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5:01 PM
Oh god I need to fax something. I hate people sometimes.
 
Anonymous
@DonMuesli The urge to pee became overwhelming before I managed to paste the link
 
Anonymous
@Zgarb That's kinda how Seriously always looks. Box drawing characters ftw.
 
A couple I knew from high school finally got engaged today.
My reaction was essentially "Finally. Took you long enough." :P
 
@El'endiaStarman How long was that?
 
4.5 years of dating.
 
5:04 PM
I has magic cat. HTF is she still dry? o_O
But, inside now.
 
I was pretty sure they'd be married eventually after the first two or three years. :P
 
@Mego That's a little bit more information than I needed
 
Meh, it took 7 years for me and my wife. ;)
 
5 years for my brother and his wife.
 
Anonymous
5:07 PM
My gf and I are going on 3 years on Thursday
 
Anonymous
I should add matrix ops to Seriously
 
Anonymous
Wouldn't be that hard to do, and they wouldn't conflict with most of the list ops now
 
Wife and I have been together for 17 years, married for 10.5 of that
 
Anonymous
17 years is quite a while
 
Anonymous
5:10 PM
Blink twice if you're being held against your will
 
What if he's being held with his will?
Blink thrice?
 
@Dennis Congrats on reaching the pi(n) bounty! \o/
 
He's possibly blinking vigorously, you just can't see it.
 
(naq na hcibgr. 60 erc gbgny)
 
Anonymous
Thoughts on this?
 
Anonymous
5:19 PM
0
A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

MegoGenerate ASCII Art related Given a black-and-white image in any reasonable lossless format (png, ppm, etc.; filename or raw bytes) as input, output ASCII art that is as close to the input image as possible. Notes Only linefeeds and ASCII bytes 32-127 may be used. The input image will be crop...

 
@Mego I'm mostly worried about your image comparison
I looked it up, and it says its comparable to human comparison, and if it is, awesome
but if it isn't, then I might consider it a candidate for popularity-contest
 
Anonymous
Structural similarity is designed to be comparable to human comparison
 
Anonymous
That's why I chose it
 
right, but I've never seen it in practice
 
Anonymous
It makes the scoring objective so that it doesn't have to be a popcon
 
Anonymous
5:29 PM
25
Q: Compress an image to a 4 KiB preview

orlpIn this challenge you will be creating an image preview compression algorithm. It's goal is to reduce an arbitrary image file to a 4 KiB preview image, that can be used to quickly identify images with very little bandwidth. You must write two programs (or one combined program): a compressor and ...

 
> Since chat is an extension of the main Q&A site, the Be Nice policy applies here too.
> See something that makes you uneasy? Don't hesitate to flag it.
 
I have seen that.
 
SE encourages flagging
 
Flagging is wonderful and does all things.
 
Anonymous
In my experience, flagging primarily exists to draw 10k/mod attention to a room
 
Anonymous
5:31 PM
Its secondary purpose is to deal with offensive/inappropriate/spam messages
 
@Mego the second answer is noteworthy
 
Anonymous
 
@Geobits flagged as obsolete
 
the images look very similar, but produce a bad score
I like the fact that the scoring is objective
but it does have downsides
 
Anonymous
The downside (that dssim scores don't always line up with human visual comparison) is much less than the alternative (using a tag that I strongly dislike and really doesn't work)
 
5:34 PM
you have to pick your poison :)
 
Anonymous
Obviously if a submission produces good-looking images, upvote it regardless of its score
 
this discussion has made me think that we need to change the name of
 
Anonymous
I'll pick the poison that's not lethal
 
we don't actually like answers that win because they are popular
 
Anonymous
was suggested in a meta thread once
 
5:35 PM
yeah, that sounds better
 
Anonymous
That could also mean the challenge author could say "I'll accept the one that I think is the best, given these criteria." Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate.
 
