Tavern on the Meta

Michael Mrozek

7:18 AM

Apparently if I pass out all evening, I can no longer get to sleep at a reasonable hour

Rebecca Chernoff

7:36 AM

yeah...my sleep schedule is totally messed up.

Jeff Atwood

Stack Overflow Blog: A Day in the Penalty Box

Posted by Jeff Atwood on April 6th, 2009

Are you familiar with the Penalty Box?

The penalty box (sometimes called the sin bin, bad box, or bin) is the area in ice hockey, rugby football and some other sports where a player sits to serve the time of a given penalty, for an offense not severe enough to merit outright expulsion from the contest. Teams are generally not allowed to replace players who have been sent to the penalty box.

It’s not something we looked forward to, but as of tonight, we’re instituting a penalty box on Stack Overflow. …

my edits, please review them!

> If we think you are reachable, and the behavior is one that we feel can change, we will try to warn you via email first when there are behavior problems — so that we can address them before they become deeper problems. But I make no guarantees; the community moderators are very, very busy and there are a lot of things that need their attention.

> The odds of moderators contacting you with a warning first will be in direct proportion to how much evidence you’ve given us that you are, in fact, a potentially valuable and contributing member of the community.

that part is important, because it's a policy change to match reality

Rebecca Chernoff

seems good to me

Jeff Atwood

It had like 200 comments, I kept the ones I felt added the most and edited them to make them more .. general

Pollyanna

That's a lot of editing.

It's a pretty big policy change, though.

Jeff Atwood

that is the way it has been for a long time now. The scale of SO makes it too hard to deal with the general "help vampire" class, which is dominant. the <h2>No effort to learn and improve over time</h2> crowd.

we actually don't have that many problem high rep users. There are a few, but they are generally rare and can be reached in most cases.

Pollyanna

7:45 AM

Ah, so boxing has become pretty common then.

Jeff Atwood

I will generally suspend any users that I feel have strong evidence of No effort to learn and improve over time

Dan Grossman

What happened to that guy that deleted his questions some hundreds of times earlier today?

Pollyanna

Makes sense.

Jeff Atwood

please delete me

1 8

Dan Grossman

yeah that was it

suspended, neat

heh, his stuff is still turned into community wikis

Jeff Atwood

7:49 AM

ah, I can enable comments there again

> As should be clear to most commenters by now, the surest way to get banned is, after being warned, to quarrel with the warning, accuse the blogger of improper motives, whine about unequal standards, and generally try to turn the discussion towards the subject of banning. If you get warned and don’t think you deserved to, just accept the fact that you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox, say you’re sorry, and/or let it go.

so true it HURTS

like, the #1 thing I look for is.. is this user willing to say "my bad, I'm sorry, I will try again?"

Pollyanna

hehehe

Jeff Atwood

you'd be shocked how many people fail that basic test

at which point I just basically write them off now, I don't have time for that shit

Rebecca Chernoff

so obvious, and yet...coffee cups at starbucks/mcdonald's etc still warn you the contents are hot.

Pollyanna

Actually, you might be surprised at how unsurprised I am.

Jeff Atwood

I am indeed surprised at my surprise at how unsurprised you are

Pollyanna

7:52 AM

And on that note, Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Dan Grossman

I was trying to find something related to the McDonalds comment with the Google search "site:Reddit.com deprive sex burn pickle"... didn't find it.

Rebecca Chernoff

I think I'm thankful you didn't.

Dan Grossman

Couple Sues Over Hot Pickle Burn washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001007/… (SFW)

Rebecca Chernoff

sighs

Jeff Atwood

Geoffrey Chetwood, North Branford, CT

1 8 24 47

c# .net asp.net polls vb.net visual-studio c++

first one year suspension ends sooner than I realized

Rebecca Chernoff

8:01 AM

@JeffAtwood here ya go: timeanddate.com/counters/…

Jeff Atwood

@RebeccaChernoff did you post on webapps about a quick schedule sync tool for proposing a time and date amongst 10+ people?

I am so curious about that

@YiJiang should build that

Rebecca Chernoff

I did a google search and tried a couple out today. timetomeet.info is good, handles timezones, doesn't require registration, just an email. Unfortunately, just as I was ready to rock and roll with it, I did another test and it shows everyone the emails of everyone involved. Not cool.

