The Nineteenth Byte

Will a mixture of six spam and rude/abusive flags still do the -100 thing?

(Talking about this (warning: spam/offensive) post)

Almost certainly a troll using sockpuppets.

At least the answer is deleted now.

At least it went -9 before being deleted

Does something like this deserve a mod flag?

No, just spam or rude/abusive IMO

12:04 AM

If we suspect there's sockpuppets, I mean?

OP of question is probably trolling

> Comment: removed offensive content!!! for real!!! ive been hacked!!!

Gah, these sort of people infuriate me!

And now the question was edited, with a comment saying "cover yourself in oil."

That's not good

At first I thought they just got a random spam answer on their question, accidentally accepted it, then started getting worried it would make them seem suspicious and started doing weird stuff, but now it definitely seems like they're trolling/sockpuppeting.

I mod flagged and gave a brief explanation so maybe they can look into it further.

How do you guys feel about the suggested edit?

12:14 AM

I rejected it already.

Wait is there another?

There's one by Makonede to make it more on-topic

It appears to be in the spirit of the OP's challenge, but I'm not totally sure about it

It's basically a duplicate of every kolmogorov complexity challenge now.

I mean it mostly was originally but editing it will either get it reopened then closed again as a dupe, or not reopened anyway.

To me it's not worth it. It does change the author's intent, and the challenge itself is very low quality

I believe OP put "preferably with short code" there just because the site's title is Code Golf

1:05 AM

@NewMainPosts Given literally everything about that challenge, I can't believe OP's acting in good faith :/

is there a way to run matlab online?

@Bubbler Tribonacci's a subset of this

Not an absolute dupe, but I'd VTC

@rak1507 At least Octave is on TIO

is octave compatible with matlab?

Mostly yes AFAIK

1:17 AM

ok, thanks, I'll try that :)

@ChartZBelatedly It does not cover the backwards step

2:03 AM

@Bubbler Not the Sandboxed challenge. A generic Tribonacci challenge would be a subset of the linked challenge, and IMO a dupe of the Fibonacci challenge

@ChartZBelatedly @RedwolfPrograms @LuisMendo I did include a "formal definition" in the recent Roman numeral challenge. Is that not clear enough?

To clarify, the quoted part is the formal definition of the challenge, which should be very clear.

Op didn't make it clear that the quoted section is the formal definition... but if you don't understand what the quoted part is for, that's something you could have commented under the question.

Don't tell me that you all only read the first paragraph, don't understand it, then skim through the rest and vote to close as unclear...

Ah yes

my university is having another blackout right now

it's clear weather outside

so something must be wrong with the power grid

that's two days in a row

very pog

By the way, did you notice that question in the sandbox? If you did notice it but skip over it for whatever reason, that's another failure.

2:19 AM

honestly i'd vtc as a dupe

i need to find the exact challenge, but i'd say it's kinda close

34

Q: Code Romanization

The challenge is to make any Roman numerals valid code in your chosen language. They should not appear inside of strings or anything similar, but work just like any other tokens, literals such as (Arabic) numbers, characters or strings; or variable/method/function identifiers, etc. For instanc...

there we go

I'd say the two challenges are pretty similar

Any feedback?

@Razetime do I get the 100 rep because I automated all of unicode?

@user my only question is what the hell did Bob do to you to make you need to ask internet strangers to abuse them?

@Lyxal It's a long story

It involved my pet goldfish and a sandwich.

Having a walked through example of integer hashing could be helpful

@Lyxal You definitely didn't understand what the challenge is.

2:24 AM

codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/220432/95516 @user I think this is eligible for your bounty

I'll give up trying to explain it to you (last time I didn't success in doing that)

There's the formal definition.

If you don't point out that the formal definition is unclear, I won't explain it again.

I feel ChartZ summarises the issue nicely:

This looks like implementing “custom Roman numerals”, where instead of the standard IVX... it can be any arbitrary characters. However, how specific characters have values isn’t clearly specified, and neither is the “rules” of the numerals (e.g. do preceding numbers subtract?). Finally, the scoring criteria fully throws me off what I thought the challenge was. This is very unclear, and I’ve voted to close it as such

@ChartZBelatedly That didn't, especially the last sentence (which implies that they didn't understand the challenge)...