6
Q: Proposing new winning criterion tag: Voter-judged

xnorI'm stepping into a hornet's nest here. Popularity contests have been controversial. Some detractors believe that non-objective winning criteria are simply unacceptable. Others are OK with subjectivity in theory, but dislike that voters upvote answers based on coolness rather than programming me...

they were actually proposing a new tag
oh, and I see you posted a comment as well
 
hello all
 
Anonymous
I commented on that? Doesn't look like it.
 
er, my bad, didn't post the second link\
@steveverrill 1. I like human-judged or user-judged. 2. Posterity alone is a terrible reason to do (or not to do) anything. — Mego Feb 10 at 5:05
 
Anonymous
5:44 PM
26
Q: The state of the popularity contest tag

MegoRecently, there's been a strong push against popularity-contest challenges. This post sums up the general feelings of the community pretty well, in my opinion. Even when challenge authors do everything right (like with Patch the Image), the challenges still attract close votes. The issue is begin...

 
Anonymous
That was from my meta post :P
 
Anonymous
You'll see that I also answered it, voting to retire the tag
 
Anonymous
I am very much against it because I am very much against trying to control how users vote
 
I am very much in favor of controlled voting. In fact, we should just get rid of the upvote button altogether.
 
Anonymous
Because 1) to me, that goes against the SE policy of anyone can vote how they wish, and 2) there's no way to enforce it
 
5:47 PM
I think I agree with the downvoters
I agree that we should retire it, but not because we are trying to control how users vote
 
I think we can all agree that we need to completely rid the world of fax machines first, though.
 
1
Q: Yahtzee Small Straight Detection

lirtosiastIn the game Yahtzee, players roll five six-sided dice, and attempt to create certain hands to score points. One such hand is a small straight: four consecutive numbers, not necessarily in order. The three possible small straights are 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 3, 4, 5, 6. For example, [3, 5, 6,...

 
@NewMainPosts That was actually pretty fast.
 
@Geobits Ah that's right. It's worry #8,567, while retiring is #8,568 what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/146/dontcare.png
 
6:01 PM
how do you take nub of an array in CJam?
 
@Geobits but the downvote button would still be there, right? ;P
 
But of course :D
 
@zyabin101theHated Thanks!
 
I have another fastest code challenge in mind :)
involving matrices!
 
Anonymous
inb4 determinant
 
6:15 PM
@Mego what is that?
 
The mean compression timeline for browsers with Brotli-like compression. IE11 takes the cake :D
 
basically codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/68176/… but for fastest-code
 
there are lots of questions that should be fastest-code if only somebody would host them
 
@NathanMerrill what do you mean by host them? Do you mean write a new question?
 
Anonymous
If your challenge is identical to another challenge except for the win condition, it's probably not interesting/novel enough to be its own challenge
 
6:17 PM
Thanks @MartinBüttner
@Mego I strongly disagree.
 
@Mego as do I.
 
Even prime counting was very interesting as fastest-code and code-golf
 
@Lembik yeah, we have very few people that are willing to spend the time to run all of the answers
 
Anonymous
@lirtosiast Alright let's make versions of every problem we have
 
@Mego I didn't say that.
 
6:20 PM
the problem is that we have lots of that should actually be challenges
 
Anonymous
"strongly disagree" -> that is almost certainly not true in your opinion
 
@lirtosiast kinda crazy how almost every answer got that wrong.
 
@NathanMerrill An automated test server with webhooked repos as submission is probably the easiest way to do this.
 
@MartinBüttner Yeah, 6 out of the first 7 answers!
That must be some sort of record.
 
@mınxomaτ we've talked about it, but nobody's actually done it
 
Anonymous
6:21 PM
Which means that, in your opinion, for most questions, it would be perfectly valid to have a version
 
@Mego not every problem that is interesting to golf is interesting to optimise for speed (and vice versa). that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems that are interesting for both winning criteria.
 
@Mego I said I disagreed with your statement, not that I agreed with the polar opposite.
 
