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12:00 AM
So I'll admit to being the first one to star "hi," but... clears excessive starring
 
I wouldn't call them excessive so much as unjustified.
The text for starring is "Star as interesting."
6
Very little of what actually gets starred meets that description
...I should have seen that coming. ಠ_ಠ
 
I was the first to star that, and I starred it because it's true and ignored. I'm this close to pin it to the starboard.
 
There's also the "useful" part of the description
 
:D
 
@Dennis Please do.
 
12:04 AM
star this message as useful / interesting to the transcript
^ That's the exact hover text
Actually no, there's two texts for it.
There's the one on the right side, which is "star this message as useful..." and the one in the menu on the left side, which just says, "star as interesting."
Now that is interesting
 
There's also one that says Add or remove your star, but that one doesn't quite capture the essence.
 
@Dennis My only problem with having it pinned is that it looks we're discouraging unnecessary starring. :P
 
On the left side, I see much more on hover: "Add a star to indicate an interesting message, for example to display in the room's highlights"
 
Surely "^" is the ultimate highlight of the room, don't you think?
For what is life without chat stars?
 
What's the daily star limit?...
 
12:18 AM
20?
 
I think I used more than that today...
 
Jul 31 at 21:10, by Doorknob
20.
Per person per day per room
 
Per day meaning day of transcript, or day of real time?
 
Is day of transcript not day of real time?
 
No, I could go back through the transcript right now.
So could I, in the next 30 minutes, go back through the transcript across different days and star 100 posts?
 
12:22 AM
Oh I see what you mean. Per day of time.
 
Strange. I thought I starred more than 20 today.
Oh nvm I just didn't star quite enough.
 
Days are counted in UTC like on the site.
 
Yes, I assumed so.
 
0
Q: Right-align text

TrebuchetteYour job is to take a string input and a number and align the string to the right, making the width of the text the number and breaking and adding spaces when necessary. For example, the string Programming Puzzles & Code Golf and the number 5 would produce: Progr ammin g Puzzl es &...

 
1:29 AM
I'm chatting from within VirtualBox.
I'm using the Tails operating system (based on Debian Linux)
 
@PhiNotPi Hahaha, nice.
 
It's interesting becuase it's meant to be booted from a flash drive, running only on RAM.
 
@PhiNotPi Well, yes, that's why it's called "amnesiac".
People don't usually run Tails for the lulz.
It's usually because they want to be anonymous. :-P
 
Well, I am, right now.
 
1:35 AM
I feel like signing into SE kinda counteracts the whole "anonymous" thing.
 
Exactly. :-P
But don't worry, just reboot and you're anonymous again. :-P
 
I've "rediscovered" VirtualBox and am trying out a bunch of operating systems.
Yesterday I tried out TempleOS.
 
@PhiNotPi I have a licence to Fusion, so I play with different OSs on it too. I actually want to write a minimal OS that's designed to run only under a hypervisor, and use paravirt extensively.
 
Can someone link me the "Welcome to PPCG" thing everyone seems to comment @ new users
 
I'm not aware of a standard template or anything like that.
It's just a little message you'd write when a new user seems to have strayed off of "best practice".
 
1:43 AM
Do you all just type it every time? :o
 
I don't know if other users use a template. I don't use a template.
 
Oh, gotcha
 
I do type quickly (average 120 wpm), so it doesn't bother me to write stuff.
 
@Dennis ri_qN/f/:+f{S@\e[}N* ?
 
@Sp3000 Is that crazy Pyth code? :-P
 
1:46 AM
@ChrisJester-Young Probably CJam.
 
looks more like cjam to me
wow ninja'd
 
@ChrisJester-Young Haha, I type around 70wpm :P
 
Dennis posts mostly in CJam.
 
It's possibly Perl.
 
@El'endiaStarman Phew.
 
1:46 AM
It's actually Foo.
 
It's probably Chef.
 
@Sp3000 Huh, that's your custom language, isn't it?
 
Nope :P (but seriously, yeah it's CJam)
 
CJam sounds fun. I'm going to practise it some, I think.
 
10/10 high quality line noise
 
1:47 AM
I like that it's GolfScript-derived.
 
And people call Perl a line noise language
I've tried to write in CJam and I just... can't...
 
@quartata It really isn't.
 
