects the site from future link breakage.

user41796

As far as down-voting other link-only answers... Those who are doing so consider it an investment in the site, which I think is a pretty valid stance. An alternative approach is to edit those answers and improve the overall site quality. An additional alternative may be to flag for mod review and potential deletion. Each answer is unique from that point of view and you have to make a judgement call. The level of effort making that determination is likely what's holding back others.

Yannis Rizos

@StuperUser There was a rise in "not an answer" flags on link only answers recently, I don't know how many of these flags came from /review. Also, flags don't always come with downvotes. In any case, if you think you can add a bit of context to your link only answers, that would be great. If not, it's completely up to you if you want to remove them or not.

user41796

my random thought of the day - you know it's going to be an "interesting" day when you rely on perspective to help you find the patience in resolving the morning's opening salvo of problems. Relying on "well, at least it's not ..." seems like a tactic of near-the-last resort. :-)

user41796

coffee shall be my reinforcement though

StuperUser

12:50 PM

@GlenH7 and @YannisRizos, I'll bring my old answers up to scratch for great justice.

MadKeithV

1:11 PM

@GlenH7 Development: the act of turning caffeine into code.

Jimmy Hoffa

2:16 PM

@WorldEngineer Data modelling refers to one of two distinct things, I usually mean OO modeling when I refer to "data modeling", database schema design is called data modeling too but I usually refer to it as database design, the skillsets have some similarities, but in OO data modeling you're focused on the API being presented, in DB design you're focused on performance and space characteristics.

Both are extremely important skills

but not the same

gnat

2:54 PM

blatantly off-topic questions like this, violating not just letter but the very spirit of site FAQ, should be closed and deleted as soon as possible. Those interested in more details, refer to this meta post for more details — gnat 3 mins ago

4

A: Programmers.SE and the Summer of Love

What kind reaction would you expect to a post looking like this? This question would surely be considered off-topic, but... A friend of mine who lives in France is going to marry soon. And we (his friends) are looking for a nice place to make a geek party somewhere in Central Europe. If someo...

as bad as...

3

Q: Good gifts for programmers

An occasion has come up where I need to present some gifts to graduating CS students on their way into the workforce/grad school. I'd like to get some presents that are reasonably affordable, geeky but not entirely cringe worthy, and semi-useful. Ideally not just a black T-Shirt with some joke ev...

recommendations college recognition

thorsten müller

3:20 PM

Ideally not just a black T-Shirt with some joke everyone has heard a thousand times.

His own answer: The #include <beer.h> pint glass from thinkgeek is one option.

MadKeithV

@thorstenmüller We should make Programmers.SE [CLOSED] T-shirts and wear 'em proudly.

thorsten müller

@MadKeithV we would maybe have to decide for "not constructive" or "not a real question". Or maybe just print the whole selection.

MadKeithV

@thorstenmüller [CLOSED] Not a real programmer?

thorsten müller

@MadKeithV "see the FAQ"

for guidance

And the up-/downvote triangles with a -1

MadKeithV

"I posted a question on P.SE and all I got was this lousy close vote"

thorsten müller

3:28 PM

There are 10 types of questions on P.SE, those that stay and those that get closed

MadKeithV

My research shows there are actually 5 types of questions on P.SE: exact duplicate, off topic, not constructive, not a real question and too localized.

(Maybe I should have put a smiley in that last message...)

thorsten müller

which would be 101 types of course. or 110 if we count those that are ok

gnat

I meant through voting, and more specifically downvoting. These questions should disappear out of view quickly, and when that doesn't happen it's a problem. Or perhaps an exception... — Yannis Rizos Aug 19 '12 at 19:15

MadKeithV

@gnat I downvoted every single thing in that question and my own snarky comment after reading your link to the meta post.

Yannis Rizos

@gnat Nonsense, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

gnat

3:44 PM

@YannisRizos that's for sure!

@Yannis Home moderator cheat sheet. "Do you love me?" -> NARQ. "Let's go shopping" -> N/C. "What dress to wear today?" -> T/L. "Why didn't you listen to me?" -> O/T. "My mama told" -> dupe of "My mama is always wrong". — gnat Apr 6 at 12:20

@MadKeithV well, in exchange someone downvoted that meta post that inspired you. Fair enough I guess

MadKeithV

@gnat It's always difficult being wrong. And I don't mean you, I mean me - I knew that question was offtopic, but fun got the better of me for a bit.

user41796

4:10 PM

@gnat I just invested four points in improving the quality of the site.

gnat

@GlenH7 judging by votes split here, there are 6-7 investors like us. Although, in cases like that I'd rather expect invested points to be eventually returned by mod deletion of the question :)

+2 / -7

user41796

Frustrating to see that all of that user's rep is from that one question

Jimmy Hoffa

4:33 PM

@GlenH7 burn it! Burn it all!

gnat

@GlenH7 agree. Again, I feel it would be only fair for this to be corrected by mod deletion (Carthage delenda est)

Jimmy Hoffa

The more I read Qs/As from php/node/ruby folks, the more I get the distinct sensation that the overwhelming majority of industry engineers are working the same way I did when I was 16 "Hey cool, this works; I'll just keep going with it and who knows what will happen but it works!"

