I wonder if some kind of Reverse Engineering challenges would be a good idea here. What do you think?

@TheDoctor There! now it is reopened.

@TimWolla I love reverse engineering! But only serious ones (not "toy" instruction sets).

@ChrisJester-Young I never did it myself, I really need to learn ASM.

What do you mean by „toy“ instruction sets?

Some university courses like to use a toy instruction set to teach their students the basic concepts of assembly programming.

I see.

In contrast, I played extensively with x86 assembly in my teenage years. ;-)

3x Cheers for assembly!

But no, I thought about giving some kind of executable in the question and some information how to use.

@TimWolla, that could be interesting.

And then the answerers have to solve a certain task with it. Like writing a reverse engineered keygen or things like this.

however, people may find it difficult to trust a random program from the internet...

Virustotal is available.

But, yeah this would be one concern.

asking people: "just download this random .exe that I wrote that happens to run with unrestricted access to your computer" generally doesn't go over well.

I don't think the to-be-reverse-engineered executables need to run with Administrator Privileges. Any suggestions on how to minimize those risks?

it's hard to find a way, especially given the variety of computing platforms.

I suppose that if you wrote your own interpreter...

and it could not execute on a real machine.

At that point, the bigger challenge is with implementing the instruction set and interpreter...

alternatively, PHP might be an option.

Yawn

I just realized i have never used the sandbox.

@StackTracer PHP is way to easy and boring as the source code is plainly available.

@TimWolla, not if the PHP is on a server.

and there is no access to the server.

at that point, it becomes I-O analysis, not decompilation.

but at least end-users are safer. There isn't really a good way to give people a fragment of code (that they don't know what it does), and give them confidence that it won't do anything bad.

I don't see any real weak points except for Timing Attacks then. This would defeat the purpose entirely, unfortunatly.

@TheDoctor You may have noticed that several of your questions receive a bad welcome. Use the sandbox.

I think the author of codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/24462/18487 fixed his unclear spec with his latest edit. Now he is judging on "most votes". He didn't edit the tags though, so someone voted to close it. I suggested an edit to fix the tag problem

I wanted to point it out in case more people were about to hop on the vote to close bandwagon.

Oh... there's another one. You guys might want to actually point out what you think is wrong with the question

My vote already is in :)

@TimWolla Like I said, he fixed his spec in response to Peter Taylor's comment, and is still getting close votes. It looks like he put a lot of work into providing a sample answer to his own question, so I think it would be great if you suggested a fix rather than being a elitist "Anyone who has problems and didn't use the sandbox deserves to be closed" kind of guy

@Rusher I just retracted mine.

@TheDoctor You shame Texans by using the phrase "Yall, you do know..."

Why are tips questions not on meta?

The lack of a 2nd-person plural pronoun is a gaping hole in the English language

I think you pretty well covers it

Y'all Northerners are just jealous of us Southern folk for inventin' it first-like :D

Umm, I'm a Texan, not a Northerner

Haha, yeah, I remember from yesterday

I've had my arm shoulder deep in a cow's vagina and I still refuse to use the word Ya'll.

I was speaking to the gallimaufry

I Googled that word and still don't understand. That's sad :(

"Speaking to the confused jumble or mess of things"

Of course, we all know that "you" is second-person plural. It just that nobody uses "thou", "thee", and "thine" anymore.

In Elizabethan English it can be taken to mean "the general collective of people" or something along those lines

Well, I'm pretty sure you in the plural sense is not limited to Elizabethan English

Unless I was raised in the 16th century

Ah, here we are. I knew it was in at least one Shakespeare play I've performed

How does one determine whether to comment or answer a meta question?

Some questions can only get answers like "I think this is a bad/good idea. Here is a reference to strengthen my argument."

@Rusher There's more hole than spec, to the point that I can barely distinguish between suggesting a fix and writing a new question. If you look at my comment history you'll see that I make plenty of pointed questions where I see closeable holes in specs, but the only thing I can think of here is to ask for a link to detailed data on star evolution, and that would probably end up disqualifying OP's answer so it's not much of a fix.

@Rusher What's the one you're unable to decide on?

