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6:00 PM
'all answers on this site should make some effort to meet the winning criteria' maybe we should stop enforcing this? as caird said (i think), it's a bit pointless to just golf variable names and remove whitespace, so why not just include such answers? i don't mean just to these hard challenges, but also to smaller ones in general, where you see answerers posting approaches that will never beat the shortest existing one, yet still do post them because these approaches are interesting
 
agreed
a long interesting approach is a good contribution to the site even if doesn't make an attempt to golf it
 
(partially influenced by mitch schwartz's points here chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/58195645#58195645) (also my point focusing on allowing vs disallowing such answers altogether from the site, instead of voting policy)
 
We do actually allow answers of different "subcategories" if you read through the rules IIRC, which don't necessarily have to be competitive for the language as a whole
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing There's a difference between knowing " challenges should generally be golfed" (which I obviously knew) and knowing "site policy is that answers that don't attempt to be competitive wrt the scoring criterion are invalid" (which I didn't)
 
for whatever reason, the part in the help center saying that solutions need to be serious contenders is in the asking section under what's on-topic
 
6:16 PM
@BrowncatPrograms thank you for reminding me, i forgot (codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8750)
 
0
Q: How to use Loop for calculation

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@NewPosts VTC y'all, OP asked the same thing over on MSE about half an hour ago
 
i guess it's all just a slippery slope, mitch schwartz still brings up good points, ie. you could just run a code minifier to satisfy the requirements, but is it worth it? idk
 
@user41805 No, I didn't say that it's pointless. I said that it takes minimal effort to do
 
6:23 PM
but i guess you have to draw the line somewhere, so showing this minimal effort might be good enough, even though i am not entirely satisfied
@cairdcoinheringaahing i guess i now agree with you
 
@MitchSchwartz I can't speak for @hyper-neutrino but we as moderators enforce the rules of the site as decided by the community. I personally don't like this rule, but as moderator we enforce the rules because the community seems to agree that they want them. I would urge you to bring this up on the meta so a discussion could be had with the community and perhaps change the rules.
 
My biggest argument for enforcing it is that all posts here must meet some standard of quality. And the more objective those standards are, the stronger they are. For example, a new user posts an answer to the HW thread showing off a full, idiomatic Java answer, completely ungolfed. They then justify this by pointing to tjjfvi's (original) answer, claiming that if that answer is allowed, why isn't theirs?
 
I think typically the best thing to do is to provide a somewhat golfed version of your answer, but put the "real" one below it
 
I don't really care all that much about this rule. It gets tiring being treated as the person who wants to delete these answers when I never would've even seen them if they weren't flagged by users who are just pointing out things that break community-established standards or rules, and that I act on based on community-established policies and courses of action.
As I always say, if you disagree with the policies that I had nothing to do with in the first place, feel free to post it to and discuss it with the same place / people that established it in the first place. People rarely actually take me up on that offer.
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing nah I think there's a difference between answering a question that wasn't answered in years and just providing a bad ungolfed mediocre solution
 
6:29 PM
No one is debating whether or not there's a difference. The question is where (and, importantly, how) to draw the line
 
(my qualm was not with the mods or enforcers, but with the site policy in case it was not clear)
 
@rak1507 There is. But how do you justify that to a new user?
 
by saying 'their answer was particularly impressive, yours isn't'
 
"That answer is more interesting than yours"? "It's more impressive"?
 
@rak1507 But there's gray in between, and you then have to either decide on a point to stop at, or keep edging in one direction or the other
 
6:29 PM
@rak1507 Good luck with that
 
why not just downvote answers that aren't 'good', whatever that means
rather than relying on rules
 
Because when I do that, people think I'm being mean
 
tjjfvi's answer was good though
 
By one standard
 
@rak1507 And because it'd just make CGCC into another random forum where you post whatever you want and the only punishment is downvotes
 
6:30 PM
By another (golfiness alone), it wasn't
 
I feel like people should take into consideration context rather than just 'not golfed - bad'
 
Oh I didn't realize that Mitch's message is already months old. I thought it was from Sept. 1st.
 
