The Water Cooler - 2013-10-01

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8:01 AM

Could use some support (was trying to do some cleanup/research, hit a brick wall due to this issue):

5

Q: Include Site-Specific Closed Reasons in Stack Exchange API Results

Current Design When we search the API for questions, one of the fields provided is closed_reason. This is a sample of the results: { "question_id": 14707, "creation_date": 1380431224, "last_activity_date": 1380431224, "score": -1, "answer_count": 0, "closed_date": 1380460217, "tit...

feature-request close-reasons api custom-close-reasons

8:51 AM

One of my recruiters has gone totally psychopathic.

9:02 AM

@RhysW Because you took a job that he wasn't involved in finding you?

@RhysW They tend to do that, being that they are essentially paid on commission. It shouldn't be that big of a surprise.

The thing is I hadn't taken a job, I said I had been made an offer by one of the other places I interviewed, then she went totally crazy saying that if i wasn't fully committed to the role she put me for then maybe it wasn't worth pursuing.

I wanted to wait til I heard back from both places, but she pretty much refused to talk to them until I professed my undying love for the company

I was more likely to accept the one I had already received the offer from though, ofc i didnt mention this, so I just sucked it up and wrote it off as one of those things

On the upside, you're looking at the proud owner of a new job! contract not included results may vary

2

4 hours later…

12:58 PM

@RhysW Congrats!

@jmac Much appreciated, working on getting the contract, seems like I have notice to hand in

1:22 PM

@RhysW make sure you wait till you have the official offer :P

1:36 PM

@jmac what about those who can't?

@enderland haha i put a lot of my experience from here to use over the last couple of days :P

i guarantee I would have failed miserably without it due to naivety

yeah, I love this site

I wish I could evangelize it to my RL friends who seem to be clueless

some people refuse to accept that they don't know whats best for every situation

and i cant really suggest this site to my friends, none of them have jobs

XD

also @RhysW I'm learning SQL

spent most of yesterday learning how to write parametized queries (without storing the queries on the server)

yeah i saw yesterday! my SQL knowledge is fairly limited, so you'll catch me soon if i dont pay attention :P

the only time ive used parameterised SQL was that one time i was maintaining a java application

1:48 PM

I'm using user input to build queries

oh dear, be wary of SQL injection

so, um, yeah. basically have to to avoid that

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

I included that as a "relevant reading" comment at the top of my database class. lol

ah yes bobby tables

xkcd has something for every situation im sure

pretty much, yeah.

wait did you pin my message? :P

2:07 PM

Who is smart with javascript and parsing info out of webpages?

(this is not a rhetorical question -- the answer is not me)

Specifically, I want to search through a website and yoink information. If I know the structure and I know the names of the containers with the info I want, how do I go about actually getting it?

@jmac haha

But really though, assume I am an idiot when it comes to starting points.

ok ill find a resource for you

gimme a sec

What tool do I use? I can write javascript, I think, but have absolutely no knowledge of where to start with the parsing

I did some javascript guide that kind of handled it (sort of)

but I couldn't figure out the most fundamental basics -- how the heck do I get the data in in the first place?

ah in that case i know just the thing

accepted answer is almost a how to guide:

11

Q: Open webpage and parse it using JavaScript

I know JavaScript can open a link in a new window but is it possible to open a webpage without opening it in a window or displaying it to the user? What I want to do is parse that webpage for some text and use it as variables. Is this possible without any help from server side languages? If so,...

javascript regex parsing webpage

@jmac prepare for the horrors of regex,

you had a problem, you decided to solve it with regex, now you have two problems

is a common phrase

2:20 PM

Thanks!

you wont thank me when you get to regex

I already know regex.

I worked in a computer company on a solaris machine for many moons.

stops running from impending angry mob

oh?

ahh

I wrote myself some bash shell stuff to do my job for me.