@JonathanVanMatre meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/1281/…

With the star explosion, I was really expecting the example to produce a red giant, not disappear.

off to work. later!

@PeterTaylor What you are proposing is akin to "Give me the 10 ASCII art images that I must produce and I will do so."

@PeterTaylor The fact that the question is open-ended does not automatically make the spec ambiguous. If I produce a more creative star explosion than you, I'll get more votes and win without argument.

If nobody reading my answer can tell that it is a star explosion, I probably won't get any votes

Give me 10 images would then turn the thing into just another Kolmogorov exercise.

@PeterTaylor In fact, the definition of "star explosion" is equally ambiguous to your "any reasonable machine" requirement in my opinion, yet somehow people were able to answer it

That question is vague, but I also like it because the animation aspect introduces something that might involve algorithms other than mere text compression. There's an opportunity in there to impress people with your code, not just with how cool the thing you made looks.

The question clearly has a winning criteria of "most votes". It also defines a voting criteria, "Most creative star explosion". Perhaps the problem is with the subjectivity of the voting criterion? But don't ALL popularity contests have a subjective voting criteria? If they didn't they would be a code-challenge rather than a popularity contest.

Oh dear, someone starred that comment earlier. Feel free to undo that...

haha, that wasn't me.

Can users with low rep see how many vote-to-close votes are present on a question? More specifically, on their own question?

codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/view-close-votes

-> 250 Rep

Ah, ok. View and cast granted at same rep. Thanks @TimWolla

I see Milo changed their avatar slightly to differ from TheDoctor :P

emphasis on slightly

By the way, i have seen several downvoted answers because they were in TI Basic. I would be happy to review/test any of those answers... just ping me! :)

GTB as well?

: - )

@TimWolla - no, i can't even understand it

@TheDoctor … as everyone except TimTech

Yep

I have no problem with TI Basic...remember it fondly from my old calculator.

TI basic looks fine to me. GTB is the issue.

Precisely

I remember it fondly from my 3 calcs

which i still have

Isn't GTB just a version of TI-Basic with the names of things replaced with shorter names? Even if it was a real language that people who aren't TimTech could use, making something that up so you can golf better should probably still earn downvotes.

I can't invent "Golfed Python" where the interpreter is "exec(raw_input().replace('~', 'print '))"

I'd tend to agree; however, it is not entirely black and white

For example, RebMu rebmu.hostilefork.com

Which had a heyday back when code golf was on SO

And seemed to be mostly accepted, despite being basically a translation layer for Rebol

The interesting part is that all of Timtech's symbols are 2 or 3 bytes, while TI basic symbols are stored as 2 byte symbols in the calc's memory

And his compiler is written in an even stranger language

techno-archaeologists of the future will surely scratch their heads when they stumble on that

And encrypted

yep

One day someone's going to discover that the GTB compiler never existed at all, and that source code is, in fact, a heavily-encrypted version of the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up".

hahaha

As a rule I hate the rickrolling phenomenon but that would be genuinely hilarious

Will someone please star this?

I also find it very strange that "TimTech Software" claims to be a company but appears to be a personal website including made-up programming languages, Minecraft videos and instructions on ban evasion and aimbot installation for Ace of Spades.

It's all a front for the Illuminati

don't be fooled

Very suspicious

That's the only thing that makes sense

I think someday, Timtech will decide to mine Rusher

@undergroundmonorail He probably is a child

Earlier today on another site I use, I got a PM from a brand new account with the lyrics to We Do (the Stonecutter's song from the Simpsons) with one of the lines replaced with "Who keeps [name of a moderator for the site] in charge?". A few minutes later his account was deleted and the message was gone. I have never been more confused.

Strange

Should this be off-topic as dangerous to computers?

Why would it be

I don't know, but the only answer so far will crash anyone's computer that runs it.

Nope not really. See my comment.

Hold on. Let me just rebuild VirtualBox for my current kernel.

It's basically a rewritten version of Weirdest way to produce a Stack Overflow, but my answer won't work :(

@mniip i thought you liked QEMU

Hmmm qemu is a good suggestion, yes

Wait you are right. I better not test this in VirtualBox