@MartinBüttner Do you have to remember all of Mathematica's functions or do you just look them up when you come to use them? There seem to be an awful lot...
@BetaDecay I need to look up stuff all the time, and there are probably still useful functions that I've never heard of (or keep forgetting about). But of course, the longer you use it, the more of those functions you actually remember.
@Doorknob Could it be that several users' votes on this poll have been retracted as serial voting? Are you able to restore them?
regardless of that being disallowed, I'm not a fan of those... I don't mind golfing languages like CJam or GolfScript, or coincidentally terse languages like the APL family, but taking an existing language and just shortening all functions and useful constructs to single characters? meh...
even then, the language to do this for is Mathematica
@BetaDecay For me the bigger problem is that, once I know a function fairly well, I forget to check for other signatures, and regularly use them suboptimally.
@Doorknob would you mind pinning a message in chat that tells people to check if their votes are still in place? (I can write that message)
It looks like at least 4 users' votes on this poll on meta have been reverted as serial voting. Please check if your votes are still in place, and if not, cast them again - but slowly. ;)
I like some of the comments I'm getting on the candy eating question. "Finally someone that KNOW how to eat candies." "So... basically candy dithering." "This actually comes very close to how I eat my candy. :)"
Like I said, I didn't write it, just changed where it was grabbing data from (posts -> votes). That part I looked at, but said 'wtf' and just ran with it.
Well, it's election day. I have some terrible choices to make for both the governor's and congressional races. Here's what Nate Silver had to say about it:
> I’ve written about Florida twice before. The story has been the same throughout campaign season. Voters dislike both candidates — former Republican governor turned Democrat Charlie Crist and current Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Both candidates’ net favorable ratings (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) have been negative for most of their campaigns.
> The race may be remembered more for the fact that it features the two most disliked gubernatorial candidates over the past decade than for any particular policy or issue.
And people wonder why voter apathy is such an issue.
The scenario
You live in a country that is having a presidential election. Each voter gets one vote, and therefore there is a firmly-entrenched two-party system. (Third parties exist, but get hardly any votes).
The latest opinion poll shows the race in a dead heat:
49%: Alberto Arbusto
49%:...
If you log that, the lines would become pretty flat, because none of them spans a full order of magnitude, but you'd get similar lines set a bit apart, by the different scales of the variables
Yes. A bit faster would be okay, but it's nice to be able to see challenges as they're posted. On some larger sites, the front page is essentially useless.
Like, if I wanted to look for something to answer on SO, I'd never use it. I have to search by tag at a minimum.
There are just too many for any meaningful manual optimisation, so on would probably just treat the input as base 26 and look it up in the bits of a fairly large number.
This is a very basic user script which does the following:
Checks the Review homepage if there's anything you can review
If so, it changes the title to (n) old_title where n is the number of review tasks you can perform
If not, it refreshes the page in 15 seconds
Install the script
This i...
DVI Connector Pins
code-golf kolmogorov-complexity
This is supposed to be a code golf challenge on the simpler end of the spectrum.
There are three basic types of DVI connectors: DVI-A (analog), DVI-D (digital) and DVI-I (integrated). Furthermore, there are single-link and dual-link versions o...
It looks like at least 4 users' votes on this poll on meta have been reverted as serial voting. Please check if your votes are still in place, and if not, cast them again - but slowly. ;)
Not long ago, we gave folks that have a gold tag badge the ability to instantly mark a question as a duplicate of another. This has worked out exceptionally well in practice. While there have been some disputed closings, the process is completely transparent and community oversight has worked jus...
I'm trying to robber-proof something for the scrambler in the sandbox, but need a quick verification. From what I can tell, there's no way to comment (or otherwise bypass code) in python without the # character, correct?
Just trying to figure out which of my candidates to use, though. I have varying lengths from 60 to 34, and need to figure out how short I can make it while making it infeasible to brute-force it in a week :/
Hmm. It looks like I need to make doubly sure I use a version with only a single pair of parentheses. Adding an unconnected bunch of junk to the end in a pair still gives output (along with a runtime error).
You know, sometimes when you're reading some text, and in the corner of your eye, you notice that in some portion of the text the spaces form some sort of line across multiple rows?
I meant like this: print(123)(123). Meaning I can't use more than the single pair in my scramble, otherwise people could shove junk in the last pair as long as the first evals right.
@MartinBüttner No name that I know of, but I do that too :P
@Geobits k... I was thinking that could make a nice challenge. given some text, find a line length between (say) 80 and 100 characters which minimises the length of such space streets (where, in monospace, a street is any connected path of spaces where you go either straight down or one step diagonally as you traverse lines)
it might be more interesting if I use just straight down, because that might allow for some interesting optimisations (over just trying out every length and finding all streets)
@PhiNotPi How is your challenge going to work? Is it going to be cops must create programs which have output X and robbers must crack them, or is each cop going to post his problem in an individual question?
My Windows is about 10 times as powerful as my mom's OSX, but many of my family like OSX, and my mom is planning on getting an Apple desktop.
Of course, all she does is social media and email.
iPhoto is slower than cold molasses, because it loads each of 2000+ photos every time it is opened (who would be that dumb to implement it this way anyway?), and I am almost positive it has memory leaks.
Whenever you open a reasonably sized program, the entire computer slows down until you reboot.
Or maybe it is external fragmentation, and OSX isn't smart enough to use compaction (literally just read that in my textbook).
I mean, I just learned about this from the textbook, nothing about OSX said.
In this game of cops-and-robbers, each cop will write a simple program to give a single output. They will then make public four things about their program:
The language
The program length
The desired output
A scrambled-up version of the source code
Then, the robbers must unscramble the sourc...
"it's quite a popular method" is a bit of an exaggeration, because so far only Calvin's Hobbies used it (twice in a row), but there's some support for it here
Find largest matrix with property X
This challenge is partly an algorithms challenge and partly an optimization challenge.
A cyclic matrix is fully specified by its first row r. The remaining rows are each cyclic permutations of the row r with offset equal to the row index. We will allow cyclic...
The scenario
You live in a country that is having a presidential election. Each voter gets one vote, and therefore there is a firmly-entrenched two-party system. (Third parties exist, but get hardly any votes).
The latest opinion poll shows the race in a dead heat:
49%: Alberto Arbusto
49%:...
This is a very basic user script which does the following:
Checks the Review homepage if there's anything you can review
If so, it changes the title to (n) old_title where n is the number of review tasks you can perform
If not, it refreshes the page in 15 seconds
Install the script
This i...
DVI Connector Pins
code-golf kolmogorov-complexity
This is supposed to be a code golf challenge on the simpler end of the spectrum.
There are three basic types of DVI connectors: DVI-A (analog), DVI-D (digital) and DVI-I (integrated). Furthermore, there are single-link and dual-link versions o...
In this game of cops-and-robbers, each cop will write a simple program to give a single output. They will then make public four things about their program:
The language
The program length
The desired output
A scrambled-up version of the source code
Then, the robbers must unscramble the sourc...
Find largest matrix with property X
This challenge is partly an algorithms challenge and partly an optimization challenge.
A cyclic matrix is fully specified by its first row r. The remaining rows are each cyclic permutations of the row r with offset equal to the row index. We will allow cyclic...
