The Whiteboard

5:47 AM

@MichaelT script works; there seem to be an overnight roll that triggers deletion. There is an expected difficulty of assessing stuff with possibly good answers, just as we spoke about, but currently I overcome it by simply skipping over these :)

Q: Programmer magazine subscription

12:16 PM

0

I'm a front-end developer eager to move into back-end development. My birthday is coming up and I've asked for a annual magazine subscription. Would you recommend any that I could subscribe to? Maybe the .net magazine? ps: my interests include PHP, HTML5, JS and Ruby.

magazines

probably not as bad as prior gift-crap, but pretty close

May 15 at 14:55, by gnat

3

Q: Good gifts for programmers

An occasion has come up where I need to present some gifts to graduating CS students on their way into the workforce/grad school. I'd like to get some presents that are reasonably affordable, geeky but not entirely cringe worthy, and semi-useful. Ideally not just a black T-Shirt with some joke ev...

recommendations college recognition

...and just like in previous case, there are "kind souls" to upvote :(

in cases like that, sympathy upvotes feel really despicable.

May 15 at 15:42, by MadKeithV

@gnat I downvoted every single thing in that question and my own snarky comment after reading your link to the meta post.

May 15 at 16:10, by GlenH7

@gnat I just invested four points in improving the quality of the site.

May 15 at 16:16, by gnat

@GlenH7 judging by votes split here, there are 6-7 investors like us. Although, in cases like that I'd rather expect invested points to be eventually returned by mod deletion of the question :)

1:01 PM

Carthago delenda est

oh no... not yet please. :) More-hot-questions in collider => more "hotness lemmings" to break good posts — gnat 3 mins ago

1:17 PM

@gnat has that bounty noticeably increased awareness in your question? I haven't seen any activity but I'll admit I'm not looking very hard.

@Ampt one minute let me check; it's the number of views that matters

@Ampt 290 now, before bounty it was at about 240 iirc. Though, it's too early to say because of "ending in 2 days". In my experience it's the last bounty day that usually brings most views

though even now +25% views are good. "unpopular bounties" may be bring as little additional exposure as 5-10%

I am sure right because I did just that. Probably, the only thing I don't know about bounties is Why bounty dropdown sometimes defaults at value larger than minimum allowed? :) — gnat yesterday

1:41 PM

wel it's probably can be called that way. Other way to describe it is "protect your own users from scale ...human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon..." (A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy) One can probably say that Meta Filter guys at referred article sweep things under carpet by closing their registration page in times of hotness, other would say they protect their community and interaction from getting blown up by unhealthy scaling. You pick the way you prefer to describe it — gnat 1 min ago

user55340

2:22 PM

@gnat adding the 'answer length' field makes it easy to pick out the answers that are decidedly 'meh'.

3:12 PM

@gnat Carthage delenda est per canem :|

Furthermore, I decree that latin shall be abolished.

user55340

@Ampt Never! search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50/lib/…

@MichaelT right, although while testing first version of the script I also have seen delete-worthy answers that were quite lengthy. If memory serves, these were typically like "Your question sucks...", followed by long, boring, 100% meta explanation for why question sucks

@MichaelT That is the most disgusting, cruel and depraved thing I've seen out of perl yet.

user55340

@Ampt Its from Damien Conway... what do you expect?

user55340

3:21 PM

Glance at his contributions and tell me if that is the work of a sane mind - search.cpan.org/~dconway

Q: I've never interviewed anybody before... HELP?

@MichaelT you sit on a lot of articles I've not seen before, toss some in comment at this guy if you can think of ones off hand I forgot

1

There were 3 developers at this GIS tracking company, but now there's 2. Last week my boss was fired. Today, new developers will be coming in for interviews. They'll be coming in from a placement agency. I don't really know how to be on this side of a hiring interview. Any advice or sample questi...

hiring

@Ampt your decree is all Greek to me

@gnat I would ask @YannisRizos then.

@Ampt don't ask please! his decree will be to delete everything, us included

	Error messages
	strewn across my terminal.
	A vein starts to throb.

	Their reproof adds the
	injury of insult to
	the shame of failure.

	When a program dies
	what you need is a moment
	of serenity.

	The Coy.pm
	module brings tranquillity
	to your debugging.

	The module alters
	the behaviour of C<die> and
	C<warn> (and C<croak> and C<carp>).

	It also provides
	C<transcend> and C<enlighten> -- two
	Zen alternatives.

user55340

3:24 PM

@Ampt Graeca delebitur.

@MichaelT Sane? Nah, not so much.