I know but still
People who think Perl is a line noise language would probably start crying at a line of CJam
The only golfing language I've managed to learn so far is GS2 and it doesn't seem to be flexible enough for most challenges
 
What's GS2? Another GolfScript derivative?
 
The best way to learn a golfing language is to create your own.
 
@PhiNotPi Or implement your own.
 
I've thought about that honestly :P
 
I think that's just the best way to learn what makes golfing languages golfy
 
I'm still a golfing noob though I'll probably get better at it
 
Doorknob is a golfing knob.
 
1:52 AM
See, what I like about CJam is that it's language-neutral. Whereas it's hard to implement GolfScript in anything other than Ruby, and hard to implement Pyth in anything other than Python.
 
If I did ever make my own golfing language, something cool that I thought of would be instead of having "extended" two char builtins to have functions be just a-z and have different instruction sets that you can rotate between with a command
 
@quartata Screw that. Unicode all the way! :-P
 
Not sure if that would shorten stuff or extend them
 
@ChrisJester-Young Except for the part where modulo is Java modulo :P
 
@Sp3000 So? That's easy to emulate.
 
1:53 AM
Oh you like Unicode eh? Well I'm actually working on a BF variant where all the instructions are non-printable Unicode characters like Invisible Separator
 
Things like being able to run arbitrary Ruby or Python expressions, not so easy to emulate.
 
@Doorknob New esolang: Golfknob
 
Which reminds me... I should get back to work on Phi's Golfo Supreme.
 
Yeah, but I just mean that's one of the few language behaviours which aren't specifically mentioned in the docs
 
@Sp3000 The docs are very incomplete, as you probably know.
 
1:54 AM
@ZachGates Golfknob. Designed by a golf knob for gold knobs
 
@quartata See, I want to start specifying challenges where we're trying to minimise bytes when encoded in UTF-21.
 
@ChrisJester-Young I'm trying to design it so that it works with UTF-8 which is quite painful
 
Probably should have put it this way: That wasn't by design? Either way, docs, happening, slowly.
 
since in UTF-8 it's like E2 81 A4
Hopefully once it's done I will have succeeded where whitespace failed
 
UTF-8 is decidedly golfing-unfriendly. :-P
 
1:57 AM
We should create our own, golf-friendly character encoding.
 
I will have made the truly obfuscated language
*true
 
@PhiNotPi I still vote for UTF-21.
 
Is that actually a thing?
Oh I see
7
Q: Why UTF-32 exists whereas only 21 bits are necessary to encode every character?

SergeyWe know that codepoints can be in this interval 0..10FFFF which is less than 2^21. Then why do we need UTF-32 when all codepoints can be represented by 3 bytes? UTF-24 should be enough.

 
I want to implement a language runtime which actually uses UTF-21 as the internal string storage system.
 
Sounds like a lot of work
 
1:58 AM
Not really.
The nice thing about UTF-21 is that a 64-bit word fits 3 characters.
whereas for UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, non-BMP characters occupy 4 bytes each, thus a 64-bit word fits only 2 characters.
 
You have to type boolean[] b = new boolean[21]; for one char instead of int i = blah
Sounds like extra typing to me
Although it is nice that 3 chars fit in 64-bits
 
So UTF-21 is really optimised for non-BMP characters.
No, I wouldn't use a boolean[21]! I'd use a uint64_t.
Then it's just a shift-and-mask for the character you're extracting.
 
Hmm intriguing
 
Oh @ChrisJester-Young, C++ question for you. Is there an easy way to split a UTF-8 string into graphemes? From what I've read, Unicode and C++ don't play nicely together.
 
How don't they play nicely?
 
2:03 AM
I don't know much about C++ or Unicode, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. :P
 
I like salt
 
Ditto
 
:/
 
@AlexA. By graphemes, do you mean code points?
 
Just out of curiosity, why is this wonderful place called The Nineteenth Byte?
 
2:05 AM
@quartata Nineteen holes in a golf course, code golf is scored in bytes typically.
 
Because its name is 19 bytes long.
 
31
A: Let's think of a creative name for our chatroom

dmckeeWell, the traditional generic name for the country club bar is "the nineteenth hole", which suggests The Nineteenth Byte or something like that.

 
@AlexA. If so, there's things like this: en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/codecvt_utf8
 
@ChrisJester-Young I guess so. I mean the individual characters, which I'm told are called graphemes.
 
