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1:43 AM
OK, I sent the emails. We'll see what happens!
 
For the moment, I'm truly out of questions, so I'll have to settle for trying to answer the questions of others
 
The more the merrier.
 
I haven't been able to answer the latest round of questions.
 
I've only come up with one question. I'll try to think of another, but nothing's come to mind so far.
 
 
5 hours later…
6:25 AM
I have questions but I feel they're currently off topic (FIRST Robotics Competition related questions)
 
I think the ones mostly in this room decided that FRT could be on-topic it worded correctly.
FIRST is education-based and robotics are computer based (for the most part)
 
That is exactly why I want to post questions about it.
You know what? I'll ask one that's been bothering me for some time.
 
Worst that can happen is that it's decided to be off-topic.
And that is still good
 
Agreed
 
Part of beta is drawing the lines
 
6:30 AM
because it makes the scope of the site more specific
Absolutely
 
I think (predict) that FRT will always be an edge case.
 
FRT?
First Robotics Competition...
 
6:42 AM
Let's hope it isn't too broad.
 
6:59 AM
anybody here?
 
Just me, myself, and I. Near as we can tell.
 
I used to answer those questions like you did XD but people got annoyed. Now idea why :P
@GypsySpellweaver Anywho, lets hope it isn't.
 
So I make a good example of bad behaviour
 
Just been playing around with my pet project and watching an empty room gather dust.
 
7:03 AM
pet project?
 
I think you made it very on-topic.
Pet project is trying to create a scalable trafic signal intersection control system
 
@GypsySpellweaver blushing
 
Started as a response to the community challenge in Code Review. It has grown way to large for that now, I think
It's my chance to practice asynchronous execution in PERL using the POE module.
 
I'm sorry, I understand the words, but I have no idea what scalable trafic signal intersection control system means.
 
red light, green light.
one four-way intersection, or a whole city of intersections
 
7:08 AM
I think my problem is understanding how scalable plays here.
 
It can handle just one intersection. Or it can grow to handle many intersections. Either case without any change to the program, only the data provided.
 
oh
cool
 
Of course, for me the actual traffic lights and the sensors or buttons will be emulated. But replacing the emulation module with one to control the lights, and one to receive sensor input would make it Real World usable
The sad part is that it will never get used, and I'll probably never use what I learn while making it.
 
I think I have a few sensors and other stuff at home that can do that.
@GypsySpellweaver I highly doubt you won't use what you learn.
 
I don't
That's been my history
 
7:15 AM
Oh...
 
I've written one commercial program, and participated in part of another. Neither really tapped into a significant portion of what I'd learned up to those points.
Yet I keep learning, just for learning's sake.
 
You could start to learn a new language... That's usually fun.
 
I already know FORTRAN, Pascal, PHP, Basic, Perl, APL, JavaScript, and Algol. I can deal with C/C++/Java without ever studying it. Perl can do functional programming like LISP.
 
Wow.
 
First leaned FORTRAN in '72, and just never quit.
 
7:19 AM
Well, you could learn neural networks or something cool like that.
@GypsySpellweaver Woah.
 
<-- dinosaur
 
the twitter posts are really clickbait-y
 
I like them. Hope they do some good.
 
I'm sure they will.
 
I think more good will come from personal contacts, like what Ben is doing.
 
7:22 AM
That's for sure
My brother is on the site but he's inactive. I'll talk to him. XD
 
I have no contacts, so I can't help there. My function is mostly sharing knowledge.
 
ugggh. that rep curve doesn't look good.
@GypsySpellweaver that's the most important part of any SE site.
(the sharing knowledge part)
 
That's what I do.
Are the robots in FRT always Java controlled?
 
And you do it very well
@GypsySpellweaver FRC*. And, no.
 
What are the options.
 
7:25 AM
I think I mentioned in my post that C++ and Labview are also options. But I don't know either language, only java.
I'm not sure about the labs tag. How would you define a lab? because I'm not so sure,,,
 
How complex are the robots?
 
in what way?
 
What do the robots do? Are they remote controlled or autonomous?
 
both. the competition is a different game each year
(there's a manual for each year, and the game is revealed on the first Saturday of January)
you can see my team's code from last year: github.com/Spikes-2212-Programming-Guild/Steamworks-2017
 
@ItamarGreen For this site, should refer to hands-on exercises/projects the students do to practice what they are thought
 
7:28 AM
Oh.
Specifically in class?
 