Is this the great @JimmyHoffa asking for ARTICLES?! I thought you just kept a giant <s>database</s> csv file full of every technical article known to man.

@Ampt I read a lot more technical stuff than interview stuff

user55340

@JimmyHoffa He gave us search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Crap-0.001002/lib/Acme/Crap.pm ...

user55340

    use Acme::Crap;

    crap "there was a problem";

    crap! "there was a bad problem";

    crap!! "there was a really bad problem";

    crap!!! "there was a really very bad problem";

Q: Programmer magazine subscription and daily news feeds?

3:26 PM

-2

I'm a front-end developer eager to move into back-end development. My birthday is coming up and I've asked for a annual magazine subscription. Would you recommend any that I could subscribe to? Maybe the .net magazine? ps: my interests include PHP, HTML5, JS and Ruby.

learning magazines elearning

this just makes us look like mean hearted people

user55340

> Load the module. Now you can spell carp more scatologically, and with as many trailing exclamation marks as you need to satisfy your degree of frustration.

@MichaelT This looks like he's trying to write his perl in the star wars scrolling text fashion, which also seems like something he might have written a module for

@MichaelT what coy does is hilarious. Error logger that generates a random haiku to prepend to your errors so they are less troubling

Between that and lingua romana perligata, the facts are clear. @MichaelT, Perl was obviously the hipster language of it's time. At least you write Java now, I guess that makes you a reformed hipster?

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Lest I point you to github.com/shagie/DredmorTools again?

my $parser = new XML::Simple;

why not...

my $parser = new Parse::RecDescent;

so many foreaches... are there no proper list comprehensions in perl?

or map functions

A: Complex Release Vehicle Management

-4

Today, when everything is done globally, it is much more important to track the location of the property. Not only in the immediate living environment, but throughout the world. gps tracking systems and online equipment based on GPS fully capable of answering the question in all information about...

32 minutes and counting on clearly spam post

(And yes, I flagged it)

user55340

3:44 PM

XML Simple gives me a nice hash structure from the xml file. I'm not trying to do xpaths or fancy xml validation (which would fail).

Blog - Stack Exchange: Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun

@Ampt look like? Hey, it's officially announced that we are...

Jeff Atwood on January 04, 2010

I noticed that the Stack Overflow question Strangest language feature has been closed and reopened several times now. The text of the question is brief:

What is in your opinion the most surprising, weird, strange or really “WTF” language feature you have encountered?

I agree this is not exactly an ideal question for Stack Overflow, per the FAQ:

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! …

I'm a little impressed that the bot that was clearly looking to spam vehicle management GPS solutions managed to post on SE

user55340

@Ampt There's another spam post in there too by a different account with the same email hash that was deleted awhile back.

packages release-management team-foundation-server

I don't think it would have been designed to do so with the inherently low volume of GPS solutions needed on SE sites

@gnat yeah, but clearly the post wasn't malicious and needed guidance more than anything. Downvotes are a way to say "This isn't a good question" but without the comments to say "Heres how to make it better" the quality will never improve

people will know what's bad but never know how to achieve what's good

user55340

Doron Vett

1

user55340

3:46 PM

Doron

1

interesting

So is it Bot or Not?

(The clearly more fun way to play the touring test)

user55340

Does it matter if there was something dumb in between the dumb human and SE?

user55340

@Ampt Touring? GPS touring? Pun intended? (Its Turing)

I tried to come up with a way to play that off as intentional but I'm still recovering from that last migraine. You got me on that one.

where is @YannisRizos with his ban hammer when you need him.

I would even settle for @Weston.h with his less mighty, yet still potent deletion wand.

Hi all

3:56 PM

hello

I just ported my proof of concept from Racket -> C++, the code size increased by a factor of 20 :(

Thomas Owens

@Ampt >_<

@Ampt well a guidance has been given to OP in less than an hour after they asked the question,

> "Questions asking us to recommend a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Programmers as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it." – thorsten müller, MichaelT, ratchet freak, MadKeithV, gnat

@ThomasOwens DOH!

user55340

@ThomasOwens apparently has a mighty delete wand of his own.

2

4:08 PM

other than that I hardly see how can I help someone asking "My birthday is coming up and I've asked for a annual magazine subscription.

Would you recommend any that I could subscribe to? Maybe the .net magazine?

ps: my interests include PHP, HTML5, JS and Ruby. "

I'll take your word for it @MichaelT

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT Mine's been getting a workout with the streaming soccer spammer.

and here, I have to recall about _my own_ interests, however selfish it may sound,...

You know, I spend some time at Programmers, studying questions and answers. I learn a lot and where possible, I try to teach others by answering, I gain a reasonably high rep and I am proud of that.

