agreed. i'm just not sure what to do

nor me

alternatively to a guessing aspect, what if it was a multi-parter? say you have to produce an image of some kind (probably ascii, that's the most language-agnostic) out of the userid of your target

then in round 2, you get randomly assigned one of the images from round 1, and you have to process it in some way to make a bot for a KotH. :D

since we're going off of userid, that would put most people on an even footing for round 2 since everyone's generating something based on an unsigned int of <=6 digits

How about the target image is something Christmassy, but the script to automatically check correctness is very forgiving. So you have to write code that changes the avatar of the user assigned to you into the target Christmassy image, in as few steps/bytes as possible, taking advantage of the fact that correctness doesn't require a particularly good match

hm, that's not bad

not guessy at all, ofc

Well it might give output that still shows enough of the original image to identify whose avatar was used

Maybe you can't change the colours at all, just shuffle parts of the image around

i suppose

I'm fairly certain I could guess mine pretty quickly if shuffled.

Let's wait for a few more ideas to drift by

yeah

@Geobits get off your ass, it's time to contribute ideas.

and... GO

Yes if the guessing was part of the challenge then there would be unfairness

Unfortunately, I get paid to sit on my ass. Unless you're willing to compensate for my lacking paycheck.... :P

It's going to be inherently unfair with different starting points anyway

haha

what i REALLY wanna do is come up with a golf involving astronomy in some way

but i haven't thought of anything yet

The identicon challenge was unfair for that reason, but that didn't seem like a bad thing, and there is unfairness between languages anyway - it's all part of the challenge

Honestly, I don't know where you want to go with this. I'm not sold on the overall idea yet, so not sure what to add.

It's much easier knocking things down.

I recommend you post in the sandbox "Secret Santa Ideas" and invite as many ideas as possible.

We have 8 months after all...

actually, that's not true, i have an idea. but i think it would be too long/hard for real golfing purposes

Wait, 7 and a bit

ugh dealing with this bus internet is torturously slow

but it's better than no bus internet

You're on a bus?

Wow. We really are living in the future

He works for Google, get him!

But people are always telling me that Google is my friend

I probably told this story before, but in high school we got two vans and drove around playing Halo Combat Evolved LAN party wireless, van to van.

i don't work for google -- most of the time i work from home, but when i have to go into my office (which is >2hr away) i take the bus

@Rainbolt It's been long enough - it bears retelling

@Rainbolt ultimate nerd

You have to stay pretty close together when you are moving

You don't say.

so

should i go to starbucks and get a frapp

ok here's my astronomy idea.

@Compass Yes, you deserve it!

Well, it is half-off

@Compass That depends, which do you like more: coffee or frap?

It's Frappucino Happy Hour or something

Frappy Hour!

@Compass They're selling half off frapps?? Ew

Customers who visit participating Starbucks® stores from 3-5 p.m. local time for Frappuccino® Happy Hour may enjoy half-priced Frappuccino® blended beverages, any flavor and any size.

"Frappy Hour" sounds.... bad.

ends the 10th

its before 4 right now

one of the things imaging surveys like to do is to put together all of their images into one giant mosaic. however, you can't just line each image up next to each other - they might have slightly different dimensions, and certainly have different positions & orientations, which might match.

if i go i can make it back and just chill out for half an hour to finish up my day

i think java chip

i really like chocolate

What if they charge you full price and give you a half of a frap

@sirpercival Like image stitching for panoramas, etc, also.

yes

@Rainbolt it's the frap diet

Half-off frap day. We give you half of a frap, and the extra money we saved goes to charity

I never understood the logic behind naming it venti grande and stuff

Image stitching star charts/photos?

you know what, im getting a frap

brb

so the input would be a list - either of filenames containing coordinate lists, or of the coordinate lists themselves. each list corresponds to the coordinates of stars in a particular image. each star has four coordinates assigned to it: x,y in pixels, and a,d in celestial coordinates.

@Compass People like to feel fancy. If it isn't English, it's automatically fancier. Even better if it doesn't make much sense in the source language.

Compass's web ads will be nothing but Starbucks for days now

what you have to do is output a transformation for each image (based on the x,y coords) to tile it correctly with the other images, so that a,d line up properly

My ads are all Rosetta Stone. After failing to pirate it, I almost decided to buy it. Now I have nothing but Rosetta Stone ads everywhere.

@Geobits yes

kind of

My ads are all for giant robots to help take over the world. I have no idea why

Mine are all about time travel.

@trichoplax it's probably because you've watched pacific rim every few hours for the past year

Haha @Geobits check this out: i.imgur.com/4DNizkC.png

I sign into Yahoo to see what the Internet thinks I want every day

@sirpercival Never seen it. I heard it had robots though

It knows

:D

You know what's creepy

I didn't even visit Pluralsight today

I talked about it in here with you guys

It could be a coincidence. Maybe you don't have a keylogger

Hey look closely at the image. Jon Skeet shows up

He didn't show up, he is always there. Always.

