The Whiteboard

user55340

1:20 AM

Happy Coffee Day:

user55340

Battle of the Baristas: Inside the 2015 U.S. Coffee Championships

►

user55340

BLACK COFFEE - THE PERFECT CUP - Discovery/History/Science (documentary)

►

user55340

2:43 AM

Am I missing anything in this:

user55340

(realizing its a rather stylized view that actually does have some things missing - more important though, does it make sense?)

user55340

+------------+           +------------+
|            |           |10k delete  |
| Question   |           | votes      |
|            |           |possible    |
+-----+------+           +-----^------+
      |                        |
  Close vote               Two days
      |                        |
+-----v------+           +-----+------+        +-------------+
|  Review    |           |Score -3 or |        | Down voted  |
|  Queue     |           |below: 20k  |        | No posostive|
|            |           |delete Votes|        | answers     |

Yannis

6:38 AM

571

A: My boss decided to add a "person to blame" field to every bug report. How can I convince him that it's a bad idea?

Tell them this is only an amateurish name for the Root Cause field used by professionals (when issue tracker does not have dedicated field, one can use comments for that). Search the web for something like software bug root cause analysis, there are plenty of resources to justify this reasoning ...

^^^ Flagged as offensive.

Robert Harvey

7:11 AM

Probably by his boss.

Robert Harvey

7:31 AM

0

Q: When was block scope for variables introduced to C, and why is it still frowned upon?

In light of the recent OBJ_obj2txt vulnerability in LibreSSL (which was found during the OpenSMTPD audit, and does not affect OpenSSL), it came to my attention that at least the memory leak issue has likely resulted from some earlier code refactoring, where the block scoped variable char *bndec w...

is an exact duplicate of

6

Q: Is the usage of internal scope blocks within a function bad style?

There are some (quite rare) cases where there is a risk of: reusing a variable which is not intended to be reused (see example 1), or using a variable instead of another, semantically close (see example 2). Example 1: var data = this.InitializeData(); if (this.IsConsistent(data, this.state))...

c# coding-style language-features scope

Guy's just trying to start a debate anyway.

Jimmy Hoffa

11:50 AM

Happy Coffee Day

user55340

1:41 PM

@JimmyHoffa glance at those videos from last night.

user41796

2:46 PM

@RobertHarvey He's certainly got a bit of a ranty tone to the question, no doubt. But that didn't stop me from addressing some of the incorrect assumptions behind that rant.

user114359

Hello! Feels like I have not been here in a year, but it has only been a week.

user41796

2

A: When was block scope for variables introduced to C, and why is it still frowned upon?

TL;DR: It's not an issue of block scoping, but rather a misunderstanding of how pointers should be handled. Courtesy of the vulnerability listing that you posted, let's take a look at the code in question. 489 int 490 OBJ_obj2txt(char *buf, int buf_len, const ASN1_OBJECT *a, int no_name) 491 ...

user41796

I think I invested way too much effort in addressing a rant.

user55340

It's a good way to get rep.

user41796

True. And I need more delete votes.

MetaFight

3:09 PM

Paris is a terrible place to need to take a dump.

4

user114359

3:24 PM

Sometimes it is best not to wonder why someone asks a question:

user114359

50

Q: If cow = beef, pig = pork, and deer = venison, then where is the word for human = [flesh as food source]?

Maybe it's the season of Halloween, because it's kind of a grim question, but I have seriously wondered from a language point of view - is there a word for human as 'food-meat', or has there ever been, in English or related historical languages? Obviously there is sanctity of life in civilizati...

etymology vocabulary history offensive-language semantics

user41796

@MichaelT sed s/posostive/positive/ And I didn't think that missing tags blocks the migrate. I thought the system substitutes untagged instead. Otherwise, looks correct, yes.

user55340

3:50 PM

Fairly sure for regular closes, missing tag will do it. Mods can force it through though.

user55340

It's the start of a post on mso for a flow chart with answers as links from each box.

user41796

@MichaelT That could be the difference then, yes

user41796

I know on Engineering, I have seen untagged and have migrated questions that ended up with that tag. But my votes are a bit different over on Engineering.

user55340

I'd have to dig a bit... I recall pinging World about a migration that didn't because of a tag.

daOnlyBG

5:38 PM

hello everyone

whatsisname

hi

daOnlyBG

whatisname, are you familiar with the web development workplace, by chance..?