I use every opportunity to refer colleagues to particular Programmers questions that relate to our day job, especially when there are my answers (for comparison I rarely did so with programming community I participated in prior to SE). By doing so, I hope they get impressed by my contribution and in particula…

user55340

@Ampt I've only seen where there was cleanup afterwards, I don't claim to have seen it myself.

A: Programmers.SE and the Summer of Love

5

What kind reaction would you expect to a post looking like this? This question would surely be considered off-topic, but... A friend of mine who lives in France is going to marry soon. And we (his friends) are looking for a nice place to make a geek party somewhere in Central Europe. If someo...

4:15 PM

@gnat I think the problem comes from the fact that anything free is inherently not professional. You can want it to be completely as squeky clean and professional as you want, but until they start charging admission, people are going to post what they want and short of approving posts before they get asked I'm not sure that you can stop it from happening (nor can you get unreasonably upset when it does happen). Just my 2 cents anyway.

@Ampt agree, this is not something that can be "stopped". On the other hand, me casting down-, close-, delete votes and flags on crap like that is not something that can be stopped either. And, you know, it feels great to know that I am not alone...

May 15 at 16:16, by gnat

@GlenH7 judging by votes split here, there are 6-7 investors like us. Although, in cases like that I'd rather expect invested points to be eventually returned by mod deletion of the question :)

user55340

@gnat I'll have to tweak the query to make it SO-able... I tried running it and it timed out. Maybe a max length filter and then limit without ordering...

user55340

(for the non-10k'ers, the post @gnat refrenced was "Good gifts for programmers")

user55340

> Q: An occasion has come up where I need to present some gifts to graduating CS students on their way into the workforce/grad school. I'd like to get some presents that are reasonably affordable, geeky but not entirely cringe worthy, and semi-useful. Ideally not just a black T-Shirt with some joke everyone has heard a thousand times.

user55340

Most of the answers had 6 or 7 downvotes on them with the range being from 3 to 7.

A: Can we get some consensus on what flag to use for link only answers?

4:25 PM

@MichaelT yeah. Back then, it didn't feel like...

...and it was great

@MichaelT max length filter for sure. In your marginal answers query, I once forgot to change to Programmers from SO when running with params that I am using here and it hanged

Jul 25 at 11:30, by Thomas Owens

@gnat It times out on Stack Overflow, but works for Programmers.

I changed to SO and set AnswerLength 127 for my MSO answer, but when changing answer length back to familiar 170, I just forgot to change that little selector at the bottom of the page

3

For this to happen, moderators and SE team need to first find out about size of the issue and come to consensus about what to do about it. Size of the issue can be estimated using SEDE query Marginal short answers with links. For example, when run with parameters: AnswerScoreMax=99, AnswerSco...

user55340

@gnat There are also things like "only pull back 100 questions" - that should be more than enough to vote on.

Historical question: Why was programmers named "programmers"? It seems to invite a lot of questions that really ought to be on SO (a much less obvious name to a newbie)

user55340

AGAIN?????????? — Robert Harvey Jun 25 '12 at 15:02

user55340

@jozefg start there.

Oh fail, how'd I miss that

Q: What is the history behind the site scope change from NPR to "conceptual questions about software development"?

4:39 PM

Upvoted for Blame Yannis SE. ;) — Yannis Rizos Jun 25 '12 at 18:18

@jozefg believe it or not, but originally, official scope of this site was "Not-Programming-Related" (if you ever see "NPR" abbreviation at MSO / Programmers meta, it stands just for that)

21

How did the topic of this site to change from "Not-Programming-Related" to "conceptual questions about software development"? I've tried looking through meta questions to find where the change in site scope was discussed, but haven't found much. The biggest change in site scope I see on meta is ...

discussion site-definition

1

A: Do moderators want to be notified when Stack Overflow questions get migrated?

The original charter for PSE was much broader. Originally "Not Programming Related", we were seeking a place to ask and entertain questions that would have been closed as "not programming related" on SO. Mostly, NPR was used when a question was more about programmers than programming. Now we've ...

user55340

At times, (and mods, don't worry... I resist the urge quite easily) I want to go to sites where the NPR advocates reside now and ask questions like "As a {christian|cyclist|chef}, what gift should I get for a non-{c...} friend?" and try to get them to say "yes, thats on topic for C?.SE"

2

Q: A coworker gave our boss a very big gift. What do I do?