@rak1507 We do. As I said, I think it's an incredible answer, regardless of golfing or not. If I saw it anywhere else on the internet, I'd upvote/bounty/reward/whatever it. But, what about taking the context of the site and the tag into consideration?
 
@rak1507 Most people do
 
I've cast a grand total of 220 downvotes (on non-deleted posts). I don't go around downvoting every answer I see that isn't as golfy as I think it could be. But, I have a personal line between "this could be improved, but is still making an effort to golf" and "this isn't making any effort to golf"
 
6:34 PM
Given the site policy, I think caird's action was a reasonable one. It's not necessarily one I would've taken, but I don't think it's productive to argue against their action
Though I do appreciate the support, @rak1507
 
It's not like I flagged it, or VTD'd :P
That would be inappropriate
 
To me it's just, what do we want the site to be? Some of the coolest answers I've seen have not necessarily been the most golfed, and I don't want people like that to feel discouraged. I think we just have different views over the 'purpose' of the site really
 
@hyper-neutrino Wdym? I've been told by many users on MSO and MSE that all moderators are power hungry users who only find joy in deleting other users' very reasonable requests to have someone do their homework for them! :P
 
For future reference: If I had known/thought Gareth would be quick to respond, I probably would've suggested the scoring criterion be changed to something like "lowest average solution move count" (which I personally think would've been much more interesting for this challenge). Given the etiquette and policies of the site, do y'all think that would've been a reasonable suggestion/request, or should I've just sucked it up and posted a golfed answer?
 
@tjjfvi It couldn't have hurt to suggest it
There have been quite a lot of challenges that have been improved by a different scoring criteria suggested by comments
 
6:40 PM
Good to know, thanks
 
> Custodian - 1/1
Reviewer - 12/250
Steward - 435/1000
Well that's fun :P
 
Noooooo
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing Yay!
 
@WheatWizard What's the no for? :P
 
I liked it the way it was.
 
6:43 PM
Well I sure didn't
 
I think that getting upset over "lost progress" is silly.
 
I was super close to a badge for FP, why should I lose that progress?
 
Because you shouldn't be doing reviews to tick up some counter.
 
No, but it's a nice bonus
 
It's nice to get a little reward for the work
 
6:45 PM
one point of consideration is that it's potentially a bad precedent that your progress can just go poof overnight and even if it's not important here it might be elsewhere... (might - i can't think of anything right now)
 
Especially on this site, where the queues are much quieter, reaching 250 or 1000 reviews is a pretty good milestone
 
in any case, i see no harm in changing it to re-award the credit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
6:56 PM
I just feel like it is encouraging the most pernicious aspects of the site.
@hyper-neutrino I think this is a good precedent.
 
@WheatWizard That might be an argument against the badges existing in the first place, but not really for just getting rid of people's progress
 
It really isn't erasing any progress.
The progress is just halted.
 
And badges encouraging reviewing isn't a bad thing either
I started reviewing because of the badges
@WheatWizard Nobody's going to go look at your reviewing stats, but they're likely to see a reviewer or steward badge
 
I've starting multiple positive actions on the network because of the badges, then continued because the actions themselves are positive, and I no longer care about the badge
 
@BrowncatPrograms That doesn't change anything though?
 
7:00 PM
Steward affects your candidate score in mod elections, which people give a bit too much weight
 
If SE just got rid of my progress toward Reviewer, it'd seriously discourage me from trying to get other badges, and trying to reach those is often what encourages me to continue contributing to this site (in terms of moderation/reviewing type stuff, and overall as well)
 
I think that anything was "wasted" just because a badge is no longer obtainable is rather revealing as to how broken the incentives here are.
 
There's a difference between an incentive and a reward
And a lot of things are both
By throwing away progress toward a badge, that's not just throwing away an incentive, which for people reviewing because they care about the site isn't a big deal, it's throwing away a reward
Humans like shiny things :p
 
Nothing is being thrown away.
 
