The Nineteenth Byte

Dennis

19:00

@Mauris How do you make J paint boxes with ASCII characters? My console is showing Unicode boxes.

Alex A.

Paint?

Dennis

Show, draw, print. Whatever.

Alex A.

:P

Peter Taylor

@Geobits Ditto until my doctor saw my blood sugar level and warned me to change my diet if I didn't want to get diabetes. I've now lost all that weight gain and am back in the "underweight" bracket.

Geobits

I haven't had that one come up yet. So far so good, not in any of the danger areas. We'll see what happens in a few years.

Alex A.

19:10

Danger Zone

Rainbolt

I keep typing Geobits in my emails

Luckily I haven't hit the send button on any of them yet

Alex A.

My phone autocorrects things to Geobits.

Rainbolt

We have this thing called a Geoserver, and it isn't one of our products, so when I talk about it I get it confused with Geobits

Alex A.

Dr. G.O. Bits

Geobits

Hmm. Well this is awkward.

Alex A.

19:13

Oh hey, a paper I worked on for a few years got published! appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/…

8

El'endia Starman

Congrats!

Alex A.

Thanks!

Sven The Surfer

I've definitely learned too much today, Alex's last name has put me over the edge.

Alex A.

>.>

Geobits

He's semi-related to a godly lion.

Rainbolt

19:15

I thought "Ararslan" was just one of those cool video game usernames that you came up with as a kid.

Alex A.

Haha no

Rainbolt

Unfortunately my last name is always taken before I get the opportunity to make my first character in every single game I play

Alex A.

That's surprising

Rainbolt

I swear this guy in Diablo II would log in exactly every 89 days just to make sure I couldn't have my name

Geobits

My name got changed slightly to Geobits when others started showing up with my old one.

Alex A.

19:16

:/

ಠ_ಠ

So what was your old one?

Alex A.

What did it used to be? George Bitson?

ಠ_ಠ

Geobyte?

Lunabits?

Geobits

@ಠ_ಠ I don't know you :P

Rainbolt

Fedorabits?

Alex A.

19:18

Sep 13 at 15:42, by Doorknob

@ಠ_ಠ WHY DO YOU EXIST

Geoboats?

ಠ_ಠ

@Geobits You know me better than you can imagine.

Geobits

Nope.

Alex A.

As it turns out, @ಠ_ಠ is Geobits' son.

ಠ_ಠ

@AlexA. Shut up, uncle!

Geobits

He wouldn't ask me that question... he knows the answer :D

Rainbolt

19:19

If Geobits knows you in ways better than he can imagine, then are you saying that your imagination is more capable than his?

ಠ_ಠ

@Rainbolt Sure, I even have the reference imagination.

Geobits

You should imagine a search term that will show you the answer, then. There's at least one I can think of.

Come to think of it, it's been mentioned in here, too.

ಠ_ಠ

Even a reference implementation can be bugged. I did not find it out up to now...

@Geobits Another proof, in case needed: As you know all odd numbers are primes, so 2 must be odd.

Geobits

All odd numbers are primes? When did that happen?

Alex A.

9 is certainly prime.

3, 5, and 7 are prime, so by induction, all odd numbers are prime.

ಠ_ಠ

19:28

rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fun:Proof_that_all_odd_numbers_are_prime

Geobits

Induction works best on normal, ferrous material. You're using odd numbers, so it doesn't work out as well.

Sven The Surfer

@Geobits Don't give @BetaDecay any reason to show us his hobs again.

Geobits

> A liberal professor at a famous university lectured his class on what numbers were and were not prime. He started out by saying that the odd numbers 3, 5, and 7 were prime, but went on to say that 9 was not. A certain student, disapproving of simply being told by an "expert" what was or was not prime, raised his hand and asked a question.
"You say 9 is not prime, correct?"
"Correct," replied the liberal professor, who did not like being questioned by his students who obviously were nowhere near as smart as he was.

El'endia Starman

[snort] Albert Einstein. Of course.

Alex A.

I don't think you're supposed to snort people.

Geobits

19:33

It's a pain drying and powdering them first, but it's doable.

El'endia Starman

"[forcefully expels air through nostrils]" is a bit verbose.

Sven The Surfer

Unfortunately, just verbose enough 'round these parts.

ಠ_ಠ

So why isn't it [featn] then?