@MichaelT funny thing is, "gift" per se can be quite topical if the question is spelled right and posted at appropriate site: workplace.stackexchange.com/search?q=gift+is%3Aquestion

16

A coworker of mine was just sent by the company to a Microsoft conference. At the conference, attendees were given Microsoft's new tablet and the Lumia 920. During our weekly meeting, my coworker was told by our boss that the giveaways were hers to keep for her own personal use. She mentioned ...

management human-resources

user55340

5:10 PM

@gnat Previous place I worked for had a very strict no gift up the management chain policy. The owner's son (high level in the company) got fired for accepting wedding gifts from people who worked for him.

Q: How to deal with undesired commits that break long-running release builds?

5:35 PM

so @gnat what would your ideal PSE site contain as far as questions go?? I've seen a lot of questions that you don't like, but which ones do you think are good

user55340

@Ampt if I may offer one that I've got an answer in...

user55340

5

We ran into an unfortunate situation at work recently and I've been wondering what we can do to avoid similar problems in the future. We make embedded systems. The FPGA code is in one SVN repository while the firmware & software code is in a different repository. Building the firmware requires t...

version-control builds branching

@jozefg Serves you right for dirtying your code with that language :P

@MichaelT Alright, noted. So I would say that that is related to the software lifecycle/ process and less theoretical in nature.

user55340

@Ampt Yep. Questions that are about the programs (less so the people, and even less so the personalities). Things that aren't just one offs, but rather material that people will come to find in the future. Things where the answer isn't "do a search in google to find this snippit" but rather require thought about why it is done that way.

5:50 PM

Doesn't that require the pool of FPGA Developers who send images to firmware teams strait out of their SVN trunks to be sufficiently large though? how do we determine if a question is too local or too broad?

how many people does a question have to apply to to qualify as not being too local

user55340

The full test unit suite on the register software I used to work on took 2 hours to run on a speedy developer machine. The build machine wasn't as fast... probably 3 or 4 depending on what it was doing. The same problem could occur there.

user55340

That was with 6 java developers.

Q: Documentation in OOP should avoid specifying whether or not a "getter" performs any computation?

@Ampt well first of al I would not want Programmers to have only questions that I like. Locked cages scare me. One can not learn much new by only looking into the mirror and seeing all the same face there every day, day by day. Paradoxically, I just feel safer seeing questions I dislike, staying open (!), upvoted (!!) and even (oh horror!!!) highly upvoted...

That said, there sure are questions that I definitely like. A recent example (except for its original title, but I edited it out) is...

24

My school's CS program avoids any mention of object oriented programming, so I've been doing some reading on my own to supplement it -- specifically, Object Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer. Meyer makes the point repeatedly that classes should hide as much information about their...

design object-oriented documentation performance

And this guy somehow manages to always post questions I like: programmers.stackexchange.com/users/3249/…

user55340

Frankly, most the unit tests were broken at the start (when we got 'em from the 3rd party), so we just turned that off to get a 10 minute build.

user55340

Keeping release and trunk separate is key in a lot of places... Even were I'm now (small developer shop, 6 developers (again))... we've gone to a separate release branch once testing begins in which all fixes are checked in rather than against the 'trunk' (see nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model )

user55340

5:59 PM

We're at the point were the testing cycle is more than "glance at it" and then merge the trunk/mainline/develop branch to master. One option was 'locking' this for the duration of the testing effort (no, don't merge anything not a bugfix in the current build into this)... but that was ugly. So we branch a release branch.

user55340

Its the same issue as the FPGA guys problem... different twist but underlying same problem.

Q: Android analog speedo meter widget

@MichaelT that Shirky's article you taught me about turned out highly reusable :)

wel it's probably can be called that way. Other way to describe it is "protect your own users from scale ...human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon..." (A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy) One can probably say that Meta Filter guys at referred article sweep things under carpet by closing their registration page in times of hotness, other would say they protect their community and interaction from getting blown up by unhealthy scaling. You pick the way you prefer to describe it — gnat 4 hours ago

user55340

6:27 PM

@gnat The cliff question query hits SO quite nicely.

user55340

It gives you things such as:

user55340

-16

I want to add speedometer to my application i.e analog speedometer. Is there any free widget that i can just integrate into my application ? Or do i have to create it from the scretch ?

java android eclipse

user55340

Which has one answer:

user55340

1

A: Android analog speedo meter widget

Here you have an answer. Modify this analog thermometer for your requirements.

user55340

data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/133171/…

6:34 PM

@MichaelT I see. Looks like RowsReturned does the trick. Neat

user55340

Drop the answer length down to 200 and you find... meh.

A: Using Wicket in frame work how to write the code that will work even after session time out

I couldn't resist to DV both Q and A in your example, even knowing it'll go away overnight

user55340

I have much less problems with the answers on SO getting downvotes than I do here...

user55340

0

Make it stateless.............

