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00:56
Just printed out the entire itertools docs because for some reason the programming contest I’m doing allows printed material but not official language docs
That happens LMAO
These are the “programming contests problems with awful I/O” I was talking about
@emanresuA relatable
I forget what if anything the rules were about bringing stuff for ICPC, but the only competition I'd been in before that allowed printed materials as well
And one year I won second place without a team, and got a slightly misprinted medal
It was fun
Nice :P
I’m in a two-person team but we have to share a computer so that’s gonna be fun
01:03
Relatable
Relatable
Sharing a computer is how it always goes but it can be preeeeeetty stressful
Hang in there
Last time I competed with a team, there was a lot of arguing about who can write what faster and when
And it can get pretty hard to work solutions out on paper even with practice
Didn't help that we never actually practiced as a team...
First time I did a competition in a team, we got second place mostly because 2 days prior to the competition I happened to accidentally work through a problem pretty much replicated exactly in the competition problem pack
And it happened to be worth like 25 points or so
real
It was something to do with naughts and crosses
Huge
@lyxal I forget if this ever happened with me but basically all of the problems for the competitions I did in high school were taken straight off Kattis
And I did do a lot of practicing on Kattis :P
01:13
lazy problem setting is hilarious
It's funny how random YouTubers can appear in the comment sections of seemingly completely unrelated videos. Like I just found Sebastian Lauge commenting on a Captain Disillusion video, and a while back I found logdotzip in a Useful Charts video
And ironically Sebastian Lauge was commenting about a Matt Parker jump scare :P
 
7 hours later…
08:30
CMC Given a Fibonacci number, output the next one
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09:16
what's the expected output for 1?
Not well-defined for 1.
Assume the input >1
Now at the gate for the flight to college
It's been a crazy 24 hours lol
Protip don't try to move a whole 2-bed apartment and pack four bags in like a day
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have fun
@mousetail Haskell, 49 bytes: f n=g 2 3 where g i j=if i==n then j else g j$i+j
Hangs on 1 or a non-Fibonacci number.
46 bytes: f n=2!3 where i!j=if i==n then j else j!(i+j)
09:40
Does anyone else increase their cursor size?
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ngn/k 13: {+/[~x<;1;1]}
09:59
Doesn't just round(x*phi) work?
Looks like it?
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10:21
yeah
but that's boring
Fair :p
10:53
@TheEmptyStringPhotographer I have a mac and I like furiously waving the mouse to make it bigger does that count
11:12
@Redz fr fr
(i recall doing that a long time ago)
 
2 hours later…
13:29
@RydwolfPrograms did you fix the DNS :p
 
2 hours later…
15:05
@lyxal 🤝
The single thing I miss LMAO
Wonder if there's something I can install to make Windows do that
(There probably is for Linux :P)
@UnrelatedString ...Reminds me, does anyone know what APL Kattis runs? Because I keep getting weird runtime errors there that I don't get anywhere else, and I don't know if it's because of something I'm not accounting for in how the input works or if it's because of actual differences in language behavior
@UnrelatedString KDE does that by default
15:40
CMQ How many different weakly connected DAGs are there on 4 labelled nodes?
 
