The Nineteenth Byte

Neil

19:02

@Razetime step 1. Install generic web server on server 2. Install remote access service on generic web server. 3. Install chat server on server 2. 4. Install SSL terminator for both servers on server 2. 5. Install http to https redirect for generic web server on server 1. 6. Try to install http to https redirect for chat server on server 1, but accidentally redirect entire generic web server by mistake.

Aaron Miller

19:38

I feel like Flipbit would actually be pretty easy to use if the input was better, but as it is we can really only use it for hardcoded answers. I just spent the last two hours getting really close to figuring out how to add two numbers only to realize that my whole idea was flawed and wouldn't work. :/

Browncat Programs

The online dictionary thing we're using in class seems to be confused:

Aaron Miller

what kind of thing which unspecified some anything

Browncat Programs

19:58

Okay apparently not only does latin have hundreds of endings that change the meanings of stuff, a lot of them are also duplicates

And since every latin teacher in the school district has quit, the online class we're supposed to be taking is using a totally different textbook that taught things in a much different order, so nobody has any idea what to do

Very fun

rak1507

@BrowncatPrograms caecilius est in horto

Browncat Programs

That's the one we used to use :p

rak1507

ayy

fond memories

Aaron Miller

so why are you learning latin again?

Browncat Programs

My school district has basically no choice of languages

Wheat Wizard

20:04

Latin is fun.

rak1507

latin at least in the UK is surprisingly fun and relaxed

Aaron Miller

I never had to learn a language in school

rak1507

if you are at all interested in roman history + literature, it'll be nice

Wheat Wizard

I like Latin poetry a lot. Since they based it on Greek forms which don't make any sense with the Latin language.

I mean there is other poetry too. And there's good stuff there too. But I really like (idk if that's the best word) the aeneid.

rak1507

I prefer non fiction or at least poems about more 'real' things, idk there's just something cool to me about reading about some stuff happening thousands of years ago

caird coinheringaahing

20:12

@AaronMiller I'd update it, but it's not exactly high priority and I'm happy to wait for TIO to become updated

(Or for another platform to take its place)

Aaron Miller

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ no worries

its a pretty unique language, I've gotta say. You can't do a ton of stuff with it, but figuring out the best way to do what you can is pretty fun

ngn

@hyper-neutrino @JoKing could you grant this user write access to this room please?

Wheat Wizard

Wow.

I'm right here.

ngn

@WheatWizard you look different :)

Wheat Wizard

@ngn done.

AviFS

20:20

Marshall still didn't have write access here? That's crazy!

ngn

@WheatWizard thanks! sorry i didn't recognize you at first

AviFS

They've had write perms in APL Orchard for over a year now.

rak1507

bit strange that if someone's granted permission to one room they still have to be granted permission from the rest imo, would make more sense to just apply to all rooms

Wheat Wizard

Not sure about that.

Getting enough rep to talk network wide is not very tough anyways.

rak1507

Why not? Not as if someone who's already been approved is going to spam in another room or anything

@WheatWizard true

ngn

20:23

@AviFS i think marshall is a lot more interested in j, apl, and his own bqn language than k, so there wasn't much incentive for him to chat there

AviFS

@ngn Oh... right. I thought it was write perms for TNB

The K room makes sense

emanresu A

24

A: Unlolify a lolified message

Vyxal s, 3 bytes ₈τC Try it Online! τ # Convert to base... ₈ # 256 C # Get charcodes

So close...

rak1507

how the hell did that get 24 upvotes

emanresu A

FGITW / outgolfing Lyxal by 15 bytes

Wheat Wizard

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

How many Jimmies does this platform need? Platforms are stretches of - characters separated by one or more characters. For example: ------ -- ------ - Has 4 platforms sizes 6, 2, 6 and 1. Platforms that are not supported will fall. To be supported platforms need Jimmies. Jimmies look lik...

Feedback?

hyper-neutrino

20:38

well i suppose my mod ~~abuse~~ power services are not needed anymore :p left my computer for a bit, thanks WW

emanresu A

@WheatWizard Try for half an hour to find a regex solution.

It's annoying when someone discovers one later on

Neil

@NimUser *role (although I couldn't work out whether you were really quoting or not)

Sandbox Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

A RollerCodester Ride Just had this idea... needs development. Submissions must be designed to output code in a different language, which is then executed to produce code in yet another language. This can go on as long as needed. Scoring: much like a rollercoaster, this is only fun if the rides h...

Neil

20:54

@emanresuA Mine is apparently +4 advisedness

emanresu A

@Neil Yes

DLosc

@Neil Sounds like a character stat from some tabletop RPG

Neil

I'd prefer to give out -4 advice though, it's golfier

+4 advice sounds like your code was buggy and my attempt at fixing it cost 4 bytes

DLosc

21:10

@BrowncatPrograms True. Although I've found Latin and Greek easier than German--German has fewer endings, but more of them are duplicates. >_<

@Neil Hm. I was thinking of +4 as you're better at giving advice than most people are.

emanresu A

+4 as 4 upvotes for good advice, no?