Jeff Atwood

is it worth emailing them about that? seems like a big oversight

regardless @RebeccaChernoff I think that'd make a great webapps post

such a common problem.. need lightweight "we gotta do this one event at this one time" tool

Rebecca Chernoff

Hrm. I could work around that with plus-addressing. I can just have all the emails go to rebecca+username and then forward them on. That's messy though.

Yi Jiang

yawn Somebody called?

Rebecca Chernoff

8:10 AM

Did you fix the duplication bug or did you fall asleep? (;

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Feel asleep. Well, it was an afternoon nap

9

Q: Adding auto-completion for @nickname in comments or adding or a reply button

I find it very hard to sometimes type nicks that have characters that I don't have on my keyboard or have very long names. It's a convinience feature, makes the comments easier to use and also helps commenting on a big thread. It shouldn't be very hard to implement. Parhaps adding a reply button ...

feature-request comments comment-replies

@RebeccaChernoff You want to do some shameless plugging? ^

Jeff Atwood

there should not be big comment threads, #1

so when they exist, they are evidence of problems

adding code to make problems work better is not really one of my goals

Rebecca Chernoff

@YiJiang the autocomplete won't help with names that begin with foreign characters. Which really is the biggest issue out of the ones mentioned.

Yi Jiang

@JeffAtwood So are you applying the same login to a feature-req like, say, this one?

24

Q: Provide more user feedback for unsuccessful comment replies

The comment reply system is, at first glance, a fairly elegant and simple system that solves a fundamental problem with comments. However, there are many pitfalls and edge cases that even experienced users may not notice. Take my own Allow for Comment Reply to Usernames With Less Than Three Cha...

feature-request user-interface new-users comment-replies

@RebeccaChernoff Doesn't the script do accent folding?

Jeff Atwood

I really feel what Oscar wrote here was quite beautiful in its own way, since what Rich B needed most was actual counseling: blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/a-day-in-the-penalty-box/…

Rebecca Chernoff

8:15 AM

Uhhh, errr, ask @TimStone. >_< I didn't look at his code. But I'm not just thinking accents, but Japanese.

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Wait, so no unicode support too?

Rebecca Chernoff

Feeling any better @drachenstern?

@YiJiang I refer you to the first part of my previous message.

Yi Jiang

Ah, right

drachenstern

I am. Feel dumb now that the whole thing is unraveled. But am home and need sleep.

Thanks @JeffAtwood for taking a moment, liked the zombie.

Rebecca Chernoff

Being home is certainly better than the hospital. \o/

drachenstern

8:19 AM

Yatta!

Will explain more in the am. Night

Rebecca Chernoff

(:

Jeff Atwood

@YiJiang your election page is very cool, I will mention it in the next blog post on the SE 2.0 elections this Sunday

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Looks really old - the copyright info says 2006, and the screenshot is that of Firefox 2.0 or less (!)

Jeff Atwood

I could never get it to load though so I was a bit perplexed what other people were talking about .. "it's a blank page!"

Rebecca Chernoff

@JeffAtwood Did you forget to put on the special glasses again?

Yi Jiang

8:26 AM

Ah, well I'm still not sure what's causing it. Client-side JavaScript just isn't up to the task

Jeff Atwood

I tried like 3 times, and finally I was like "this page is a prank!"

IVE BEEN PUNK'D

Rebecca Chernoff

haha

Yi Jiang

/blame YQL - all of the 'blank page' reports so far points to that ><

Rebecca Chernoff

@YiJiang yeah, but it's the winner of the losers so far.

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Is it? Maybe I should built something :P

Jeff Atwood

8:28 AM

Rebecca Chernoff

@YiJiang hehe. Just found another one I'm trying.

Jeff Atwood

you ought to be caching that anyway and serving from the cache.. rebuild every 12-24 hours

Yi Jiang

@JeffAtwood It is, right now.

Or rather, it is an option, for the user.

Should I just drop the dynamic version altogether and serve the static version?

Jeff Atwood

probably, and regen it on the server like every 4 hours would be PLENTY

let's make it awesome for Sunday

sunday.. SUNDAY.. SUNDAY!