(literally)

@jmac now its just called outsourcing

2:22 PM

Yeah, but anyway, regex didn't really bother me. But if the thing is in the DOM model, can't i just parse out by using regression to find each individual entry within an entry, and yoink the ones I want?

theres a library that allows that in c#, i dont think there is a javascript counterpart, that im aware of

I want to get this out of a page <span class="pds-feedback-per"> 17.27%</span>

it will always be called pds-feedback-per, always a span

(for instance)

can't I just scan on through the entire document and yoink out that stuff? I could have sworn it was doable...

its doable through ID which is supposed to be unique, but not everyone gives everything an ID anymore

Errr, it's a class, not an ID

@jmac probably, i havent tried in javascript, i know you could do soemthing similar in c#, it would be messy, dirty and slow though

@jmac exactly

2:24 PM

I don't have c#

nor would I want to diddle with C#

because that is a grownup language for people who actually know what a pointer is.

pointer is mostly a C++ thing, C# abstracts that so you never deal with it directly really

I learned C++, many moons ago.

(many many many moons ago)

(like 240 moons ago)

i did not, that was mostly before my time, c# was the thing on the up and up training wise when i started

Okay. I will investigate regex tomorrow

@RhysW I feel crippled in languages where pointers are cryptic

2:26 PM

I cannot believe there are sites which have tons of data but no API to let you get at it.

ill keep an eye out for resources for you jmac

I'm so used to just doing object * myPtr

And I despise bloody parsing HTML

@jmac there might be one i dont know about

and passing pointers through arguments :D

2:26 PM

I will usually just do the work myself. Old school style. As it is quicker to get done

but this time the info I want is spread across about 50 separate html pages

and I may be a diligent person when I do data entry, but that is just a mind-boggling amount of drone work for my free time.

Anyway, thanks for the info, I will diddle with it later and see if I can get it working.

@jmac oh

might have something for you

I have to run off and do something right quick, but I'll read it later -- thanks for the help Rhys!

ill ping it to you so you know its here

no worreis

(I need a permanent programming assistant. I have so many ideas, but lack the free time and technical knowledge to complete them in a reasonable amount of time)

pahaha, well im trying to get my hands dirty and more experience in my free time, so we might have a match

might have cracked it, and in a one line solution

2:32 PM

can we get a close reason because the OP does not actually want to solve their problem just be told they are right this sucks.

@Chad just quit

3

@Chad 'Other: custom close reason'

@jmac got it, will have a blog post on how to do it this evening for ya, fairly simple actually!

2:50 PM

BTW Enderland you were right yesterday the twitter question sucks

@JoeStrazzere I have no desire to work with assholes again — user1450877 3 hours ago

1

Q: What does Non-circumvention actually mean, in plain English?

A staffing firm offer included a Non-Circumvention paragraph basically including the following: For the period of employment and 12 months after termination, the employee will not engage in the provision of any service to any company client where employee performed work except on behalf of our s...

hiring-process recruitment contracts

this is not a legal question... its quite common and just asking what it means

@RhysW Awesome! Thanks :D

3:05 PM

@RhysW is it possible to easily sort an SQL table by a particular value?

@enderland you can sort by highest or lowest numerically, or a-z z-a alphabetically

how? :P

0

Q: Colleague keeps trying to set me up to fail and discredit me

I have been working at my company for around 9 months. It is small place and I am having problems with a woman I work with. I was bought in with a couple of other people to drastically expand the company. They have a number of long standing staff who like the status quo and this seems to have mad...

relationships conflict bullying harassment

this is going places

...

I know I can do it on a query - using "order by"

select * from Blah order by [columnname]

^defaults to ascending, if you want descending then

select * from blah order by [columnname] desc

but I'm not sure I can actually have a table that way

oh you want to sort the table

hmm

3:08 PM

this table will be static for the most part

so that when you view it its in a specific order?

but it seems the auto sort is sorting by the left most column rather than

yeah, because I want to be able to pull it out of a query and get it in the order sorted by the table view (but I'm using a generic query to pull it, don't really want to write tons of custom queries)

what tool are you using to view it?

SQL server 2005

sigh, stop typing faster than me! haha

3:09 PM

maybe I can just write somethine like

you could have a query, that calls the generic query, then orders the results how you want using the order by,

sort of like a wrapper

hmm couple ways I guess

but reordering an in memory table will be resource hoggy if its lots of data

it's not

oh you know what, I think I have to use order by in the query

-2

Q: Why am I unable to add most of my colleagues on LinkedIn?