Neil

@emanresuA Ah, you mean my advised comments get 4 upvotes? Nice.

emanresu A

22:02

First Good Answer!

user

I don't really think it deserves 25 upvotes, but I upvoted it anyway because I would have normally upvoted it because of the cleverness

ಠ_ಠ

emanresu A

@user Does this deserve +47?

user

No, more like +20 imo

emanresu A

Funny, but that's it.

user

It's quite humorous but I feel like answers with 47 upvotes should be ones that ingenious approaches

^^

CGCC's voting principles are so messed up

emanresu A

22:14

Agreed

hyper-neutrino

22:28

@emanresuA i was gonna bring that up had I been here and you hadn't already mentioned it lol

i am disappointed that that is my highest voted answer but i don't really care anymore

Unrelated String

😔

ngn

@WheatWizard @hyper-neutrino @JoKing i have another request: write access for this user to the same room ("k tree") please

Wheat Wizard

done

user

@hyper-neutrino Heh, for a while my highest voted answers were those in languages which I never used

hyper-neutrino

oops i did it at the same time

ngn

22:32

thanks both :)

user

A tip for golfing in Pip, a Mathematica builtin that took five seconds to find, a ridiculous Unary answer, and something else

hyper-neutrino

why did that mark me as joining the room

at least my second highest voted answer isn't the most boring but it's still not that interesting

user

> now beats OP's unposted haskell solution!

**CMP:** What's a good way to implement a garbage collector?
(I'm planning a language that'll have a GC; my current plan is to have a `numRefs` field in every object and have a `decrementNumRefs` method that decrements the field and, if the object has 0 refs, deletes it and calls `decrementNumRefs` on the object's other fields. The method would originally be called when a variable is reassigned/goes out of scope. That sounds too simple, though, and I haven't done any research on GCs, so I want y'all to do free work for me /s /s)

Wheat Wizard

@user You're going to have a problem with circular reference.

Unrelated String

yeah i think reference counting is a fairly tried and true method with that caveat

user

22:44

@WheatWizard Like if two lists contain each other?

Wheat Wizard

Sure that would be one way to have circular references.

A simpler one would be a doubly linked list.

user

Wouldn't one be deleted if the other was, though?

Wheat Wizard

Yes, however if there are no references to the two they will keep each other alive.

user

Ah

Wheat Wizard

Neither of them will ever be deleted in the first place.

Step one: Make all data immutable. Now if references can only point to objects which are the same age or older. GC just got a lot easier and faster.

rak1507

22:45

the best GC is your operating system, it'll free any memory after the script finishes running :)

user

lol

@WheatWizard That's much easier to implement, but a bit more inconvenient to use. I'll certainly consider that, though, a GC with all the bells and whistles of practical languages is probably something I can't handle

Wheat Wizard

This would likely make your language purely functional.

user

Not a bad thing, but not a great thing either

Wheat Wizard

It is great for GC though.

user

Even cooler would be something like Rust, but that would be a pain both to use and to implement

Wheat Wizard

22:50

iirc Rust does have mutable data.

user

Yeah

I meant that not having a GC or manual memory management would be cool

Wheat Wizard

The thing isn't so much that immutable data speeds up GC it's more that mutable data slows it down. Any mutable data at all instantly makes GC harder and slower, even for the immutable parts.

lyxal

23:15

Aw frick they copyright claimed my soup falling over video

user

Wait what

lyxal

Thank you Oppo for providing templates with non-royalty-free music

Very cool

Browncat Programs

What even is this "unlolify a lolified message" challenge

It's just base conversion

It has nothing to do with lol

Wheat Wizard

I'm surprised I wasn't able to find a dupe target.

user

lol

Browncat Programs

23:24

And why did it take lyxal 18 bytes to solve in Vyxal

That's some pretty insane overcomplication

@lyxal I demand an explanation

user

lyxal's nervous because Vyxal is so close to 69 stars

in Vyxal, 16 mins ago, by lyxal

We are 10 stars away from haha funny number

Wheat Wizard

Yeah. I saw the 18 bytes in Vyxal and was pretty surprised that it could take that much to do.

user

@BrowncatPrograms Must've choked under pressure as those humans often do

Maybe a more straightforward explanation of the challenge would've helped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Browncat Programs

There's some seriously awful voting on these answers, too

Wheat Wizard

@WheatWizard I don't know anything about Vyxal though.