Rebecca Chernoff

Damn. ScheduleOnce reveals emails for everyone too.

Jeff Atwood

8:34 AM

►

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff I think these services assume that everyone is close enough that revealing an email won't matter anyway

Rebecca Chernoff

THEY ASSUME INCORRECTLY

Jeff Atwood

well if you wanted a project @RebeccaChernoff I guess you have one :) at least, if we can't find something that does this

this might be a cool page to have in chat.se

Yi Jiang

I'm constantly checking my email worried that Dropbox would send me a warning any minute now about bandwidth usage

Rebecca Chernoff

haha, one that doesn't show emails only lets you choose dates, not times. yeah, no.

Jeff Atwood

8:39 AM

this does seem like a legit chat page function: for these 20 users, have them all tell me what times work for them for an hour long chat, and do a "best fit"

however, if the best fit is bad for you or Robert.. that'd be a dealbreaker, so I guess certain "users" have priority

Dan Grossman

hmm

Rebecca Chernoff

Yeah, I've seen a couple different implementations. TimeToMeet has an "important people" mode that hides the organizer's availability. ScheduleOnce doesn't let attendees select ranges outside of the organizer's availability.

Dan Grossman

I don't know why that reminded me of class/exam scheduling

which is an np-complete problem

Jeff Atwood

good to do the due diligence so you know what works and what's out there, of course.. that's a given

Dan Grossman

not that complexity matters much with an input size of 20

Jeff Atwood

8:43 AM

luckily for you, I am the world's foremost authority on matters of np-completeness.. codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/the-girl-who-proved-p-np.html

I SAID YOU'RE WELCOME.

Rebecca Chernoff

@DanGrossman, not sure what angle you're going for, and I haven't looked at this other than remember the title, but... webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/9934/…

Dan Grossman

:lol:

@RebeccaChernoff NP-complete doesn't mean it's not easily solvable, just that you can't do it in polynomial time

Rebecca Chernoff

You mentioned class scheduling and it rang a bell, nothing more than that (:

Yi Jiang

Our teacher did a small lecture on how they schedule all 1200 of our's class timetable

Dan Grossman

there was another "P=NP" claim going around this week, but seems unlikely the author didn't make a mistake

Yi Jiang

8:46 AM

> In theory, the computer is suppose to do all the work - we give it the input, out comes the timetable. In practice, that never happens

Dan Grossman

> The polynomial algorithm for 3-SAT problem (or P=NP) news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2121727

Jeff Atwood

Math.StackExchange question: Is the recently proposed polynomial solution to the (NP-complete!) 3-SAT problem valid? http://bit.ly/fPCKWT

Tweeted by balpha on January 20, 2011 at 6:40 PM

A FIE UPON YOUR OUT OF NETWORK LINKS, SIR.

A FIE UPON IT!

here, we recognize no reality except that which we have created, and this is as it should be. Obviously.

Dan Grossman

>_>

But that information travelled to Hacker News, to me, to this chat room, then to math.SE via dracnehstern in this chat room, before I could have linked that page to start the events leading to its creation

Jeff Atwood

I CARE NOT FOR YOUR USELESS EXCUSES

ah, I miss the caps lock room. That was great fun.

Rebecca Chernoff

I shouted something in caps the other day and got a reply that I was spending too much time talking to you. >_<

Jeff Atwood

8:54 AM

it's like talking to a deaf person, you have to YELL so they UNDERSTAND YOU.

Dan Grossman

Typing in CAPS seems to encourage people to swear more

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman YOU'VE SEEN THE ALL CAPS ROOM?

Rebecca Chernoff

in Science Fiction on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, Jan 11 at 23:54, by Rebecca Chernoff

All good @MarcGravell. I FIXED IT BECAUSE I AM AWESOME.

in Science Fiction on The Stack Exchange Network Chat, Jan 12 at 6:14, by Marc Gravell

@RebeccaChernoff you've been talking to Jeff too much I see ;p

lol

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff QFT!