Does the formal definition help?

no one can understand your formal definitions

@rak1507 What you're really saying is that you didn't understand the formal definition, and you believe others won't too.

You're probably wrong on the second part.

2:33 AM

what I'm saying is whether or not someone can understand it doesn't necessarily make the challenge any better

@rak1507 I'm addressing the unclear part. People must not close challenges solely because it's "bad".

That's what down votes are for.

why

I disagree

Well then, write a meta post about that.

to be fair, I agree with you in that it's not unclear

I think I got the idea correct, so I made another attempt at clarification:

Let me rephrase the challenge: You write a function/program \$F\$ that takes a positive integer \$n\$ and generates a code fragment \$F(n)\$. \$F(n)\$ as a program must output the number \$n\$. \$F(a) ++ F(b)\$ as a program must output \$a+b\$ if \$a \ge b\$, \$b-a\$ otherwise. This must extend to any number of code fragments emitted by your program in the way that \$b-a\$ cases take precedence (think of an arithmetic expression with +s and -s, but the two sides of -s are flipped and it has higher precedence than +). — Bubbler 1 min ago

2:34 AM

Then vote to reopen it.

and I did understand the definition, it's just not particularly helpful to people I think

I don't have enough rep to do that

Helpful in terms of what?

Answering the challenge?

yes

the challenge is clear just from the non formal bit imo

Then that's your problem. It's okay for challenges to be difficult.

The definition of the QFT challenge is not very helpful for answering the challenge either.

it probably shouldn't have been closed, but I don't think the definition makes any difference either way

2:37 AM

If it shouldn't have been closed, then it shouldn't be closed.

By definition.

@Bubbler Well okay, that is correct. Add the no 3 consecutive increasing condition to it.

Although comments with MathJax are terrible on chat.

whether or not it should have been closed based on principles and whether or not it should be reopened are two separate issues

They're the same. If a challenge shouldn't be closed, then the closure is wrong, and it should be reopened.

People are given the tool to do that, and they should do it correctly.

now that it is closed, what would reopening really do? just get it more downvotes, and realistically probably no answers. is that worth it?

That's what should be done.

I don't care too much about the results...

(apparently)

People keep saying that "down votes are not unfriendly", but close vote are.

By definition, it says that "questions like these are not welcoming here"

in principle I agree but practically I think having challenges that aren't very well liked on the site is not very good

2:41 AM

@rak1507 codegolf.stackexchange.com/…

personally I don't see why the challenge got so many downvotes but oh well

I'm getting the feeling that it's practically doable in Jelly

@user202729 yes, all of those should be autodeleted

I would support autodelete at -5

...

@rak1507 Apparently nobody proposed this before.

As far as I can search for.

You can make a meta post about that (for searchability, chat log is basically not searchable), but I'm not sure if it will be supported.

I'm too lazy to make a meta post

I doubt people would agree

2:48 AM

At least you get some reasons why that's a terrible idea.

You don't have to include a bunch of reasonings, but expect more ~~downvotes~~ disagreements if you don't.

The unclear-to-some closure problem is not new, but it's more prevalent nowadays that there are more new people and they propose new types of challenges.

Q: Autodeletions - debloat the site

codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/20850/… posted, feel free to rip me to shreds

New Meta Posts

3:06 AM

0

Problem The 'recent challenges' section is clogged up with nonsense. Solution Auto-delete challenges past a certain negative rep value, maybe -5. Reasons for doing this These challenges add nothing to the site. Downvoting gains more power and lets the site users decide what sort of content shoul...

discussion feature-request

@rak1507 I’ll start a bounty tomorrow

cool thanks

Razetime

3:25 AM

@Lyxal i didn't check whether that was allowed by site

@rak1507 Oh, I'm more than happy to

@Razetime I've given out bounties for much more trivial

Just you wait til I'm done with my edit :P

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

lol

Razetime

@Lyxal lol ok

New Sandboxed Posts

3:36 AM

0

Binary Classification of Odd Square-Free Semiprimes Background An Odd Square-Free Semiprime is a natural number with two distinct prime factors, neither being \$2\$. Here is a list of the first 10 of these numbers (in order): $$15, 21, 33, 35, 39, 51, 55 ,57 ,65, 69$$ It follows, by the definitio...