Not required. Teacher's choice
 
so the game in the competition is 2:30 minutes of fun.
(I'll send a link to a video)
this is a game played this year.
the first 15 seconds are autonomous, the rest is teleop (tele operated)
and so they are not too complicated.
 
cool. Last time I had anything to do with motor controls it was programmed in machine code.
Are the motors "stepper" motors?
 
Oh. That's not very convenient to use, right? XD
 
It's the only thing to use when you have a hex keypad
 
7:36 AM
I wouldn't know...
 
Like a phone keypad except 0-9,A-F with "Load" "Increment" "Step" "Execute", no keyboard. Display is like an LED calculator, no video screen, no characters except hex digits.
 
oh. Well now we have better things
 
Long time ago
 
just how long o.o
 
That would be early '80s. Personal computers were just coming out.
Manufacturing still used the dependable stuff.
 
7:41 AM
wow.
well, maybe I should pay attention to the probability lecture I'm in...
 
probably ;P
 
nice one
un-dependent pun?
 
the person next to me is rolling his eyes. can't see why.
I should stop.
 
50% change the key clicks disturb him.
 
7:47 AM
well played.
Oh. Peter out-actived ben (most active, according to area 51)
 
I'm still on page 1, though most likely not for long
 
so many inactive users.
 
then ask a question ;)
 
I did.
Unless someone new shows up, it looks like Ben and Peter will be mods
 
7:52 AM
(I meant another question).
@GypsySpellweaver I doubt someone will have a problem with that,
 
Aurora might, if the other sites don't take too much time.
I don't really have any to ask. I last taught anything several years ago, and CS over 2 decades ago.
And none of it was to children/teens
 
hm... well, then I guess promoting the site is the best thing to do
 
I had to invent the one I did ask, but it seemed like a real possibility, and might help someone later
I think, for your problem, start at the top - a running robot. Work backwards into what it will take to make it work, then get into the abstractions.
Maybe even working towards explaining RobotMap.java and why it's there.
 
 
2 hours later…
10:17 AM
@ItamarGreen I saw that you made . Why not the broader ?
 
10:42 AM
@thesecretmaster because I felt it would have been much to broad for that specific question.
But might as well
 
Well, now you need a retag request because it has a tag wiki, right?
 
actually that might be problematic to create a FIRST tag, because it would become first
@thesecretmaster not sure I understand what you mean
 
I mean if you just retag the question you lose the wonderful wiki you wrote
 
oh. blushing well then, I just added another tag to it...
 
Oh nevermind. You just added a tag rather than replace.
 
10:46 AM
yep
(btw, answering your question now)
 
Thanks! I tried to answer yours, not sure if it was any good.
 
I haven't had a chance to read it carefully, but from what I saw it is useful
(I'll look at it again soon)
 
11:16 AM
@thesecretmaster edited my answer. I can try to think of a harder example (you'll understand what that means when you read the edit)
 
11:46 AM
Hi guys
 
greetings!
 
@thesecretmaster Hi
Sorry I'm late.
You see something unpredictable has happened to me.
My charger broke.
Never knew it was going to happen.
It just happpened
RIP: Henry's Lenovo Laptop charger from December 25 2015 - May 3 2017
 
12:01 PM
I have a question (which isn't really a large question and I don't think it's worthy of posting on the site)... where should I ask? As I know this room isn't for that
 
@dipper The question is
What is the question?
Give us the title at least.
 
In terms of cryptography: The weakest link property specifies "A system is only as strong as its weakest link" I've got an example of this: "A system may only be as secure as its root password as the root may allow other security measures to be bypassed"
To me, that example sucks. I was curious to see if anyone had any better examples.
 
So it's a security question.
Is it?
@Aurora0001
 
Yeh
 
@ItamarGreen Would you mind removing the link and formatting from cseducators.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/202 (the [frc] excerpt)? Excerpts can only be plain text, so the formatting won't work. You can just go to the [frc] tag and click edit to revise it further while the edit is pending.
 
12:11 PM
Oh.
 