3 hours later…
18:37
damn CMU's got good wifi, 200 Mbps both directions
@Ginger Didn't end up having enough time to get everything packed, let alone set the servers up
I'll have to walk my parents through the process some day soon
ah
...right
wait, weren't you moving my VM to the cloud?
I just need my dad to put the servers in the rack and get someone to hook them all up to ethernet and power
@Ginger Most likely, once I can get the server online for me to pull files from
ah
so it'll be a while
I couldn't even bring my chonky HDD in the suitcase I took, so I'm going to have to have my parents hook it up to the server and figure it out remotely
My desktop should arrive by Wednesday, at least
18:53
autocorrect hates me
It's like it's getting more and more pushy, it's started changing things to be wildly different
When they're not even spelled wrong, just unusual word choices
lmk once it's back up I guess
@RydwolfPrograms I think that’s happening to me as well?
Okay I have no idea where anyone is
This orientation thing is a mess
Orientations tend to be disorienting
3
All they gave me is a T-shirt and I'm literally the only person currently in my dorm other than someone I can hear making noise upstairs (this place has cool creaky floorboards)
Like there's no structure
19:01
Oh yikes
It feels far more isolating than just jumping into the first day of class
'cause unless you bring your family or know someone going there, you're just wandering alone
Mine was online because COVID and it was highly structured... it just wasn't much other than structured
Was funny having one guy calling in from Kazakhstan though
I think the actual stuff starts tomorrow but I'm not really sure where everyone else is
@RydwolfPrograms this feels like a super early start to uni tbh
19:03
@RydwolfPrograms That's the best part of college, the lack of people telling you exactly what to do
It can be all over the place
My FDOC is this Monday
Also one of the worst parts, if you're like me and need precise instructions for everything
My uni doesn't even start for 3 weeks, and we're a super early start for the UK
I assume yours also ends later than Unrelated and Rydwolf's unis
19:05
For some reason I assumed every uni in the UK started at the same time, and it was in like October
^
@UnrelatedString They mostly do, and it tends to be mid-late September
For whatever reason, my uni went super early this year
My university has no holidays during the school year, apart from Thanksgiving and spring break. But hey, in return, we get a longer winter break. Because winter's the time of year when you can get out and have fun, right?
@user @UnrelatedString @RydwolfPrograms when does your summer vacation start in 2025? Mine is May 26th
WQhich is, tbh, about 2 weeks earlier than last year
Mine's around then too (late May). My uni starts a week from Monday
19:07
Classes end December 4 and finals end on the 13th this Fall
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@Simd mathematica says 446
@cairdcoinheringaahing my former college started alr
Spring semester is from January 8 to April 29/May 9
@cairdcoinheringaahing So you're later than me by like 2ish weeks
Or more depending on individual exam schedules :P
Tbf, we have about 2 weeks of exam period ahead of that
Last night I woke up multiple times during a fever and for some reason actually believing I was the tsar of russia
19:09
No idea when people conventionally move out of dorms though since I've never had one and nobody really talks about that stuff
Wait, last day of classes for the spring semester is May 13 for me, and it starts January 27. Fall semester is August 26 to December 9
@cairdcoinheringaahing Oh so you're more like a whole month ahead
Reckoning it like that then my summer break starts on April 29
@user Yeah I've heard mine's pretty early for an American school
D:
Speaking of uni, uni gave me an excuse to spend ~£550 on board games a couple days ago :P
AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Nice
@Seggan What if it's like that short story from that something Dick guy where you're actually the tsar and this current life is the dream?
19:11
Was it for a class somehow or is it a club you're starting/resuscitating
@cairdcoinheringaahing What was the excuse?
Yeah, I'm the president of the uni's board game and ttrpg society :P
Nice
And we're updating the inventory :P
19:13
I just remembered mine has one a week or two ago and joined their Discord so hopefully I'll end up actually attending some meetings some time
Huge overlap with the linguistics club :P
There is a linguistics club? What do they even do?
Talk
Ninja'd :P
TBF my uni had a "Europe club", no idea what they did
19:14
Were you in Europe?
@mousetail Nominally it would be stuff like chat about research but for the most part it's just themed games :P
There's your answer, they were a club in Europe
There was also a Japan club, that one makes more sense
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be European I suppose
19:15
@user mmmmm yeah until there's literally nobody in your dorm, no buildings or dining areas open, long lines leading to peopld telling you that it's not actually a line, etc.
@mousetail No, that makes less sense. If you were in Europe, it can't have been a club in Japan
Some of them are like actual linguistics themed board games, like IPA Scrabble or this thing with X-bar theory style syntax trees, but most of it is more broadly about languages
@RydwolfPrograms Wait how far away is the first day of classes if it's that empty?
Language guessing games on the internet, Duolingo speedruns, multilingual telephone
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@user maybe they were establishing an enclave in Europe
19:16
Then it does make sense if it has a lot of overlap with board games
A week. It's not empty as in nobody's here yet though, it's empty as in everyone's stuff is here but not them
