The Nineteenth Byte

Matthew Roh

12:24 PM

Okay, I went the hard way and created a challenge without sandbox again.

I hope its simple for you

ಠ_ಠ

._.

Views = dislikes

This is bad

It looks like people understand it

but, uhh, why the dislikes

New Main Posts

-4

Q: Convert all 'o's to 'ಠ'

This is an extremely simple challenge. This challenge is based on a meme in PPCG, which has been trending until now. You will be given a string, and your program should convert 'o's (case insensitive) in the string to 'ಠ'. Examples Doorknob -> Dಠಠrknಠb Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetu...

It's too simple.

s/o\|O/ಠ/g

@MatthewRoh ^exact, don't allow room for cool tricks, probably there is a built-in on every language for "replace character X with character Y"

Anonymous

There's got to be a dupe target for that

Matthew Roh

12:32 PM

too simple?

Anonymous

@KritixiLithos s/o/ಠ/ig

Matthew Roh

Nothing could be too simple iirc

Doorknob

There's a difference between appealingly simple and trivial.

2

Kritixi Lithos

Wait, Carrot doesn't have a builtin for this

satibel

nor grass not brainfuck

Jan Dvorak

12:34 PM

x.tr ?o,?ಠ

Matthew Roh

@satibel brainfuc cant do unicode

ais523

@KritixiLithos why the backslash? is that an old regex version?

@MatthewRoh there are BF interpreters that can; BF is rather nonstandardised

Matthew Roh

Ahh.

Kritixi Lithos

I was thinking about vim regex

ais523

ah, fairly old then

most modern regexes just use | for that

Matthew Roh

12:35 PM

People are actively answering and disliking it ._.

ais523

trivial questions nearly always get a lot of answers

Kritixi Lithos

and downvotes in equal quantities

ais523

that reminds me, I should put in that request for questions with answers > (upvotes-downvotes) to be excluded from HNQ

as it's normally a fair sign that the reason the question is receiving attention is due to triviality

if more people know the answer than think it's a good question…

Matthew Roh

I want to delete it now but theres this answer which blocks me to

Rod

@MatthewRoh and this is why the sandbox should be used '-'

Matthew Roh

12:37 PM

ikr

lets just say that made people know why the sandbox is important

ais523

there are plenty of things the sandbox is good for

determining if a challenge is too trivial is one of them

there are also plenty of things the sandbox is bad at, though

Matthew Roh

I'm supposed to delete the challenge but this one answer keeps kicking my ass

ais523

in particular there have been some challenges which were overwhelmingly popular when posted but got a mediocre receiption in the sandbox

I thought the rule was only against deleting questions with an upvoted answer, but maybe +2/-2 counts as upvoted

Matthew Roh

:\

ais523

"only one answer, but that answer has no upvotes"

so I guess it's treating the answer as having upvotes

I blame the upvoters for this

Jan Dvorak

12:45 PM

You could ask the answerer nicely to delete the answer

Matthew Roh

This is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad...

@JanDvorak I did

ais523

you could also ask the answerer to delete the question, seeing as they're a mod with a deletehammer ;-)

Matthew Roh

oh

Or possibly the one who created the meme?

Jan Dvorak

You could delete that one, too

Matthew Roh

Uhh, What?

Do you mean ais?

ais523

12:49 PM

I don't have a deletehammer; I can contribute deletion votes to some things, but not recently posted questions

Matthew Roh

Nooooooo yet another answer

ais523

that one's being downvoted too by the look of things

I wonder if an answer in a language where the task is actually very difficult would be downvoted?

but I'm not sure I want to put in the effort to do that

Rod

@ais523 Maybe on a more generic "replace character" (showcase like?) challenge...

ais523

I think "implement tr" would be about the right level of nontriviality for a language in this space

although Jelly has a builtin for it, so it'd still fail my definition of triviality

Rod

@ais523 hm, what is the meaning of "tr"?