Anonymous
Let me rephrase my statement then:
 
@NathanMerrill I'm more than happy to provide the resources. I just have no idea how to write an API for the webhooks (though I have a github Developer Program membership, so I might want to read the docs at some point).
 
Anonymous
Simply changing the win condition from code golf to fastest code is not enough to make an interesting challenge for many of our existing challenges
 
6:23 PM
@Mego I agree. I feel like we're just debating about the amounts now :P
 
Anonymous
@mınxomaτ Setting something up via Heroku shouldn't be too difficult, since Heroku has a built-in feature for automatic pulling
 
Anonymous
My advice is this: don't go on a s/code-golf/fastest-code/g spree
 
Anonymous
I'm not convinced the challenge you linked, @Liam, would make an interesting fastest code challenge. Then again, I haven't looked at the challenge in-depth, so take my previous sentence with a grain of salt.
 
6:27 PM
@MartinBüttner IYO is it better to require consistent truthy/falsy values for future challenges?
 
Anonymous
If I don't get swallowed whole by Nethack today, I might try setting up a rudimentary fastest code testing server on Heroku
 
@lirtosiast not necessarily
(it wouldn't have made a big difference for my code anyway)
 
Anonymous
I fixed it :)
 
Anonymous
0
A: Yahtzee Small Straight Detection

MegoSeriously, 21 bytes 3R`;4+@x`M4,╨╗`╜íu`MΣ Try it online! Explanation: 3R`;4+@x`M4,╨╗`╜íu`MΣ 3R`;4+@x`M push [[1,2,3,4], [2,3,4,5], [3,4,5,6] 4,╨╗ push all 4-length permutations of input to register 0 ` `M map: ╜íu push 1-ba...

 
Anonymous
@lirtosiast That's a 1-byte difference in a lot of languages, so it doesn't really matter
 
Anonymous
6:39 PM
Plus the norm is to allow any truthy value
 
Anonymous
@lirtosiast The challenge seemed simple, but there were a lot of gotchas that people didn't consider :P
 
@El'endiaStarman my eyes can't adapt to the length of those lines of text (and my hand is too lazy to minimise the browser window so I resize the wdith)
 
Sounds like you've been conditioned by news/other websites.
 
^ you're doing it wrong
 
6:44 PM
hahaha
But hey, now they have a 44 to cross out!
 
Anonymous
Ooh, I spot a clever morse arithmetic solution in Seriously that I'll have to do later
 
I thought this was funny and disturbing.
 
interesting: getting consecutive differences doesn't seem to be the shortest solution for Small Straights in CJam.
 
The Stack Exchange app on Android is just spinning in circles when I try to login.
@Dennis the TIO run/save/debug buttons look weird on Android. Run shows a gear, save shows a hand holding a pen, and debug is something else.
 
7:02 PM
-2
Q: 35 Oompa Loompas?

Yossi GilI hope members of this community would find this question amusing and of use in some particular cases of office debates: How many different entities named Oompa_Loompa are there in the code code? Can you mark which of these entities, each of the 35 occurrences of identifier Oompa_Loompa denot...

 
@phase that's what they show on desktop for me too
 
@Mego which link were you talking about?
 
(debug being a cross or a checkmark depending on whether it's on or off)
 
@NewMainPosts wtf
 
@phase Yeah. Stupid emoji fonts...
 
7:10 PM
Use fa?
 
@AquaTart Oompa, Loompa, doopity doo. I've got some coding puzzles for you...
 
@NathanMerrill well.. I am tempted to ask one now :)
 
7:32 PM
woooo, CJam beat Pyth
 
dear python people.. how can you iterate over all h by n binary matrices in python?
 
iterate over numbers, convert to binary, reshape into matrix?
 
@Lembik I'd probably use itertools.product([0,1],h*n)
and then chunkify it
but if you're golfing that may be too many chars
 
Trying to figure out a solution without itertools, and itertools might actually be the shortest here.
 