@Geobits Omg you're right!

No matter what screenshot I take he is there

Lol this made me laugh: gaming.stackexchange.com/q/217457/106943

"Note 2: I just wanted to say that I'm not a noob in minecraft."

Wait... you can break sand in vanilla minecraft?

Ah, make it fall into cobweb

@Rainbolt LOL

I finished the AP Calculas AB

Um, Code Golf is down.

so is the minecraft post I linked to :(

Site goes down, @Doorknob appears

turns Doorknob

Hmm, I need a key

Weird fact: My internet just stopped working, but I can still see new chat messages. - timeout - - timeout - - timeout - - timeout - - timeout -

Test

Working ^

No timeout...

sometimes the DNS gets unhappy

OK, everything is down. We're talking about it here.

Ah, so that's why few of my posts have been starred

@PhiNotPi How'd you do this morning?

Seemed okay.

If I don't pass it, I'll quit and become an English major.

interesting that stackoverflow isn't affected by the outage

Skeet watches over it

Why isn't chat down too?

Chat is never down

@nderscore Stackoverflow is the problem...

Chat always stays up.

(Almost always. I recall it being down exactly once.)

im back

chat seems to be a separate service

there are people playing cricket in my office space

@TheNumberOne SO loads (slowly) for me right now, yet SE doesn't load.

@Compass When SE goes down people stop working??

stackoverflow is the error (joke)

Watch it be something like a "Surprise Rep Recalc"

hurrr

@Doorknob Yet when you go to log in to chat, you get meta.stackexchange.com/users/…

:P

I don't know, I never understood the rules of cricket anyways

Where do the people responsible for fixing SE look up the errors?

SO

dictionary

google

experts-exchange and yahoo answers

maybe not dictionary...

@nderscore you're a bad person

@nderscore You're missing two hyphens there

@nderscore Please put some kind of token between s and e.

John Skeet

@trichoplax That's where ^

@nderscore expert what???

:P

@TheNumberOne What other exams are you taking?

Both Physics C's

ah, physics

the only hard science i was good at

even though i wanted to be a doctor

Remarkably also the science I stressed out about the most

@TheNumberOne same here

Your taking Bio and CompSci A too, right?

What do these magical letters mean

A - apple; B - banana; C - cat; D - dog; Should I continue?

i dont see a pattern unless cat and dog are fruit

Hint: They're all Earth based.

chem and compsci. I took bio last year.

Also: they're in alphabetical order

maintenance :(

I am outraged!

Ever seen chat have a horizontal scroll bar?

chat.meta.stackexchange.com/rooms/862/…

...

So why does SE Status follow Ryan Seacrest?

@Calvin'sHobbies "You must log in to do that"

Guys I know what happened to the network

Well it's true

Jon Skeet went to sleep. That's why the network is down.

He doesn't come to PPCG though, ever...

@Rainbolt And SO is still up

Really? I wonder why they are special

Nothing bugs me more than an inconsistent bug

Is SO the only site up?

an inconsistent bug is ok

a heisenbug is terrible :P

Google's still working. That rules John Skeet out.

I heard that if you spell his name with an 'h' five times, he'll go all Candy Man on you

@orlp Is a heisenbug one where there's no way of telling whether it's intended behaviour? Or one which is impossible to predict or repeat?

@trichoplax A heisenbug is a bug that disappears or alters its behaviour when you attempt to study it.

@orlp Ah - impossible to observe. I get it now :)

Been trying to work out what I've done wrong in my JSFiddle KotH - it won't load any entries. Just occurred to me that maybe the site being down might mean it's not the best time to test...

Good time to sleep...

bluh

did anyone have comments on my astronomical tiling challenge?

I don't have any input, but it sounds good

ok well then i'll post it

good luck with that :P

or wait

The sandbox works best if you give it a few days

should i post in sandbox?

lol

yeah

Oh right - yes always post in the sandbox first :)

fair

not that i can ofc

ofc?

of course

yeah - I just remembered it's SE that's down, not the internet, so I looked it up...

Oh yeah - meta will be down too - this is going to take some getting used to

i missed my opportunity to say "of course, of course"

ah well

lol

haha you're right

Wow. I just checked a couple of minutes ago

Apparently the API isn't back up yet

The Stack Snippet runs but it can't load the code from the answers

still not back

wait , does this server work fine ?

Oh yeah - SE is down again

yes chat is hosted on an invulnerable server

usually IM protocols are vulnerable , maybe not this one

i remarked a strong security in this website thu

:(

back

and in all the time it was down, no one upvoted anything of mine. what's the world coming to....

:D

ok i posted the image tiling challenge in the sandbox

it seems too hard, but who knows