@WheatWizard The progress toward a badge is
 
7:02 PM
Your progress is still there, and can be viewed.
 
But I'm not just reviewing to inflate a number somewhere
I'm doing it mainly to help the site, and the badge is a nice reward
The number itself, at least to me, is just progress toward the badge
It's not much on its own
 
If you had 999 FP reviews, you'd feel pretty cheated if the queue was deactivated before you could get the final one
 
It's like how I don't post challenges for the rep, but it's the sort of positive encouragement that makes me want to come back and do it again later
 
Even if you aren't reviewing to get the badge, it's still a milestone that has been given some importance by SE. To have that progress reset by deactivating the queue and creating two new blanks ones, it can feel pretty bad
 
I don't really care about how I would feel. This should be about promoting a healthy reviewing community.
 
7:04 PM
I don't review for the badge, but getting something shiny I can show off as a reward for doing it is a great motivator to work toward reviewing even when I don't really feel like it
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing No progress is being reset.
 
Progress toward a Steward badge is
 
@WheatWizard And it is promoting a healthy reviewing community
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing It is not. I can see my progress towards steward right now.
@BrowncatPrograms It absolutely is not doing that.
 
But the progress means nothing if you can't keep gaining more progress
 
7:06 PM
Yes. That is what has happened the progress has lost it's value towards a badge.
 
That feels like quibbling over semantics, rather than actually discussing the point
 
This is a very important distinction.
 
I disagree
 
You are not entitled to a badge.
 
7:07 PM
The site says I'll get a badge at 1k reviews, so of course I'd feel cheated if I didn't get that badge
 
This presupposes some entitlement to a badge. That by working you deserve to be able to get the badge.
 
And I think I do deserve a badge if I manage to help 1k new users on this site, right?
 
Noone desserves a badge.
 
Uh...I disagree?
 
Just some people have them.
 
7:09 PM
They have a defined condition for getting them
If you do that action, you deserve the badge
By definition
 
Surely not.
 
Once again this feels like semantics
 
I don't know how y'all can assert simultaneously that badges are trivial enough that they don't encourage poor behavior but important enough that it is a loss when progress can no longer be increased.
 
If the site says "If you do X, you'll get a reward", and you get close to doing X, then they say "Sorry, you can't get any closer to X, but look, another way to do X, starting from scratch", that feels wrong
 
@WheatWizard A loss doesn't have to be a big loss
Although it sort of does feel like a big loss
 
7:11 PM
Badges are a reward system, that make the crow part of our brain want to do more on the site. Sometimes, they encourages ...less than useful behaviour (Peer Pressure anyone?), sometimes, we do those tasks because we want to, and sometimes, we do them because the crow brain says "Do it, and you'll get closer to the shiny thing"
 
The collective mini-tantrum of SE over this issue seems to indicate that a lot of users hold this to be very important, and to be fair I suppose that is not y'all specifically.
 
@emanresuA In case anyone was wondering how impossible this is: I scanned 300 million random strings, and only 6 of them, when hashed and base36'd, contained neverg
 
@WheatWizard It is important to me that the work I did with the expectation of being recognized for it is recognized as I'd been told
As much as I'd love to be able to say I do everything out a 100% pure sense of selflessness and dedication, I don't and nobody on this site does
 
Why? And why is a badge, such an important way to be recognized.
 
@BrowncatPrograms The key bit is "as I'd been told". If there was no reward for reviewing, I'd probably still do it, and be quietly happy at my own milestones. But, because I'd been told I'd get something for doing reviews, I want it when I do those reviews :P
 
7:14 PM
@WheatWizard Because the badge is exclusive. The badge is the reward that we were promised, so it's the one that people care about
 
I think we should be encouraged to review for quality not quantity. I don't think that achieving 1000 review on its own makes anyone worthy of much.
 
Sure, but that's not an argument for discarding progress, it's an argument for not having the badge in the first place
 
Again No progress is discarded.
The question is whether certain progress should be exchanged or converted into new progress.
 