@Razetime I once gave Redwolf 50 rep for learning to play All Star on piano

And 50 rep for adding a constant for 69 to Ash

Razetime

well you are Lyxal

yes

I am Lyxal

@user202729 The problem is, the challenge will always be clear to someone. But if 90% of the people who view it can't figure out how to read it, it should probably be improved. Closing a question isn't the end goal; it's a temporary status to prevent it from receiving answers when the challenge could still have ambiguities or misunderstandings that need to be ironed out.

3

@RedwolfPrograms What's the point of the closure then?

If the challenge is closed, then these 10% can't post an answer.

If it isn't, then these 90% will probably not post a wrong answer anyway.

2 days ago, by user202729

This site is not for the same purpose as Stack Overflow. It's for people to have fun.

Given that most people complains about "can't understand it at all" rather than "ambiguous", the second point above holds.

3:47 AM

In that case, I suppose I'd agree with you. That's a good point, I'll try to keep it in mind in the future.

@user202729 To give the challenger time to make their challenge clear, without invalidating any posted answers

1 min ago, by user202729

Given that most people complains about "can't understand it at all" rather than "ambiguous", the second point above holds.

@user202729 It's probably true, but if the inaccessibility is not due to the topic itself, IMHO the challenge writer (and the community) should strive to make it as accessible (and thus clear to larger audience) as possible.

@user202729 the issue is why do the 10% understand it? Is it because they can follow the OP’s poorly structured wall of text, or is it because the task is very specific and not everyone will ever be able to understand it?

If it’s the former, the question should be closed

God, I hate autocorrect. “Wall” is clearly not a word and should be “and all” :/

@ChartZBelatedly Not everyone are capable of writing easy-to-understand English.

3:51 AM

@user202729 No, and that’s why we close challenges: to allow those who can the time to help those who can’t

@ChartZBelatedly Given that in most of these cases there's no room for misinterpretation, closing is strictly worse -- it prevents answers from being posted.

A surprisingly large number of challenges just need a few paragraph breaks and formatting fixes to go from “I have no idea what this is about” to a top quality challenge

The set of people who can understand the challenge is small. The set of people who can understand the challenge and can write good English is even smaller.

@user202729 Answers shouldn’t be posted before or while people are fixing a challenge. If you understand it and the challenge gets closed as unclear, hold your answer until later and help fix it

I consider myself to be in the first set, but not in the second set.

@ChartZBelatedly Poorly-structured is not the same thing is "unclear" or "broken".

With the first thing, it takes more effort to understand the challenge, and you can't understand it incorrectly.

3:55 AM

@user202729 But it can be. Walls of text are often incomprehensible, and it’s why paragraphs are a vitally under appreciated tool in writing. Even turning a solid page of text into the same text but as 4 paragraphs is likely to help people understand what you’re trying to say

@user202729 Sufficiently poorly structured text can be misunderstood.

@Bubbler It's much easier to fix something if people point out what they could understand it as.

Take the Roman numerals challenge. The title is completely misleading and all the code formatting in the main paragraph makes it close to impossible to understand or even follow when reading it in my head.

It's really hard if people keep saying "this is badly written, fix it".

@ChartZBelatedly I find the title appropriate and the code snippets appropriate (although some formulas could be turned into MathJax formulas)

Bubbler’s fix mainly revolved around fixing the formatting and wording of the central paragraph. It isn’t much, but it’s enough

3:58 AM

I do agree that the title is somewhat misleading

@user202729 The challenge has nothing to do with Roman numerals, and the title and examples insisting that it did is confusing

@ChartZBelatedly ... okay, I see the point, but it is inspired by the Roman numeral position value system (whatever it's called).

If I wrote a challenge asking people to calculate the determinant of a matrix, I wouldn’t refer to it as a grid throughout the challenge

You can redefine determinant on a grid of number. Clear, but hard to understand.

