Tavern on the Meta

12:41 AM

@Moshe Heh well I wasn't planning on doing that...

Moshe

12:53 AM

Well, get well soon.

mootinator

O_o

1:12 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Yeah, you're supposed to save getting sick for when you need a break from your new job! ;)

Hehe! Well, isn't the goal not to need a break? Especially when just starting a new job?

Sure, just means you should get better and then not sick again for a long time. :P

(;

2:04 AM

hides ;)

Hehe

goes to pass out and hopefully sleep. >_<

GG(s) :)

Feel better!

If you don't, we'll go find Oys to star.

2:17 AM

Mitch Wheat needs a hug

stackoverflow.com/users/16076?tab=activity

Hahah

2:47 AM

:confused how UPS expects to deliver a package tomorrow when its status shows it has yet to depart from the other side of the country:

I would say the important 85% of our stuff is moved from the sticks to the city, I made a useless 8 hour roundtrip drive to Dallas today, I forgot to check SO yesterday and am back to one consecutive, have not setup my wireless and am back at Walmart. Talk to y'all either later or tomorrow. And tims kicking my ass by 200 points.

mootinator

Ltr

3:24 AM

reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/a8a2v/…

Take a quick scroll through the comments.

@DanGrossman Excellent example of why reddit voting is now totally useless

No, no it's not :p

It's an excellent example of the reddit hivemind having fun. 2,379 identical comments are NOT the norm...

No, but stuff like that isn't exactly uncommon either

It has the SO problem but massively worse -- jokes get way more votes than useful posts

@drachenstern Nice on the move, but tough break on the rest. I'd be pretty annoyed if I drove 8 hours for nothing, heh.

@DanGrossman We should probably invest in them now before they reveal that they've invented teleportation.

reddit has time travel reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9z4d5/…

3:39 AM

@MichaelMrozek Additional imaginary +2 for your response to the "How did Unix/Linux survive" question.

4:02 AM

@TimStone link me?

A: How did Unix/Linux survive Area51?

2

I'm not sure what Joel is talking about, but Unix/Linux was proposed two weeks before Ubuntu was. Ubuntu went through definition/commitment faster and went into beta two weeks before Unix/Linux. There was much discussion about why they were separate; Robert mentioned that "It was inescapably clea...

speaking of the Unix/Linux site... do you have any design suggestions?

Hmm, that's a good question.

lots of penguins

I've been looking at a lot of Unix/Linux related sites and books, there doesn't seem to be any "visuals" that are associated with them.

4:12 AM

tux!!

type linux into google image search

Yeah, the terminal isn't particularly artistic :P

At least not in a visual sense ;)

@DanGrossman i can't really use that logo. plus isn't the penguin logo only for Linux?

the devil for bsd

draw your own penguin and devil

@dan I mean I can't really use that logo or a variation of it.

4:15 AM

> The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.

@Jin Hm, perhaps some sort of minimalist theme is in order?

@TimStone that's what I'm thinking. i think a classy theme may be more fitting. like the O'Reilly books

woodcut animals, plus serif fonts etc

Q: what is the impact of facebook questions going live going to have on Stackoverflow and stackexchange

0

is there any concern about facebook questions copying and taking flow away from stackoverflow and stackexchange given the presence??

all the unix books I read back in college had that look

Yes, because based on the groups on Facebook, clearly there's an overwhelming amount of quality information there..heh.

Hmm..

4:17 AM

This was my first unix book. I bought it in middle school.

But it didn't come with Fedora-Core 3. It came with Redhat 5 or something.

mine was Unix in a Nutshell. i forgot which edition

it came out in the late 90s

My first distro was Slackware Linux. The same day I installed it, someone rooted me and wiped my hard drive.

My root password was 12345.

@DanGrossman should've made your root pw 123456

Minimalist design, pipes and > and ampersands and man???

And hyphens!!

#!/usr/bin/unix.se ...

all you Linux heathens.

