The Nineteenth Byte

6:00 AM

Like, I doubt I will ever hit 61k rep on there, despite many hours of answering questions. But if I'd Googled and cited an RFC at the right place at the right time, y'know.

Took the original answerer like a minute of effort. (All of the other info was added on in later edits.)

Reto Koradi

@Mauris True. My highest votes/effort must be this one: stackoverflow.com/questions/23318875/…. I don't normally even answer questions this simple, especially not in popular tags. My guess is that this one accumulated upvotes because it has very good search terms in the title. People with the problem will probably find this question.

I believe John Skeet got about 500 upvotes for explaining the difference between static and non-static member variables in Java. Granted, it was a very nice and clean explanation. But not very demanding for sure.

Dennis

@Mauris Well, 6170 upvotes for that one is nothing compared to 4427 for this one:

4427

A: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool th...

Mauris

Haha.

Look at this messy half-assed first-revision answer: stackoverflow.com/revisions/179147/1

It went on to get 9508 votes. It became Community Wiki at some point, and I'm not sure what happens to reputation when that happens?

Reto Koradi

@Dennis Yeah, that one is legendary.

Mauris

Sigh. The saddest thing about SO is how having a gold badge has a lot of psychological value. :(

Dennis

6:08 AM

@Mauris You don't get any rep while it's CW, but nothing else.

undergroundmonorail

@Mauris my only gold badge on SE is the one that you get for just looking at the site a lot of days on a row

Dennis

On SO, I just got Fanatic. (that one ^)

Reto Koradi

@Mauris I know people say that, but I'm not convinced. I don't think I get more upvotes for the same types of answers now that I have a moderate amount of rep (and one tag gold badge) than I did when I joined last year.

Mauris

One of the gold badges is a ridiculous gimmick to get, and many of the other ones are just "get lotsa upvotes" which is akin to "win the lottery and/or ask a question in 2009".

The gimmick being visit the site 100 days in a row or whatever, yeah.

Because if your internet goes out for a day I guess you're not a trustworthy, valued user of the SO community and you deserve to get your progress on that kicked back to zero days?

Reto Koradi

Yes, that one is easy. Most of the other ones I have are for moderation type activities. Flagging, review queues, etc.

Mauris

6:12 AM

Like, I don't even want to consciously visit the site daily to get the thing, because anything like that happening would just frustrate me.

Dennis

It's all to fuel our SE addiction.

Reto Koradi

The biggest problem I have with SO is that there are fewer and fewer good questions. My rep gain actually slowed, and that's the main reason. Well, and maybe spending more time here...

Dennis

Yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio is a bit of a problem on SO. I never understood why SO doesn't have more moderators.

feersum

No wonder...almost every good question has been asked, so only people too lazy/stupid to use a search engine will ask.

2

Reto Koradi

@feersum That's probably part of it. But I only joined last year, and I think it has gotten worse even then. Frankly, just between us, the level is partly frightening. There are claims that SO is for "professionals". But I can't believe that more than 5% of the people asking questions are professionals. Then again, I have interviewed plenty of people that make it believable...

Mauris

6:21 AM

Interviewing job candidates sounds fun.

Reto Koradi

@Mauris Fun? Sometimes. Mainly, it's very important. Nothing more important than hiring the right people.

Pietu1998

The main problem of SO is not even trying to a) fix anything yourself b) google the problem c) read the SO guidelines d) read the similar questions SO suggests to you when creating one. This leads to these questions.

Mauris

"(gestures at my candidate's whiteboard FizzBuzz solution) OK, but can't you shave off a couple of bytes there?"

3

jrenk

Me in the Interview: I fill in a glass of water and fill in just a bit too much so it flows over. The Interviewer asks me "Nervous?" I answer to him "No I always give 110%."

Mauris

I bet Pyrrha is a good interviewer. "So you're stuck on an island, inside a blender, with a laptop..."

Reto Koradi

6:25 AM

Those blender and manhole cover questions are silly, IMHO. I don't know how much they are actually used.

Dennis

Haha, being interviewed by a PPCG member might be quite entertaining.

Pietu1998

One could test the candidate's ability to learn by teaching them CJam/Pyth and seeing how fast they learn to golf

Reto Koradi

Honestly, a main reason why I've been enjoying this area of SE is the level of the people. I'm constantly impressed by the level of many members.

Dennis

Exhibit A:

47

A: Regex that only matches itself

261 289 characters Regex with backreferences, 289 characters Yes, it is possible! /^(?=.{64}2\)\?\.\*\\.{204}\\2\\\{2\}\.\{11\}\$\/$)((.*)(\2\2)?.*\/\2\^\2$\2\?=\2\.\2\{64\2\}2\2\\\2$\2\\\2\?\2\\\2\.\2\\\2\*\2\\\2\\\2\.\2\{204\2\}\2\\\2\\2\2\\\2\\\2\\\2$\2\\\2$\2\\\2\{2\2\\\2\}\2\\\2\....

Martin Büttner

topologically, what is a hexagon with wrapping edges?

ah, still a torus apparently

Dennis

6:39 AM

Martin Büttner

@orlp do you have a recent example where "reasonable input format" has been abused?

you also seem to be duplicating the effort of several meta questions that have already reached a consensus

Dennis

@MartinBüttner Since you're already up... Would this be doable?

Are you planning a snippet to list existing languages and their best answers? If so, what format should people use when adding a note about trivial variants? Perhaps the convention should be a section beginning ### Language variants and an unordered list of items in the format * Unary (123456 bytes). Explanation...? — Peter Taylor Sep 5 at 8:20

Martin Büttner

that sounds like a pretty cool idea

I don't know if I'll have time to add that to the snippet any time soon though

New Meta Posts

-1

Q: What input forms are 'reasonable'?