Dan Grossman

lol

in ALL CAPS ROOM, yesterday, by ALL CAPS

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

in ALL CAPS ROOM, 14 hours ago, by Neil Fein

WHY THE HELL IS WORDPRESS.COM SO SLOW? SORRY FOR THE YELLING.

in ALL CAPS ROOM, yesterday, by drachenstern

OMG ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT I SWEAR TO GOD IT'S A FUCKING EMPTY CATCH FFS SHOULDNT YOU TELL SOMEBODY IT FAILED YOURE A FUCKING IDIOT I SWEAR

Jeff Atwood

8:56 AM

Rebecca Chernoff

Aww. I was hoping that was a reply to the first quote. Then you could be quoting me being awesome for truth!

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Meh, the truthiness of the second one outweighed the first.

Dan Grossman

wow, that has a whole page

Truthiness

Truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse. He particularly applied it to U.S. President Geor...

Jeff Atwood

0

Q: How do I delete all comments from a specific old blog post?

I'm cleaning up an old, controversial blog entry and I need to remove all the comments from the post. Surprisingly, I can't find a way to do this within the existing WordPress (3.0.4) UI. I can certainly go through and click "trash" on all 200+ comments, but that seems.. excessive. Is there ano...

comments

my first wordpress post, I committed to this site, it's the only one where I didn't fulfill my commitment :(

Rebecca Chernoff

for shame!

Jeff Atwood

9:15 AM

wordpress.stackexchange.com

tell me what you see in the footer where it says "WordPress is a trade.."

Dan Grossman

Jeff Atwood

that sucks, I changed that on 12/13 to WordPress foundation .. I even have the email to prove it

not sure what happened

Rebecca Chernoff

@JeffAtwood I see this.

Jeff Atwood

yeah I had to change it AGAIN just now, so it's changed for web07

Rebecca Chernoff

I'm on 8

Jeff Atwood

9:17 AM

it should have been persisted to the DB though on 12/13, that is so odd.

Dan Grossman

I refreshed and see the new text

Jeff Atwood

you're probably hitting web08

man I can't wait until we roll out lucene on the web tiers.. our web tiers are doing almost nothing, it's sad

Dan Grossman

Really? You could always consolidate them on fewer servers then, and let me have the spares you free up... :)

Rebecca Chernoff

Ooohh that's what I can do if I'm not driving tomorrow. I'll read that Lucene book on the way to visit family. Then maybe I'll figure out what I was doing so wrong a couple years ago that gave me crappy search results.

Jeff Atwood

all 10 of them are like that

it's just.. sad. We need to use PHP so our web tiers get some work

Dan Grossman

9:24 AM

:lol:

Jeff Atwood

Rebecca Chernoff

php... shudder

Dan Grossman

Nah, that's a standard Apache/PHP site doing ~500 requests per second

Tim Post

Sanka isn't all that bad.

Dan Grossman

if I turned on caching it'd probably drop near 0, but there's no point

Rebecca Chernoff

9:27 AM

So...when I downloaded a driver earlier, Lenovo decided to install "Orbit Downloader". Pretty damn sure I didn't ok that. >_<

UNINSTALL

Tim Post

I hate easter eggs that get bundled with junk I can't avoid downloading

I cringe every time I install a printer driver

Dan Grossman

A full install of the software that came with my last printer takes like 25 minutes, it's ridiculous

brrrrrr

Jeff Atwood

> Stackoverflow.com is ranked #176 in the world according to the 3-month Alexa traffic rankings. Compared with the overall internet population, the site appeals more to men; its visitors also tend to consist of childless people under the age of 35 who browse from work and have postgraduate educations. Approximately 68% of visits to the site consist of only one pageview (i.e., are bounces). Visitors to the site view 2.4 unique pages each day on average.

Rebecca Chernoff

@DanGrossman yeah that's what it is here.

Tim Post

@JeffAtwood The first time I read that, my brain did a s/childless/childish/

Rebecca Chernoff

9:32 AM

@JeffAtwood I like the trend graph (:

Jeff Atwood

quantcast.com/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc/traffic/sites

heyy, se.com network is as big as serverfault.com now!

Rebecca Chernoff

Misreading things is fun! I did that with one of Joel's tweets the other day.

Finally done with the FogBugz - Kiln world tour. #phew! Thanks to 3000-odd people who turned out.

Tweeted by spolsky on January 19, 2011 at 5:02 PM

I missed the hyphen at first.