Don't you love opening your logs just to check in and seeing segfault at.... followed by Started Process Core Dump? sigh
 
@Aurora0001 mended the issue
 
@ItamarGreen Great, approved.
 
Yay. I hope I can bring more FRC mentors to here.
 
12:48 PM
This laptop is a little bit slow.
If my charger wasn't broken I would of have a better experience.
right now.
 
1:04 PM
So in theory we start getting evaluated Monday. Robert mentioned that our evaluation might be postponed, but since we haven't heard anything else I'm going to assume we've done a good job of promoting the site and everything will go as planned
Also based on math (85+(13-4)*7) if we continue at 7 questions per day, we're on track to hit ~150 by 6/13 which is when we would hopefully go into public beta.
And what is most exciting is that our questions/day and views/day are actually increasing
 
1:21 PM
@GypsySpellweaver About your question: Would a good answer be "run a ssh server and set up accounts for each person"?
 
1:31 PM
Continuing with random stats: It seems like the 10 questions/day thing is a bit of a high expectation. In the first year of public beta academia had 2 days with 10+ questions. IOT hasn't topped 6 since early January.
 
@thesecretmaster Those expectations are for graduation, not for private beta
 
2:32 PM
@ItamarGreen Is there a visualization of our rep curve somewhere? And what a healthy one looks like?
 
2:46 PM
I just wrote a little SEDE query to make a rep curve for any public SE site: data.stackexchange.com/cs/query/680523/rep-curve#graph
Wait never mind, that's not quite right. Still working on it
 
You want SELECT reputation, count(*) FROM Users WHERE Reputation > 200 GROUP BY reputation
Although the graph isn't really very satisfying
 
Could you make it round rep to the nearest multiple of 25?
That might improve the graph
 
SELECT round(reputation, -2), count(*) FROM Users where Reputation > 101 Group by reputation rounds to the nearest 100
Just change -2 to -1 for rounding to the nearest 10
 
Thanks! I really need to work on my SQL-fu.
That graph looks better
 
3:08 PM
sql-fu
can I use that? XD
 
 
2 hours later…
4:46 PM
back to <6 q/d
(on area 51)
 
Here is an actually nice SEDE graph of rep. Mostly credit to Aurora0001 with some bits added on to make it neater.
 
I'm not sure what to make of the graph
 
 
1 hour later…
6:06 PM
@thesecretmaster Ah, that looks much better
 
We were out around 297 users when I logged in around this time yesterday...up 22 in a day is great
I have to think Twitter and Ben's emails and I know at least one of my posts in the AP community have brought people here along with our awesome community ads
 
The community ads were a good idea, but they have about 8 total clicks, so they're kinda a failure.
 
You never know. 1 from the right person is better than nothing.
 
How is the twitter going? Do we know if we've reached people though that yet?
 
We won't know for sure really, but I've had a few interactions there of new followers and favorites/retweets, which just help spread the word.
 
6:14 PM
That's good. Also, because it's social networking, it'll (hopefully) grow it's reach over time.
 
7:00 PM
Teach AP Computer Science A? Check out our #apcsa tag here for all questions related to the course: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ap-computer-science-a
 
7:13 PM
So,
when does public evaluation start?
 
It's supposed to start monday, but Robert said we might be postponed.
 
 
2 hours later…
9:45 PM
@ItamarGreen Clearly the question/day stat is BS. Nobody asked a question and it jumped from 5.5 to 6.5.
 
10:02 PM
Not Monday - Tuesday was supposed to be the beginning of a week of evaluation, with public beta the following Tuesday (3 weeks from private beta start)
But if he delays a week, then we'll start his evaluation after 3 weeks instead of 2
At least, that was my understanding
 
10:37 PM
Yeah, your right. I misread it. It would start Tuesday or it would be postponed, but he didn't give a date for postponement.
 
I have half-formed questions floating around in my mind, but I am too tired an unfocused to figure them out
 
I have a few as well, but they are a little broad as yet.
My best question thus far as the one on real-life examples of 0-indexing. I'm trying to think of more questions in that style.
Open-ended but precise and research-/experience-based
 
I also want to try my hand at some lesson-review style questions, which we haven't had yet, but had discussed in principle
 
Good idea...that would be a great feature to advertise
 
11:02 PM
@Peter sorry about the room invite, that was an accidental click
 
Ahhh...no worries
 

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