Q: Is it time to tighten up the question quality filter?

@MichaelT so many dots. And, we know why these are there don't we? :) .............

50

As everyone here well knows, we get a lot of questions on Stack Overflow. And, as some of us here probably already know, there is a quality filter in place for new users: Also, there are certain quality filters applied to questions to try to ensure a clear title, a reasonable explanation of t...

discussion stackoverflow questions low-quality-posts quality-filter

user55340

6:52 PM

@gnat Its closer to this one...

user55340

32

Q: Bananas in comments?

On this question, I'm seeing bananas in two of the comments: Am I going bananas?

discussion comments

Blog - Stack Exchange: Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun

12

A: Bananas in comments?

It's shorthand for "flag this comment as noise so that it can be removed". The banana itself is a reference to a famous theorem.

Jeff Atwood on January 04, 2010

I noticed that the Stack Overflow question Strangest language feature has been closed and reopened several times now. The text of the question is brief:

What is in your opinion the most surprising, weird, strange or really “WTF” language feature you have encountered?

I agree this is not exactly an ideal question for Stack Overflow, per the FAQ:

Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered! …

Are the bananas supposed to attract a certain moderator or group of moderators?

@Ampt monkey moderators?

user55340

@Ampt Some moderators may require other unicode characters. 1F377, 1F378, 1F379, 1F37A, 1F37B are all good choices.

user55340

7:06 PM

I am amused that the next character sequentially is 1F37C

Almost surely

In probability theory, one says that an event happens almost surely (sometimes abbreviated as a.s.) if it happens with probability one. The concept is analogous to the concept of "almost everywhere" in measure theory. While there is no difference between almost surely and surely (that is, entirely certain to happen) in many basic probability experiments, the distinction is important in more complex cases relating to some sort of infinity. For instance, the term is often encountered in questions that involve infinite time, regularity properties or infinite-dimensional spaces such as functio...

I love that a simple colloquial phrase like "almost surely" can be connotated to mean a very specific thing by sciency folks

user55340

I personally like the phrase 'almost never'. The DBA was saying that something was "almost never going to be a problem"... then he did some back of an envelope calculations and amended it to "never happening about once every other month on average"

List of Unicode characters

This choked my browser, I wonder if you could technically choke chat's SE server a bit with

This is a list of Unicode characters. Basic Latin {| class="wikitable sortable collapsible" !Code !Result !Decimal !Description !Abbreviation |- | U+0000 | | | Null character | NUL |- | U+0001 | | | Start of Heading | SOH |- | U+0002 | | | Start of Text | STX |- | U+0003 | | | End-of-text character | ETX |- | U+0004 | | | End-of-transmission character | EOT |- | U+0005 | | | Enquiry character | ENQ |- | U+0006 | | | Acknowledge character | ACK |- | U+0007 | | | Bell character | BEL |- | U+0008 | | | Backspace | BS |- | U+0009 | | 	 | Horizontal tab | HT |- |...

7:21 PM

Running on a Core2Duo over here. No clue why I clicked that link.

user55340

I'm curious if they pull the entire page, or if they stop at some point.

@MichaelT That was my thought

@MichaelT Sometimes I wonder if our mods might respond better to 1F489

can you remove the edited symbol in a comment after reaching a certain rep requirement?

user55340

Nope.

Must have deleted his comment and added a new one before I got my comment in then.

user55340

7:36 PM

@JimmyHoffa Somewhere, there was a bit of a 'scandal' with rails using pile of poo to detect utf8 support.

unless @RobertHarvey is a hacker. I'd accept either answer

user55340

(actually, it was to force utf8 submissions rather than detect it...)

user55340

8:04 PM

Unicode 1F638 to 1F640 (thats 19, not 3) are pictures of cats. fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f63b/index.htm

user55340

1F700 - 1F773 are alchemy symbols.