BSD for the win.

4:25 AM

No penguins tho, or devils

North pole theme with masses of penguins on glaciers.

Unix is System V and SCO and BSD

A lone wildebeest stands atop the glacier.

yep, I know. I was looking at the Linux references above.

Dont forget Minix either ;) ... Mailing lists and FAQs and RFQs and newsgroups

Those are the influencers for Unix/Linux

What about terminal coloration as inspiration?

4:31 AM

What color is your terminal??

@drachenstern what colors would that be? white on black?

Terminal look = the old programmers.se design

I was thinking like when I run ls --color

Sadly I'm primarily on windows nowadays so I don't remember if that's by distro

white blue and purple?

i can't do dark theme, it's too hard to read.

i most likely will go with a minimalist, classy design for unix/linux site, using one or two imageries to balance the simplicity.

4:36 AM

What about tags being presented with two preceding hyphens?

Dan there's way more colors

My Linux distribution is not as colorful as yours :|

Ls --color /var

Ls --color /var/proc

Looking for symlinks

There's a few typesof files

Grrrr and on my phone to boor

Getting my ass kicked in wwF

cyberciti.biz/tips/where-is-color-of-ls-command-defined.html

Nearly home!!! :)

If you're a Google customer, they thank you. google.com/landing/thankyou/2010

4:59 AM

Wait, I leave for an hour and we talk about Linux?

@Jin The color scheme from the first Programmers design is probably good, actually

5:14 AM

Good call Michael. Just need to lose the brackets from the sitename...

Ok, nighty night. Time for bed so I can goto work tomorrow. Chat you all there.

5:51 AM

@Jin I started to mess around with it, and then got lazy..but :P

(I also lack logo and button making creative skillz, as you'll note)

love that program

@DanGrossman I like Filelight too:

Pretty...

@TimStone thanks! i'll try to post on the unix site meta this week with a design proposal

still working on a few concepts.

"If Stackoverflow.com were a country, it would be larger than Switzerland." sharenator.com/w/stackoverflow.com

not sure how accurate the data are on that report

Maybe I'll be persuaded to finally join by then ;) But cool, look forward to seeing what you come up with!

i think WwF nuked my game with @RebeccaChernoff...

5:59 AM

Hahah, really?

yeah it happens, rarely though.

@Jin Is Unix launching next? I thought RPG and Money were before it

@MichaelPetrotta they all are pretty close.

I'm going to try to launch sites faster after the new year.

@Jin I very much pity you for your workload :)

@MichaelMrozek it's pretty fun! some sites are a bit more challenge to design than others.

6:11 AM

@Jin I used to hate the design part when I made web sites independently, heh. Even when other people would like how things looked, I'd always find a reason not to like it and spend waaaaay too much time redesigning. So kudos for being able to push these things out so efficiently.

@TimStone I used to work with another guy who did pretty much all the design, I hated it too

HAHAH

Oh Roblox.. shakes head

@TimStone the trick is not to let my own personal preferences get in the way.

otherwise i'd never release anything.

Heheh. I guess it helps too to..actually have feedback.

My clients weren't particularly good about that.

i think being able to sell/pitch the design is almost as important as designing itself.

i can't just post a mockup and say "here it is." then i'm wide open to people imposing their personal preferences. "i want this to be that color" etc

6:17 AM

Hmm, yeah

it's important that I research a site well, before I start designing. I may end up tweaking some small details based on user feedback, but not the overall design direction. so far it's been working well. except for the programmers.se site.

That may have been part of my problem too, I never really had any sense of direction. :P

I think my favourite SE design so far is the statistics one, though I'm partial to the blues/greens to begin with.

i've been meaning to blog about these SE design process. maybe i will over xmas break.

I like the English one, and I didn't design that one

Q: What are the requirements of beta badges on se sites?

G'morning @balpha

Peter Smit

6:35 AM

Good morning

Is there anyway I can extend a bounty?