Jeff Atwood

lol

Tim Post

Haha, I initially saw "Killed world tour"

Jeff Atwood

that's just bad

Yi Jiang

9:35 AM

... the 3000 odd people...?

Tim Post

Or, paraphrased, 1500 odd couples :)

Rebecca Chernoff

I mean, come on...you may be glad it is over, but you don't have to call them odd!

@JeffAtwood \o/

Yi Jiang

@RebeccaChernoff Obviously, since 3000 is clearly an even number!

Rebecca Chernoff

oy.

Jeff Atwood

> This destination reaches over 11 million monthly people, of which 3.7 million (34%) are in the U.S.

the world, she is big.... p.s. USA #1!!!!!!!!!1!!@!1one

Tim Post

9:38 AM

How much of a dent are the SEO scrapers taking out of you?

Or can you really measure that?

Jeff Atwood

@TimPost I think it was a lot, but mostly we found out because of all the email complaints and twitter complaints..

Rebecca Chernoff

NOTHING TO SEE, CARRY ON

Dan Grossman

Matt Cutts just talked about SO in Google today

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128020

Tim Post

I saw something about that on slashdot. Basically, "we don't have a SPAM problem"

I've been using Blekko and it is quite nice. A little sluggish at times though. But, once you tune your slashtags, it's really easy to find what you want

Yi Jiang

> Please tell us how we can do a better job, and we’ll continue to work towards a better Google.

Do they really check the inputs from that link?

Jeff Atwood

9:41 AM

@DanGrossman I covered it all in the blog post on Coding Horror anything else I say here would just be rehashing that

Tim Post

I really like how they present the SEO info they use for ranking, plus how you can flag anything as spam

Yi Jiang

Surely that form must receive thousands of 'feedback' everyday

Dan Grossman

> We see a virtually unbounded number of problems with our search results, and we're working constantly to fix them. Most of the people I talk to who work on search have the attitude that Google is horribly broken all the time, it's just also measurably the best thing available.

Rebecca Chernoff

Oh, @YiJiang, did you see the comments here? meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/74983/…

Dan Grossman

@TimPost news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128928

Yi Jiang

9:42 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Yeah, but IANAL. I have zero idea on whether or not the ad is acceptable, so... erhm

Jeff Atwood

isn't he in China? Do they even care? :)

I KID I KID

you could make Mario less overtly Mario-ish

then it'd probably be fine

Tim Post

I'm just about done pulling links to blogs of people that answer questions on tags that I follow on SO to finish my slashtags on blekko. So I can search for say ... parse html with regex /unicorns , and blekko gives me results from SO, programmers.se, webmasters.se and blogs / sites from people who bothered to list them in their profile

Jeff Atwood

We were supposed to help Blekko out in curating the programmer slashtags and I had a call with Rich Skrenta about that but never heard back

I'll email him

Tim Post

@JeffAtwood That would probably be a cool relationship. They really are onto something useful

Jeff Atwood

well you may reck-a-nize

stackoverflow.com/about/management#advisors

> Rich Skrenta is a seasoned technology executive with nearly two decades of industry experience. He is currently CEO of blekko, a web search startup based in Redwood City, Ca

Rebecca Chernoff

9:47 AM

I've heard the name, but what does Blekko do that's different?

Dan Grossman

I like that DuckDuckGo is pulling from Blekko, I wouldn't use blekko but I occasionally check out DDG

Tim Post

@RebeccaChernoff You'd kinda have to use it to see

Jeff Atwood

FEAST YOUR EYES ON USER ZARDOZ!

Zardoz, Germany

592 2 11

ruby-on-rails javascript rspec jquery ruby ruby-on-rails-3 testing

stackapps.com/404

Tim Post

I'm starting to use blekko when I want to get work done and Google when I need to steal an image off teh interwebz for something

Dan Grossman

this is now how I will picture all germans by default

2

Tim Post

9:49 AM

Is he holding a pistol?

I guess the beer there really IS good

Rebecca Chernoff

...and on that lovely note, g'night lol.

Jeff Atwood

> True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away.
It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater time investment to read through to find the relevant sections.
I guess that's a tribute to how well stackoverflow works, most the time. And also to how lazy I am.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128020

Tim Post

I wish I could get glasses that work in front of and away from the computer. I had to get them, last week I grabbed and tickled the wrong kid at the arcade.