Peter Taylor

@ಠ_ಠ I hadn't come across all of those before. One or two of them are quite good.

Geobits

@ಠ_ಠ Then it would be mistaken for featuring Albert Einstein like they do on songs.

El'endia Starman

19:36

@ಠ_ಠ Would you have known what featn was? Plus, it's ambiguous.

ಠ_ಠ

@El'endiaStarman No, but I had to look up 'snort' too.

@PeterTaylor Well I just found them via google, because I recalled a similar joke about a engineering student at an oral math exam.

Geobits

Some Noses Often Require Trumpeting

Alex A.

haha

Sven The Surfer

doesn't this encourage upvoting of bad answers? codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/badges/58/sportsmanship

Geobits

Only if you think all answers except for yours are "bad" I guess.

Unless you just mean indiscriminate voting just to get the badge.

But that's a thing for many badges.

ಠ_ಠ

19:45

Having the 'most upvoted' sorting as default does not help either.

I suspect most people are only looking at the top 1-3 answers anyway.

Sven The Surfer

The other voting ones are generally "use" not specifically "up-vote", but I realize that most times there aren't actually answers that deserve to be down-voted.

ಠ_ಠ

So for getting a good score the quality is IMHO not the primary ingredient, but rather the order of the submissions.

Martin Büttner

More nington Crescent

Sven The Surfer

I don't mean to start this conversation. I was looking through the badges and that one was the only peculiar find.

Martin Büttner

(that was bad, and I should feel bad)

3

ಠ_ಠ

19:47

So votes usually have not much to do with quality.

Geobits

Yes, views is correlated to upvotes. Answering quickly gets more views. Sort order keeps it on top. FGITW is born.

Mauris

@Dennis The default differs from system to system. On Windows, j804 gives me ASCII box drawings.

You can type 9!:7 '+++++++++|-' to set it to ASCII (or, by changing the stuff in that string, to anything else)

Martin Büttner

@Dennis mine draws the required characters by default

Mauris

It tries to read your term settings, probably

ಠ_ಠ

@MartinBüttner Is there no esolang yet that accepts number inputs only in their prime decomposition?

Geobits

19:52

I think most people don't come up with esolangs purely to loophole golfs :P

Martin Büttner

Dennis is probably already on it

ಠ_ಠ

I think all golfing languages are designed to shine in golfing situations, whether abusing loopholes in an obvious way or less obvious way.

Geobits

That's a pretty blatant one :D

ಠ_ಠ

I mean look at cjam, with built in isprime/factorization/permutation functions.

Martin Büttner

some non-golfing languages have those as well

Beta Decay

19:56

Anyone here ever used Ada?

ಠ_ಠ

But most non golfing languages that have those usually have a vast library, while cjam does not.

Beta Decay

I've just watched a documentary about Ada Lovelace and it sounds like a nice language to learn for commemorative purposes

ಠ_ಠ

These commands appear to be quite specific when you look at the number of cjam commands.

Beta Decay

@ಠ_ಠ You mean like Python?

Martin Büttner

@aditsu I think we may have discussed this before... were you intending to reserve one each of e* and m* (for some *) to extend to 3-character built-ins at some point?

Geobits

19:57

Sure it has a bunch of useful stuff, but "I can only take input as prime factorization" means to me "I'm only ever going to use this language in golfs where I need to factor things."

ಠ_ಠ

@BetaDecay I had Matlab/Mathematica in mind.

Beta Decay

@ಠ_ಠ Mathematica is probably the weirdest language on PPCG

Alex A.

I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

Geobits

Damn. The one time I can't use the [alex-is-wrong] tag.

Beta Decay

I was thinking more because of the huge number of built ins

Mauris

20:02

Mathematica is a little freaky :<

Martin Büttner

what's freaky about Mathematica?

Mauris

Sunset[].

Beta Decay

I don't think there's another language with so many abstract functions

Martin Büttner

@Mauris eh, that's nothing

Beta Decay

Which don't require to be included

ಠ_ಠ

20:03

And it seems you can solve 80% of the challenges here with less than three Mathematica commands.

Alex A.

Mathematica builtin: WatchesYouWhileYouSleep[]

Martin Büttner

@Mauris okay this is maybe a bit weird:

Geobits

They're not exactly "built-in"... Mathematica scans your brain to determine what you need. If it's not already present, it creates a new function and adds it to both itself and online documentation. It's simple, really.