I have (what I believe to be) an "ethics" question in web development for small businesses

(and yes, programming is involved)

whatsisname

5:54 PM

not specifically web development exactly

let's hear it anyway

daOnlyBG

ah nevermind, it's OK; I asked the javascript chat

my question was essentially this: is it ethical to use a basic template when making websites for small businesses/clients and then spend more time customizing it for that specific client, rather than trying to build a basic structure from scratch?

those who responded in the javascript chat all said "yes," and that it's the norm in the web dev industry

(a "basic template" being a bootstrap template)

however, if anyone here would like to offer their own input, I'd be curious to hear their responses

Duga

Intuitively I'd say programmers.stackexchange.com would be a better match... — moooeeeep 35 secs ago

user114359

@daOnlyBG What you describe is very roughly what my employer does to make money, as does every other company in the market.

thorsten müller

Sure, why not? A template is just another tool you can use. In some sense it's not much different from using a library or framework. The client pays for a solution to a technical problem (normally). If a template solves it (and all legal issues like copyright/payment etc are properly resolved it should be ok. (unless explicitly agreed not to use templates, though why should they even care?)

user114359

A template is simply the common, boring crap that you would need to do every time anyway, so why not reuse it? Our profession is built around code reuse.

whatsisname

6:11 PM

@daOnlyBG: ethically there is nothing wrong with it, plus, most clients would rather you do that anyway, because they'd rather you start with something mostly there and make it work in an hour, than to charge them 10x and do it from scratch

the only other concern is ownership of your template in situations with assigned copyrights

Duga

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic here because I think it would better fit to programmers.stackexchange.com and should maybe migrated there. — moooeeeep 17 secs ago

daOnlyBG

Yeah, that was my understanding. It's my understanding that a basic tenet of coding is to not "reinvent the wheel." Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure that this wasn't a big "no-no," since as a web-developer, one would be making money off this code

whatsisname

how is using a template any different than using the microsoft <whatever> library?

daOnlyBG

@Duga what harm is it to you if I'm asking this question here?

user114359

@daOnlyBG The only "no-no" is if the following two conditions are met. 1. the template or code being reused contains customer-specific code or data, including proprietary or confidential customer information. 2. your company and the customer have a contract in place that expressly forbids sharing said code or data.

whatsisname

6:13 PM

@daOnlyBG: Duga is a bot

daOnlyBG

ah, ok

user114359

@daOnlyBG If you follow the link, someone recommended posting a question here at Programmers that was asked at SO. SO gets bad questions, sometimes people recommend cross-posting here. That alerts us to be proactive and clean it up ASAP.

daOnlyBG

@Snowman OK, so one should check (and then double check) the license for the template, and any specific contract with the client

user114359

@daOnlyBG If it truly is just a template, none of what I wrote should be applicable. But I have seen an employer take a customer's code that we billed them for, then reuse it with another customer. Lawyers were involved and it checked out.

daOnlyBG

Was it a big headache?

(you know, lawyer involvement)

user114359

6:15 PM

Yes, but not for me.

daOnlyBG

Ah, ok

Duga

@Snowman Apologies, if the impression occured that broadness would be a criterion for migration to programmers. I rather meant to indicate that the question should either be migrated there or even closed altogether because it's indeed kind of broad. — moooeeeep 31 secs ago

user114359

That was all at the executive level, reusing code between $10 million customer projects.

daOnlyBG

Interesting. Well, in the specific scenario I have in mind, I don't think that would be an issue

but hey, thanks to everyone here for offering their responses

user55340

-4

Q: Algorithm for best discount for multi-city trip

There is multi-city trip for the clients. Prices are like p1, p2, ... pn for every next destination and there might be a single discount for the trips like pi to p(i+1) which is never higher than pi, let's say ni<=pi. And there might be some group discounts like only for p1-p4 there is g1_4 and m...

algorithms complexity algorithm-analysis iterator

user55340

6:21 PM

^^ improve my company core product that I can't describe.

user114359

@MichaelT I have worked on similar problems before, and there is no way we can answer this in a reasonable amount of space anyway.

user55340

Especially when the starting point isn't defined.

user55340

It will become a morphing question from hell as additional tidbits are added.

user114359

You are right, it is probably a rules engine which is a whole different can of worms.

user55340

The custom rules engine in the pos was a nightmare to debug.

user55340

6:37 PM

Btw, if you see an A* question that lacks a-star, add it.

Transcript for