3

I tried to search here on meta, but I couldn't find any thread that answers this question. What are the criteria for awarding a beta badge on the stackexchange sites?

support badges beta-badge

That question does not really get an answer....

@PeterSmit No, but you can make a new one

balpha

6:48 AM

morning @TimStone

Who keeps breaking Meta? :P

To the WOB!

balpha, tsk tsk. shakes head

7:04 AM

Yay for free airport wi-fi

Hooray!

The latency is terrible though

And the speed is mediocre. On a separate note, I've found that airport food is just as terrible as airplane food, only not free

Unsurprisingly, I am now hungry. :P

5 hour flight, and the batteries will only last for one and a half

7:22 AM

charge! charge now!

@YiJiang nice bokeh

@Jin Focus is a little off, with the awkward angle I'm taking this at and having to use manual focus. The new lens is worth it though

@YiJiang which lens did you get?

@Jin 35mm 1.8G with a Nikon D50

The camera is old, but the lens is new

7:27 AM

@YiJiang +1 for Nikon

@YiJiang Ah nice, I have a D50 too :D

Morning all

'Ello

You people and your middle-of-the-night mornings. Crazies

:)

Q: Suggest me the path to learn Maths

7:40 AM

This is an excellent title:

2

Hi, I am a Software Engineer. With interest on computers I have chosen this path. But I don't know anything about great maths. I want to learn from basic to some level(which would help me in my field..like identifying solution to a problem, designing algorithms, designing shapes and some animatio...

math

Hm, must get round to reading "Books of Knuth" myself, I'm lacking in Knosis :)

8:00 AM

I am suspect that anyone has ever fully read his books

While most of them owned TAOCP, I don't think a single programmer admitted to reading it entirely

amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programming/dp/…

8:13 AM

^ One of my favorite books ever :D

8:26 AM

> WEST CHESTER, PA, US 12/20/2010 3:10 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY

9:00 AM

@DanGrossman looks interesting

10:49 AM

stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts is a live implementation of the heuristics described in this meta post

6

What's the official approach for "this should have been a comment" for users who don't have the rep for comments?

Q: Heuristics for detecting a bad answer?

34

A lot of bad answers are slipping through the cracks on Stack Overflow. You can see some examples at Thanks a lot for this post ... and other first time user curiosities I've been paging through hundreds of these first answers by new users and I've identified a few heuristics that, when applie...

discussion new-users answer-quality

depends if I think it's useful as a comment or not

remember you have mod_flags_daily + (rep / 1000) daily mod flags now

A: Extjs & grouping grid remote sort

And here, for example:

0

user name and password for demo??????

Do I comment, or flag, or both?

er what? there is no username and pw on that demo

useless post, useless comment

So flag?

or comment suggesting he delete his post?

(Sorry, my two questions were unrelated)

10:54 AM

flag and indicate "comment, no utility, should be deleted" etc

ok, but what about 'user education', or is having a post deleted a sufficient education? :)

@JeffAtwood When did that change?

this weekend sometime, I don't remember when. I want to say late Friday.

Handy

I preferred stern @Pekka gravatar! now he's all happy

11:05 AM

@Jeff the next one might be "perturbed" or "astonished", I haven't decided yet

@TimStone although from a purely numbers point of view, Roblox seems a pretty interesting field: There are 317 people committed to that proposal.

I think they should have their site so they leave SO proper alone with their "How do I build a flying car? Will pay 400 Robux!" questions

it looks like minecraft for kids

it is basically

my 10 year old cousin is into Roblox and he somehow discovered the area 51 proposal, and now he thinks I am a God

2

@Pekka Oh wow, that many already? I just thought it was funny in light of those questions on SO, heh. :P

@JeffAtwood Hahah, nice.

minecraft is so boring to me. I need dudes getting blown into bits with massive explosions to be happy. codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/…

@JeffAtwood Play online, the guys on the Reddit server have been blowing everything up with TNT in the wait for MC to go beta.