7

Martin Büttner

6

Mauris

Yeah, I dunno. The syntax just looks scary, so many &s and @s and whatnot? I barely ever understand what's going on.

Hahaha, yes

Martin Büttner

20:04

@Mauris not as bad as Perl :P

Beta Decay

Or lisp

Martin Büttner

(also that's only golfed Mathematica)

Alex A.

@MartinBüttner Well that was unexpected.

Mauris

Very true. Or most actually freaky golfing languages

@MartinBüttner Are there actually Map[] and Reduce[] and stuff?

Sven The Surfer

@MartinBüttner Do you mind editing of your answers with trivial grammatical errors I see?

Martin Büttner

20:05

@SvenTheSurfer no, thanks for the proof-reading

Alex A.

@Mauris Map[] draws a map and Reduce[] makes a balsamic reduction.

Martin Büttner

@Mauris yes

Beta Decay

Though I guess Mathematica's no different to Python

Mauris

I know @ is composition and // applies (maps?) functions or something... I'd like to see an overview of what all the punctuation means, really

Martin Büttner

although Reduce is Fold (and there isn't even syntactic sugar for it)

@Mauris not quite

@ is prefix function invocation. // is postfix function invocation

@@ is apply and /@ is map

Beta Decay

20:07

> This is my face.

XD

Martin Büttner

and composition is @* (and there's /* for right-composition)

ಠ_ಠ

@BetaDecay There are a lot of books in her face.

Beta Decay

@ಠ_ಠ Bookne. It's a recognised condition ;)

ಠ_ಠ

Does anyone of you know Matthias Wandel (Engineer/Youtuber/Woodworker)?

Sven The Surfer

I saw his lego domino row building machine on Reddit.

ಠ_ಠ

20:12

Wood geared baby soothing machine

►

He's got a kid now=)

(That poor thing=)

Baby rocking machine

►

aditsu

@MartinBüttner I don't intend to do that, but I will probably use x* for more 2-char operators

Martin Büttner

is there any reason not to leave that option open?

ಠ_ಠ

@aditsu Why not use a negative space unicode character?

aditsu

@MartinBüttner I will probably leave it open, i.e. I won't use up every single combination of characters

Martin Büttner

reserving one would be useful if it's supposed to have a reasonable mnemonic though

Mauris

20:17

@ಠ_ಠ Those sadly don't exist (or do they? Unicode is so full of hacks, gosh.)

Martin Büttner

(I was thinking ex and mm or mx)

aditsu

@ಠ_ಠ first of all, I have no idea what that is; second, I want to make it ASCII-only

I will definitely use ex for something (there are at least 3 operators fighting for that name)

ಠ_ಠ

@aditsu I do not know whether there is, but at least in latex there is the very useful command \! which produces a negative space, so I thought if there is a latex command, there must be an unicode symbol=)

Martin Büttner

if you use x for 2-char operators, which single chars are left? only nkv?

ಠ_ಠ

@aditsu It seems there are at least zero width spaces

Martin Büttner

20:19

oh, and y I think

aditsu

also u

Martin Büttner

that's quite a lot actually

aditsu

well, n and k will probably show up in the next version

maybe v too

Martin Büttner

@aditsu k as inverse f?

aditsu

no, for more stack stuff

Martin Büttner

20:23

oh?

2

aditsu

well, could be overloaded too

Martin Büttner

what "stack stuff" :P

aditsu

there are a few things that are still hard to do: wrapping top n items in array, copying top n items, moving n-th item to the top

Martin Büttner

oh, the last one would probably be my favourite of those

Beta Decay

Nope, no one else is starring Martin's oh?. Whoever you are, it only works once per day ;)

Dennis

20:39

@Mauris Ah, yes, it's right there is base.cfg: case. 'Linux' do. ... BoxForm=: 0.

Digital Trauma

21:14

Today's reminder of why I'm not keen on perl - these comments:# "What's in the box?" "Pain."
#
###########################################################################
#
# This is where all the scary things happen: parsing lines into
# paragraphs; and then into directives, verbatims, and then also
# turning formatting sequences into treelets.
#
# Are you really sure you want to read this code?

aditsu

Dune reference :p

El'endia Starman

Is it typical to count unavoidable spaces in Befunge programs as part of the byte count?