Browncat Programs

23:26

+25 (24 now) for a trivial golfing language answer with flags

I thought we were better than this

user

Someone was very happy with many of the answers :P

1 hour ago, by user

I don't really think it deserves 25 upvotes, but I upvoted it anyway because I would have normally upvoted it because of the cleverness

Browncat Programs

What cleverness

That's the most straightforward way of doing it

What else would you have done?

user

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Browncat Programs

And there's flags too

It's a downvote and half for me

user

It's a whole lot shorter than lyxal's, and I figured that took cleverness

Browncat Programs

23:28

Plus someone needs to counter the vote spam

user

@BrowncatPrograms Refrain from upvoting if you want, but why downvote?

Ah

Browncat Programs

Flags + trivial + overrated

Wheat Wizard

You can downvote if you want to.

user

Sure, but I see nothing in the answer that needs downvoting

Browncat Programs

I do, and it's in the header :p

user

23:30

...

Browncat Programs

(and another one's just to the left of it, and unnecessarily in the double digits)

user

Wait, left of it?

hyper-neutrino

the vote counter

Wheat Wizard

@hyper-neutrino I used to be really mad that the least favorite of my questions was my top scoring one. I solved it by just asking a better question :P Someday you will overcome that answer.

hyper-neutrino

@WheatWizard I had that one trivial fibonacci number formula in sympy thing at the top for like years, only to be beaten by a 1-byte answer stretched out to a rickroll verse :( hopefully I will eventually make an actually clever answer, but I haven't had many in a long time overall lol

Browncat Programs

23:32

@BrowncatPrograms Meanwhile answers that are actually clever, like Arnaulds, are buried at +3 or +4

hyper-neutrino

also my top voted question is a pretty bland kolmo to just output a really long chemical name (at least my dennis appreciation challenge is just barely behind it)

Wheat Wizard

My top answer is kind of meh. It might be somewhat clever? I lack the ability to judge it anymore.

My first question is also still my #4 of all time and I honestly have zero idea why.

hyper-neutrino

i think the only reason the vyxal answer is so highly upvoted is because of lyxal's blunder which is the main reason i'm not going to vote on it

Browncat Programs

Plus there's probably some HNQ effect going on

Wheat Wizard

I think that is 100% true.

hyper-neutrino

23:34

base 256 → to codepoint is like, half of the answers there, and I don't hate flags as much as redwolf (:P) but the rest do it fine with just 3 bytes of code alone

Browncat Programs

People notice one answer way ahead and either vote on it immediately, or don't understand the Vyxal answer and assume it's this crazy magical thing nobody could come up with

hyper-neutrino

not sure what japt flags do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ no opinion on those

Browncat Programs

They're about like Vyxal's, but my opinions on Japt's flags are slightly less negative since its creator didn't do it purely for the sake of doing something borderline cheaty

Wheat Wizard

It's kind've just a boring challenge.

user

^

Browncat Programs

23:36

It's definitely a boring challenge, yeah

When I first saw it I was like "...what?"

The flavortext and title massively overhype it

I did the exact same thing today as part of a parser and it never would've occured to me "hey, this is some seriously 1337 shit here"

user

Yeah, I was hoping for a better challenge

Wheat Wizard

I probably should have left more comments in the sandbox.

hyper-neutrino

yeah the explanation is quite complex, the background story is quite unnecessary and makes it seem a lot more complicated than it is, and the title is pretty meaningless and i thought it'd be a string processing challenge

also "lol-ify" is not exactly the first way i read "lolify", tbch...

3

user

It'd be nice if you got a notification in your inbox every few days to go visit the Sandbox

Browncat Programs

When I saw the binary I got excited because I thought it'd be about how lol and 101 look similar, so you could somehow encode lols in raw bits

Which is a creative idea

user

23:39

Oh, is that why it's named lolify?

Browncat Programs

Probably not

Idk

Wheat Wizard

@BrowncatPrograms I thought this too.

I don't know really why it's called that.

Browncat Programs

It got to second place or maybe even the top HNQ, and if it had been titled "reduce a string to an integer" it definitely wouldn't have gotten close

Niko

i mean, first second i just read it like loli... and i thought wtf to myself

hyper-neutrino

actually

do y'all think we should take it off the HNQ?

@Niko heh, same

Niko

23:40

unlolify

user

@hyper-neutrino Probably a good idea

Browncat Programs

Maybe, it's definitely getting a lot of vote spam on answers

Niko

lmao

rak1507

degenerates

hyper-neutrino

no u

user

23:41

@rak1507 Yeah, triangles are dumb, squares unite!

Wheat Wizard

@BrowncatPrograms Activity is a strong influence on HNQ (at least at one point it was) so I think the fact that it is quite trivial actually has a lot to do with it's performance on the HNQ.

hyper-neutrino

oh hi @JoKing good timing. Also @WheatWizard thoughts on removing codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/235199/… from the HNQ? it's not very interesting and the votes on the answers are getting very FGITW/HNQ-effect-y and i think it'd be best to take it off, but i'd like a second opinion

I think HNQ still cares mostly about answer count so... trivial challenges go to HNQ.