We have different definitions of progress then
 
The progress is still there I don't know how it can be discarded.
 
7:15 PM
My progress toward something becomes worthless if I can no longer do that thing
It's still there, but it has no implicit value
 
Your progress should have been worthless in the first place.
 
But it was given worth by the existence of the badge
 
well, it wasn't
 
Yes. and SE briefly rectified the issue before users threw a mini-fit on meta.
 
Most people don't see it like that
They didn't "fix an issue", they broke what was basically a promise of a reward
 
7:17 PM
Yes clearly they believe that they are entitled to a badge or part of a badge.
 
I wish you'd stop using the word "entitled" for this
 
If they put in the work, why aren't they "entitled" to a badge?
 
And had they not reversed the decision this would be evidence going forward that they would not be entitled to such.
 
I'd be willing to mow my neighbor's lawn when I do my own for free our of generosity but if they come to me asking if I can do it for some payment, and then don't pay me and say "you would've been willing to do it for free anyway", should I accept that?
 
@WheatWizard It would be evidence that, on a whim, they won't honor their promises
 
7:19 PM
Where did they make a promise? It seems to me that that promise was purely in the minds of the users.
 
And the company is definitely trying to move away from any changes that would suggest they don't honor their promises
 
@WheatWizard We're "promised" a badge for a certain amount of work.
 
@BrowncatPrograms And a badge was given to everyone who did that "work".
And I think it would be best if they didn't have that idea that they are promised something for doing reviews.
 
@WheatWizard Perhaps. But that's removing the badge, rather than discussing any potential "compensation" or not
 
that would be an appropriate argument for removing the set of review badges entirely. not what this is
 
7:21 PM
I am arguing for both, because I think both are good.
 
@WheatWizard That'd be like HN's metaphorical neighbor waiting until he was halfway done mowing his lawn for pay, then saying "never mind, I don't want my yard mowed"
 
I think that by ending the queue without refunds it sets a good precedent that you are not entitled to any reward for doing reviews.
 
That's a bad precedent
It's a precedent that SE doesn't care about us
Or the work we put in
Or the promises they make
 
@BrowncatPrograms No, in the metaphor here now they have a shared covenant, which is broken.
SE never promised the queues would be around forever.
 
What do you think of the old Reviewer badge, out of interest?
> 1000 reviews, over 200 actioned, predicated on first earning Strunk & White
 
7:23 PM
I don't think that you can make a metric that cannot be gamed, either intentionally or unintentionally.
I think that a humble counter would be fine enough.
 
Tbh, I do pay more attention to the counter, rather than the badge progress bar
 
Although I do prefer that you have to have taken action on a certain percentage.
@BrowncatPrograms In this case that is what I am discussing?
 
But you can't use not liking the badges in the first place as an argument for getting rid of people's progress
 
I am giving my opinion on the old reviewer badge.
@BrowncatPrograms I am arguing that the both are good for the same reason.
 
Gaaah, and I was just closing in on 900 reviews after a year and a half, and those were for combined reviews of all types. Jebus knows how long it'll take to hit 1000 on each criteria now. Not that it's all about the badges of course. (Who am i kidding). — JonW Sep 21 '12 at 23:17
Looks like outrage on changing the queues is at least 9 years old :P
 
7:29 PM
Older than our site.
 
Ooh, nice, looks like Community will be getting a personalised [Bot] label soon: meta.stackexchange.com/a/369844/355458
 
Hopefully they get rid of canned comments along with that :p
 
I read "community" and "personalised" and got really excited for a second.
 
Sorry :/
@BrowncatPrograms They aren't, they've said that
 
7:32 PM
Kind of. They're keeping the idea of canned comments, but site specific ones are
 
Community is the most prolific flagger on this site, however it almost certainly has the worst track record.
 
And they're working on fixing the current ones
@WheatWizard How many flags (total) has it raised?
 