As in, spaces needed for aligning flow controls.

Martin Büttner

yes

El'endia Starman

That's what I thought.

Rainbolt

21:45

Am I just bad at math or is this due to Java rounding errors?

float num = 0.12438f;
int fifthDecimal = (int)(num * Math.pow(10,5)) % 10;
System.out.println(fifthDecimal); // prints 7 instead of 8...

Someone dug up an extremely old answer of mine on StackOverflow and pointed out an issue with it. Then I got to tinkering with it and now I can't see how my examples were ever correct

El'endia Starman

Just did that with Python and I get 8.

Rainbolt

Interesting

Well anyway, the commenter's concern was that the solution fails for negative numbers

This was just something I found while messing with it

feersum

The nearest representable 32-bit float to 0.12438 is less than 0.12438, but the nearest representable 64-bit float is greater than 0.12438.

Sparr

round instead of cast to int?

Rainbolt

Can't round. I need the digits to remain the same

The challenge is to pick the nth decimal digit of some float

Crap, I've given myself away by referring to an SO question as a "challenge". Now you guys know that I play kiddie golf while you guys are doing the hard stuff.

How is this for a model Stack Overflow answer? stackoverflow.com/a/26048414/3224483

feersum

21:58

The question itself is flawed, since if we say num = 0.3 it depends on whether the nearest representable float is e.g. 0.29999999996 or 0.300000000001

Rainbolt

Well whatever the case, I exacerbated the issue. I tested with this:

float num = 0.12438f;
System.out.println(num); // prints 0.12438

It's not until after I do some math on the number that the rounding error becomes noticeable

feersum

If you do System.out.printf("%.20f", num), you will see that the 5th decimal digit is actually 7.

PhiNotPi

I wonder if printing does some auto-rounding on the number.

Sparr

what @feersum said. "0.3" isnt' a valid float, so askng for the first digit of 0.3 is not asking for the nth decimal digit of some float.

Rainbolt

22:13

sigh after going back and forth with this guy he tells me he is using Python to test my Java algorithm

Python handles negative number modulus differently

Sparr

I understand the reasons for both types of negative modulus... I just wish someone in math/compsci in the 1800s or 1940s had said "this is how we're all going to do it, and fuck the other guys"

Dennis

22:36

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

feersum

I want to have Python's modulus but C's negative division.

Sparr

@Dennis not relevant. this is about picking one of two existing standards, not adding a new one.

Martin Büttner

@Sparr alternatively, languages could just include both modulus and remainder separately (like Julia does)

feersum

Or you could do like OCaml, and only have the remainder operator, but call it "mod".

Sparr

Just give modulus a higher precedence than unary minus. It's already higher than subtraction.

:)

PhiNotPi

22:48

I just found out about a site feature called a "post notice" meta.stackexchange.com/questions/191981/…

El'endia Starman

They're great.

PhiNotPi

I think it's also the name for the "duplicate of" boxes that appear at the top of duplicate questions.

feersum

I don't get it. What is "post notice"?

PhiNotPi

I think this is an example of an automatically-generated post notice: codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/58039/…

The box at the top of the question.

Sparr

meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250148/… <-- still my most wished for SE/SO feature

El'endia Starman

22:56

@PhiNotPi Actually, post notices appear at the bottom and are added and removed by mods only.

PhiNotPi

@El'endiaStarman Where the "marked as duplicate by" box is?

El'endia Starman

@PhiNotPi Not exactly. Lemme find an example on C.SE.

feersum

Is it like the gray boxes that say 'this answer sucks' or something like that?

El'endia Starman

Yes. There are three general kinds of post notices that I can add to an answer (see image below). When a question is locked, that counts as a post notice too, but of a different sort, so to speak.

@feersum @PhiNotPi, all of the post notices on PPCG can be seen here: codegolf.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasnotice%3A1

PhiNotPi

23:24

I haven't seen any grey boxes in those questions, just things like open bounty notices.

and "locked by" notices

So I guess PPCG mods haven't ever used custom post notices.

El'endia Starman

I guess your mods haven't added post notices to any answers.

PhiNotPi

nope: codegolf.stackexchange.com/search?q=hasnotice%3A1+is%3Aanswer

Alex A.

nope: Chuck Testa

El'endia Starman

Bahaha. I remember when that was going around.

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