@user202729 Yeah, I suppose a lot of people use “VTC as unclear” to mean “this is unnecessarily hard to understand and should be make easier to understand”

4:01 AM

@ChartZBelatedly And that's the whole problem right? (good point, I guess.)

Which, IMO, is a valid use

Telling those 10% "you must not post an answer because we don't like how the post is written" is rude.

If a challenge is unnecessarily hard to understand, it should be fixed to be easier to understand. Closing a question is designed to give people the time to fix it. Therefore, IMO, closing a question because it’s unnecessarily hard to understand is exactly what closing is for

@ChartZBelatedly As I've said, there might not be any intersection between the people who can understand the challenge and the people who can write clear description.

And as I've said too, closing is not originally designed for this site. We inherit it from Stack Overflow.

@ChartZBelatedly This, combined with

4:03 AM

@user202729 And, as I’ve said, that’s what editing is for

8 mins ago, by Bubbler

@user202729 Sufficiently poorly structured text can be misunderstood.

I'm okay with it using to prevent answers to ambiguous/perhaps-not-what-op-wants answers, but unnecessarily hard to understand isn't right.

And misunderstandings can result in wrong answers

@ChartZBelatedly In that case, who would edit it?

@user202729 If there's really no one who can fix it, it is unfortunate. But at least we (the community) can try to make it better

4:05 AM

@user202729 The people who do understand it. Together, people’s different takes on a challenge will either lead to everyone understanding it or no-one (aka vote to reopen and vote to close)

and I think we found the solution in this case

(in that Noodle9 and caird found my explanation understandable)

And if no one can both write well and understand a challenge, then I’m fine with it staying closed until someone can

(related: I think I still can't explain my BF challenge to Lyxal. Somehow.)

@Bubbler Who is this caird fellow? I’m ChartZ :P

Anyway :P

4:06 AM

At least until April 6 :P

@Bubbler BTW if you edit your description in, I’ll vtro

The current one doesn’t exactly read very easily

My only concern is that, to make it maximally clear, I have to ditch everything in the current post (including the title), so I'm waiting for OP's consent

@Bubbler Just do it. If op don't like it they can roll back.

^

Add a "note: description written by bubbler. See OP's original description in the revision history" if you want

That definitely is allowed by the license thing, right?

Plus, if they only like some of it, they can edit in a mixture of yours and theirs

4:10 AM

>.< I wasted too much time here.

@user202729 Given that revision history is fully public, I don’t even think it’s necessary

@user202729 Same, it’s 4am, I should be asleep :/

Okay, I'll try

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

4:52 AM

Done editing the Roman numeral-thingy challenge. Please review @user202729 @ChartZBelatedly (and any others if interested)

New Sandboxed Posts

5:17 AM

0

KoTH: Hunter-Gatherer Society king-of-the-hill javascript grid In this challenge, the goal is to write a bot (Javascript function) which survives for as long as possible with its tribe. The bots are placed on an island, with the ability to hunt, gather, farm, and build. Tribes can fight, and the ...

this question is very sus! evidence

Adám

5:42 AM

@Bubbler What is "++"?

@Adám Concatenation. (clarified in the post)

Q: We need to talk about the Sandbox

6:02 AM

@Bubbler LaTeX is surely hard. The spacing isn't correct.

That same issue has been raised several times over the years.

44

Warning: this post will contain things that people don't want to hear. But it needs to happen. Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to business. The Sandbox was a brilliant idea. It allowed people to see what others thought of their challenges before actually posting them. It was a ...

discussion sandbox

6:45 AM

@user202729 Can you clarify which spacing? I'm not seeing immediate issues except the ++ thing (I know there must be a symbol for that, I'm just too lazy to look it up)

Adám

@Bubbler ⧺? Or +\!\!\!+

Q: New mechanism proposal: [MOVED TO SANDBOX]

So \! is for negative spacing?

New Meta Posts

0

Related: (would have the same effect of sandbox visibility): Should the sandbox be moved to the main site? Replace the sandbox with a Main site tag. Current situation: Some sandboxed posts on main are closed, for various reasons. Fact: nobody likes seeing their posts being down voted and clo...

discussion

Adám

@Bubbler Yes, like the inverse of \,

@Bubbler I've added a trailing \, so the spacing appears more natural.