[itertools.product([0,1],h*n)[i*n:i*n+n] for i in range(h)]
 
7:45 PM
What I have so far that only works for square matrices:
[[list(map(int,bin(x)[2:].zfill(h*n)[i::h])) for i in range(n)] for x in range(2**(h*n))]
 
can you slice iterables?
ok, it looks like you can, good
 
>>> map(int, "0123456789")[2:5]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#24>", line 1, in <module>
    map(int, "0123456789")[2:5]
TypeError: 'map' object is not subscriptable
Not always.
 
ok, I fixed the bugs:
[list(itertools.product([0,1],repeat=h*n))[i*n:i*n+n] for i in range(h)]
I have to do list as well
and repeat=
which is lame
 
I want to plan a day on which folks chat in words that are just one part of a word long
 
3
Q: Half-reverse a binary string

LynnThis is a follow-up question to my Puzzling.SE question: I asked if there’s a function f mapping Boolean strings to Boolean strings, so that f(f(b)) = reverse(b) for all input strings b. The above link contains a positive answer, with proof, by the great f'', but you might want to ponder the que...

 
7:53 PM
It’s a breath of fresh air. March, May, and June would be good months to plan it in!
 
"a word long"?
 
One part of a word.
 
Oh, I see. Wow, that was hard to parse.
It's "just one (part of a word) long".
Which still doesn't make much sense. :P
 
It would be like “talk like a sea crook day”, you know? But yeah, stuff gets a bit hard to parse like this, and at times it’s hard to hint at the words you mean. :<
 
@NathanMerrill ah.. chunkify :)
 
7:57 PM
I guess you can sort of see what I mean by “part of a word” if you see the way I talk right now.
 
So, no compound words?
Reminds me of "Thing Explainer".
 
I guess those are banned – I can’t think of one that’s just one part of a word long – but I mean words that have just one rime.
 
Anonymous
I'm guessing he means 1 syllable words
 
@El'endiaStarman It feels a lot like that!
 
Anonymous
Just hovered over the link - yep
 
8:02 PM
@Mego I only got that after looking at the link.
 
@Mego Yup, that’s right. (The “he” isn’t, though...)
 
Clever self-restriction, actually.
 
Anonymous
@Lynn I went by your old name, which made me think male
 
Anonymous
No two or more rime words in chat is hard :/
 
You should watch this talk by Guy Steele (by sheer luck, his name fits the rule, too!)
It’s long, but soooo worth it.
Whoa, if you do this for too long, words with more than one rime start to look weird as heck.
 
8:11 PM
Really weird?
;-)
 
Is there a way to put newlines in a chatroom description? (e.g. for here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/26380/…)
 
would you guys mind if i "shamelessly" promote a challenge in the sandbox that i'm wanting more feedback on
 
@crayzeedude no
 
wait
no as in dont do it or no as in you dont mind
 
@crayzeedude yes
 
@crayzeedude Go for it. Asking input from others is never shameful.
 
alright, here it is
0
A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

crayzeedudeHelp develop Alphys' newest puzzle! code-golf game Alphys, the Underground's Royal Scientist, has finished a prototype for a new puzzle. However, she can't seem to find anyone willing to test it. The rules of her puzzle are as follows: The goal is to get to the right side, starting from the ...

 
@Lynn I'm just mesmerized by his tie.
 
@Lynn I should definitely link to this in the Pytek room. @AquaTart, you should watch this.
 
@crayzeedude start from the tile on the bottom-center may make some people think you mean the middle tile of the bottom row.
 
8:22 PM
@trichoplax I suspected that. I wasn't sure of how to word it at the time, so I'll change it in a bit
 
@crayzeedude (in a 4x4 array, this would be [3,0]) will mean the start of the third column to some people, and the start of the third row as you intend to others. It might be worth putting it also in English to remove amiguity: (in a 4x4 array, this would be [3,0] - the first tile of the third row)
@crayzeedude Also, I suspect you mean either [2,0] or [3,1] depending on whether you are indexing from 0 or 1
(although I may have misunderstood what the rule is for even side lengths)
 
@trichoplax Basically, the rule for even side lengths is that the player starts on the lower of the two center tiles. In a 4x4 grid, this would be the second row from the bottom.
 