It's very common for a question to leave the input format unspecified and simply let the golfer choose a 'reasonable' input format. I'd say this is a bit vague, and we should decide what can be considered reasonable. I recognize two separate categories, with subcategories (feel free to edit): ...

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Find all matchings code-golfpermutations Golf this SO question in any language. Fewest bytes wins. Given two equal-size sets of positive integers, A={3,1,5} B={2,4,3} a matching pairs up elements from {(5, 2), (1, 4), (3, 3)} There's one matching for each permutation of n elements, wher...

Martin Büttner

6:48 AM

FYI (everyone), I have turned the Labyrinth chat room into a general esolang discussion chat room.

Dennis

Well, that's it for today. Good night!

Martin Büttner

goodnight!

Pietu1998

Good morning everyone, it's 10AM here

jrenk

Dennis is from Germany right?

Martin Büttner

8:50 and I've been up for two hours U_U

@jrenk yes, but he's based in South America

jrenk

6:51 AM

@MartinBüttner Ahh that explains the Good night :D

Pietu1998

It's 9:50 here to be exact, woke up at 6:20 to go to school :\

orlp

7:05 AM

@MartinBüttner no

@MartinBüttner but I do see the same damn questions on challenges multiple times each week

'can I swap the order of the input'? 'can I also separate by newlines'? etc etc

flawr

8:00 AM

@TheNumberOne D'oh! Well who knows, perhaps Wiles' proof is just gibberish and the few ones who actually reviewed it are just too proud to admit that they did not understand a single word!

flawr

11:53 AM

What the hell happened at December 28. in 2013?

Optimizer

code-trolling

flawr

Ok the shitty charts of the analytics site do not even show the year...

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

It's somebody's birthday! popularity-contest Beta Decay was very selfish on their birthday, demanding cake from everyone and no plans to share! 🎂 It's bound to be somebody's birthday today, so why not make them a cake. Use Chef to make a delicious cake, with a nice "Happy Birthday" message ...

flawr

@Optimizer And why is there so much traffic ever since???

Martin Büttner

@flawr because a lot of the users stayed anyway, I guess?

flawr

11:56 AM

Do you know what attracted so many users back then?

Optimizer

2 mins ago, by Optimizer

code-trolling

I can do it again if its not clear

flawr

It does not answer my question.

Martin Büttner

sure. the code trolling challenges were what attracted so many users

flawr

I mean there must have been something that shared this throughout the whole community?

Martin Büttner

they were ridiculously popular

also, our most popular question ever was posted that week

(the 2014 new year's challenge)

flawr

12:01 PM

I cannot believe that there hasn't been someone mention it at SO or something like that.

There surely haven't been hunderts of users just waiting for the right moment to spam the site with stuff, there must have been something that triggered the propagation?

Martin Büttner

I don't know, I wasn't an active user before March/April 2014

Sp3000

There's two posts about PPCG on the SE blog, if that helps: 1, 2

Especially 2

flawr

12:36 PM

Any haskellers here?

haskellians?

Martin Büttner

@Zgarb I think ^

flawr

@Zgarb Are you still alive?

@Zgarb If not, how does being dead feel?

TheNumberOne

12:55 PM

@MartinBüttner How do I get your leaderboard snippet to work with the word bytes replaced with characters ?

Martin Büttner

it doesn't check for the word "bytes"

TheNumberOne

It fails if you use the word characters in the header instead :/

Martin Büttner

which challenge did you test it on, and which copy of the snippet are you testing?

TheNumberOne

http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/57363/the-margin-is-too-narrow
http://meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/5139/leaderboard-snippet

Martin Büttner

which answer uses characters?

TheNumberOne

1:00 PM

I was fixing answers so that they would work with the snippet. I changed one of them to characters, and then back to bytes.

Martin Büttner

can you change it back to characters so I can test it?

TheNumberOne

sure

hmm, works now. Must have been because of caching :\

Martin Büttner

the API needs a few seconds to deliver the new data

PhiNotPi

Always blame caching.

2

Zgarb

1:44 PM

@flawr I'm awake now.

flawr

2:03 PM

@Zgarb I heard you know haskell?

Zgarb

You can say that, yes.

flawr

May I bother you with a beginner question?

Zgarb

Sure!

flawr

I have a list of 3-tuples.

i want to find the 'best' tuple

the best one is the one where the last tuple-entry is maximal

my approach was as follows:

maxi [(a,b,c),(d,e,f)] = if c>f then (a,b,c) else (d,e,f)
maxi x:xs = maxi [x, maxi xs]

Zgarb

Can you reorder the tuples so that the first entry should be maximal?

flawr

2:10 PM

The first line seems to be ok, but as soon as i add the second one to my file I get an error Parse eerror in pattern: maxi

That would be possible yes.

Zgarb

Then you can just do maximum xs where xs is your list

flawr

Ah, and then i can directly compare tuple1 > tuple2 because of the lexicographical order?

Zgarb

Yes.

flawr

Thanks, nice idea, I can use that for golfing it later=)

But other than that, can you see what is wrong with my second line?

Zgarb

But in your line, you're missing parentheses: maxi (x:xs) =

flawr

2:12 PM

Ah lets try!

Oh thank you very much, now it works. I just have to figure out now why it works=)

Beta Decay

2:39 PM

Can someone verify this for me?

0

A: It's my Birthday :D

Mathematica, 203 Bytes simpleCake[n_] := StringRepeat[candle, n] ~~ "\n" ~~ StringRepeat[top, n] ~~ "\n" ~~ StringRepeat[mid, n] ~~ "\n" ~~ StringRepeat[bottom, n] simpleCake[0] := "Congratulations on your new baby! :D";