moinudin

I'd still like to hear a more authoritative answer. All answers so far are very opinionated. (I can't view the first article as we share IP addresses here so it says I've hit the viewing limit.)

@Stephen That's true, but for us it was more recent so we've had less time to move away from British English. I agree with you 99.9% of the time, but with this bot we try make the English as natural as possible and we don't want to get some obvious cases wrong. @smirkingman :D

@Stephen South African English is very close to British English as we were a British colony for many years and we're still part of the commonwealth. What I learn from this answer will affect an IRC bot I contribute to, which currently follows British English.

@Stephen Sure I agree. My comment was just a FYI.

@Stephen I am a native English speaker. :) This is just a question I've been debating amongst friends.

@smirkingman Just to explain the 29 characters: Sometimes short is sweet. I got my question across and besides the one clarification which I answered, it appears I was well understood. The answers "yes" and "no" kind of turn the question into a poll. I didn't downvote though.

@ElendilTheTall I'm not sure I agree with that. I think if anything it's different fields have adopted either the correct or incorrect way of saying it.

@smirkingman I disagree. A profit of -1 dollar(s) is entirely valid, even if it's equivalent to a loss of 1 dollar. Or think of a negative cashflow of -1 dollar(s). It makes total sense if you have some accounting background.

@smirkingman That's probably because the idea of paying a negative amount makes no sense. Think of it as "Net profit is -1 dollar(s)".

That article says: "If the number one is used, whether it is +/-1, the following noun will be singular. So it would be -1 apple." Interesting point on countability.

@Nemo157 That would be great!

i have the erlang book, but haven't read it yet :-/

really want to learn scala

i haven't found the time (yet) to dig too deep into functional, but i'm getting some people to run a 2-day haskell course at my uni which i'll be attending next month

nice :)

i sometimes use perl when appropriate, and c++ when i feel like it

wrt time limits

and that choice sometimes bites me

it is

/me too, but i use the fileedit plugin which lets you use any editor

haha

only done about 4 TC SRMs

@ChrisJesterYoung Regarding TC, I don't like their platform either

:D

for real

i'm heading to work there later this year

but i have strong reason to enter :)

yeah, it was

@ChrisJesterYoung I did GCJ since before the new format

i'm doing round 2 of facebook hacker cup tomorrow

@ChrisJesterYoung yip!

i'm a bit over sudoku problems though tbh

love algorithms :)

/me is pretty strong at maths

Wondering how this site's progress compares to other betas

Both of you :)

Have you been involved in other beta sites before?

@ChrisJesterYoung Both!

We need to come up with a really nice question to post on reddit to get new users in

@SMark hi

I agree. Code golf receives a lot of negative attitude on SO and that's a major reason for this site. We don't want that negativity to come over here and lose that benefit.

I don't think we should "boot" them, as we have been tending to expand scope. But we do need to remove the friction between sides who are pro and anti code golf

@ChrisJesterYoung Yeah I see his last lines are always "this is not golf".

@ChrisJesterYoung So far his questions have been on-topic IMHO

Could someone kindly ask Noah to be constructive rather than posting answers that are obviously not wanted

We're naturally going to get many questions legitimately getting lots of answers

@sepp2k We might want to remove the auto-CW resulting from too many answers