Wheat Wizard

Which is why if you think a challenge is boring do not answer it.

Jo King

or at least answer it in an interesting language

user

:( Didn't realize that before I started writing my solution

Deleted my answer now, though

hyper-neutrino

23:43

Gotta be careful using "loli" these days. 💁🏻‍♀️ 😂 — Taco タコス 7 hours ago

lol

Browncat Programs

@WheatWizard Yeah but I want the dopamine rush from that green +10. (I can quit any time, I swear)

Wheat Wizard

@hyper-neutrino I don't care either way.

user

@BrowncatPrograms Yeah I want that dopamine rusg too, can't get by without rusges

hyper-neutrino

@BrowncatPrograms quitting is so easy, I've done it a hundred times! (I think that's a Mark Twain quote? can't remember)

user

Dammit, you fixed it

Niko

23:44

@WheatWizard but boring question is mostly easy to be answerable by newer users( or me), and those more interesting ones are likely to be out of reach for most of the people’s ability

user

@hyper-neutrino I'm not addicted to brake fluid, I can stop at any time

@Niko But there are plenty of boring questions already out there

hyper-neutrino

challenges don't have to be trivial to be easy and don't have to be hard to be interesting

Browncat Programs

^

user

Tangent: We need a near-comprehensive list of easy challenges, medium challenges, etc. to help out new users

Wheat Wizard

@Niko You can always answer old easy questions too. Old questions never end up in the HNQ to my knowledge.

Niko

23:45

@user most of them already have 99% of more general languages

Browncat Programs

@user And for golfing language development. A good list of hard but somewhat "vanilla" challenges would be so helpful

user

@Niko So? You can try to improve on them or answer in a new language. Older answers are often badder

hyper-neutrino

yeah I don't think I've seen posts on HNQ older than like a week max

111

A: What are the criteria for questions to be selected for Hot Network Questions?

Basically the same formula used to select the questions shown in the "hot" tab on a site. We have a few tweaks: Successive questions from the same site are penalized by increasing amounts. So, the first question from SO in the list gets multiplied by 1.0, the second by 0.98, the third by 0.96, ...

behold, the algorithm

Browncat Programs

@user People often overlook older trivial challenges, so there's often huge golfs possible

E.g., if nobody's taken it, I currently have the shortest JS primality test IIRC

hyper-neutrino

the answer count (up to 10) is multiplied by the question score, divided by 5, and then the total answer score is added, and the whole thing is divided by the question age +1 ^1.4 (so between linear and quadratic falloff)

2

so basically questions that are young, highly scored, and have a lot of answers get a huge boost, even if the question isn't interesting and the answers are mostly just ports of each other

Wheat Wizard

23:48

I'm just saying that in general answering a question boosts that question. It is a form of promotion, especially if that question is new enough to be elligible for the HNQ. I'm not commanding anyone to act in any way, I am just saying if you want to do something about trivial challenges, then not answering them is one thing you can do.

hyper-neutrino

anyway, i have decided to boot this question from HNQ; nothing we can do about the vote distribution now but w/e

Wheat Wizard

We should make a bot which edits some invisible mathJax into the title of every new question so we can never end up on the HNQ.

user

MathJax works in titles?

And how does it stop questions from getting onto the HNQ?

Wheat Wizard

It's just one thing that makes a question inelligible.

It's on the list above.

emanresu A

@user Provavly because it can render weirdly

user

23:51

Huh, interesting

hyper-neutrino

oh apparently questions can't hit HNQ until 8 hours later

Niko

@hyper-neutrino i gonna remember this because it looks interesting

hyper-neutrino

@Niko it is just a rough estimate tho and there are a bunch of other factors that sort of change it, but it's a good estimation of the approximate "hotness" of a question

lyxal

@BrowncatPrograms because I'm bad at golf and because I had previously made a base64 encoder/decoder using Vyxal, I thought the solutions would use somewhat similar methods

Also, base conversion isn't obvious to me

user

In the words of exedraj: stoopid :P

Browncat Programs

23:54

Ah. Base conversion's a bit like recursion I think, takes getting used to

(When you're using it outside its intended purpose)

lyxal

Exactly

hyper-neutrino

who's this exedraj? we must punish them for being so mean to lyxal

emanresu A

I just have used it a lot, it's very good for ascii-art or other large strings with limited charsets.

lyxal

@BrowncatPrograms It takes me a few minutes and a bit of mental processing to remember which base conversion element does what

So I usually don't consider base conversion straight away

Hence the padding and splitting approach

emanresu A

I mean, say, codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/231150/100664 is definitely worthy of the vote spam.

user

23:55

@hyper-neutrino Yes, let's ban exedraj!

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