Canned comments from community overall are a horrible idea
 
I'd have to check.
 
hard to tell because it owns flags from deleted users too I think
 
7:33 PM
The anonymity is something that is bad in every way
 
We can see the number of helpful flags, but not the total number :P
@BrowncatPrograms Anonymity is going to be optional
 
according to the user info, it has 5324 helpful and 178 other. which is absolutely wrong
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing It shouldn't be an option at all
If you're scared of how your feedback on a new user's post will be received, your feedback is bad
 
@BrowncatPrograms Agreed
 
@BrowncatPrograms Agreed
 
7:34 PM
@cairdcoinheringaahing On meta and main combined around 5,500.
I will say though that frequently community flags are marked "helpful" because that is the quickest way to dismiss them.
 
looking through the flag history itself tho, a lot of them seem like they were written by a human
and i don't think community raises red flags
 
Oh does that number only count reds?
Oh yeah I can see community has flagged the sandbox more times than its flag raise count on meta.
 
@WheatWizard no i think that number only counts flags that are owned by community but actually raised by real users
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing This is something community kindly reminds us nearly constantly.
 
7:39 PM
for a site called "code golf", it's ironic that community almost never raises a single helpful "excessively long" flag
6
 
8:19 PM
It's probably a good thing that we rewrote the Vyxal parser. The old one had... issues:
 
Was it deleted? :P
 
i thought it would shorten the link but it didn't. just a sec
 
Cursed.
 
actually i guess that's technically a lexer issue, but still
 
More cursed.
Where is the 0 coming from?
 
8:25 PM
The entire program is actually a comment
 
Oh, I see.
Because the ` sets to stringmode even inside a comment
 
the backticks still start/end strings even though they're in a comment, so all of the newlines are part of the strings and don't end the comment
 
that is cursed
 
yep :)
 

 CGCC Mod Office

Informal chat room with CGCC's moderators regarding moderation...
room is now set up with smoke detector posting reports from this site into it. feel free to also talk about moderation stuff / to mods in general
 
8:29 PM
Now, we spend 2 weeks without any spam being posted here :P
 
honestly, with how much spam we get, we probably need to constantly antifreeze the room. unlike math.SE we don't get that many mod inquiries/requests either :P
 
@AaronMiller It works because the lexer groups all strings together before any tokenising is done, so it gets tokenised as <Start Comment> <String> <String> <End Comment> which is why it doesn't work with other structures, like lambdas or diagraphs
 
Is it configured to spot spam on meta?
They've done that before
 
@hyper-neutrino Ignore the flag that just got raised because I was cleaning up my posted sandbox challenges.
At least I think deleting five posts raises a flag
 
8:35 PM
lol, you don't need to tell me to ignore it, vandalism flags containing a bunch of sandbox posts are not something i haven't seen before :p
(also by ignore, i assume you mean decline, cuz i'm not just gonna let it sit there forever)
 
Oh ok
Speaking of the sandbox, Any feedback?
 
@hyper-neutrino Idk, deleting a bunch of sandbox drafts sounds suspicious. I say you ban emanresu A just to be safe :p
3
 
One thing I love about the broken parser in the current version of Vyxal is that the syntax highlighting has no idea what's going on: Try it Online!
 
Vylight's a little buggy, which I'll get around to fixing at some point. I have 3 bugs to squash, one of which I forgot to put on Github and forgot what it was.
 
Well, a lot of the Vylight bugs I've noticed are just because it's doing the sensible thing, but Vyxal isn't :P
 
8:47 PM
In one case, it's doing the same (wrong) thing as Vyxal.
 
in Vyxal, Jul 28 at 14:45, by Aaron Miller
Fun fact: VyLight gives up after exactly 10001 characters. The 10002nd character and beyond has no syntax highlighting.
in Vyxal, Jul 28 at 14:45, by user
...Why do you know this?
 
That's CM's fault - I can change the limit if you want, but it'll slow down the page, and what's even the point of highlighting a 10000-char program? How do you even get a 10000-char program?
 