user41796

5:07 PM

@JimmyHoffa which is all fine and dandy until you need to prove or verify how it's working

user41796

@JimmyHoffa - what's the C# appropriate way of creating a bitmask? specifically, I'm working on our unit of measure implementation and I need to track the dimensions. The challenge is that I think I want to be more coarse grained than what the boost C++ array methodology presents. I just want to know "length", "mass", etc...

user41796

I saw this: stackoverflow.com/questions/3261451/using-a-bitmask-in-c-sharp but it seems like I'm coding C in C# that way instead of coding in C#

user41796

5:23 PM

I have answered my own question. Apparently it is idiomatically correct for C#. stackoverflow.com/q/8447/1345223 and msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229062.aspx

user55340

5:51 PM

@jimmyhoffa indeed. It even feel encouraged in some circles.

Jimmy Hoffa

@GlenH7 enum with [Flags] attribute on it

user55340

We're agile!

user20683

The moment your code becomes indistinguishable from magic, you are in trouble.

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Also in answer to your question on HTTP verbs: get, head, put, post, trace

user20683

I can't remember what all of them do but I remember those

Jimmy Hoffa

6:03 PM

@WorldEngineer that's all you need, knowing what get and post do and are for is good too. You'd be amazed how many people have either no idea what you're talking about when you ask them that or just know get or just post

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Logically when communicating with someone you'd need an introduction: the header, some content, some addressing info with some way of doing a trace on that and some way to initiate all of it

Jimmy Hoffa

addressing and initiation are typically handled by the TCP stack

or below

but yeah most protocols are just a matter of header/content

Yannis Rizos

6:34 PM

@WorldEngineer You forgot the mod friendly one: DELETE.

user20683

@YannisRizos ah

Yannis Rizos

Also: options, connect, patch.

user20683

I should probably just build a little app that uses them all.

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer no one uses much of them other than get/post/put/delete, head options and patch I don't know exactly what they do, though I think connect is used for websockets at a guess, and options obviously lets you set some options. I think head is for either chunking or just checking the header to see if there's even been a change for cache checks

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I assume many of them are abstracted in frameworks?

Jimmy Hoffa

6:39 PM

? You mean client side frameworks use them so you don't have to?

That's more or less likely. I'm sure browsers use a variety of them for various reasons. Back in the day it was thought HTTP would be used a lot more for two-way file interactions like FTP than it actually is, now mostly people just use them for their semantic meaning than any reference to their original intent: remote file system interaction

technically you could say using them for their semantic meaning is still doing that, but it's really no how they were originally envisioned and used back when you would use webdav and frontpage to publish up shit etc

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa OPTIONS tells you what other methods (verbs) are supported for the requested url. HEAD is the same as GET, but without the body, the response will be just the header. TRACE is... weird. PATCH is... weirder.

CONNECT is usually used for SSL, but I don't remember what it does exactly.

@WorldEngineer Common interview questions on HTTP: Which methods are safe (i.e. read only), which ones are idempotent (the safe ones + PUT & DELETE), and what's the difference between GET and POST.

Also, state. HTTP is stateless and maintaining state can be tricky. Sometimes, even delicious (cookies).

Jimmy Hoffa

6:55 PM

@YannisRizos yeah so the latter thought I had is what head does. Used to check the last change/md5 sum to see if the cached version is still good

Jimmy Hoffa

8:11 PM

Is this question NC or NARQ or neither? It feels like the way it's asked right now is "Why do a lot of people do X" which doesn't really work, as opposed to asking something like "Is X a good choice for Z, and how does it compare to Y for Z?"

4

Q: Why is MongoDb popular with Node.js?

I've been looking att different web stacks, mainly rails and node.js. One thing that strikes me is that while rails is often used with a relational database Node.js seem to go hand in hand with Mongodb, judging by the blogosphere. Is there a specific reason for this? I like the modularity of nod...

ruby-on-rails node.js nosql mongodb

user20683

@JimmyHoffa It's probably borderline but we'll see.

Jimmy Hoffa

9:08 PM

Ruby is the VB6 of the '00s.. and nearly every last one of those VB6 devs matured and blossomed as proper C# devs... I wonder what Ruby developers will become when they grow up and try writing real software..

Python? That wouldn't be so bad, but the key for the great VB6 migration was something new that made development as easy as VB6 did, but performed properly and had functionality VB6 didn't... Python is more of a Ruby competitor, like Java to VB6 back then..

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I can see the parallels

user20683

Python has more variety in terms of application than Ruby seems to though I'll work with whatever

Jimmy Hoffa

Like Java to VB6; Java was away and above a far superior, more robust and mature development stack at the time, but none the less VB6 devs abounded..

user20683

Ruby gives you a certain kind of freedom

Jimmy Hoffa

VB6 gives you a kind of ability to wing out garbage desktop apps at the pace of a sweat shop worker

there was reason VB6 was so wide spread, it was still a crap language

@RobertHarvey you were a VB6 dev, no?

Jimmy Hoffa

9:52 PM

grumble, I thawed steaks to grill tonight, and now it's thundering outside :|

maybe I'll just say Eff it and do it anyway. It'll just make such good dinner..

Code review gets more haskell questions than we do... hrumf.

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