Ah I see
 
2:07 AM
like a letter + diacritical markings, or something like that?
 
Yeah, like ≤ or ß or å
 
those could all be 1 code point
 
@AlexA. Yeah, sounds like codecvt_utf8 does the job nicely.
 
@feersum If you loop over a string in C++ that has those in it, you get separate bytes at each iteration rather than just å for example.
That might not make sense, and if it doesn't apologize.
 
An std::string is a container of arbitrary bytes
If you want code points you would need to use a unicode-related function.
 
2:14 AM
I now have a bitcoin wallet inside my VM.
 
Bitcoins pffft
Try dogecoin
Maximum swagger
 
such altcoin much swagger wow
 
so cryptocurrency
I wish someone would post an easy challenge so I could try my non-existent CJam Pyth and GS2 skills
 
@AlexA. With a codecvt_utf8 facet, you convert between std::string and std::wstring.
so you end up with a string of wchar_ts instead.
 
"add two numbers"
 
2:19 AM
@feersum Like codecvt_utf8.
 
@ChrisJester-Young I'm looking at codecvt_utf8 now
I don't really understand wide strings/characters yet
 
Wide strings are strings that contain wchar_t instead of char.
 
You don't need them
 
Then why do they exist?
 
@feersum You don't "need" them, but I like wchar_t.
 
2:20 AM
I'm taking nominations for the next OS I try out. Any ideas?
 
Interacting with Windows API functions is one case where you have to use them
 
Gross, Windows.
 
@PhiNotPi Haiku.
 
@PhiNotPi Debian!
 
@PhiNotPi Mac OS X!
 
2:20 AM
@Doorknob PhiNotPi was already using Tails.
 
Also Debian!
 
Puppy Linux!
 
@ChrisJester-Young I tried Haiku a lonnnggg time ago and I actually kinda liked it
 
I don't know! (Note: not an actual OS.)
 
@PhiNotPi Personally, I like OpenBSD.
 
2:21 AM
Is development for it still alive?
 
@quartata Yes, I have a friend who's in the Haiku dev team.
 
Reimplement TempleOS in an unholy language!
 
@ChrisJester-Young Nice
 
Elementary OS! (There's even an SE site for it.)
 
Whoa
 
2:22 AM
@ChrisJester-Young I was actually trying to find an ISO of OpenBSD earlier, I assume it's buried somewhere deep in the mirrors.
 
Eyecandy
 
@PhiNotPi But seriously you gotta go for Haiku
Try it out it's pretty cool
I'd recommend you try Irix on a VM too but you'd have to go buy it off Ebay + can QEMU even do MIPS?
 
Well, let's see how many ISOs I can download at once.
 
I actually have an old SGI O2
Haven't booted it up in a while. Kinda wish Irix had a good web browser (the port of Firefox is suppperrrrr sloowwwwww)
 
2:26 AM
I enjoyed playing with OpenSolaris back when that was a thing.
 
^
OpenSolaris wasn't bad, it was just too late
 
Right now, I'm downloading Haiku, Elementary, and OpenBSD.
 
Oh noes my BF intepreter threw a bunch of glitchy characters at me
I thought this would be the easy part
It's just a tape
 
@Sp3000 Thanks! That paved the way for li_qN/f/ff{S@\e[N}.
 
ff, nice :P
 
2:30 AM
What challenge was this for?
 
Right-align text
 
17: li_qN/f/ff{\Se[N}
 
12: sdfkl;asdf;;;;;;lkaewoiu
What are we doing
 
Dennis I have a question for you.
 
Shoot.
 
2:32 AM
Do you think in CJam?
 
Shoot.
 
I'm not sure I understand the question.
 
@Dennis Does your brain have a precompiled mental model of CJam?
 
See, I'm beginning to suspect you aren't a human being but rather are a robot written in CJam that roams around looking for new challenges, writes the CJam code to solve them, and then waits a random amount of time and then posts it in order to look human
 
aditsu wrote a CJam bot for a KOTH but it became self-aware and moved to Paraguay.
 
2:34 AM
SkyJam?
 
It's the only possible explanation for your inhuman CJam skills.
Confess.
 
Well?
We're waiting...
 
silence
 
I have to wait a random amount of time before answering... er, I mean your theories are wrong.
 