I'm assuming it's people wandering with their families
Oh that's kinda early
First-year orientation stuff
The end of every semester we do a scavenger hunt where all of the clues are in different languages and some of them are FIENDISHLY difficult
My freshman year, they didn't let most move in until like 2 days before first day of classes
19:17
Like IIRC last time one of them was like
Nice
@UnrelatedString Oh that sounds fun
Romanized Cantonese
@user Did y'all have any sort of orentiation over the summer tho?
Are there a lot of conlang enjoyers also?
19:17
And another one was a Mayan dialect
@RydwolfPrograms Yes, one for my major, one for another program I was in. None for the university as a whole, afaik
And I think the semester before that we had some minority language from Myanmar that a single club member happened to be doing active research on because they knew a single native speaker who was somehow also a student here
@mousetail Yeah it's great
@mousetail There isn't a lot of conlang talk but most of us have made at least one anyways
I think they force some or most kids to take a 1-credit class that serves as a semester-long intro to the university
@user Well, they can't do any in-person orientations over the summer for us since most people at CMU are from California, so they have to do it all in the week before school (most of it is college/program-specific)
Ah ok. Weird that no one else is around for the orientation then
19:19
@user We had a class like that but it was 0 credits
lol
@RydwolfPrograms ...Are Californians an actual majority, or just the largest single group of people from any given state
One of those would be a lot more surprising than the other
Plurality, but a pretty big one I think
Our "orientation" here is basically just a week of drinking and clubbing called Freshers :P
19:20
Also the demographics at this school are so skewed
Go compare the pie charts between CMU and MIT
@cairdcoinheringaahing Yep same here
Meanwhile here they repeatedly tell us to avoid drinking and stuff ("1 in 4 students don't drink!")
They gave up on that here
The dorms have posters all over saying to pregame with protein and stuff
Actually it's not as different as it was a few years ago
19:21
@RydwolfPrograms Too lazy, give us a tl;dr :P
@user They let us hand out alcohol at the Welcome Fair, the 2-day fair they run for all the societies to table :P
They tried to do an alcohol free intro week a few years back. There where riots. And still a whole lot of alchohol
Living the dream
@user The orientation involved something where we had to check a couple boxes to say we read the alcohol policy but IIRC it just boiled down to "don't drink on campus but if you or a friend do anyways then we're not going to be too mad if it puts you in danger and you ask for help"
@mousetail Whah
Oh hey yeah there's a policy for that here too
19:22
From what I remember is was skewed male, heavily skewed white/asian, and very heavily skewed toward people from technopole-type cities like wherever silicon valley is, Austin, etc.
@user ...Isn't pre-workout basically always protein and caffeine anyways
You won't get any consequences if you report a friend having an emergency
Or is pregame something fundamentally different
I guess athletes probably need to focus more on in the moment performance than long term gains :P
So, pro tip: if the cops are about to bust your party, jab a needle into your best bud and call 911 immediately
@UnrelatedString pregame is what to do before drinking/going out
19:24
And protein slows down the effect of the alcohol you drink while watching the game or something
Like, pregaming for clubbing generally involves getting drunk at home/party/pub
Ohhhhhhhhhhh
Wild
I always assumed pubs were just part of the destination for clubbing
I think I'm gonna go buy a bicycle rn lol
It's more efficient to get wasted first
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nah it's alcohol for the league of legends grind
19:26
TRUE
I unironically do play LoL better when I'm a little buzzed
I get free public transit with my ID card so I might as well just take a bus to the nearest bike shop and buy a bicycle with part of one of my scholarships
@RydwolfPrograms You could get an e-scooter
Where's the fun in that?
Can't speak for you but my campus is all slopes so my legs are always dead at the end of the day
Anything in between a fully maniual bicycle and 300cc is lame and for weaklings, duh
19:27
Real
Exactly, which is why you need an e-scooter :P
My bike at home didn't have a working derailleur/gear shifter or whatever so it was permanently on the hardest gear
I kinda have a grudge against escooters for some reason
Lot of respect for those who go around campus on rollerskates
@RydwolfPrograms Yikes
19:28
@RydwolfPrograms Like 3 (front one) or 7 (back one)?
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@UnrelatedString wanna carry me (:
@mousetail They look so cool. I've only seen one on my campus though
@mousetail I know a few people whop've gotten around campuses before on a unicycle
I have been defaulting more towards higher gears the more I get used to biking but slopes are still a struggle
@user I don't know what the front one was, the back one (it was 6-gear) was on the smallest
19:29
Including seeing people go down an incredibly steep hill in my ccity on one
And the house I just moved to is at the bottom of a HUGE incline compared to the rest of town
I think there's electric unicycles
Haven't tried biking out from it yet since I only moved my bike here two days ago but
That's going to be something
@UnrelatedString Pro tip: Go down the slope, not up it
Probably going to be walking it up the slope for a while
@user I have done that :P
19:30
👏Time👏symmetry
Personally, I love walking :P
Go down the slope both ways
Yea walking is great
Walk uphill both ways to and from uni
I love all non-motorized forms of transport