...which should happen sometime today.

11:13 AM

dwarf fortress --> minecraft --> roblox

meh to it all

enjoys a wide selection of games

it's just like kryptonite to me, gaming-wise

I also learned my candy kryptonite is Peppermint Bark

white chocolate, hate

peppermint, hate

mint + chocolate, hate

@Pekka I take issue with the inability to convert reputation to robux

That's just crazy, mint chocolate is delicious. :P

11:16 AM

hideous

Yeah, that picture didn't do much to persuade me; that looks quite good

Though I have no idea what the hell that is. Chocolate shouldn't have candy attached to it.

white chocolate is a crime against chocolate

I think you might've mistyped "dark chocolate" there

I hereby extend an olive branch to dark chocolate enthusiasts. It is disgusting, but we must face our real enemy together: white chocolate.

Tweeted by codinghorror on January 2, 2010 at 8:10 AM

11:17 AM

To arms!

white chocolate is not even CHOCOLATE.

White chocolate

White chocolate is a confection of sugar, cocoa butter, and milk solids with a pale yellow or ivory appearance. The melting point of cocoa butter is high enough to keep white chocolate solid at room temperature, yet low enough to allow white chocolate to melt in the mouth. Composition and regulations White chocolate is made of cocoa butter, milk, and sugar. Most often, the cocoa butter is deodorized to remove its strong and undesirable taste that would negatively affect the flavor of the finished chocolate. Before this date, U.S. firms required temporary marketing permits to sell whi...

> Although white chocolate is made the same way as milk chocolate and dark chocolate, it lacks the cocoa paste, liquor, or powder, leading to the claim that "white chocolate is what is left after the chocolate is removed from chocolate.

Hahah

yes, it has everything except for EVERYTHING THAT MAKES CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE..

so nasty tasting

"The most soulless of the so-called chocolates"

Interesting. chocolate = delicious, but chocolate - chocolate = also delicious. There is some kind of magic going on there

Q: how to get mail notification whenever new questions are posted

11:20 AM

I am writing a blog entry about subscribing to tags via email and this meta post just came up

0

Hi Experts, I want to know if there is a way to get mail notifications whenever new questions are posted by other members so that i can also contribute in helping them solve their problems or do I need to build some level of reputation to enable such a facility. Regards, Samar

discussion

TEN THOUSAND QUESTIONS were asked on 12-01??

data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/748/…

oh no wait that is wrong, that's 10k posts

yeah, 3259 with PostTypeId = 1. phew.

sede is crazy fast since we moved it to oregon

Ah good, so I wasn't just imagining that.

Does it get more frequent updates now? I was wondering how 1 Dec 2010 was already in there

I ran a query the other day and thought I had written it wrong because it didn't take two minutes to complete.

"24 hours of A Christmas Story" on TBS starting Christmas Eve......Why?

@TimStone Tradition? That movie is always on constantly during Christmas

I know...I just, don't get it. Not that I had anything against the movie, but it being on all day long...eh.

11:29 AM

@TimStone They save a shitton of money on getting a real schedule going on!

@Jeff out of curiosity, do you have any plans of going international with SE in the foreseeable future?

Like, localized branches of successful SE sites

> Under the terms of this agreement, Santa Claus is required to deliver only Apple-branded products to those wishing for music players, smartphones, laptops and tablets.

@radp I always thought those iPad commercials claiming the device was magic were a lie. But, if they have Santa on their side...

> Steve Ballmer, groveling before Santa, did manage to get one small concession. Children originally slated to receive a lump of coal in their stockings will now find a Zune instead.

Seems very un-Apple. Normally they would just buy out his factories and incorporate tiny pieces of Santa's technology into their own while abandoning the rest

11:32 AM

sharenator.com/w/stackoverflow.com

SUCK IT SWITZERLAND

Ahahahaha!

Burundi better be on its guard!

Yeah, but SO is below Burundi.