There isn't a point. That's why it's a fun fact instead of a bug report :P
 
@emanresuA That's just a normal Vyxal answer by lyxal to unlolify :P
 
LMAO GET REKT
 
8:50 PM
@cairdcoinheringaahing Don't tease them, they tried.
 
@emanresuA I discovered it when I was hardcoding an answer to "Scream Very Loudly"
6
 
That actually made me laugh out loud.
 
Did it make you scream out loud? :P
 
Bye
 
8:56 PM
/o
 
9:22 PM
0
Q: Convert to a non-adjacent form

caird coinheringaahingConsider a form of binary where digits can be any of \$1\$, \$0\$ and \$-1\$. We'll still call this "binary" because we convert the digits from base two. For example, $$\begin{align} [1, 0, -1, 1]_2 & = 1 \times 2^3 + 0 \times 2^2 + -1 \times 2^1 + 1 \times 2^0 \\ & = 8 - 2 + 1 \\ & = 7 \end{alig...

 
9:51 PM
Looks like we're doing ><> today for LYLGG!
 
Today only lasts for 5 more minutes. Do you mean tomorrow?
 
In UTC 0?
 
@WheatWizard I'm not expecting the 2am'ers to be the ones coming :p
 
@DLosc Oh no, did someone break your nose?!
 
10:02 PM
@user Nah. It sticks out from my face, that's all.
 
Have you considered getting surgery to correct it? :P
 
Not even once. :^P
If I did, then my glasses wouldn't fit
and I'd look like Voldemort
(with hair)
 
10:22 PM
sus
I vote to eject DLosc on account of being a possible Death Eater
 
11:03 PM
@AaronMiller except for the fact that it isn't cursed
if you see the compiled code using the c flag, you'll see nothing actually transpiles
hence why it outputs 0
because it thinks it's an empty program
@emanresuA the 0 is coming from implicit cat
It probably is erroring interally
but because the online site wraps everything in a try/except, some errors get lost along the way
meaning it doesn't report 100% of errors like the offline version does
anyhow it's wednesday morning zoomies time, so let the tnb sh*tposting commence ;p
 
11:34 PM
CMQ: Who remembers this music?
 
I thought Club Penguin was dead?
 
It kind of is
There's club penguin clones
but those are prone to being pwned
 
so, we're doing ><> for LYAL?
 
I guess so
Any ><> users here?
 
👋
And @JoKing, right?
 
11:40 PM
l do a decent amount of it
 
@user Not regularly, but I know a bit of ><> because it was the first esolang I learned
 
Great!
 
>MC: Output the first N Fibonacci numbers (you can take n via the -v argument)
 
Oh no, let's please not call them >MC's
Why not ><> CMC?
 
Sure
You can find a neat (if a little buggy) visualiser at suppen.no/fishlanguage
4
 
11:44 PM
Ooh
 
There are a few differences from the official interpreter, but it's a lot nicer to work with
 
Can it take input?
 
@JoKing oh amazing
didn't know that existed since fishlanguage went down
 
nvm, I see it now
 
@JoKing N > 1?
 
11:47 PM
you can do zero indexed or one indexed as you wish
 
@tjjfvi The only one I know of right now is wrapping; the official interpreter wraps at the end of each line, whereas fishlanguage wraps at the end of the block, which is the maximum width of all lines
 
@lyxal let's go with N>=1
@tjjfvi I believe there's also some issue with . as well? Not sure
Oh, i thought the event already started an hour ago, my bad
 
Hmm, I'm not familiar with that one. Recently g was completely broken, maybe that's what you're thinking of? I submitted a PR for that one that has been merged
 
@tjjfvi ah, that was it. neat, thanks for fixing that
 
do you need spaces/newlines?
20 if so, add in ao
not written any ><> in ages
 
11:58 PM
what are the advantages of fish over befunge?
 
Isn't ><> a fungeoid?
Some people like vanilla ice cream, others chocolate
 
It's a lot cleaner overall. The conditional's are symmetrical rather than in fixed directions, the stack operations don't limit you as much, and the jump operator is neat
 
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