19:30
Personally, I always forget I have to be wherever until 5 minutes before so I need a motorbike
@mousetail Cool, if you obtain a motorized form of transport, could you send it over to me?
@cairdcoinheringaahing Ok boomer
@user I happen to have a Honda CB300R motorcycle on sale for a great price
You joke, but I might actually be one of the oldest here :P
I like walking but it's also a pain to schedule around sometimes
The alignment's a bit off but who wants to be straight anyway
@RydwolfPrograms Why are you selling it?
19:31
Oh absolutely, aside from Adám
And I don't like walking as much in the summer :P
Where the summer is more like half of the year
In college so no way to get it up here, and I don't trust myself to not almost die again
@RydwolfPrograms Me, remember?
@RydwolfPrograms I was joking about looking for a motorbike lol. Why not ride it around college and look badass?
@user Going into my final year of uni, with most of my friends either joined at the same time or later than me, it's been sobering to realize that I'm almost always one of the oldest people in the room most of the time now
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oh no I'm old
19:33
caird aren't you like in your twenties?
@user I know you were joking, not like I'd have a way of getting it to you :p
You've gotta be at most a decade older than them
Everyone gather around old man caird
@RydwolfPrograms Ride it all the way over here, then take my childhood bicycle back to CMU :P
Add in the fact that I took a gap year, and might take a year out before doing a PhD after graduating, and I could be at this uni, in the clubs I'm still in, being 5+ years older than other people :/
@user Yeah, I'm 22
19:34
That's like nothing
But when the people around me are all 18-20, that's old
@cairdcoinheringaahing 🫂
I mean, 5 years has got to be a cosmic blip in the life of someone as old as you :P
That's like 4% of a lifespan yeah
5 years passes in the blink of an eye for me
19:34
...It's always uncomfortable when I realize that's the case with my IRL friends from middle/high school
I take some hard drugs, and then decades pass before my eyes
But less in a sobering way and more in a "oh yeah sometimes I forget I literally didn't have any friends in my grade for the entire two years of high school before I wasn't willing to go back"
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@cairdcoinheringaahing tbf none of the years since 2020 are real
If it helps, I'm 20 and I would not blink at a 22-year-old classmate
19:36
@cairdcoinheringaahing What month
I'm 22 with a birthday in April
Mentally like 13 but that's besides the point
@UnrelatedString Hey, same! Except I'm not 22 and my birthday isn't that month
@user There is also the factor of "authority". I'm now arguably the most accomplished mathematician in my group of friends, as they're all at least one, sometimes 2, behind me in studies. I'm the president of a large society and actually organizing things, and then I'm also older than most of my friends or the members. I feel more and more like an adult :P
We're basically the same
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no way
19:37
@UnrelatedString Damn, you're older than me by a couple months
That's such an insane coincidence
I'm wondering why everyone here is so young? It seems like this would be a hobby that requires some amount of programing experience so would attract older people?
@cairdcoinheringaahing 😭
Hey, are you also composed of organic matter?
@cairdcoinheringaahing To feel better, abuse that power
Take back everything I said about me being old, everyone laugh at old woman Unrelated :P
19:38
@mousetail Counterpoint: older people can actually get jobs programming, but younger people need other excuses
👵
@user I abuse that power here, I'm fine :P
@mousetail I don't think it requires much programming experience. And old people might be tired of programming after doing it at their jobs. Young people are fine with doing it for recreation
You should see all the comments I nuke daily
The entire reason I got into the hobby is to pass time at work, when I was studying I had plenty of other things to do
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19:39
you younglings scared all the older folks off
We should do a survey of reasons people joined this site
I'm 25 btw
Laugh at old person mousetail
I just kind of ADHDed myself into it while trying to use SO for a pseudo research project I was trying to do in HS
Though I'd been interested in esolangs for a while already
lol
19:40
@user thing is it wasn't a dream
Mostly to kill time in this "computer skills" class in middle school that was 90% just about how to use Word
@user Oooooh yes
@user Friend recommended it to me, then Jelly got its hooks into me
@UnrelatedString Oh my god I had a class like that too. It was called Software App Design or something and it was just how to use Word and Excel, and then the rest of the time we'd do our homework or, when the teacher occasionally felt like teaching, she'd force us to do NitroType
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I think I joined ppcg because a discord server I was in was doing golf
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
19:41
Wait can we do a meta question to record these responses?
I feel like this is valuable info, not sure if it's appropriate for meta though
I think we occasionally also did some kind of typing speed thing but I forget what it was called
@user I don't see why not
We already have that "the users" post
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it's similar to the name/avatar thing
I have no idea why I joined :3c
@user I like that idea, though it could be a bit similar to the PFP and username question
19:42
Though few people answered with why they started golfing
39
Q: Who are you? Why are you here? And more introspection

