The Nineteenth Byte

quartata

10:00 PM

Yes but we haven't taken action against it

It's a good example of a subjective popcon

Doorknob

Why did someone upvote this?!?!

quartata

misclick?

GamrCorps

hopefully

quartata

I have had that happen where my vote gets locked in

@Doorknob thoughts on taking action against the underhanded tag?

Doorknob

"action"?

trichoplax

10:06 PM

Underhanded challenges that are not tagged popularity contest

Should they be?

If so we can just close all underhanded challenges...

DJ McGoathem

Hey @all!

quartata

Yea but we'll want to delete the bad ones and lock the notable ones

trichoplax

> I and two others I recruit will judge the entries

Sounds worse than a pop con...

quartata

All I know is that they are definitely not objective so something needs to happen

DJ McGoathem

Well they definitely are objective. Most votes.

quartata

10:09 PM

We need to approach how we handle popcon carefully since they are much more appealing to new comers

trichoplax

@DJMcGoathem You may want to have your say on the recent meta posts about popularity contests and objectivity

quartata

@DJMcGoathem subjective voting criteria

DJ McGoathem

@quartata That is definitely true. I was just saying that winner is still objective.

trichoplax

@quartata Yes - I definitely don't want to lose pop cons as a concept. I just want to see ruthless assessment of which ones are a good fit for the site

DJ McGoathem

I think one of the big problems is that some new users will post a bad challenge without a clear winning criteria, and then go "Oh it's okay, it doesn't need one. Just make it a popcon!"

flawr

10:12 PM

My suggestion was to improve tag info.

/Update.

quartata

@trichoplax agreed.

trichoplax

@flawr Maybe we need to do that first, before closing questions

quartata

@flawr the tag wiki has always discouraged this but no one reads it

trichoplax

What about

> Thus, your score is number of upvotes - (byte count / 100)

50% objective?

quartata

number of votes is objective hence my answer

DJ McGoathem

10:14 PM

@trichoplax that would be both a popcon and a code-golf. Which is ok, but that should only be for specific challenges, not all popcons.

quartata

the votes themselves tend to not be however

flawr

Has it ever be in question that the number of upvotes is objective?

DJ McGoathem

The tag wiki actually encourages really broad challenges.

"Please only use this tag if your question is too broad to be easily tagged [code-golf], [code-challenge], or another type of challenge."

flawr

That is something from the very early days of pop cons.

DJ McGoathem

I think that part has to be removed, and instead we have to find out what makes a good popcon good, and encourage that instead.

quartata

10:16 PM

@flawr idk but we seem to be pretty splintered on this

flawr

@quartata Splintered?

quartata

@DJMcGoathem I'll redo that and the code bowling one here in a bit

@flawr yea we have had 3 discussions and no consensus which kinda makes me mad

trichoplax

@DJMcGoathem Agreed - I don't think other pop cons need that - it's just an interesting combination when considering closing all underhanded pop cons - that one is underhanded but only half pop con

DJ McGoathem

This is a Good popcon. codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/44680/…

This is also a good popcon. codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/28672/…

quartata

americn gothic in particular is an awesome popcon

flawr

10:19 PM

@DJMcGoathem But perhaps a bad example, as it is quite unique, and I think it is not possible to make anything similar again.

@quartata Agreed=)

quartata

if we redo how pop cons work we should consider that particular one

flawr

Too bad that so many other interesting problems are subcases of that one=)

trichoplax

I was wondering if there's a way to split the pop con tag to have different names for challenges that are totally different

DJ McGoathem

@flawr Fair.

quartata

I mentioned that a while back and people seemed kinda lukewarm on it

trichoplax

10:21 PM

Splitting?

DJ McGoathem

Here is what I would call a bad (yet highly voted) popcon: codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2/99-bottles-of-beer

It should have been code-golf instead.

quartata

Too many tags is nasty for one

@trichoplax ye

trichoplax

I started to draft a meta answer about keeping but splitting the tag, but then realised I couldn't put my finger on what the different types are...

quartata

@DJMcGoathem agreed

flawr

@DJMcGoathem Oh yes, I agree!

trichoplax

10:24 PM

The objective validity criterion requirement shouldn't result in closing any. They all have something, just some are too broad. I think that's what needs focusing on

quartata

that was back in the early days when no one had any idea where ppcg was going

mistags were common

DJ McGoathem

Does that mean we should try for a historic lock?

quartata

@trichoplax I disagree I think some are like code trolling: they just cannot be fixed

@DJMcGoathem no point in locking but not closing :p

trichoplax

I think popularity-contest suits challenges like this and this‌, whereas challenges where a human judges the accuracy of an answer like this could do with a separate name, like human-judgement

@quartata Sorry, I didn't mean "don't close any", I meant "don't close any for that reason" - there are plenty that need closing for being too broad.

