The Nineteenth Byte

Hello

12:05 PM

in Mos Eisley, 8 mins ago, by KyloRen

@LeakyNun How do I do an empty array in J

0$?

oops, syntax error

i.0

Zgarb

@LeakyNun '' is shorter.

@orlp Repeating pattern ABACABADABACABAE ...

@Zgarb the J master is back!

@Katenkyo - I wanted to answer to your comment on the trivial tag thing, but discussions in the comments are discouraged. :) I thought that a non-trivial tag could be part of the solution for rewarding good challenges that do not attract many answers, because if you can look them up, you can upvote them.

12:11 PM

@Katenkyo Runs the GUI.

Or perhaps there are other ways to make hard questions more visible, or to look them up... I don't know, I don't have much experience with the site.

@mIllIbyte Yeah, but we can't judge a challenge being "trivial" because he attracted lots of answer. What if someone write a complex but beautiful challenge that attracts 20 answers, do we mark it a trivial?

(and also, I wondered before commenting if I should have invited you here ^^)

@orlp git gui*

How about the length of answers - trivial questions could be those that attract a lot of short answers, 5 bytes or so.

Q: Look and Say sequence in any base

@mIllIbyte I think that's not only about hard vs easy questions (which is a debate linked in the comment), but about a distinction in quality, and I don't think it is linked to the triviality

Let me take an example in my own questions

5

We all already crossed the look and say sequence, and where asked to guess the next element. As its name tells it very well, you just have to say what you see : 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 3 1 2 2 1 1 ... But, what if we had to use a different base to describe it? You could count it in base ...

It has some view, and some upvotes, but no answers, would attract only long answers, but should be tagged as "trivial"

12:17 PM

@Katenkyo bounty?

The length only comes in because you have to do the base conversion yourself, which isn't interesting, also, even if I think the specs are clear, it is still a bad challenge that shouldn't be rewarded

@LeakyNun I don't think it deserves a bounty

I realised myself that preventing base-conversion just rendered this lame, and wasn't motivated myself to provide an answer (to have people wanting to compete with it)

I even wondered if I should have deleted it

@mIllIbyte I don't know if I explained myself clearly, so let me know if I haven't

So trivial = basic operations, hard = you need to do more than one step/complex operations?

@Katenkyo - I like the queston, I am going to answer it. :) But I would not have found it if you wouldn't have linked to it. I understand what you mean, and I agree that the tag could be problematic.

@MarsUltor - In my opinion, the trivial tag can be applied after the fact. If a question has already attracted a lot of answers that are very short, five bytes or so, quickly after it has been posted, it is trivial.

@mIllIbyte Hardly any questions have five byte answers

@mIllIbyte Wow, thanks! I like the idea of a tag, but it would be more in the line of exemplary for a few ones that were genuinely good. But that would overlap with what we try to do via the challenge tour

12:30 PM

@MarsUltor - Perhaps I have exagerated, but the number can be adjusted. How long are the answers to questions like "Hello World", "print 1", "read input and exit" etc.

@mIllIbyte Those are extremely trivial

8

Q: Tags regarding difficulty

I think that we should tag puzzles (or whatever) with an estimated difficulty tag. That way people who want a real challenge can find it and those who are just starting out can find ones they might be more able to solve. For example consider: Distance between hands on clock vs: Shortest path i...

discussion tags

@mIllIbyte @Katenkyo Doesn't trivial mean "Something very easy to grasp/solve?", I'm not an enlgish man though

I agree with the top answer there - what's difficult for one person is easy for another - people have different strengths

@Bálint It's what it means, but I'm trying to use it in the sense intended by mIllIbyte in this case

12:36 PM

Two different people would put a list of challenges in a different order of difficulty

@trichoplax I agree too

But some challenges are made of multiple steps

And those are definitely not trivial

Also there's a difference between
1. A task that is difficult to solve at all
2. A trivial task that takes great skill to golf

Both are difficult to win, but only (1) is difficult to enter

Jan 22 at 21:29, by TimmyD

Simple is nice. Trivial is not.

Trivial around here tends to become "One very obvious way to code it" and that tends to be boring.

3

@TimmyD Was just about to write something along the same lines - that sums it up perfectly

Q: Stack Overflow should have smileys and friend groups

12:40 PM

I looked at other meta posts on this topic, and this came up in the sidebar:

-69

I think Stack Overflow is the most awesome site for programmers on the net. It has all the features one could expect from a programming forum. But there are several features that I miss. In particular I think the discussions and posts are just plain text, which looks boring. Apart from superhum...

discussion feature-request stackoverflow social-networking

I didn't know a question can have so many downvotes without being deleted

or closed

Can you see the vote count split?