DoorknobWhereas: we are unsure about where exactly we fit into the SE mission others sometimes don't take us seriously the site has been languishing in beta with minimal communication from SE for years we have, after receiving explicit advice to expand our horizons, consistently failed to do so I hav...

@user If you do, I think it'd be better to frame it as "Why did you join, and why did you stay, so that we can try to attract/retain new users"
👍
@user I wouldn't close a new post as a dupe of this, as while this does have a "who are you"/"why are you here" aspect, it's best summed up by this question:
> Basically, should PPCG have a more well-defined purpose as a Stack Exchange site? What should it be (other than "solving tasks / spec writing / etc. is inherently fun")?
Ah
19:44
@cairdcoinheringaahing Ooooooh, smart
Oh my god the temperature just dropped 10 degrees this place is awesome
I missed the bus by like 10 seconds though so I have to wait 20m for another lol
@user saw the hyperfactorial challenge on HNQ, answered it in Kotlin, found Jelly, then went into Vyxal
Oooh, nice
I think I vaguely remember the first challenge I saw, but I didn't actually answer it on my current account so it's a little hard to find
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19:48
I know I was looking at the site at least 2 years before I actually joined
@user I have a bunch of 20-year-old classmates who haven't noticed I'm 16 (or at least they assume I'm a young-looking 18-year-old or smth)
@att Wow, make sure to blink and use artificial teardrops when you do that
I can't remember if the first post I posted is still around, cause I had a different account I used a couple times at the start
@emanresuA Congrats (?)
19:49
@emanresuA wait you are 16? 💀
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@user no one said anything about blinking (:
And yeah I found the site through HNQ too, was not in a good mental state when I joined - I was using PHP
Wow, tell us your story
From PHP user to high achiever
I'm very grateful to PHP for teaching me how not to program
Just remember, that doesn't mean you ever have to forgive it
19:50
lol
1
A: Covering a Skyline with brush strokes