@crayzeedude Great - that's what I was thinking. So if you are using zero indexing you'd want [2,0] for a 4x4 array.
 
@El'endiaStarman ok
 
@trichoplax Changed it up a bit. How's that look?
 
8:32 PM
@Lynn any reason, integer I/O isn't allowed for your challenge?
 
How would that go?
 
oh because leading zeroes
 
@crayzeedude The wording is much better, but double check your zero indexed counting for the 5x5 array
 
Yeah
 
well you could limit it to positive integer input and ignore the leading 1
but yeah that's a bit awkward
 
8:34 PM
Right, that feels like it’s stretching “sane input formats”.
 
@trichoplax Whoops, brain was thinking 1-indexed. Fixed it.
 
I always try to specify some (usually very lenient) guidelines as opposed to writing “sane”. I dunno why.
 
Sounds better than pretending sanity can be defined...
 
That’s the thing, yeah.
Also, I think what I’m allowing here is far beyond what most people would expect is “sane” :3
 
imgur.com/luYMsdZ (SFW) potentially the most offensive error message a Microsoft product has given me.
8
 
8:37 PM
It's good general advice... :)
 
@Skyl3r What product was it??
 
And you labeled that SFW???
 
Visual Studio Code
@Geobits haha, sorry... I forgot just how offensive this could be.
 
Anonymous
@Skyl3r Seems fine to me
 
Visual Studio Code?
 
8:38 PM
It's not fine. There's not a way to change it as far as I can tell
 
@Skyl3r SFW == Spaces for the Win
 
Yeah
 
Anonymous
Sure there is. Stop using Visual Studio.
 
Anonymous
Your life will be 14x better
 
@Lynn This is amazing
 
8:39 PM
It's Visual Studio Code, it has almost no resemblance to Visual Studio
 
either I havent heard of it or I don't remember what it is
 
It's much more lightweight and intended for PHP, JavaScript, JSON, etc.
 
@crayzeedude Not sure if you edited but it isn't showing up here - still shows [3,0] for 5x5
 
Anonymous
It's VS trying to be Atom
 
Anonymous
Just use Atom
 
8:40 PM
@trichoplax wow i never actually saved the edits
gg @ self
 
Apparently people search that a lot.
 
@Mego I do use Visual Studio though and I like it fairly well.
 
@Skyl3r oh god why
microsoft noooo
tabs FTW
 
@EasterlyIrk I had to learn it for my current job.
 
Anonymous
@Skyl3r You poor thing. You clearly have Redmond syndrome.
 
8:41 PM
VS itself is pretty good. VS Code is garbage.
 
Was already heavily used when I joined.
 
@crayzeedude Ah - shows up now. The only other thing I can think to clarify for people who haven't played the original game:
 
@Skyl3r :/
 
Does the smell of orange last for one move or until made to smell of lemons or indefinitely?
 
Will add that.
 
8:43 PM
@Skyl3r Then most important regex: s/\s\s\s\s/\t/
 
@EasterlyIrk You seem to have that backwards. I assume a typo...
 
Nah, I think it's good as is.
 
And yeah, that's correct. Vice versa as well
 
@Doorknob don't comment on the space/tabs pls, I don't need more insane people contradicting me..
 
Basically the smells override each other
 
8:44 PM
@crayzeedude what is this for?
 
clearly you shouldn't be using any. gotta save those bytes. i'm sure your coworkers will understand.
3
 
@EasterlyIrk No need to comment - Doorknob can just edit your comment to correct the regex :P
 
Anonymous
s/\t/ /g
 
@Doorknob and no mod powers...
 
