Let's get philosophical

2:48 AM

gag / freeze is for total extreme situations ... but there are other more important low hanging fruit

like pin "general discussion" to the front of the list

TIME-STOPPING HOURGLASSES!

I like the break off into another room idea

what if the meta site posted "bugs" to a particular room

IRC has robots to do this

yeah we can do that now

@waffles, i think it's the closest thing we're gonna get to threads here

2:50 AM

set up an rss feed for the room on the tags newest

@waffles: Just a suggestion but maybe a permanent room that does this

Permanent pinned room would be cool

pin general discussion / bugs / features / and chat feedback

with rss feeds ...

yes, not sure how you would do it or if it would make it more complicated but add chat feedback as a comment

back into the original discussion

yes: NHibernate would be cool if i didn't require me to do any configuration

Philosophically speaking ?

2:54 AM

@Shog9: Well what's nice is there are tools to do it all for you and generate your POCOs, XML, etc

I dont mind the theory of this weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/08/03/…

philosophically-speaking, I like things that don't require me to think about them

but I lost all confidence with EF ... so I dunno

I like hand coding my data access crap ... at least I know how it is going to work

XML configuration scares me ... a lot

IMHO, the whole POCO thing has one fatal flaw: it requires users who actually know how to write queryable object models

@waffles what are your biggest issues with EF?

2:57 AM

well there is fluent nhibernate and the mapping is brought into your code

fluentnhibernate.org

(no more embedded resources aka XML files)

that its complicated and big and tries to be everything for everyone

re: fluent - looks better than XML, still ugly as sin

there is one advantage to external configuration files for ORM. the DBAs can make changes to the database schema without recompiling code

they can do that with stored procs

and are more comfortable with them anyway

@waffles: Harder to maintain IMHO

2:59 AM

any schema changes here require months of coordination between teams. The actual coding is a tiny part of such changes.

@Shog thats the problem ... not the ORM :)

well, yes, it is

but when you have a half-dozen applications all doing different things with different subsets of the same data...

most devs and shops i know still prefer one-to-one mapping of object to table making it all unecessary

You can make the schema dynamic so that despite the database, your code won't fail at runtime if a column doesn't exist or is different, it will fail at compile time. It's a feature called FieldNames

@Eric: Wow not even 1NF?

I thought that was rare

@Changling or just use a cough NOSQL thingy

3:01 AM

@EricWeilnau: i so hate code like that

me too

@Shog: Are you a fan of LINQ to SQL ? Seems about the same

I've used it a bit in some small side projects

@Changeling the db schema is not that bad the devs don't get the advantages of oo

I don't hate it; but it wouldn't really buy us much for the big stuff

it beats embedded SQL for quick, one-off stuff

3:03 AM

@Changling btw bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

has anyone seen performance data for Linq to Sql?

@waffles: Interesting. I bookmarked it

@EricWeilnau: I seem to remember Rico Mariani writing about it a while back

All of these different frameworks seem to be forcing developers into using these underlying patterns that people have been talking about for years

*using for years

3:05 AM

performance is of linq to sql is plenty good, you are not going to get much better performance by hand coding. but you can write horrible linq queries that perform badly ... very badly

(e.g. ASP.NET MVP Template, NHibernate Repository or Active Record Pattern [castle rock])

also left joins in linq are horrid

@EricWeilnau: blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2007/06/22/…

and sometimes bad linq queries go into round trip central

@Shog9 thanks

3:06 AM

not sure how much of that is still relevant; it's been a while

i have mostly used LINQ for objects

LINQ is great. I have no real complaints about LINQ

we be nice to be able to set a marker in the conversation when the topic of a room changes ...

yeah... Like a little arrow or something

was able to write decently performing queries for the first few project euler problems

3:08 AM

and then indent the comments below it

what causes the dotted grey line?

silence ?

i dunno

Q: How can I quicky edit my last message?

0

It's annoying having to click a post to edit it. Is there a way to do this more quickly?

^^^ ain't that in the FAQ?

Jared Harley

I was thinking that it was when you were scrolled up/somewhere else and it showed new content below

but it doesnt look like that's the case

3:10 AM

yeah it is

but its hard to find

needs its own section

ARGH! IT WON'T HELP!

NONE OF THE FAQs HAVE ANCHORS / IDs ON HEADINGS

Q: Show number of exact duplicate votes for each URL

0

For the rare cases where a question is in the process of getting closed as a duplicate of more than one other question, can the close summary dialog show the current votes? It does so in parentheses before you've voted (when you select "exact duplicate"), but you can't see the breakdown anymore a...

feature-request voting vote-to-close exact-duplicates

seems like it already does this

A: LINQ Inner-Join vs Left-Join

you could have a thing that teaches users about this feature ... eg show a (edit my last message link) until they learn about the feature .. probably not worth the effort though

10

I think if you want to use extension methods you need to use the GroupJoin var query = people.GroupJoin(pets, person => person, pet => pet.Owner, (person, petCollection) => new { OwnerName = perso...

totally intuitive ... NOT

Hello

What you all up to?