DJ McGoathem

That's true, but we're one short step away from art-contest with some of those.

quartata

10:30 PM

you should post the tag idea I would like to see what people think

flawr

I see a problem with human-judgement that you cannot make voters behave in a certain way. Voters will vote whatever they like.

And that is usually the most upvoted answer.

Lembik

@MartinBüttner yes

quartata

thats true but what if we changed that

flawr

You could only make this happen if we had secret voting.

trichoplax

@flawr This is true - they all become popularity contests in that sense, regardless of how the question is worded

flawr

10:31 PM

Where you cannot see the number of votes.

quartata

what about a panel

flawr

@trichoplax Exactly.

@quartata What do you mean by that?

quartata

Like a panel of judges.

trichoplax

Ideally we'd have a population of willing volunteers who are shown pairs of answers and asked which performs best, and compile an order from that

quartata

yeah like that^

DJ McGoathem

10:33 PM

> Jon skeet knows what we should do with the popularity-contest tag.

flawr

@trichoplax That is not going to happen, I think.

trichoplax

This shows that popularity contest is even less suited to the Q&A format than the other challenge types

flawr

That is the curse of the framework of this site.

quartata

If we could do it with one challenge and see if it worked that might be good experiment

code-iron-chef

trichoplax

It could be like a KotH, where the competing answers try to impress a group of humans simultaneously, so you don't get the first to post advantage

@flawr Yes, we do seem to have wandered away from discussing practical changes we can actually make...

flawr

10:35 PM

@trichoplax What I've tried so far with my popcons is making challenges where the "good" results are results that people will like automatically.

I think this is the key to "good" popcons, in our current framework.

I just see the problem (that affects not only popcons but any type of challenge) that you can see the votes before you vote yourself, and that by default sorting, the most upvoted answers are on top. This makes it difficult to get "objective" votes.

trichoplax

Yes. It also makes it difficult to get any votes at all for new answers once the existing answers take up more than one page

@quartata I'm still not sure how to split it - and human-judgement is a rubbish name... I'd like to see what people think but I can't see it getting a good response without showing the need first

quartata

I'd suggest we move this to the popcon discussion room but it is frozen :/

New Main Posts

0

Q: Find the factorial in pure standard C

char *factorial(const char *); The above is the prototype of the function to be implemented. The argument is the base-10 null-terminated string of n in n!, and the function returns a pointer to the heap-allocated memory block containing the base-10 null-terminated string representing the result...

ETHproductions

Did one of the PPCG users buy codegolf.xyz the other day? I seem to remember that.

The home page is a mirror of codegolf.stackexchange.com, anyway.

RikerW

10:51 PM

Yeah, but I think it was a couple months ago.

quartata

minxomat owns that domain.

trichoplax

@NewMainPosts Does anyone know what this question means, and why it's not a duplicate?

RikerW

Okay.

ETHproductions

@quartata Figured. Xe owns a bunch IIRC.

RikerW

xe

*Xeno

*Xenophile

@ETHproductions ^

quartata

10:57 PM

@trichoplax It's a dupe. Small restrictions like those do not change that.

It's also rather strange since he's basically asking for you to also implement bigint support

trichoplax

I see so many reasons to close it and I'm trying to explain what is unlikely to be received well. I've also voted to close as unclear what you're asking

I see it still lists everyone as dupe voters even if they gave a different reason to close...

quartata

yeah there is a feature request on that on meta

been there for years with no official response

ETHproductions

11:21 PM

Which of \ , #, or @ do you think is used least in ASCII-art challenges?

Doorknob

Definitely not \

feersum

@ for sure.

ETHproductions

That's what I thought

Would it be too wacky to use @ as a substitute for a backslash in a language designed for ASCII-art challenges?

So backslashes can be unescaped, I mean.

Martin Büttner

how about backticks?

ETHproductions

I was planning on using backticks for regex literal syntax :/

But that could be changed.

Maybe ' for the meta-character?

quartata

11:35 PM

Maybe &? (for backslash that is)

ETHproductions

Or I could use ' for defining a regex and backtick for a char literal

So many options...

quartata

@ would be useful in nethack challenges so probably not that

:p

trichoplax

Aaah... the star board is restored :)

flawr

Oh noh D:

New Main Posts

11:59 PM

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Q: Self-answering question

This challenge is to make a program that will post an answer to this question. You can use any language that existed before this challenge. This is a popularity-contest, so the answer with the most upvotes at 0:00 PST February 6 wins. You must use a language that can access a url. Leaderboards ...

popularity-contest

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