I don't have the rep on SO

It won't get deleted because of the upvoted answers

Also votes on meta mean disagreement rather than a bad question

(I wish votes on meta questions indicated whether it was a good question, with only votes on answers indicating agreement/disagreement)

Perhaps tags are not the best idea, you people should now better since you have been longer registered on this site. The problem that I see is that the harder a challenge is, the less answers it attracts, which means little visibility, which means few upvotes, which means that an answer to it is not properly rewarded.

@MarsUltor Shunting yards don't solve the problem of requiring people to define what methods have higher precedence. They simply solve the problem of converting from infix to postfix once that precedence is defined

@TimmyD The only problem is that sometimes I think something has only one obvious way to solve it until I see what other people do

3

12:44 PM

@NathanMerrill Yeah, but what's so bad about defining precedence?

lets say I had a Map<Int, Int>

@NathanMerrill unlikely

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

map get 4 add 6

I'd have to define the precedence of "Int.add" vs "Map.get"

meaning that there would be some sort of global precedence

@mIllIbyte If there's a difficult challenge you can put a bounty on it to both encourage solutions, and to get more views for the challenge.

12:45 PM

@mIllIbyte The "age" of your account doesn't mean your point of view has less value, the newer user are really important and will see lots of thinks elders won't. also "The problem that I see is that the harder a challenge is, the less answers it attracts, which means little visibility, which means few upvotes, which means that an answer to it is not properly rewarded." is a really good point, that's why bounty exists nowadays, but they don't directly reward the question

why is this better than map[4] + 6?

its not

@MarsUltor A bit mis-worded, mostly the style of the buttons and other things As an example:

I was debating whether to allow a func b as a readable, optional alternative to a.func(b)

@NathanMerrill if you want to go the way you're going

12:46 PM

Before:

just go lisp

After:

I like my infix notation

@mIllIbyte There's also the unanswered questions page but I don't know how many people look at it

and optional functional :)

12:47 PM

@LegionMammal978 You really should see Ubuntu Software then, the installation screen is so different

This one will never be solved

@MarsUltor Wow you're right

@Fatalize How are you so sure?

Some of the unanswered challenges are not even too difficult - they've just slipped off the front page and been forgotten

12:49 PM

@MarsUltor no one would spend month solving this

@Fatalize Doesn't take a month

Just use the OTCA metapixel

@Fatalize I don't see that one as difficult, just incredibly tedious. Pixels and logic circuits are already implemented and available for copying

build a processor out of El'endia/orlp's wire building blocks (there are more needed)

That's what I'm saying, it's extremely long and not very rewarding

@Fatalize There is at least one person who is actively still working on this challenge.

12:50 PM

then backtrack - write the simplest Tetris implementation possible

@TimmyD Really?

A working solution to that one would probably make for great publicity though...

@Fatalize How are you so sure?

yeah, I thought I remember somebody working on it

reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/4g70lj/…

@NathanMerrill There was a chat channel

12:52 PM

hmmm, it looks like Phi was working on it back in Jan

@Bálint Quote the text here :)

How do I insert a quote BTW

?

@Fatalize I think @PhiNotPi was working on that.

> text

@Bálint > texthere

> texthere

12:53 PM

> Was their name in unicode? Nope.
Was their name "root" or "null"? Nope.
Perhaps an SQL keyword like "select"? Nope.
It was "Geoffrey". See it?
No? Try this.
Geoffrey

I'm not sure if you can put bold in the middle of a word - maybe just put spaces or CAPS

Geoffrey

you need spaces before iirc

drop the quotation

gEOFfrey

12:54 PM

Geoffrey

g**eof**frey geoffrey

Not sure if it doesn't work in quotes or doesn't work in multiline comments

testing
t**est**ing

confirmed

Oh well...

I love the second answer

> But here docs don’t do substring matching. The document has to end with one line containing only and exactly the eof keyword.
$ cat > /dev/null << EOF
geoffrey
GEOFFREY
eof
EOF
# end of here doc
So that grad student must’ve been doing some really funky shit for this to break that way…

12:58 PM

> Reminds me of the time when I wrote an email to a friend of mine to help him get started with modems. I gave him a list of the most commonly used commands, such as +++ATH0 (this is the Hayes command for hanging up the phone). I spent a day or two afterwards tyring to figure out why my modem kept disconnecting every couple of minutes. As you have probably guessed, every time my computer tried to send out this email, the plain text +++ATH0 went through my modem, and made it hang up...