If I go to my company's page, I can hover and click connect on the top right "How you're connected pane" but if I actually go to any of their profiles I can't find a connect button at all. They also have hundreds of connects, so I can't imagine it's all a grand process for each one. How do I go ...

^^^ Great candidate for deletion.

3:16 PM

@enderland facepalm

@JimG. nice spot

6

A: In hotness formula, discard answers when voting evidence indicates that these are not good data points

Sorry, marking this as status-declined. We love seeing people contributing in concrete ways (especially backed up by research!) but in this case, not knowing the implementation details makes it almost impossible for you guys to solve this one. The hotness formula that's used for the network ho...

@gnats thing was declined :(

3:35 PM

i should change that pinned comment of mine, contract is now included!

3:49 PM

:D

@JimG. here's a bunch more - workplace.stackexchange.com/questions?page=45&sort=votes

I've already voted to delete most of them

too bad I can't easily filter based on that

workplace.stackexchange.com/review/close/5401

better off for programmers?

not convinced it's a good Q at all

@enderland me neither on second glance

the title seems promising

if that was the question it might be worth keeping

4:53 PM

@Chad you are totally going to get a great badge for this answer

17

A: Someone is harassing me on Twitter with false accusations that I made statements on behalf of my employer

Actions have consequences While your employer can not force you to stop posting political statements, they have been made aware of your posting, and the account has been linked to you personally. If you continue posting using this account then you risk your company taking action against you. I...

isn't there one if you have like 10x the accepted answer?

@enderland i thought it was double, provided the accepted had 10 minimum?

@RhysW some things never die (funny that it took me just three minor changes to adjust feature request to the "tweaked" formula - see rev 7 at meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/192046/revisions)

@ShaWizDowArd if only rejection would somehow make the reported issues disappear. But, oh, it doesn't — gnat 4 hours ago

i found it exceedingly ironic that he said if we felt that it needed to be changed then make a general post, as if the 43 people that upvoted didnt prove it was an issue, even if not to be dealt with how you suggested

yeah, and which is maybe even funnier is that "general post" seems to be already there. For 2+ years, with 70+ upvotes

regarding the "more open-ended feature request" you mention, does this one fit: Don't let questions stick to the top of the hot questions list forever? Per my reading it points to the issue almost precisely as you describe: "Hot questions stay at the top of the supercollider for too long" — gnat 4 hours ago

and with a couple bounties in the history, including currently running one (thanks to @jmac)

yeah, i dont get them sometimes, but im not one to judge, maybe they have their reasons that they wont share with us

funny how they say the algoritm is different, but dont share it with us, we cant suggest how t improve it if we dont know what to change

and these general 'please fix it' posts get ignored

5:13 PM

@RhysW well this time it looks like they managed to post accurate details at last

11

A: How do the "arbitrary hotness points" work on the new Stack Exchange home page?

Basically what's documented here: What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions? We have a few tweaks: Succeeding 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 ...

@gnat maybe make a more general one built off of that equation then?

@RhysW hard to tell. I need some time to figure how to proceed further. As I mentioned, I already updated the request to match the tweaked formula. On the other hand, general request asked about by David, is already there, and even is bountied by jmac. Will see if there's more feedback / details from SE team...

As of now, I am focusing more on educating MSO audience about involved issues than on pushing for specific change; from this perspective status-declined is not very significant. the more people learn about it, the better chance for someone to come with a killer idea that would push it through

sounds like a good plan!

@RhysW yeah, and this isn't new. By similar reasons I didn't worry when one of my requests about SO CV queue was declined. Whatever status is there, issue just doesn't go away and only is getting harder; I only noticed more requests on how to fix it coming on and on and on, closer and closer, pushing harder and harder- just because it's not me alone...

