@hyper-neutrino Pop-cons are generally considered to have an objective winning criteria if there is clear criteria of what voters should and shouldn't vote for
But pop-cons are generally difficult to close, as they're borderline ok, and there's a lot of precedent of leaving one of two similar pop-cons open and closing the ither
The only argument I remember reading which I could understand was that if the winning criteria is objective, you have a metric for how good your answer is
And plus, you still never really know how well you've golfed. Until there are other answers in your lang, and the optimal algorithms are found, you can't know. And sometimes one never finds out how 'bad' one's answer was
@AviFS My "more creative" Jelly answer (convicted polynomial builtins) was fun to write, but when do I stop? I could keep adding random builtins that slowly converge towards 0.5, but the fact is that I'm trying to create a solution I think people will vote for. HN's rickroll is a good example of that - the entire code doesn't do anything more than my 1 byter (literally, everything other than the . is ignored), but it's "funnier", so gets more votes
When I golf, I know that a 9 byte score is better than a 10 byte score. I also know that if there's already an 8 byte answer in Jelly, I'm unlikely to post my longer answer because it's worse. I know before I post roughly how good my answer is. With pop-cons, I have literally no idea until people start voting. Hell, I was fully expecting people to downvote my 1 byte Jelly answer because it is rather boring
i don't think there's anyone arguing against the creation of code meant to be entertaining it's just that it doesn't necessarily fit within the framework of a competitive programming site
So, you can have creative answers to code golf challenges that aren't the shortest approach, and we explicitly allow longer approaches that make an effort to optimise their score. You can also have pop-cons that make an effort to be as objective as they can (see my last popularity-contest). This recent one doesn't do that, but it also doesn't inspire many actually creative answers because the task is so simple
I have no problem with interesting pop-cons that try to make some effort to fit with the site rules of an OWC. I do have an issue with low-effort, uninteresting pop-cons that just say "Do X but creatively"
Dennis's answer touches upon this, but I wanted to write a separate answer to make it more explicit:
Objective scoring is essential to drive competition, and competition inspires creativity.
Here is how a challenge works that doesn't have objective scoring: you come up with a solution that is v...
I like the idea that with an OWC, I know at all times how good my answer is. Otherwise, I have to guess what other people like and have to try to go towards that
There are plenty of places on the web for "Do cool coding stuff". I think having a well defined scope and limits helps us to maintain quality and build a community. Some people enjoy pop-cons even the bad ones. But some people enjoy knitting and that's not a reason to start hosting knitting challenges here. You can seek that out elsewhere. This is about the scope and aim of our community.
OWC helps us say "This is what we are about". That way we can build a community around common interests rather than trying to accommodate every possible desire.
It also means that I sometimes have to choose between an answer I find interesting, and an answer I think others will find interesting. For example, I don't find HN's rickroll particularly interesting. The only clever bit about it is a language quirk, and rickrolling is overplayed IMO. There aren't really any answers to that I find especially interesting, because they (mostly) have the same approach of dividing 1 by 2 (or 2 by 4, 3 by 6 etc)
Also, chat is a perfectly fine place for some interesting but non-OWC challenges. If you want to see some creative approaches to trivial tasks, just ask a CMC here and say that "Most creative wins". People like to goof off here
You might get a couple of "VTC as non OWC" replies but even those are jokes :P
Count my Pluses
Your task is, to count how many pluses I have.
What Pluses?
The no plus: 0 Points
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The naïve Plus: 1 Point
+
The double Plus: 2 Points
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The mega double plus: 3 Points
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+ + +
+++++++++
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Pluses of higher order tha...
There's GPT-2, which is free, but pretty bad at generating text, because there really isn't a ton of data here so, the real test seems to be looking at whether we can figure out which text is more interesting than others and how useful it might be for the audience. I tried that, and then I started looking at all of Facebook's social networks to figure out which was the most interesting
Yeah GPT-2 ********************* (2) "I want for sure I know how the last few minutes were." "Aye, what happened?" "What?" "I felt like I had something wrong."
GPT3 has already been put into the position of a dungeon master. It's quite creative and mostly long term consistent, but also needs supervision because it can spontaneously go mad ... or too nsfw
.......... so my now tied 2nd most upvoted answer is just copy-pasting rickroll lyrics into jelly and having UB ignore literally the whole program except a single dot
@JNat Ah nice (I'm specifically thinking about our Welcome page, which I've already posted, which might be better as a "Want to get involved in code golf?" or similar if we show it on other sites)
@Adám I'm still going over all the pings that accumulated over the weekend — I'll leave a note on anything that's not allowed in a timely fashion, don't worry about it. I'll be aiming to not leave said note the minute before the submissions close too.
Actually, shouldn't the title be different depending on the target. I like the new formulation for all other sites, but somehting like "Welcome to the site – read this first" might be better for self-ads. — Adám5 mins ago
If we have "2" welcome ads where one has a title for the network and one has a title for self
Also @JNat for the question ads, if we'd like them to be both banner and sidebar ads, should be post 2 answers, or can we say "right sidebar + banner" in one answer?
@JNat Ah good, don't have to list 170+ sites to advertise on :P
The post says "Each answer must relate to a single ad submission," @Adám, so an individual submission for a sidebar and banner ad would be required. And the 2nd template guidance above should clear your question about where the ad should be displayed, no? — JNat ♦Jun 17 at 17:12
^^ had already answered that too, @cairdcoinheringaahing ;)
@hyper-neutrino I've found that interest here isn't exclusively tech-centric. At worst, we don't attract any newbies from (e.g.) Mi Yodeya, at best we do
BTW @JNat do you get click stats on community ads (like how many times clicked and from which sites/locations) and if so do we get any access to those numbers?
@Razetime Not at the moment--you'll have to subtract 1 (or add v, if you haven't modified it). I'd certainly consider adding a "minus 1" operator if you think it would be useful. It would have to be a two-letter operator, so in general it wouldn't save bytes over just subtracting, but there might be some cases where it would help with parsing.
It would still be hard to do much, because all the functional programming operators and all the looping constructs use letters. Some things might be possible if input was stored in one of those variables automatically.
Count my Pluses
Your task is, to count how many pluses I have.
What Pluses?
The no plus: 0 Points
-
The naïve Plus: 1 Point
+
The double Plus: 2 Points
+
+++
+
The mega double plus: 3 Points
+
+++
+
+ + +
+++++++++
+ + +
+
+++
+
Pluses of higher order tha...