Anonymous

12:54 PM

@ais523 Like detecting blatant flaws with the challenge

Anonymous

I might write a "implement tr" challenge

Kritixi Lithos

@Rod transliterate in bash I think

ais523

@Rod it's a standard program on UNIX systems, its specification is here

Matthew Roh

I wanna delete it ;_;

Fatalize

@MatthewRoh So you ask for feedback on one of your challenges in the sandbox, which we tell you is a bad challenge in its current state. And this gives you confidence to post a challenge directly without using the sandbox after that?

ais523

12:55 PM

(it's not actually builtin to bash, but on the vast majority of systems that come with bash preinstalled, tr wil be installed too)

Matthew Roh

uhh

Fatalize

Moreover: "This is an extremely simple challenge. This challenge is based on a meme in PPCG, which has been trending until now.". 1) this ಠ thing does not come from PPCG 2) basing a challenge on a meme is almost certainly a bad idea

ais523

actually tr is fairly complex due to support for things like character classes

@Fatalize every meme-based challenge I've seen so far has been downvoted

Fatalize

The upgoat/downgoat one hasn't

Jan Dvorak

@ais523 meta-challenge accepted

ais523

12:57 PM

@Fatalize that's more a Nineteenth Byte meme than a PPCG meme

Fatalize

That's practically the same thing

ais523

I think it's possible that a question based on crossed out 44s could do well, but it'd have to be less trivial than the obvious one

Matthew Roh

I want to delete it, and two answers are blocking me to. that is nearly torture.

ais523

@Fatalize not really, I personally don't really agree with the concept of a "main chat channel" because you'll never find a topicality that everyone agrees with

Matthew Roh

Under 100 rep

TORTURE

Anonymous

1:01 PM

@Fatalize Well that's because it's actually an interesting challenge in of itself

ais523

@MatthewRoh: your recent series of posts is really getting on my nerves

Matthew Roh

sorry

Fatalize

@Mego The scoring is flawed in that since the test images on which your method is scored are public, it's then trivial to get a perfect score

ais523

right, I'm surprised at the scoring method for the upgoat/downgoat thing; actually, I think it's one of the few challenges which would work best as a popcon

because many of the answers are very creative, despite being optimized for accuracy rather than popularity, and because it'll never be objective how good the program could be

Rod

@MatthewRoh it's just fake internet points, no need to worry, stick around, learn new things, improve your golfing, and the points will come by their own

Matthew Roh

1:03 PM

but currently points are fleeing away on their own

Fatalize

You drove them away; not on their own

There is a reason why we encourage the use of the sandbox. It's not no be annoying

Matthew Roh

Oh right

but not being able to delete questions is annoying

ais523

well, the rule was intended for StackOverflow

so that other people who had the same problem could find the answers

Jan Dvorak

You can ask mods to be dissociated from the question

ais523

PPCG is all messed up, because over here, the questions are normally more valuable than the answers

which reverses the whole dynamic of the site

Fatalize

1:06 PM

I don't see why it should be deleted at all. It's a valid challenge, it has clear specs, and it's in-scope. It just happens to be badly received.

Matthew Roh

Could anyone delete my question ;_;

ais523

(that's not to say that answers are useless; just the vast majority of questions require a lot of effort, and many but not all answers are trivial)

Matthew Roh

@Fatalize ^

ais523

8

Q: How easy is too easy?

Recent example: Code Golf for a^b mod n. Is there a policy I'm missing about what's too easy? If not... Should questions I personally dub too easy be... Ignored and left for interested users? Downvoted? Flagged? Commented with a policy of some sort? What, if anything is too easy? Arithmet...

discussion down-votes

Matthew Roh

hmm

Kritixi Lithos

1:08 PM

Sometimes in code golf you think something is easy and then you see some of the answers... — Eelvex Mar 14 '11 at 8:56

Matthew Roh

I deleted it, My reps doesn't go back up?

Oh its back

Anonymous

@MatthewRoh My advice is the same advice I gave Abel yesterday - think before you hit the "post" button

Matthew Roh

In a comment in my sandboxed challenge...

> This is very underspecified. I don't see any mention of projections (orthonormal or perspective), back-face culling, z-buffering, shading, lighting, ...