8:22 PM

@Weston.h do you have any experience threading in python?

user55340

8:48 PM

I tried to install this on my wife. It did not work. But she did give me this look. So I guess it did work after all. — Andrew Barber 2 hours ago

user55340

The things you find in Meta.

user55340

(from this question)

user55340

-12

Q: ಠ_ಠ button for chat

I think this would be really useful. There's a Chrome plugin that provides some great functionality, but sometimes you just need to break out a disapproving look immediately in another browser, and I think SE chat needs to support this. Can we have a ಠ_ಠ button please?

feature-request chat

9:01 PM

I can't tell if this guy intended to use Programmers as the toilet bowl, but result is the same

If this is about code, show us the code. If this is about the concept of programming, you should take your question to programmers.stackexchange.com — gunr2171 39 mins ago

-1

Q: C# Logic - gaps & Islands

I am completely stumped on how to do this: I have a SQL resultset that returns rows of DateTimes of unavailable dates. I need to take these results, organize them and output to my user the lists of available dates. So lets say Feb 3rd, from 12 to 5 is unavailable, i want to output the following...

c# asp.net

psr

@gnat He might have mentioned that it is almost certainly about the code.

and I am tempted to quote self on the previous occasion

Aug 1 at 12:37, by gnat

@2rs2ts quoting comment of Programmers moderator from here, "Please do not recommend sites, especially those that you aren't an active participant in. This question is not appropriate for Programmers and has not only been cross-posted, but closed there." — gnat 16 secs ago

@gnat Do.

@JimmyHoffa there you go...

@gunr2171 quoting comment of Programmers moderator from here, "Please do not recommend sites, especially those that you aren't an active participant in. This question is not appropriate for Programmers and has not only been cross-posted, but closed there." — gnat 13 secs ago

There's logically a fixed/slow growing number of these barf-on-Programmers folks, we can surely go through and barf-on-Them one by one to get them to feel like they might get shit if they do it again.

We won't stop it, but for each member you take out of the pool I believe you do reduce the number who are suggesting such

psr

9:06 PM

30 secs ago, by psr

Do

2

user55340

Does that make it Do do?

@MichaelT that makes it DODO I think

►

user55340

@gnat Thats quite different than // TODO

(shameless plea) while we're at it, may I ask a couple votes on that comment, so that it doesn't look like a one man crusade?

@gunr2171 quoting comment of Programmers moderator from here, "Please do not recommend sites, especially those that you aren't an active participant in. This question is not appropriate for Programmers and has not only been cross-posted, but closed there." — gnat 8 mins ago

oh my, link-only answer, amplified by comment like that, priceless

@gnat I think the question would be better asked on the Mercurial mailinglist (where the real experts are). That is why I pointed Robin there and gave him a link to the wiki so he can use that as starting point for the thread I hope he will start on the list. — Martin Geisler 1 min ago

> For the details of the algorithm, I think you should look at the code or ask on mercurial-devel@selenic.com. There you'll find the people who actually implemented the algorithm.

believe it or not but I once posted crap like that myself when I was new at Programmers. If memory serves I "converted it to comment" but if anyone anyhow stumbles over my post like that, please do me a favor, ping me about it with a friendly downvote, I'll take care of it

9:22 PM

@gnat isn't the point of anonymous voting to remove the mob mentality in making decisions? Also, he may have a point that mercurial questions could be better served by going to the mailing list, in which case the real problem is attracting mercurial experts to the site

@Ampt The point of anonymous voting is anonymity; mob voting happens regardless based on which answer has most votes and which answerer has highest rep

If I think your answer is wrong or bad I can downvote it without worrying about you arguing with me or retaliation voting. If I think your answer is right I can upvote it without worrying about other answerers arguing with me or retaliation voting. If I think your answer is good/bad I can upvote/downvote it without worrying that I may be publicly castigating myself.

I stand corrected.

user55340

On Everything2, one of the features they had for voting was you could make it so that you didn't see who wrote the node until it was voted upon. You could turn this off, but some people liked that setting.

@MichaelT Before the diamond, I used a little userscript that hided all user information from SE sites. It wasn't perfect (didn't handle comments), but it was good enough...

@YannisRizos have you worked with OAuth?

9:37 PM

@JimmyHoffa No.

Damn.

Anybody here know what an OAuth "Access Token" is in the context of OAuth?

What platform?

I've done it for java on desktop, and helped with it for android

let me look up my notes

@JimmyHoffa It's a string that defines access scope and duration.

@YannisRizos It's for authorization instead of authentication then?

pretty sure it does both

authorizes your account to use the users stuff, and authenticates that your account is who it says it is

9:40 PM

@JimmyHoffa both

@Ampt That's what I'm confused by; the consumer secret and consumer token are for authentication

yeah but I don't think you should have both of those

unless you're doing your own account

@Ampt whatever point he makes (and to me his point makes good sense btw), there are answer quality norms, and I think his answer doesn't meet. I think it would make a pretty helpful comment. As an answer... no way

@JimmyHoffa tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-1.2

@ColeJohnson you maybe can. I can't - in the sense of adding anything that can not be inferred from original post (for that, it doesn't matter if I logged out or not). That's my Editing Philosophy if you wish, it doesn't depend on being logged in. "Did I mention that from above perspective, it doesn't really matter whether one suggests the edits through review or does free editing?" — gnat 9 mins ago

9:43 PM

@YannisRizos Right, I've worked with federated authorization like that before, but then it is separate from authentication

I'm wondering if it's a necessity, thinking not

@JimmyHoffa The diagram in sec1.5 (scroll down a bit) may be a bit more helpful

You need an access token to get anything

@Ampt ...then what do you need a consumer key for? I understood that was the purpose of it.

to get the token I believe.

