@JackDouglas Thanks. I made a request.

@JackDouglas BTW, I sort of heard that people from DBA SE were a big driving force behind TA. Is that true?

when you are searching a text file, how do look for the new line "character" ?

@Adam '\n' is usually that. What are you searching with?

@FaheemMitha yes, there is a rising sense among us that SE plans to fold all the technical sites into SO (probably including dba and u&l), and abandon the rest. That might be good for their bottom line but would be bad for the people who make up these communities.

Of course the writing is on the wall for M.SE

TA is going to try the opposite — focus on the existing communities and break up SO into smaller communities too.

@JackDouglas Codedidact seems to have similar aims. I heard there is a chance you may combine efforts.

Any consensus whether the new sites will be importing the old SE data?

@JackDouglas BTW, what's your evidence for this, if any?

@FaheemMitha we are leaving that up to each community — databases are importing the best content but leaving the rest. TeX are being even more selective, it seems they want to start with a fairly clean slate. 'writing' are on a different platform, but they chose to import the entire q&A from a data dump. what we do on *nix I don't know yet.

@JackDouglas Oh. How are you defining "best content"? :-)

That's an odd decision for TeX. TeX SE has a ton of valuable stuff. Probably the most comprehensive collection of TeX-related information ever assembled.

@FaheemMitha I'm not personally doing any importing, but those that are are using their own judgement in various ways

@FaheemMitha did you see the SO survey question about 'would you like to see blah blah on SO'?

@JackDouglas That's a bit vague. Don't you think there should be some clear criteria?

@FaheemMitha I think each community needs a meta question and a clear answer, yes

Oh, and is all the information exportable, including all the schema related stuff? Like tags and so forth?

like data dumps you mean?

@JackDouglas I'm not sure which question you mean. Do you have a link?

@JackDouglas Well db dumps, yes.

@FaheemMitha 'fraid not, there was chat about it on M.SE, but I can't find it right now :(

I'm assuming that all the meta information about questions and answers is stored in some database. Or databases.

@JackDouglas Ok.

If you ask Paul White on TA, he may well have a link or two — he seems to sift things much better than me

@FaheemMitha github.com/topanswers/topanswers/blob/master/db.sql

@JackDouglas On Top Answers? Where on TA? The meta?

no data dumps yet, but we'll need to consider that at some point

@FaheemMitha yes in the meta chat room (tavern)

@JackDouglas Sure, but I meant SE's own databases. Did you write that schema yourself?

Looks quite comprehensive.

yes that's our own creation. no idea about SE's database

I haven't even looked at the data dumps because that's not where we import from

(at least not yet)

@JackDouglas Ok. I just wondered if their db information was public. I guess not.

@JackDouglas Oh. How are you importing then? Just curious.

I don't think the dumps are the same schema as their 'real' database, no

@FaheemMitha by scraping

@JackDouglas Oh. Huh.

@FaheemMitha topanswers.xyz/meta?q=236#a176

Sounds like hard work.

depends how many users you have doing it :)

obviously it's not the way to bring over all content, but if you want to be selective it's a pretty good way I think

@JackDouglas Ok. It seems to me that a bulk import would be the most efficient way. Assuming it's possible, of course.

SE has no incentive to make this process easy, of course.

@FaheemMitha no and they may make it more difficult in the future too

@JackDouglas Indeed.

@AndrasDeak thanks for the reply unfortunately for text analysis type things I always start in maple because I had been using it for about a decade before I decided to learn other programming languages. Basically it's equivalent "cat" is being used to read a txt line by line, and when no more lines exist it returns an output of zero, which is obviously whole idea for text processing line by line, ie the loop is terminated when the readline() command's output is equal to zero.BUT

the problem is, it is returning zero for particular lines other than the final line, and so I need to figure out why and what if statement I need to add to prevent my loop from prematurely terminating

And I cant import the whole thing, for what ever reason maple is alphabet racist and freezes for certain txt, or just gives you something like this

which also soon freezes and tells me to go #$@$ myself

@Adam I can't say anything else than that maple doesn't strike me as a prototyping language, nor one that's good with text processing :) But I only had a little math-related encounter with maple. Never got the hang of it.

You should probably look at the maple docs and some maple-related forum

@AndrasDeak sure in my first 12 months of Linux i quickly noticed what you are saying unfortunately "i" don't get to choose when my brain decides to start making intelligent changes to my behavioural patterns, i just wake up one day and the penny drops

sure i guess maybe carl will pity assist for the infinitieth time ill post on their forum

It has an improving code translation package so that's one blessing i should count, ie yeah i can see what means what in python and c etc

if you have a lot of such tasks to do it might be worth learning a high-level general-purpose language in a focussed way

yeah well no love on the other end of the tab array just INJUSTICE so I concede you are probably right. I'll work on a .sh I guess at least my Linux OS gives me permission to look at my own property geez louise

can I can I please have a windows 7 iso? if I'm in a malware group im in the isolation both and they already hate me too much to ever let me escape

@Adam ... what is that supposed to be o.o

meh don't worry about it im going to bed

So for any computer the rule of thumb is not to hold down the power button or pull the plug to turn it off (force shutoff) unless its frozen. This is because it cause data corruption if its in the middle of writing to the disk. But many devices the only way to shut it off is by pulling the power cord (like Alexa or Google Home). Why is this ok?

(a bit off topic but arguably relevant cause those devices are probably running Unix software :D)

@JBis Those types of devices usually do not do much writing to disk.

@Jesse_b eTd

Teh Standard Etidor!