Jeff Atwood

lol, SURPRISE RANDOM KID!

that reminds me, one time in Denver we went to McDonalds and my wife (I can't remember if we were married then, or not) sat down in the wrong booth with another guy

he was like.. HEYYY! LADIES OF MCDONALDS KNOW WHATS UP!

Tim Post

hahahahahah, The family record was my mother getting into the wrong car in front of the grocery store

Every time I go to get them adjusted, they work fine. Then I sit at my desk and end up going back to reading glasses

I don't think I could deal with bifocals with a dual head display + laptop going all at once. I'd have a perpetual stiff neck

Dan Grossman

9:58 AM

laser eye surgery?

Tim Post

@Dan it's not yet that bad, it's a weak prescription

Dan Grossman

I'm failing at keeping any kind of sleep schedule

Jeff Atwood

> One UI issue we've struggled with is how to tell the user that there isn't a good result for their query. This comes up when we evaluate changes that remove crap pages all the time. For nearly any search you do, something will come up, just because our index is enormous. If the only thing in the result set that remotely matches the query intent is a nearly empty page on a scummy site, is that better or worse than having no remotely relevant results at all?

Tim Post

If they'd just give people a convenient means to say "this is bad" (similar to flags on SO), the problem would cure itself

But then you'd have competitors flagging each other into oblivion

Dan Grossman

they've had a couple UI tests where you could downvote or remove results you don't like

Tim Post

10:02 AM

@Dan, yes, I saw one of those. But the results are basically used only to offset your future results

Jeff Atwood

@TimPost yeah the flagging thing, is a lot harder than people realize -- they look at it naively. Imagine all the mechanical turk jobs that would create "search for foo, then downvote our competitors"

Dan Grossman

they were at the time, but they were also collecting all that data and I'm sure they analyzed it

Jeff Atwood

mechanical turk is used for about 50% spam SEO tasks now

it's very very good at that too

Tim Post

I remember seeing a rash of wikipedia scrapers a few years ago, then they all of a sudden basically vanished from most results

I just hope SE gets similar treatment

Dan Grossman

already has, so they say

Jeff Atwood

10:06 AM

it would behoove Google to figure this out for the general case of "creative commons content, that gets scraped and remixed".. rather than as a fire and forget custom switch per domain

Dan Grossman

which they're doing, so they say

Tim Post

@DanGrossman - It is a rather difficult problem to solve

Dan Grossman

> It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more

Jeff Atwood

BAH SIMPLE

Dan Grossman

> Because that wouldn't solve the problem for clones of other sites, or clones in other languages. And the Stack Overflow cloners could just make other websites. That's why a primary instinct in search quality is to look for an algorithmic solution that goes to the root of the problem. That approach works across different languages, sites, and if someone makes new sites

> To be clear: the webspam team does reserve the right to take manual action to correct spam problems, and we do. That not only helps Google be responsive, it also improves our algorithms because we get use that data to train better algorithms. With Stack Overflow, I especially wanted to see Google tackle this instance with algorithms first.

Tim Post

10:08 AM

If it exists on a SE site, it must be a copy?

Dan Grossman

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128692

Tim Post

I still think this is a case of manually putting out a fire until something better surfaces

Yi Jiang

  //for the I can't believe I had to write this™ series
  function now(){
    return new Date();
  }

@badp Have you looked at Date.now()?

developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/global_objects/…

Tim Post

time_t now(void) { return time(NULL); }

1

Q: How to pass 2 dimension arrays to function in C ?

Hi, I try to pass 2 dimension arrays to function in C, and the following code works void printArray(int a[][4], int size) { int i = 0; for (; i < size; ++i) { int j = 0; for (; j < size; ++j) { printf("%d,", a[i][j]); }...

c

I can always tell when a winter mini semester starts somewhere in the world

Yi Jiang

@badp In addition, this bit of code:

//lit up the envelope
$(".envelope-off").toggleClass(".envelope-on", true)
                  .toggleClass(".envelope-off", false)
                  .attr("title", "You have new replies");

Doesn't seem to do anything except to give the envelop a new title?