@JimmyHoffa You need the consumer key and the shared secret key to generate the token the first time. Then, you continue with the token.

9:47 PM

you refresh the token using one of the keys don't you?

consumer keys and shared secret keys are constant, tokens last for a session (or less).

you know, I think I remember it now. You use the keys in a builder and then get a new token when you build it.

at least that's what I think happens. Good thing I get to go back and work on this project in a week....

@YannisRizos Huzzah. This makes sense in line with my initial thoughts, though at odds with someone elses implementation but what're you going to do...

one thing's certain: OAuth is a f'ing mess.

2

@YannisRizos chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/10956190#10956190

9:49 PM

@YannisRizos Yeah, this became clearer today as I had been presuming this implementation was not OAuth compliant just because it's a mess; but turns out it's just an accurate representation of OAuth.

Hm, tomorrow I'll be interviewing people for a junior (web) dev position. Will it be too cruel if I ask them to explain the typical OAuth workflow?

@YannisRizos Cruel? Try fun. At the end of the day it matters minimally; you could call it a waste of time for your entertainment, but then it doesn't take much time to find the depth and breadth of a junior anyway.

@JimmyHoffa To be honest, I'd be happy if they know what git is. svn is (still) king here <sigh>

user55340

@gnat psst - the "from here" that links to stackoverflow.com/questions/17947267/… is a deleted question. Might be better to find a rather permant MSO question/comment/answer that one could link to.

10:08 PM

@MichaelT did you hover over that link in my comment? :)

1 hour ago, by gnat

@gunr2171 quoting comment of Programmers moderator from here, "Please do not recommend sites, especially those that you aren't an active participant in. This question is not appropriate for Programmers and has not only been cross-posted, but closed there." — gnat 13 secs ago

next time (hope there will be no next time but that's unlikely), I'll probably "move" words 10K-only from tooltip to the text (the rest will remain in tooltip:)

@gnat Just struck the kill-shot over on SO. I may be barely over 3k there, but barely over 3k works just fine.

@JimmyHoffa that was...

Coup de grâce

A coup de grâce (; , "blow of mercy") is a death blow to end the suffering of a severely wounded person or animal. It may be a mercy killing of civilians or soldiers, friends or enemies, with or without the sufferer's consent. It may also be the final event that causes a figurative death: The business had been struggling for years. The sharp jump in oil prices was the coup de grâce. Examples of coup de grâce include shooting the heart or head (typically the back of the skull) of a wounded, but still living, person during an execution or by humanely killing a suffering, mortally wounded ...

@gnat Common mistake, you meant

Foie gras

Foie gras (; ); French for "fat liver") is a food product made of the liver of a duck or goose that has been specially fattened. By French law, foie gras is defined as the liver of a duck fattened by force-feeding corn with a gavage, although outside of France it is occasionally produced using natural feeding. Foie gras is a popular and well-known delicacy in French cuisine. Its flavor is described as rich, buttery, and delicate, unlike that of an ordinary duck or goose liver. Foie gras is sold whole, or is prepared into mousse, parfait, or pâté (the lowest quality), and may also be s...

A: Someone flagged my question as already answered, but it's not

@JimmyHoffa pardon my French?

+300 bounty at MSO is burning my pockets, I am making weird plans to invest it...

14

what's the best way to prevent these "helpful" flaggings in the future? Although you put this word into ironic quotes, it is helpful indeed, and instead of preventing, you better learn to use these flaggings to your advantage. Just think of it: someone invested their effort, did some rese...

first, I'll put a bounty on that "other off-topic" question mentioned by Thomas...

yesterday, by gnat

@ThomasOwens I see I already upvoted it. And even the answer from the same guy whom I target my bounty to now. Okay, I know now where to put my next bounty after one I plan for Nicol's answer :)

Q: ASP.NET and windows applications

Should I delete my answer here?