My brain's gonna explode

Jan Dvorak

He is entirely right, though

Anonymous

It's also not a great idea to try to write a challenge about something you don't really understand

5

ais523

1:17 PM

flagging question: if I see an answer that's been deleted by red flags, and warranted deletion, but only regular deletion (it didn't warrant the red flags), should I bring it to mod attention?

oh right, I see why it was red-flagged now

but I'm just interested around the general topic

Matthew Roh

@Mego I originally understood it but the comments boosted the difficulty to barely understandable

ais523

let me try to talk you through the comment then

projections = "the way points in 3D map to a 2D screen"; in an orthonormal projection you basically just ignore the existence of the z coordinate

which is much terser than doing something that does correct projection would be

Anonymous

@ais523 Possibly. If people are misusing red flags, then a mod should know about it

ais523

back-face culling is not drawing the back of a solid object, z-buffering is not drawing things that are behind other things

and the other option is sorting the faces so that they get drawn from back to fornt

Matthew Roh

Not drawing things that are behind other things?

ais523

1:20 PM

if you don't do any of those three things, then you'll be able to see the back of things sometimes rather than the front, which looks obviously wrong

but apart from z-buffering, none of the approaches are fully general

Matthew Roh

Okey

Jan Dvorak

raytracing is an alternative to z-buffering, in which you test every pixel against every object and pick the closest intersection

ais523

when you have things like angled planes that intersect their range of z-coordinates

oh right, I forgot about raytracing, but yes, that'd work too

shading and lighting are talking about what colour things should be

because the tersest method is to assume that all the things you're drawing are completely black and absorb all light

because that way you don't have to worry about what goes behind what other thing as you're only drawing a silhouette anyway

Fatalize

(Or completely transparent and you don't even have to draw them)

Matthew Roh

I know about shading and lighting but lets just let people to render in simply 1 color

ais523

1:22 PM

if you want to actually be able to tell the faces apart, you need to define some sort of shading restriction

Matthew Roh

oh

ais523

@Fatalize the golfiest method :-D

but say you have something like a red cube, that you're looking at from the corner

if you don't have any sort of lighting, it'll just look like a red hexagon; you won't be able to tell the faces apart

using directional light is the main method of being able to tell the difference between faces at different angles

and it's the method that we mostly use in real life, too

Matthew Roh

Hmm, Let's just use wireframe :\

ais523

(most humans also have eyes capable of depth perception, but it's not a very accurate sense compared to our senses for colour and shading)

Matthew Roh

wireframe is way easier, am I wrong?

ais523

1:25 PM

incidentally, depth perception is possible to a limited extent even with only one eye, but it takes an appreciable portion of time and is very inaccurate

right, with wireframe you don't have to worry about shading/lighting, and you also don't have to worry about z-order issues

so the only thing you'd really have to specify is projection

Fatalize

@ais523 And it would probably be really bad if you weren't allowed to move at all

ais523

@Fatalize you can test it; close one eye, hold a finger around a foot (30cm) away from the other eye, then look between the finger and a background object alternatively

Matthew Roh

So I would choose wireframe with input constant camera angle (:\)

Jan Dvorak

You don't need depth perception to know that a tiger is jumping at your face.

ais523

you'll discover that you can make one blurry and the other sharp; you do that by changing your eye's focal range, which you have conscious control over

and that's purely based on distance

(note that the darker it is, the smaller the eye's depth of field is, so this might be hard to pull off in a sufficiently light area where the depth of field is very large)

Jan Dvorak

1:29 PM

I love playing with depth of field when photographing.

Matthew Roh

Does "wireframe with input constant camera angle" even make sense?

ais523

yes; you should probably specify what the camera angle is, though, and also things like the camera's field of view

Jan Dvorak

A camera isn't just its field of view. They also have a position, a direction and an up vector perpendicular to their direction.

ais523

@JanDvorak right; I don't think depth of field is something you have conscious control over, though, unfortunately (because the way the retina works, you can't vary the exposure time, and the relationship between exposure time and depth of field is fixed for any given lighting level)

Jan Dvorak

Some cameras also have an aperture size and a focus distance.

ais523

1:31 PM

well, direction + up vector is the camera angle; I forgot to mention position, though

aperture size is the size of the output image in this case, which maybe should be specified? focus distance is irrelevant in wireframe, we're assuming infinite depth of field there

Jan Dvorak

@ais523 I thought you meant the field of view angle.