25

A: Daily close votes queue limit

Shog9, Tim Post, and I met earlier today to discuss the issues with the close queue and we all agree that we need to take some steps towards making it more manageable and, more importantly, more reliable and useful than it is today. Unfortunately, there isn't just one thing that we could do that...

people learn about stuff and they come up with ideas on how to deal with it, the more the better. Simple as that

5:29 PM

hmmm I have 2001 rep on meta. NEED TO DOWNVOTE SOMETHING

@enderland I've got a couple ideas on that. :) On the other hand, being currently #8 editor at Workplace, you may find rep over 2K convenient, for giving free edits (I once went under 2K at MSO with bounties, now try to avoid that by all means:))

97 is pretty weak relative to everyone else :)

:) At Workplace, 97 is pretty decent I think. Per my observations, posters here spell better on average than at Programmers and of course better than at SO, and there are more active editors contending for corrections

@enderland 97?

@gnat it's going to get higher because of this - meta.workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/…

5:43 PM

@RhysW 97 edits, see here: workplace.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Editors&filter=all

ahh

my 282 is only because of that insane spree of mine where i got rid of the etiquette tag

that was about 130 edits

@enderland yes I have read it. Interesting discussion, good food for thought. there was a somewhat similar one at Prog meta recently

6

Q: Can we give the community evangelist something more notable to make suggested edits go more smoothy?

I've noticed the SE community evangelist SamtheBrand making some copy editing edits to correct the formatting of the markdown or the proper wording of a phrase. Likely to help improve our (P.SE's) image for showing us off the the world. Currently, the community evangelist does not have a diamon...

discussion suggested-edits

@gnat I'm probably going to do more edits too, seems Workplace is a bit more "happy to see edits" than SO

the site doesnt have a lot of questions per day, so an edit to one to bring it to the top, even when minor, generally makes little difference

i approve all minor edits at the weekend, as this place dies down so much that it doesnt matter

@enderland yup. Wikipedia's be-bold principle works here well. With maybe a minor tilt to more tech-writer oriented attitude...

3

A: Editing Philosophy

A friend of mine, professional tech writer, once told me that one of the major skills in this profession is to remain anonymous. He explained that it means that to readers (including original author of the edited content), it shouldn't look like you added something of "your own", that it shouldn...

5:53 PM

I'm also bad at doing reviews

the site reviews?

yeah

review/close vote/etc

ahh, the second to last one i was poor on, the last one took me a few hours to do

and i think i took over meta when that happened because of my answer per review task

I completely missed that last site review too lulz

@enderland well if you want an update

7

Q: Let's get critical: Sep 2013 Site Self-Evaluation

We all love The Workplace Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who...

discussion featured site-evaluation

everything we were asked to review is there :P

LOL i overshadowed the community bot, didnt see its own answer til now

6:07 PM

I think I voted on some of your answers, so I pseudo reviewed

2

A: Let's get critical: Sep 2013 Site Self-Evaluation

Final Results When is it acceptable for a subordinate to earn more than a manager? Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 2) When keeping track of your hours, should you round at all? Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 4) How can I get...

2

7:04 PM

@enderland you reviewed my reviews? :P

@RhysW something like that

7:21 PM

@Jmac didnt have time for the blog post but

18

Q: Can Javascript read the source of any web page?

I am working on screen scraping, and want to retrieve the source code a particular page. How can achieve this with javascript? Please help me.

javascript html

covers it, use jQuery with yahoo query language

2 hours later…

9:31 PM

enormous fun at MSO: hotness formula request, bounties strippers, jfk and stalin!

-17

Q: That comma should not be there

I've just stumbled over this answer and noticed the nice +550 bounty it got. Curious to see how many bounties it won, I hovered. And saw this: The comma might be small, but I just couldn't miss it. Can the last comma before the "and" please be removed?

feature-request status-declined bounty tooltips

user image

user image

What if my user name was actually enderland, ???? — enderland 11 secs ago

2

9:57 PM

@enderland workplace.stackexchange.com/help/badges/39/populist

10:14 PM

@enderland what about enderland`'); DROP TABLE moderators;--`? — gnat 9 mins ago

@AnnaLear it's funny because I actually used that comic as a comment in code I wrote yesterday... :-) — enderland 26 secs ago

11:06 PM

@RhysW Rhys, this is awesome. You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar!

11:59 PM

@enderland ...this question is not likely to help future visitors as they will not find it (or read through it) I would think...

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