Dan Grossman

10:17 AM

what's wrong with addclass and removeclass?

Jeff Atwood

0

Q: Can you recommend some light siver colors in rgb format?

Can you recommend some light siver colors in rgb format?

fonts colors photoshop

literally, what color is the bikeshed

Yi Jiang

Okay, several problems - one, not using remove/addClass, two you've left the . in there, which means it'll add a class called .envelope-on instead of envelope-on

A single toggleClass('envelope-on envelope-off') should do

Dan Grossman

9

Q: Paint me a Rainbow

How would you go about making a range of RGB colours evenly spaced over the spectral colour range? So as to look like a real rainbow.

language-agnostic colors rgb

I liked that question when I first encountered it

Tim Post

I just moved the FAQ on the C tag wiki to the top

Every semester, 20 incarnations of the same exact questions

Dan Grossman

yet another way to make it harder for humans to decipher :/

Jeff Atwood

10:34 AM

if there is ever a recaptcha class break we are all so f**ked

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/class_break

Dan Grossman

0

Q: Difference between report and sub-report

Hi, What is a sub report and how is it different from a report? Thanks Furqan

vb.net

0

Q: how to use web sql database to connect two html5 pages for mobile applications.

i am trying now for android,please let me know in detail how to do coding.. Thanx in Advance.

sql

-1

Q: Please explain what is "white noise" with example in very simplest way.

I am not good at Math and not in any engineering program. Could anybody please explain what is white noise ?

noise white noise-words

question quality seems to go down when americans are asleep :/

and... the close link just broke on me

Jeff Atwood

ok, we'll fix.. Marc deployed meta only which pushes all javascript to sstatic.. looks like Jarrod changed some stuff there

Pekka

WHO UPVOTES A QUESTION LIKE THIS?

0

Q: what's general structure of classes and functions in php?

what's general structure of classes and functions in php?

php class functional-programming

I can understand not wanting to downvote a complete newbie, but *upvote *? What the hell?

@DanGrossman good catches. Goodness gracious.

Dan Grossman

1

Q: Obtaining METER corpus

can somebody provide me link for downloading METER corpus.I visited the site http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/meter/index.jsp. But it seems to be broken.pls help me out. i need it for Text reuse method evaluation.Thanks in advance.

nlp text-processing

"Give me a link to a file" doesn't sound like a programming question...

0

Q: Chinese become garbled

Chinese become garbled FiledownLoad return File(path, type,HttpUtility.UrlEncode(filename,Encoding.GetEncoding("gb2312"))); This code does not turn up？

chinese

Could you at least tell us what language that CODE is written in??

Pekka

10:51 AM

We need a crap channel

A chat room to spend all remaining close votes and downvotes on

Yi Jiang

@Pëkka chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/rooms/227/regulator-headquarters

Pekka

@YIJiang good point, but "regulation" sounds so reasonable. I'd prefer "DOWNVOTE CHANNEL"

Dan Grossman

I'd rather use this channel so that it's active more hours of the day and doesn't die out like most channels do

Pekka

True

Dan Grossman

there are so few chat rooms with regulars already

-2

Q: Starting Internet Radio

Hi, I am a php programmer. How can I start building a internet radio station? I have some ideas- I will not use any third party like Live365 or SHOUTcast. I will create a php-based website and all songs, news will be in my PC. I will broadcast songs, live voice from my PC. There will be some pl...

php wordpress joomla internet-radio

Pekka

11:05 AM

@Jeff I am starting to understand why you are so strictly against "List of X" questions

1

Q: Your Favourite Fonts?

What is your favourite fonts to use in your designs? They have something like this in StackOverflow and WebApps SE, detailing their favourite programs or favourite webapps per answer. Perhaps we could do this too with typography on Graphic Design SE. (Suggestion: Vote for one font in each answer...

graphic-design typography

I am not overly fond with the average question quality on that Area51 site, I'm afraid

Yi Jiang

@Pekka They would start calling us the Chat Downvote Mafia :P

Pekka

@YIJiang heh :) Nah, I'm not pointing to that for downvoting, more for discussion

There are some gems on the site in both questions and answers, but not as many as needed (or as I'd have expected)

Jonas

Is it only me that is confused about the [mac] and [osx] tags on SO? Most people use [mac] but [osx] is probably more accurate when developing software.