11

That's amazing, 17/10 best modem ever

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Any chat mini-challenge?

hm

brb, I used to have a .challenge file with a couple

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ .challenge?

file extension...

1:03 PM

yeah

I made it up myself, has no meaning other than for me.

As long as you configure your computer to open them correctly, it's fine.

People watch your Github repo and you have no idea who they are…

@mınxomaτ Hi, you changed avatar?

Yes. I decided to use my GH avatar everywhere.

Looks cool

@Fatalize And people always star the repo you put the least amount of work into.

1:06 PM

Kinda like codegolf answers

reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/4jqrcj/…

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ And... have you found your file?

@LegionMammal978 Can you just link the source, this is awful to read.

@LegionMammal978 This can't be real, right?

@TimmyD You'd have to ask the user ;)

1:09 PM

@LegionMammal978 That's just stupid in a whole new level

Why is this answer downvoted 185 times? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2645/…

I was summoned?

@mınxomaτ I only have one repo :p

@PhiNotPi Were you the one who worked on that tetris in GOL "program"?

Yes

@PhiNotPi Do you still work on it?

1:14 PM

@LeakyNun no

if I did, I would have posted it here already.

>_>

@Bálint It's been a couple months, but now that I've been reminded about it, I might actually time to finish it up.

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Care to make one on the spot?

sure, let me think

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ You know how to write JS, right?

yeah

not amazingly, but yeah

1:15 PM

needs help

what program?

The main roadblock right now is a development environment, something that is capable of handling tiled logic gates (which I might need to write myself).

@LeakyNun I can multitask.

I know js too

@PhiNotPi that would almost be more impressive.

Q: Proving you are the best obfuscator

1:16 PM

@Sp3000 appeared once we said "JS"

New Main Posts

0

Write a program that, given a String as input, outputs a truthy value, if the String is your StackExchange-Username and a falsey one if not. Make your code as obfuscated as possible. Testcases (for my case:) input output ------------------- Seims true BestCoderXX false Scorin...

popularity-contest

@PhiNotPi what's wrong with using a circuit designer?

@Fatalize Making something stupid simple in JS is a sure way to get stars and forks:

2

Agawa001

@Bálint sql injection, lol robert is a name which seems to fit his impetuosity

@NewMainPosts Would anyone upvote me if I answered with a really simple answer claiming it was obfuscated for non-coders?

1:19 PM

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Go ahead

@NathanMerrill Digital signals in GoL are a lot different than actual electricity.

would you upvote though?

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Yes, I thought the same BTW

Agawa001

i dont think those sql tricks still work out

@PhiNotPi how so? is it the fact that they take time to run?

1:22 PM

@LeakyNun has a trailing comma

i,j;f(n){int a[1<<n];*a=n;for(i=0;i<1<<~-n;++i){for(j=(a[i]=i&1?1:1+a[i/2]);j--;)putchar('[');‌printf("]],");}}

if so, I believe most circuit designers allow you to make your own "modules", and you could simply create a different module for each possible tile that adds a delay

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I simply create an unreadable code, and run it trough minimizers and obfuscators

@orlp What is that?

@LeakyNun your mini challenge

in ruby?

1:23 PM

C

wouldn't recursion make it shorter? (refer to my pyth solution)

@Bálint okay

it's an online algorithm

2 hours ago, by Leaky Nun

Reference string approach without commas u%"{%s{%s}}"*2]PtGQ"{}"

it generates character by character

1:24 PM

Oh, nice

@LeakyNun I have one, gimme a bit

using [6, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 4, 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1]

how do you generate that sequence?

a(n) = n&1 ? 1 : 1 + a(n/2)

a(0) = N

nice!

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ alright, waiting

1:26 PM

Could a moderator please unfreeze this room?

The Quest for Tetris

For discussing this: goo.gl/kuCiRF | VarLife: goo.gl/StrPLC |...

@PhiNotPi I'm afraid moderators do not have such heating capabilities

try asking the sun

@LeakyNun about lines of regression from points

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Nice!

@zyabin101 why?

@PhiNotPi He's a m--- wait, he's not.

1:30 PM

Given either a list of pairs of integers [(x,y),(x2,y2),...] or 2 lists of integers [x1,x2,...] and [y1,y2,...], output equation of the line of regression for those points, without using any built-in functions.

@PhiNotPi you heard nothing >_>

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ Well, what's the requirement?

code-golf

sorry, wifi went weird.

I thought I said that?

@PhiNotPi done.

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I mean, how accurate must the line be?

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ You are not a mod.

1:32 PM

Do you know how to calculate the line of regression?

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ cool

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ by what metric

@LeakyNun there is a formula for it, use the normal precision of your language.

