Voting for those candidates is pretty much a no-brainer.

At least the top two are obvious. And it's virtually certain that one of them will get the position. Which is not to say that mod positions are desirable. In fact, I don't quite understand why anyone applies for them, honestly.

@FaheemMitha me neither ;)

@JeffSchaller Are you saying you don't enjoy being a mod? :-)

@ToxicFrog Since it seems you know both Lua and C, and so probably the Lua C API, can you suggest good documentation for it? I'm currently looking at "Programming in Lua", 4th Edition. And a bunch of misc links, including a tutorial or two. Apprently the Lua C API is "very simple". :-)

@FaheemMitha cleaning up messes has its upsides and its downsides

@JeffSchaller I imagine you end up seeing mostly messes

messes that can't be resolved by the community, yep

@JeffSchaller Just curious what the upsides are.

I've been watching a rather silly police show (the usual procedural nonsense) on streaming, and similar thoughts crossed my mind.

Silly but watchable.

@FaheemMitha seeing a high-functioning U&L site with good Q's & A's, engaged users, interesting problems

@JeffSchaller Ah, so, "to protect and serve"? :-)

defuse, guide, and suspend, maybe?

The thing is, for police and janitors, even assuming they are doing good work, very little of the upside comes their way.

(idly wondering if U&L is "silly but watchable", too)

it's a similar feeling to when I walk the neighborhood and pick up trash; I feel better that it's cleaner now, and worse that people feel the need to drop trash

@JeffSchaller Nothing can compare to the inanity of a US prime time show.

I've got to the point where I can accurately predict plot twists before they happen a good portion of the time.

I think they depend heavily on the actors' appeal.

I find TV enjoyable the way Groucho Marx did -- whenever it comes on, I sit down with a book :)

@JeffSchaller With streaming, it doesn't "come on". Which you already know, and which is good, of course.

@JeffSchaller Yes, littering is awful. I can't understand why people do it. But I don't understand a lot of things about this world. Some of the more unpleasant realities I would never have believed if I didn't have incontrovertible evidence.

what was the twitter thing I saw the other day ... "just one more episode, I lie directly to my own face"

yes, I can't help but think "there's probably a trash can whereever you're going"

Sometimes, if someone litters next to me, I pick the litter up and give it back to them, “You dropped this”. This is especially effective with car drivers dropping stuff at a red light.

Heh, yeah. I love doing that.

@JeffSchaller I don't get the meaning of that.

@JeffSchaller Or that.

@FaheemMitha the idea that you'd tell yourself "I'll only watch one more episode", and then watch more than one

@JeffSchaller Oh, of a TV show? No, I never tell myself that, speaking personally.

@FaheemMitha I don't understand ... well, I kind of do -- but why people would throw trash on the grass instead into a container dedicated to that purpose

I sometimes talk to myself, but never about TV shows.

@JeffSchaller Is that a complete sentence?

@JeffSchaller The container is more than a meter away.

@JeffSchaller I knew someone who used to say that he did it to ensure that street cleaners would keep their jobs

(but that was just an excuse for being lazy)

@StephenKitt Weird thing to say. Even if there was no litter, streets still need cleaning.

which is why I always have mixed feelings afterwards

@JeffSchaller Is that part of a sentence?

@FaheemMitha it takes fewer people to clean streets if there’s no litter to pick up

@FaheemMitha I'm not convinced of this. I don't think they had janitors on the Oregon Trail, for instance.

@JeffSchaller who needs janitors when you have dysentery

@StephenKitt I suppose that's true. But they could find something else to do, probably. The world is full of messes to clean up.

@JeffSchaller The Oregon Trail?

The Oregon Trail was a ... east-west, large-wheeled wagon route ...

(no, not referring to the video game)

@JeffSchaller I wasn't aware there was a video game.

There is (was?) an organization in the US called the ATF -- Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. I've come up with an alternate definition while picking up trash -- Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fast Food -- since it's mostly beer cans, beer bottles, empty cigarette packets, and fast food cups & wrappers

I headed off Stephen's potential rejoinder :)

@JeffSchaller headed off?

:-P

@StephenKitt you had potential ;)

@JeffSchaller So that's why they've lumped those together! I always found that the weirdest federal agency in the world, but I guess beer cans and can bear arms go together.

oh my, it just clicked (Stephen's dysentery comment)

@terdon doing either one badly gets you in trouble; both together is a fast pass to real-world suspension

I see they've weirdly added "and Explosives" to their name; guess that wasn't sufficiently covered by "firearms"??

because grenades are in the same class as drinks, cigars, and pistols??

the world continues to not make sense

I bought some Snaps for the Fourth of July a couple years ago, did I " ... cause to be transported, or receive explosive materials" ?

@JeffSchaller That's one feature which I find quite reliable.

Well, I finally managed to segfault my C code. I was wondering how long it would take till that happened.

@FaheemMitha I generally just use the Lua Reference Manual: lua.org/manual/5.4

(I'm not sure which version LuaTeX uses, but the older manuals are still available)

@ToxicFrog So not "Programming in Lua", then?

While I've heard good things about PiL, I haven't read it

My understanding is that it is more of a "gentle introduction" while the Manual is very much a reference work

But it's also very clearly written, well organized, and short enough that you can read the whole thing in an afternoon

@ToxicFrog And it covers the Lua C API too?

Yes.

@ToxicFrog LuaTeX is currently 5.3, I think.

I thought it had switched to 5.4, but perhaps I was mistaken.

lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#4

That's the chapter on the C API.

@ToxicFrog Ok. Thank you.

That actually looks like a lot of material.

The manual describes Lua in its entirety, including the language lexis, syntax, and semantics, the builtin libraries, the lua<->C API, and the user interface to /usr/bin/lua

If you already have a working knowledge of Lua and C and just need to know how to hold the API, though, you can probably get away with just chapters 4 and 5.

@ToxicFrog Just a very very basic knowledge of both. Though Ch 4 and 5 seems like a lot.

Though taking shortcuts, in my experience, often doesn't work out well either.

Hmm, I wonder if I should be using strerror_r instead of strerror.

The former is described as thread safe. Presumably that's a good thing.

Reading the man pages carefully can save one from chasing down blind alleys.

@FaheemMitha the difference between strerror and strerror_r (and, more generally, between non-threadsafe functions and their fully reentrant _r counterparts) is that strerror uses an internal buffer for the string and returns a pointer to it, and this buffer is re-used across strerror invokations, so if you call it from multiple threads, thread A might call it but get the error message from thread B back instead (because B called strerror in between A calling it and using the result)

The _r version requires a caller-supplied buffer and is thus safe to use across threads provided different threads pass different buffers to it.

If you are not writing threaded code you do not need to use the _r version.

@ToxicFrog I don't think I'm writing threaded code.

In news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20955386

is buf intended to be a string? I realise it's hard to comment on a snippet of code in isolation.

@FaheemMitha man fmemopen

tl;dr it's a void* with no requirements on what it points to except that at least size bytes of it are accessible under the given mode

@ToxicFrog So I guess that a string is OK then. Thanks.