Tried Creating an AccountClojure, 50 bytes #((reduce(fn[[s n]i][(+(max(- i n)0)s)i])[0 0]%)0) Try it online! (Why doesn't this print anything?) #( ; begin anonymous function (reduce (fn [[s n] i] ; internal anonymous reducing function, destructures accumulator argument into a sum and the previous item ...

I remember I had multiaccount issues when I joined the site as well, which finally got resolved when I got suspended on genai.se
Hah, it is still around :P
29
Q: Draw an ASCIIrisk

user63571There are an abundance of questions involving drawing shapes using asterisks - so I thought, with so many asterisks out there, we should draw one, using the ASCII table. Challenge Your task is to write a program or function which takes no input, and outputs this exact text: ! ...

@user I'm getting tired of the PHP user stigma. It's not a moral failing to use PHP. You can't control it. It's a medical condition, not a crime. I'm glad people are starting to recognize that.
8
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19:52
my last job had some php
Oh no! Did you complain to your HR department?
We've all had that moment where we'd allow an XSS or SQLi just to get the next fix
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well, I can say I'm not at that position anymore
See, this is why we need strong regulations at the federal level, to stop companies from exploiting their employees like this
My last job was entirely PHP. Might be Stockholm syndrome but it wasn't terrible. Better than Java at least
20:00
It seems less cumbersome in some respects to do lightweight stuff in than Java, but at scale Java at least has the redeeming grace of a lot of its cruft being to support well-organized code
Which isn't to say it's actually good at that
But it at least tries :P
PHP has all that same cruft too, with the additional option of writing cursed procedural code
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honestly I'd rather hate on js than php
Mmmmm
PHP is, in and of itself, without the slightest doubt massively worse than JS
But JS is a bigger problem for humanity
So that's fair
Both languages have a problem with "bad parts" of the language but are not that bad if you know to use only the good parts
PHP has good parts?
4
20:04
Generators that can yield key-value pairs for one
Useful in unit tests but not much else
Oh and a type system that's actually partially checked at runtime
Why is that a good thing
Better than a type system that isn't checked at all at runtime?
In TS, a typing mistake can cause bugs very far away as none of the intermediate steps actually check if the type is correct. It can be very hard to find where the wrong type was introduced. In PHP you know more closely where the error must come from because it will crash immediately
It doesn't support generics though it it's kinda mid
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20:26
@emanresuA yeah it's not js
20:49
@att that can't be right
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why not?
assuming this is about the DAGs if you want to double check it's brute force tio.run/##VYyxCsIwEEA/…
@cairdcoinheringaahing Oh yeah come to think of it, with how many graduate or mixed-level classes I end up taking, this isn't necessarily true for me :P
@cairdcoinheringaahing ...but I do also forget that there are still actual 18-year-olds around me
Life is confusing
21:37
@cairdcoinheringaahing or other mod, could you please unfreeze Do Stuff Online?
@DLosc done :3
Thanks!
 
2 hours later…
23:56
@user HNQ from grinding SO answers, discovered ><>, made a few esolangs, took a little break (and almost didn't come back), found someone had made a spin-off of one of my esolangs (and claimed it was an improved version), wanted to prove that person wrong, came back, ended up collabing with that same person on many esoalngs :p
Code golf over the last 4 years could have been a very different place if it wasn't for the inherent pettiness that comes with being a code golfer :p

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