@PhiNotPi @Eᴀs is not a mod >_>

least squared error?

least mean absolute error?

1:33 PM

> Linear regression models are often fitted using the least squares approach, but they may also be fitted in other ways, such as by minimizing the "lack of fit" in some other norm (as with least absolute deviations regression), or by minimizing a penalized version of the least squares loss function as in ridge regression (L2-norm penalty) and lasso (L1-norm penalty).

@zyabin101 yeah, but it's unfrozen

:D

@zyabin101 Just look at the room :P

so..

which is it?

can you wait 15 seconds

1:34 PM

which is it?

@LeakyNun I use the one in my stats textbook, (Mean(xy) - (Mean(x) + Mean(y)))/(stdevX * stdevY) * (stdevY/stdevX) is the slope, (Mean(y), Mean(x) is a point on the line.

what is stdev?

standard deviation

^

Do I win the obfuscation challenge?

@Bálint JSFuck obfuscator

1:36 PM

no, it's not creative enough.

and ninja'ed

@MarsUltor How the fuck does that work

with DURK MAJIK

@Bálint JS' type coercion

and stupidity

e.g. + turns stuff into numbers/NaN, !! checks truthiness

1:37 PM

oh @Bálint answered

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I linked to JScrewIt

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I already upvoted it

I not upvoting, he didn't do anything but paste into the translator.

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ What on earth is (stdevX * stdevY) * (stdevY/stdevX)?

@Dennis @MartinBüttner @Doorknob @AlexA. We've got a serial editor who's editing in spam links -- codegolf.stackexchange.com/revisions/55959/3 (among many others)

1:40 PM

@LeakyNun ?

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ What's the point multiplying by stdevX and the dividing by it?

brb, maybe I messed upt the formula

@TimmyD Hmm? What did he edit in?

Changed all of the links

It's his post, and it looks like they go to the dyalog site.

At least the one you linked.

1:43 PM

^

Wait, you actually clicked the goo.gl link?

You're braver than I

Yea

@TimmyD That's his own post, and I clicked it too

@TimmyD goo.gl sites can't lead to unsafe stuff, google makes you sure of that

I saw dozens of edits changing links to some goo.gl address and raised a concern.

Makes sense :)

A straight address would be preferable imo. It's not like it points to a very long url.

But probably no big deal.

1:46 PM

I would be more concerned with his proselytic avatar

Well, carry on, then

Martin Büttner

@TimmyD Wow, ~70 edits at once... I've let him know that flooding the front page isn't very nice, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the edits themselves.

dyalog.com/meet-team-dyalog.htm#Adam

Maybe he's running SEO for dyalog now :P

@LeakyNun looks like that is unnecessary, idk.

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ L@.Om^ad.Ob2b2%"(y-%s)/(x-%s)=%s"+J.OMCQ/-.O*MQsJ*FyMC

1:49 PM

I've never seen the front page flooded like this.

@LeakyNun the end formula after checking my book was

Σ(x .* y) - (Σ(x) + Σ(y)   σ(y)
–––––––––––––––––––    * --------
     σ(x)*σ(y)             σ(x)

@PhiNotPi Goes beyond the front page too...

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ What does this mean?

the brackets aren't even balanced

Doorknob

@TimmyD You can use "other" flags for that (well, turns out it raised an automatic flag anyway).

1:53 PM

@LeakyNun ?

I missed one, oops.

But that is the formula.

@Doorknob TIL

Σ(x .* y) - (Σ(x) + Σ(y))      σ(y)
––––––––––––––––––––––    * --------
     σ(x)*σ(y)                σ(x)

How to fuck with programmer friends:
step1: Go to their code
step2: pick out a random spot, preferably in a long line
step3: insert this three characters in there: --
step4: remove the "-"s

lol

@MartinBüttner Thanks, Martin. Sorry for the pseudo-panic. :D

1:54 PM

@Bálint But there are only two characters there

@LeakyNun Try to copy-paste them, and start deleting them

Adnan

@Bálint Hahaha sneaky

@Adnan I don't get itttt

@LeakyNun .mothereff.in/byte-counter#-%E2%80%8B-%0A

Much better: -‌-

Adnan

1:56 PM

There is another character between the two dashes

Guess what :P

Doorknob

@TimmyD Thanks for letting us know :)

@MarsUltor Took me a while to delete it

U+200B

or as punks call it, a zero-width space

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

1:57 PM

‌‌

It needs a ton of bytes BTW, like seriously a lot

Compared to how it is only 1 character, if we even can count it 1

‌‌

Oh good, we're playing with zws again :/

‌‌