Pekka

@Jonas makes sense. I would expect the "mac" tag on superuser where one might discuss Mac hardware, but on SO?....

Jeff Atwood

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

Jonas

11:10 AM

Yes, and [mac] have been used more than [osx], I think it would make sense to have [mac-os-x] tag instead of both [mac] and [osx].

Pekka

Woollen mittens? In California?

@Jeff any word on when the Area51 proposal merge thingy is coming?

Jeff Atwood

a51 discussions and categories is next week, beyond that I don't know

Pekka

Great. Would the team merge proposals if the overwhelming majority of participants were in favour?

Jonas

@Pekka Thanks for your support. I'm not alone then. I started a question about it: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/75941/…

Jeff Atwood

@pekka probably, yes

merging proposals is a tricky thing

Pekka

11:19 AM

Nice.

@JeffAtwood Yeah I imagine

Jeff Atwood

@DanGrossman some guy named Kim from Denmark voted up that post you were complaining about

I have no idea why

Pekka

11:36 AM

@Jeff did you mean @Dan's or mine?

Benjol

@YiJiang, you've seen that dropbox has had enough? :)

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Not yet, no

Benjol

error 5xx ...

Yi Jiang

10 gb of bandwidth free. But I have seen sporadic 5xx errors

Dan Grossman

Do you not have hosting of your own somewhere?

Yi Jiang

11:39 AM

@DanGrossman No, not really.

Benjol

@YiJiang, ok, back again. ignore last comment

Dan Grossman

doesn't work for me anymore

I can see the page, but no css/javascript

if you'd like a mirror I can put it up somewhere?

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman Yes, please. Dropbox isn't going to hold I'm afraid.

Sigh... I actually do have hosting, but it's provided by my school

Benjol

I could stick it on my dropbox, but that wouldn't help for long.

If @dan does mirror it, we just have to change all the links :)

Dan Grossman

awio.com/SE/election.html

Yi Jiang

11:44 AM

checks email No, nothing from Dropbox about me hitting the limit yet

Benjol

@Dan, ok with if we update links then?

Dan Grossman

SoftLayer projects I'll use 185GB of 3000GB allocated for this month, I think there'll be plenty :)

Benjol

Hm, on that version I get the badges twice over...

Dan Grossman

had to reset my password to check that, I haven't logged into their site in ages

I think that was a bug @YiJiang identified earlier.. I just copied/pasted his files

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman There's just one problem - there are also static versions of the page which I use ajax to pull in

Benjol

11:48 AM

Anyways, just don't forget a mod/dev to change the pinned message :)

food time...

Dan Grossman

Is that something I can mirror if you give me the URLs?

Yi Jiang

dl.dropbox.com/u/1722364/Stack%20Overflow/Elections/… dl.dropbox.com/u/1722364/Stack%20Overflow/Elections/… dl.dropbox.com/u/1722364/Stack%20Overflow/Elections/… dl.dropbox.com/u/1722364/Stack%20Overflow/Elections/…

Four files, for each of the four sites

Dan Grossman

eek, 6 502/503 errors in a row

badp

@YiJiang doh! I wondered why it never did anything

Dan Grossman

alright, I think I got 'em

does it work right now?

Yi Jiang

11:51 AM

Apparently not...

Dan Grossman

-rw-r--r--  1 root root      6768 Jan 22 06:42 election.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    350158 Jan 22 06:49 election programmers.stackexchange.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    293710 Jan 22 06:50 election serverfault.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    483040 Jan 22 06:50 election stackoverflow.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    339812 Jan 22 06:50 election superuser.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     10808 Jan 22 06:43 master.js
-rw-r--r--  1 root root      8074 Jan 22 06:43 plugins.js
-rw-r--r--  1 root root      7364 Jan 22 06:44 style.css

Yi Jiang

Looks like it might be an encoding problem

awio.com/SE/election.html > click on the link for local copies > click on any of the sites

Dan Grossman

seems to work

sometimes

firefox bugged out

badp

@YiJiang no, I hadn't. Also keep in mind that's the first "program" I ever wrote in JS :)

Yi Jiang

Chrome works... Opera too

badp