Seems legit
My apologies
 
2:38 AM
@Dennis Statement: Clearly, you are pretending.
 
Nah nah he's legit he used ellipsis instead of a dash
 
So that's how ELIZA feels.
 
No self-respecting robot with proper strict grammar programming would do that.
 
loading up Haiku right now
 
I'm gonna try to do it in ><>
Just to torture myself
 
2:40 AM
1
Q: Just repeat yourself

Super ChafouinWrite a program that outputs "Do not repeat yourself!" Your program code must respect the following constraints : its length must be an even number each character that is in position 2n (where n is an integer > 0) must be equal to the character in position 2n-1. The second character of the pro...

 
Yeah that post
Thanks robot
 
><> should be pretty easy since the restriction doesn't apply vertically
 
oh I didn't think of that
 
... actually I might try and see how that goes
 
NO WAIT
I shouldn't have given you that idea...
Actually, I'm not sure it would work at least not feasibly
Since string parsing needs a "
and ends with a "
 
2:43 AM
That's fine, right?
 
Well, in order to put the " you'd then have to put another " right afterwards
If I understand the challenge
Which would cancel the string parsing
 
@quartata Go through it vertically?
 
Should I just post it so you see what I meant then? >:D
 
But even if you do go through it vertically you still need to put a duplicate character on each row with a character
I think it's just not as trivial as it might seem
Oh half a moment
 
I'm now chatting from within Haiku. :)
 
2:46 AM
Whatcha think of it?
 
seems okay
 
I think this repeat yourself challenge is actually not specific enough
Does position mean in the line or in the file
 
I assume if the file is read as a single string
So all newlines need to be doubled, which is the only hard part here
 
loading up ElementaryOS
 
Oh I think I figured out how to do it in ><> finally
Now I have to beat Sp to it
Probably not going to happen
 
2:56 AM
I'm done btw :P
Just not posting yet
 
@quartata I think you could beat Sp
 
vv

""

DD

""

oo

;;
why dis no worky
should print out the letter D right?
 
I don't really know but isn't the most recent char a space?
 
Oh
Well that was kinda dumb
Hmm I'm not sure how to get rid of the spaces though
 
"Well that was kinda dumb." <-- story of my life
 
3:01 AM
easy but long way would be to drop every other char
 
Hmm
I could do @ and r to flip the whitespace the other way
 
Seeing this just made me realize that now I know the solution in Befunge.
 
would the trailing whitespace invalidate my answer
 
Or rather, a solution.
 
I'm trying Prelude.
Feeling stupid right now as I can't figure out how to make an odd number.
Aha, got it
 
3:15 AM
I'm now chatting from within ElementaryOS
 
I wanna finish this fish answer but I'm too sleepy
Go ahead and post yours Sp... sniff someday my day will come...
Bye all
 
Ah... sorry :/
 
This answer is going to be way too boring to write. I think I'm going to have to make a program to do it.
 
@PhiNotPi Do you like ElementaryOS? From what I've read about it, it looks pretty neat.
 
(I'm updating it right now) I'm impressed with how good it looks.
Of course, TempleOS set the bar kinda low.
 
3:21 AM
:P
I don't know what you're talking about, TempleOS looked stunning.
 
I kinda wish more software were ported to other OSs.
 
Yeah
 
I would totally switch to something not Windows, just to be different, if possible.
 
Mac.
 
I see a bunch of Mac users every day.
 
3:25 AM
It's not Windows!
 
It's actually rather popular for college kids.
 
With good reason though, OS X is solid.
And it's Unix-based.
(Based on FreeBSD, to be exact.)
 
I... might actually see if dual-booting ElementaryOS is possible on my laptop.
 
Is it that nice?
What do you like about it?
gimmeh the deets
 
3:42 AM
I don't really know how to describe it. It's a linux distro, based on Ubuntu, and I think it looks nice.
 
Hey, there should be a number system called i-nary, where it would be like unary except with the imaginary unit, sqrt(-1).
 
There's probably something already like that.
In arithmetic, a complex base system is a positional numeral system whose radix is an imaginary (proposed by Donald Knuth in 1955) or complex number (proposed by S. Khmelnik in 1964 and Walter F. Penney in 1965). == In general == Let be an integral domain and the (Archimedean) absolute value on it. A number in a positional number system is represented as an expansion , where The cardinality is called the level of decomposition. A positional number system or coding system is a pair with radix and set of digits , and we write the standard set of digits with digits as . Desirable are coding...
 