> 1 in every 221 internet users visit Stackoverflow.com daily

That seems unlikely. It's more likely those of us that do visit visit about 5000 times per day

2

@MichaelMrozek You forgot about our split personalities.

11:34 AM

I check the new questions list, close the tab, and open a new one 5 seconds later to see what's changed

So I'm sure it all balances out somewhere.

Sockpuppets...

@MichaelMrozek Is Ctrl-W Ctrl-Shift-T faster than F5?

I could see it without the shift but...

@radp No, but I'm under the illusion I'll do something productive in between

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/…

It can also randomize the load time :P

...and one of the screenshots in the gallery is on an SO profile page

I guess as a cheap plastic imitation of SO Live!

an old screenshot, we dropped the comma in rep a while ago

Stack Overflow Blog: Subscribe to Tags via Email

11:49 AM

Posted by Jeff Atwood on December 20th, 2010

You can now subscribe to a tag (or set of tags) and get an email when new questions arrive.

To begin, visit the Tag Sets page on stackexchange.com, and either create a new tag set, or find a cool tag set someone else already put together.

Click on a tag set to browse the questions, and look on the sidebar for the email subscription option:

Once you click subscribe, you can indicate which email address you want to use, and how often you want them to be emailed to you — every 15 minutes, every 3 hours, or every day. …

prepares to watch his rep go doooown

Hahah :P

@radp I see you ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶

Nah, I was actually looking forward to get my answer rejected automatically

if you want to make the lowest quality post ever, just combine all the heuristics: lots of !, lots of ?, lots of .., all uppercase (or lowercase), no spaces, w/hyperlink, w/email, low entropy

12:00 PM

Next time I'll sprinkle some more unicode love

oh and add smiley

it has some weaknesses: posts with code and little else do very poorly (you might argue this is correct), and posts where users do not MARK code as CODE. (ditto)

we will implement the EULA based on the post quality score tomorrow

▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█▇▆▅▄▃▂
▛▙▟▜▐▀▄▌▘▛▙▟▜ ─ ▛▙▟▜▐▀▄▌▘▛▙▟▜ ─ ▛▙▟▜▐▀▄▌▘▛▙▟▜

also posts with urls and almost nothing else do really badly as well (ditto)

Oh, cool. If somebody pasts a barebone link to a SE question you prettify it.

The title-fication?

12:07 PM

Yeah.

I always hand-"prettify" my links so I never noticed.

Also I see users can no longer see their own self-deleted posts.

@radp Ah yeah, that was added in last month.

But I think it's only to the same site?

@radp, I didn't notice that, good thing, I think I had a feature request for that way way back - in uservoice days

Finally - after watching @Pekka fly in and out continuously, coupled with his relationships with Welbog, I have determined he's a fruit bat.

@TimStone Yeah, it is.

Seems like a logical conclusion.. :P

whistles Look at all that bounty reps sitting on the front page.

Hmm... tasty MSO reps.

12:18 PM

looks at the clock I should really stop forgetting to sleep.

@TimStone Sounds like you could move to Europe with no jet lag at all

It's 1320 here

Quite possibly.

12:33 PM

@radp I fly in to star things, read up, and fly out again

Mainly because I'm usually at work, and can't really afford to be drawn into a conversation

There should be a stealth mode. The transcript is not sufficient

Open it in an incognito window and don't log in

@Dan good idea, but then I can't un-stealth in case I want to contribute something

We need a "Das Boot" mode with a "surface" button

That's what you get for paying attention to work! ;)

@Tim yeah! :)
Why does Jeff's star to the right look different from the others?

The first message is pinned.

12:35 PM

Ahh I see

12:54 PM

I have a question about the /review page - is there any point showing answers on closed questions? discuss...

This is freaking me out. #222 is apparently a color that can't be rendered directly by my LCD, so the webpage background looks like it's moving from the pixels rapidly flashing between two similar shades of dark grey...