-2

Currently I'm still learning ASP.NET. My goal is to build dynamic websites. However, I also want to be able to build some windows applications as well. So, is it easy to learn Windows forms or WPF after ASP.NET? or is the reverse easier? meaning to start with WPF then move to ASP.NET?

asp.net wpf

I always feel like I did an oops when I wrote an answer on a question that shouldn't have been

10:23 PM

@JimmyHoffa I looked at it and it didn't look bad (otherwise, you'd already have my -1 there). Guess that means you will have to decide for yourself :)

...next, I'll put a bounty on my hotness formula correction request - to avoid an impression that I only beg others for bounties

I just learned there are people who stuff a tube in a ducks stomach to force feed it corn meal until it's dead. Crazy.

Q: What is the future of the present programmers?

10:41 PM

@JimmyHoffa I think you can put your new knowledge into this "great" question, it seems to be spelled the way that will accommodate anything...

0

Ok , i am 25 and am currently intern in an R and D division of an MNC. Everywhere i look around ,i hear stories of my acquaintances and their kids doing programming from age of 10. I fear that if i don't acquire any other skill like an researcher in an particular field ,i will be replaced by all ...

career-development

- "How do you face these fears?" - "I am thinking of ducks fed to death and feel that my fate as a future of present programmer is anyway better than theirs, that makes fear go away"

- "How do you face these fears?" - "I am thinking of ducks fed to death and feel that my fate as a future of present programmer is anyway better than theirs, that makes fear go away" — gnat 14 secs ago

Q: Good open source example of object oriented php client code?

0

Are the any good examples of open source php client code written in an object oriented paradigm? I've read similar questions to this one where the answers cited are frameworks such as Symfony or Zend, but what I'm looking for is application or client code. By client code, I mean not a framework o...

php object-oriented open-source examples

...use your best judgement how to respond to this question...

@gnat This kinda makes me want to burninate the career-development tag even more, I realize people say there are good uses for that tag here but... there are so many bad ones, and the good ones could usually do without it...

@JimmyHoffa I am out of any kind votes that would express my judgement. Maybe tomorrow

10:57 PM

job-market great there's another should-go-die tag that exists

@JimmyHoffa as far as I can tell, there are good uses. Search says so 217 times: programmers.stackexchange.com/…

Q: What is the difference between a freelancer programmer and a Programmer working in a Software company?

3

I was told by a HR department that freelancing experience is not considered as professional experience. What could be the reason?

career-development

What isn't closed is a poor indicator of what shouldn't be closed

@JimmyHoffa search says this tag can stay alive 97 times: programmers.stackexchange.com/search?q=[job-market]+closed%3Ano

►

@gnat If questions that aren't closed shouldn't be closed, no questions would ever be closed.

(say that five times fast)

@JimmyHoffa well then the action sequence is clear isn't it? Close what should be closed, revisit that search and decide. IIRC prior burninations went just this way

11:06 PM

I personally disagree with the "Don't hold old questions to current standards" rule. I know it's the rule, I will try to follow it, I will bite my tongue because I think old questions that don't meet current standards are one of the greatest sources of new questions that don't meet current standards. grumble grumble grumble...

@gnat well it still took quite a while to close it, and usually as long as opinionated questions are well thought out (better than what's your most controversial opinion) I, personally, don't have a problem with them — aaronman 11 mins ago

@aaronman that's probably because you didn't yet see enough of them. And especially, didn't see how crappy answers like I have no fear because of ducks fate get their portions of cheap upvotes, making it look like the answerers earned reputation same way as you do with hard earned, effort consuming posts — gnat 41 secs ago

I just like to reference self

even as an example of a crappy content

next thing to do would be to flag self and do other stuff required for that Solipsist badge...

maybe you could also flag your own post and dospute own flag? to make a perfect solo so to speak? I feel a new badge coming, awarded to users who managed to 1) post, 2) flag their own post, 3) dispute their own flag on their own post, 4) raise a meta discussion about own dispute of own flag cast on their own post. Solipsist? — gnat yesterday

@gnat Canem ipse est :(

@gnat you keep making me learn latin words and before you know it I'll be a lawyer. Jerk.

@JimmyHoffa blame Wikipedia, I just do link-only comments

A: What is the meaning of the "broken-windows" tag?

11:38 PM

@JimmyHoffa this disagreement and this belief isn't only yours, it's an officially known issue of old questions that don't meet current standards are one of the greatest sources of new questions that don't meet current standards: meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/broken-windows/info

> Existing inappropriate questions used to justify posting of new inappropriate questions "why can't I ask X when Y exists".

10

How many questions on meta have asked, "Why can't I ask this question when that question is open"? Above question made me feel that topic of broken windows may be worth tagging: ...I was wondering just how many meta threads there were asking "why can't I ask X when Y exists"... In this que...

BTDTGTTS

Matt D

oh hey gnat, thanks for the edits :)