Dang, they beat me to it!
 
@Sp3 quater-imaginary base is a good example, though
 
But is there an esoteric programming language based around it though?
 
3:45 AM
It's linked in the article
 
;)
A negative base (or negative radix) may be used to construct a non-standard positional numeral system. Like other place-value systems, each position holds multiples of the appropriate power of the system's base; but that base is negative—that is to say, the base is equal to for some natural number (r ≥ 2). Negative-base systems can accommodate all the same numbers as standard place-value systems, but both positive and negative numbers are represented without the use of a minus sign (or, in computer representation, a sign bit); this advantage is countered by an increased complexity of arithmetic...
Negative bases too
 
I'm signing off for tonight.
Dual-booting will have to wait until tomorrow
 
Goodnight!
 
right now I am clearing a flash drive
.... I found a 1 GB corrupted zip folder
huh
 
:O
 
3:56 AM
I have almost no clue what was in it.
 
Almost?
 
I think it was photos
Should I just delete the file?
I guess that's what I'll have to do.
It's literally stuck on that flash drive, I can't copy it off.
RIP
 
Can you copy it with cmd instead of gui?
 
maybe
 
You can use Robocopy
 
4:10 AM
0
Q: Karel J. AlphaBot Sequence Generator

EridanScores This section will be filled in as submissions are entered. Normal 1. name, score 2. name, score 3. name, score 4. name, score 5. name, score Bonus Round 1. name, score 2. name, score 3. name, score 4. name, score 5. name, score Karel J. AlphaBot Background A popular introdu...

 
I'll try again tomorrow.
@AlexA. I fixed it by unplugging and replugging the flash drive.
 
Haha computers are weird.
 
It also appears that it contained both Windows and Mac versions of the photos.
 
4:25 AM
There are OS-specific photo versions?
 
I'm not sure why the two copies are needed.
 
I still don't understand the very concept of OS-specific images.
 
4:37 AM
New Main Posts sure is behind
 
0
Q: A Euclidean Algorithm

Zach GatesThe Challenge Write a program or function that takes two input integers, i and j, through STDIN, and outputs their greatest common denominator; calculated by using the Euclidean algorithm (see below). Input The two integers will always be given through STDIN in the form i j. You can assume t...

 
No offense, but seeing "program or function" followed by "must be STDIN" always makes me twitch a little.
 
^
 
a function can read stdin
 
I know it can. But it takes quite a bit away from the utility of an actual function.
 
4:52 AM
^
 
gcd(a,b) just makes more sense to me than gcd()
 
sure, yes, I agree that it seems conceptually kind of odd. the idea might be that it helps languages that need a lot of boilerplate to create a program (say Java), while you still make people read input
 
Hm, that's a fair point. I hadn't thought of that.
 
new java.util.Scanner().nextLine().split(" ");
^ boilerplate IMO :P
 
Holy crap, that's how you read a line from STDIN in Java??
That's almost as bad as Rust!
 
4:55 AM
There are a few different ways, but it's a common one.
 
That code is actually missing a bunch of pieces.
 
^
 
I greatly prefer challenges where most of the code is for solving the actual problem. Particularly if people define input formats that are painful to parse, or output formats that need a lot of work, I don't really like that. Also if you have to deal with a lot of special cases and boundary conditions.
 
It would really be java.util.Scanner s=new java.util.Scanner(System.in);int i=s.nextInt(),j=s.nextInt();
 
Yea, you could do it that way or parse the ints out of the string array the other way (so you don't have to specify Scanner twice). Either way it sucks though.
 
4:57 AM
Then again, if I wanted to play devils advocate, I could say that if you use Java for a code golf challenge, and hope to be competitive, you're screwed no matter how exactly the rules are defined.
 
I don't know what "competitive" is. The point is to have fun, and writing out input code is not fun.
 
I don't think any Java golfer is under the illusion that they'd win.
 
@RetoKoradi I don't care about being competitive against other languages (except C#... I love beating them). But like you said, if half of my code is parsing the input, that sucks.
And for something as simple as Euclid's, I think it would be over half my code ;)
 
Understood. And Java vs. C# seems like a fair fight.
 

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