I take hand coded sql any day over that

3:13 AM

what an abortion

you mean abomination?

@waffles: yeah, that's the sort of thing I was thinking of when I said LINQ2SQL wouldn't do much for the big apps here; we'd essentially be hand-translating gigantic queries into a different query language, and then tweaking them such that they'd get translated back correctly.

yeah that is totally dumb, FWIW we hand code plenty of stuff at SO even though we use LINQ2SQL for the simple things

that said, I love LINQPad now. Totally beats all the other interactive SQL apps I've tried.

...even if the SQL it generates is unspeakably lousy sometimes ;-)

night all

3:21 AM

night

feature-request hyperlinks faqs

HEY

before you slumber, @EricWeilnau

UPVOTE THIS

10

Q: FAQ deep-linking

I ask you to insert id attributes (definition, spec) for each heading and paragraph on http://stackoverflow.com/faq within the div.content-page. These serve as specific link target anchors, allowing to correctly deep-link to a certain relevant portion of the FAQ. For instance, change <p>W...

3:36 AM

GET OFF MY LAWN

that is all

@Chacha102: less talky, more upvote-y

I already upvoted you

no, up-vote the deep linking thing

I did

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!!!!!!

oh. Then Eric didn't. Lazy bastard, strolling off to bed without scattering up-votes

8:19 PM

The future is here.

We have computers linked in a decentralized network.

The world is at our fingertips. We need only ask for it.

We still have privacy. We still have individuality.

We are inundated with conversations, information, entertainment.

There is more data in a Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up video than entire tribes of our ancestors had in their lifetimes.

This is the future, and it is wonderful.

8:44 PM

In other news, I believe I just fixed a memory leak in my IRC bot.

There were a couple of codepaths from which I was not closing its SQL statements.

This is ironic because I switched to SQL from an in-memory structure in order to save memory in the first place.

9:01 PM

Does your IRC bot wax philosophical?

Oh, yes. It outputs poetry and knows pretty much everything.

Markov chains? Or is it just that good?

> <KevBot> I will play this new jerk seasoning, right?

> <KevBot> I have never played an actual discussion.
> <KevBot> You just called "lexus"

Second-order Markov chains.

Nice

I believe I've seen less-coherent users before

Recently I added per-user tracking.

So on top of having a global list of second-order pairs, it keeps second-order pairs and the user that said them.

So it can imitate specific users as well as the channel as a whole.

So for example, this is me:

9:05 PM

Uh-oh

> <KevBot> Go for it and rename it Plant BOB, and I have some errands to run.

And this is someone else:

> <KevBot> oh man that reminds me rev

And this is someone else else:

> <KevBot> oh no I am only half western european

You must have some very interesting users

Only the best.

Except you. Errands to run?

I often have errands to run. Don't you?

Thomas McDonald

9:08 PM

So how do you like the cold weather we are having?

Are you kidding me? It's been crazy hot the last couple of days. I want it to be cool.

Stupid summer.

Thomas McDonald

It's not hot to be claiming to be cool also.

Jaberwacky fails.

Actually, speaking of weather, it's tried to rain all day today, just not succeeding until it was time for me to walk home.

That happened to me the other day.

No rain at all, got halfway to my destination, downpour.

You have rain in the summer?

Rain only in the summer here.

Doesn't rain much in fall, snows in spring.

Snows in winter.

9:12 PM

We get ice in the winter, rain in the spring, nothing in summer, then a little rain in fall.

I'm going to make some chicken. BBL

Since this is the philosophy room:

why do people say they are going to "make" chicken?

Do they have a secret lab where they can make animals?

That always bothers me, which is a clear sign that I need to find something more important to worry about.

9:28 PM

yes. And now you know too much.

I agree. Biologically, children make themselves.

Parents just kickstart the process.

And the mother provides a safe place for the construction process.

serg555

10:06 PM

i made myself

wasn't easy, had to work in the dark for months

We all did it too. You're nothing special.

JSBangs

you forget that the mother also has to provide the raw materials

and the dev environment

not just "a safe place", but the actual build tools

and the deployment is very painful

This is true.

10:40 PM

Another random philosophical question: When people post emoticons, are they actually making that face?

(>'_')>

X'______'X

@/"

<('_'<)

--m"=

/">

8======D

:-0

:-D

>:-(

||¦||¦

\_____/"~<

o|-<

<"\3

I can't tell; is that a yes or a no?

;-)

(>'_')>

(>'___')>

(>'________')>

(>'_')> (>'_')>

<('_'<) (>'_')>

____\o/_____________

You know, for the longest time I thought \o/ was a dog's nose.

/V'>

/V'< woof

/V'>

10:49 PM

:58346 That must be philosophy because no one cares what I just said.

:-3.14159

Is that a pi in the face?