Matthew Roh

input format could be specified by base x, base y, base z, x angle, y angle, z angle, distance from base

ais523

I specified both camera angle and "things like the field of view"

Jan Dvorak

@ais523 aperture size = the iris diameter

ais523

although of course the field of view is two-dimensional

Dennis

1:32 PM

@ais523 Yes, absolutely.

Matthew Roh

@MatthewRoh and that is still damn complex

ais523

@JanDvorak wait, are we talking about eyes or codegolf problems?

Matthew Roh

both

Jan Dvorak

I'm talking about 3d graphics

ais523

@Dennis OK; it was a false alarm in this case, but I'll know for the future

Matthew Roh

1:33 PM

But at least blender isnt that complex

ais523

incidentally, I came across a post with 2 delete votes which blatantly needs deletion, and am currently fighting the urge to VLQ flag it (which would be a valid flag) immediately before deleting it for the flag weight increase

can someone talk me out of it?

Jan Dvorak

What? You can set all of these and more in Blender.

Anonymous

@ais523 Don't flag something if it shouldn't be flagged

ais523

@Mego it's something that should be flagged; however, I also have the perms to just delete it

which would mark the flag as helpful

Anonymous

Then go ahead and flag it

Matthew Roh

1:34 PM

@JanDvorak You can ignore all of these in blender :\

ais523

oh well, free flag weight I guess

Anonymous

"trusted user" means we trust you to use your privileges responsibly

Jan Dvorak

Blender cameras not only have an aperture size and focus distance, but also a number of blades (for polygonal bokeh) and angle, and even an anisotropy ratio for your bokeh.

ais523

oh, haha, SE thought of that, the VLQ flag option doesn't even come up on something I can voluntarily delete

Anonymous

If there's no clear abuse (i.e. the flag would've been marked helpful either way), then go for it. Less work for the mods.

ais523

1:36 PM

(to be fair, if the post wasn't obviously flaggable, it'd have been unlikely to attract two delete votes)

Matthew Roh

I have a (hopefully) nice topic for a challenge

Kritixi Lithos

Please put it in sandbox first

wizzwizz4

I'm getting a really weird behaviour in Windows that I don't understand.

Jan Dvorak

Nothing unusual so far...

wizzwizz4

Writing echo ^[[HHello, World! echoes in the top-left corner of the screen.

(the ^[ is the key-combination Ctrl+[).

Jan Dvorak

1:44 PM

That's an ANSI escape sequence

didn't know ^[ produced the escape character.

wizzwizz4

Writing printf("\x1B[HHello, World!"); prints the DOS symbol for the ESC character.

@JanDvorak That's not the weird part.

Jan Dvorak

Try \e[H

wizzwizz4

@JanDvorak It's definitely printing a ESC character.

I tried \33 too.

And copypasta'd it into Notepad++ to check.

Here it is: .

Kritixi Lithos

Vim displays the escape character as ^[ too

Jan Dvorak

Works as expected in Ruby

ais523

1:48 PM

@wizzwizz4 Windows has more than one API for writing to the terminal; the situation's complicated by the fact that terminal control codes used to be handled by a separate program called ANSI.SYS that might or might not be running at the time, and nowadays are handled by Windows but not in all contexts

wizzwizz4

@ais523 "not in all contexts" How can I make my program one of these contexts?

ais523

on Linux you can expect consistent output in any given terminal, due to the pty abstraction, but Windows doesn't have ptys so outputting to a terminal can give inconsistent results depending on what methods you use

Jan Dvorak

Try running it in Powershell

ais523

@wizzwizz4 the intended solution is to use a bunch of APIs with long Windows-specific names, rather than printf, to specify the position, color, etc. individually

but I don't think most people want to do that

wizzwizz4

@JanDvorak That... is a great suggestion.

ais523

1:50 PM

there are some terminals that always parse stdout, such as ConEmu and the new Windows 10 bash.exe (which isn't technically a terminal, and doesn't have much to do with bash)

PowerShell's terminal might or might not be one of them, I'm not very experienced with it

anyway, the Windows console output situation is just a complete mess

wizzwizz4

@ais523 bash in Run... does nothing.

ais523

for a while you couldn't copy-paste to terminal windows for permissions reasons (they weren't drawn by normal user-mode code)

Anonymous

@JanDvorak Now you have 1378459 problems

ais523

@wizzwizz4 I think you have to opt into it somehow, it's basically a reimplementation of Linux for Windows

and thus handles terminal codes consistently just like Linux does

wizzwizz4

@ais523 You have to right-click on the title bar.