Anonymous
@EasterlyIrk That regex will replace \t\t\t\t with \t, so it's wrong even if you're wrong about indentation
 
8:46 PM
what? I though \s is space.
 
Anonymous
\s is any whitespace character
 
Well, s/ /\t/
 
\s is [ \t\n\v\r] or something silly.
 
@EasterlyIrk For a challenge that I'm sandboxing. It has to do with the multicolored-tile puzzle in Undertale.
 
ELI5 pls? and link
 
Anonymous
8:46 PM
It matches spaces, tabs, linefeeds, carriage returns, and formfeeds
 
@Lynn depends on the regex flavour
 
Vertical tabs are cute
 
but if you're including \v there's likely also \f in it, and potentially a bunch of characters in the upper unicode ranges
 
 
8:47 PM
@EasterlyIrk Link to my challenge or link to something about the original puzzle?
 
e.g. JS matches a character called "Mongolian vowel separator" with \s whatever that is...
 
FLAG EVERYTHNG

Does anyone know why this popped up today?
Did something change?
 
I've got the ECMAScript list in one of my github repos...
 
Anonymous
Probably because of the chat philosophy MSE post
 
@flawr I got this today too
 
8:48 PM
What’s \f again?
 
@Mego What post?
 
Same as @flawr and @trichoplax, that is annoying.
 
@flawr It's a new message. Every signed in user sees it once and never again.
 
okai cool
 
Oh, ok
 
8:49 PM
@crayzeedude both
 
Anonymous
296
Q: Toward a philosophy of Chat

Shog9TL;DR: The Problem This keeps happening in chat: Surprise at flags on vulgar messages. Language that would invariably get your comments deleted on the main site occasionally gets flagged and deleted in chat. Confusion reigns. Controversial topics leading to bickering and name-calling. Folks b...

 
@Lynn feed forward or something?
formfeed
 
@EasterlyIrk I didn't find it annoying, just unexpected. It meant I read the third place post again, and smiled at the comments about how chat would be an awful idea...
 
@Lynn my JavaScript test suite for \s:
@assertCharCodeFalse("\\s", [0x0..0x8])
@assertCharCodeTrue("\\s", [0x9..0xd]) # horizontal tab, line feed, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return
@assertCharCodeFalse("\\s", [0xe..0x1f])
@assertCharCodeTrue("\\s", [0x20]) # space
@assertCharCodeFalse("\\s", [0x21..0x9f])
@assertCharCodeTrue("\\s", [0xa0]) # no-break space
@assertCharCodeFalse("\\s", [0xa1..0x167f])
@assertCharCodeTrue("\\s", [0x1680]) # ogham space mark
@assertCharCodeFalse("\\s", [0x1681..0x180d])
@assertCharCodeTrue("\\s", [0x180e]) # mongolian vowel separator
 
Ogham space marks :')
 
8:51 PM
Sounds like an astronaut injury...
 
@EasterlyIrk The puzzle itself is a rectangular grid consisting of individual tiles, each with a certain color. Each color has its own "sadistic" function. For example, purple tiles make you smell like lemons and slide to the next tile. The goal is to make it to the right side. Wiki: undertale.wikia.com/wiki/multicolor_tile_puzzle My proposal: meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/…
Also, puzzle generator here: putnam3145.github.io/tilemaze
 
@Mego "(...) don't hesitate to to flag it."
 
Anonymous
@flawr I still think something should be done to minimize the stampeding hordes of blues/10k's when a flag is raised, but flagging bad stuff is good.
 
I completely agree!
 
(about to get out of school, will be hopefully be back later this evening)
 
8:57 PM
@crayzeedude Don't forget to save your edit... ;)
 
@trichoplax I saved it! :P
 
Does anyone know why this is: Whenever write something in a text editor (windows, e.g. notepad++) and hit enter, it will create \r\n. But why is it doubled up? Wouldn't \n suffice?
 
Anonymous
Because Windows line ending format is \r\n
 

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