Anonymous

1:51 PM

@ais523 Yep, it's an optional feature that has to be enabled

wizzwizz4

Powershell is slow.

Oh, wait. It was searching the entire path.

Anonymous

AdmBorkBork

@Mego Hey now. That's ... ok, that's fair.

@ais523 Don't forget all the problems with colors and redirection.

Matthew Roh

@Mego I enabled all of them lmao

Anonymous

@MatthewRoh That's probably not a wise move

Matthew Roh

2:01 PM

Yeah, but idc

muddyfish

I now know why bash for windows wasn't working for me

Anonymous

Welp. My internet has slowed down to dialup speeds for no discernable reason

wizzwizz4

@MatthewRoh It's not a good idea to turn them all on.

muddyfish

minGW's bash.exe was higher in my path than the Canonical one

Matthew Roh

I dont care

muddyfish

2:03 PM

@MatthewRoh It's definitely not a good idea to turn them all on

wizzwizz4

@MatthewRoh Stuff will break.

Matthew Roh

Woah

Anonymous

@wizzwizz4 Quit with your spam

Matthew Roh

features = love

Anonymous

(/s in case it wasn't clear)

AdmBorkBork

2:05 PM

@Mego TIL Mego and Matthew Roh share an Internet connection, since as soon as Matthew turned on Windows features (which means Windows Update checks), Mego's connection speed dropped.

Anonymous

@AdmBorkBork I have a lot of questions if that's the case, because the only inhabitants of my apartment right now are me and my cat

AdmBorkBork

Matthew Roh is a cat. QED. ;-)

Mitch Schwartz

how do we know this cat exists

muddyfish

The great thing about the internet is that nobody knows when you're a wolf

Fatalize

Or he is Mego's split personality

wizzwizz4

2:13 PM

@@ppcgmods Please check the IP addresses of Mego and Matthew Roh.

Matthew Roh

@AdmBorkBork Meow.

@Mego ~~I accidentaly found the password of your router out~~

Erik the Outgolfer

@wizzwizz4 I don't think mods should share information not available to regular users. Also, IP addresses are really private information that must never be misused or publicized to a broader audience IMO.

wizzwizz4

@MatthewRoh Ssh... Now you've revealed it for certain, your chance of getting stars from subtle references have gone.

@EriktheOutgolfer I said "check", not "disclose".

Anonymous

The joke

you

wizzwizz4

The instruction manual for the PII page actually says "do not disclose this information".

Kritixi Lithos

2:16 PM

@MitchSchwartz The cat exists and doesn't exist at the same time

Matthew Roh

Wait, mentioning a message without ping? HOW?

Kritixi Lithos

@EriktheOutgolfer I don't think mods have access to our IP addresses

Anonymous

@MatthewRoh I'm not actually sure

Anonymous

I guess the fact that it's a multiline message means the explicit ping was stripped out?

wizzwizz4

@Mego Fun fact: A quote also has this effect.

Erik the Outgolfer

2:22 PM

@Mego I was pinged, but only a small arrow is visible.

New Sandboxed Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Convert to polynomial base numbers code-golfparsingstringmathbase-conversion Background Base Representation Bases may be written with the following generalization (let concatenation just represent adjacency in digits; 10 = ab when a = 1, b = 0): abcdex = ax^4 + bx^3 + cx^2 + dx^1 + ex^0 E...

Poke

@EriktheOutgolfer wat? I wouldn't go so far as to say "really private". Any partner in an internet connection will have your ip and the only information it gives is about your isp and general location

muddyfish

2:38 PM

@Poke but you implicitly trust those people when you browse. You don't however have to trust the entire internet

AdmBorkBork

Don't forget you can also run tracer-tee and see who else is connected to Google.

Jan Dvorak

Huh... if I search "tracer-tee", Google tries to sell me some T-shirts

wizzwizz4

It turns out you can't ping yourself without editing. :-(

Jan Dvorak

@JanDvorak I can totally reply to myself without editing

Kritixi Lithos