Tavern on the Meta

Undo

12:14 AM

Hmm.... It's a new UTC day!

animuson

1:37 AM

wonders how many people are angry with me flooding the Recently Deleted Posts stats on Meta

jmac

2:24 AM

@animuson Absolutely furious. How dare you clean things up!?

Would it be in bad taste to write a meta post complaining about the incredibly long close vote review queue on MSO (it is all the way up to 2!!!).

animuson

Outrageous!

At this rate it will be to 100k by the time I die!

jmac

We need to nip this problem in the bud before it surpasses even SO.

Because if there's a bad question problem, it is definitely more insidious on MSO than regular SO. The lack of people doing their research is so evident with all the duplicate closures!

By the way, why did they remove the nice summary totals by site of rep in the new black SE bar at the top? Or is it still there and just shows up arbitrarily?

animuson

Huh?

jmac

There used to be a nice little icon of MSO or TW or SO that had a +XX under it, showing you your total for each site in that day.

animuson

Oh, hum. It was just there like an hour ago...

They added my UTC time though! Yay!

jmac

2:31 AM

I think it's because I don't have a rep change on multiple sites yet

bingo.

You need to have rep changes on more than 1 site for it to show up.

I should be a professional QA tester. Does that pay well?

animuson

2:47 AM

@jmac I'll probably turn that question into a full FAQ whenever I go through the faq-proposed tag.

jmac

@animuson Thanks! I was wondering how that worked. Then I read the tag summary. And it was helpful (go figure!). Documentation that works? You sure SE is related to IT?

animuson

I've almost finished browsing through all the current FAQ entries...

jmac

I think of all the issues that I see on meta, the poor <2k users who come in asking about a rejected edit are the ones I sympathize with the most. It'd be nice to see that sitting in the faq to point people at in the future (particularly those who believe strongly that community ownership doesn't apply to them)

animuson

Is there a proposed FAQ for it?

Going through some of the existing ones, they're just horrid. A lot of them are very open to discussion and have no canonical answer.

jmac

Yeah, that's the one you just made community wiki:

31

Q: When should I make edits to code?

Return to FAQ index The about page says: Improve posts by editing or commenting Our goal is to have the best answers to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can edit them. Use edits to fix mistakes, improve formatting, or clarify the mean...

(I see very few people complaining about edits to non-code blocks -- but code blocks? It seems like there's at least one every week)

animuson

2:58 AM

Ah, well that makes sense then.

There's 150 questions tagged with faq-proposed that need to be gone through.

jmac

There is a small(?) but vocal contingent who strongly believe that broken code should just be downvoted (even if it could be fixed by adding a semi-colon or bracket), and that corrections should go through comments, or be posted as separate answers.

animuson

6:41 AM

Finally finished going through the existing list of FAQ entries!

@Pops jsfiddle.net/2d26q/2 I'm going to bed now.

Johannes Kuhn

8:05 AM

I'll just throw this tag in the chat: activity-badges

Destroy it.

Is it possible to filter all suggested edits reviews that I did by reject reason?

Ahh, Data Explorer :)

Johannes Kuhn

11:57 AM

Congratulations. Someone managed it to suggest an edit with the same quality as an audit: stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/3444120

Bart

12:41 PM

Wow ... if that "spineless" ranter really is the 46 year old guy that he says he is .... wow.

Duncan

@JohannesKuhn This seems to be caused because I made a significant edit, then someone produced a minor edit which seemed significant compared to mine.

Ideally the system should have spotted that somehow.

Johannes Kuhn

1:11 PM

Ok, that makes sense.

And I HATE robo-reviewers

Duncan

2:22 PM

Does this question warrant closing as opinion-based?

35

Q: Correct idiom for managing multiple chained resources in try-with-resources block?

The Java 7 try-with-resources syntax (also known as ARM block (Automatic Resource Management)) is nice, short and straightforward when using only one AutoCloseable resource. However, I am not sure what is the correct idiom when I need to declare multiple resources that are dependent on each other...

java try-with-resources

I'm leaning towards "no", but am thinking it would benefit from an edit along the lines of "what are the pros and cons of these three approaches".

Bart

2:37 PM

I'd say the boundaries are well defined on that one. Yes, it can attract some opinion, but nothing too wild. Any decent answer would have to be backed up by sufficient detail/referencing.

qwertynl

2:54 PM

Hi

Martijn Pieters

5:02 PM

starts lurking a bit.

Undo

Oy @MartijnPieters

Martijn Pieters

@Undo: Oy yourself!

animuson

@MartijnPieters If you're lurking, give opinions: jsfiddle.net/2d26q/2

Undo

@animuson Can I give opinions too?

First, what are we opinioning on?

Martijn Pieters

I am of the opinion that we'd all be better off eating less meat.

animuson

5:08 PM

I've been working on redoing the FAQ index.

That's my current prototype.

You know, minus the couple of errors I made. Like not correctly typing the HTML comment on one of them. Pretend that's not there.

Martijn Pieters

Oi, it's rubbish, because I can see a HTML comment that should not be there..

But that looks good to me so far.

@TimPost: you about?

animuson

(Note the red X's denote items that I feel should be removed as FAQ entries.)

Tim Post

@MartijnPieters Yep, what's up?

animuson

A few of them already have been.

Martijn Pieters

@Tim: Your email has me intrigued and puzzled. :-)

> is probably in order to avert a flag economy collapse due to inflation.

I am still trying to parse that, my logic circuits are not up to the task it appears.

Am I flagging too much, too little, flagging the wrong things? :-P

Tim Post

5:15 PM

@MartijnPieters Hehe, just a whimsical and nonsensical allusion to flags and flag weight :P

(of which flag weight was just recently retired)

Martijn Pieters

Ah, is my flag weight threatening to cause structural damage?

Tim Post

@MartijnPieters None of the above, purely an attempt at humor, a poor one at that it seems :)

Martijn Pieters

I can always flag some nonsense comments to lighten the load a little.

Undo

Oooh @MartijnPieters I have a tool...

Tim Post

We called in a crane - it's fine now.

Martijn Pieters

5:16 PM

Okay, I'll stop worrying about that then.

Note to self: structural disaster averted, no need to do anything about flagging behaviour.

Undo

^ How I consistently hit 100 comment flags / day.

Martijn Pieters

What am I looking at, comments that match a search done with the API?

Tim Post

Yes, what is this Charcoal thingadongdong you've got there?

bluefeet

@Undo you can use Data Explorer to find crappy obsolete comments as well.

Martijn Pieters

Talking of which, the Data Explorer isn't too happy these days. Queries for answer counts consistently time out. I guess the SO dataset is finally too big.

Tim Stone

5:29 PM

Data Explorer will be moving to new hardware sometime soon, once it's all delivered and installed and there's a chance to move it.

I imagine the SQL Server issues over the weekend are probably still taking some attention away from other things at the moment.

There are probably some indexes that would be beneficial to add, but that'll require some analysis and an okay from Nick, so no promises on that end.

Martijn Pieters

It's okay, I'll just wait. I was only running egoqueries anyway.

Undo

@bluefeet I take the DE CSV and throw it into a nice MySQL db.

Undo

6:22 PM

@MartijnPieters @TimStone It's a thingydongdong I built to find comments to flag.

Tim Stone

/cc @TimPost

Undo

Oh, sorry :P. Autocomplete to the rescue!

jadarnel27

Classic wrong-Tim-ping-fail =)

We've all done it.

animuson

There's no such thing as pinging the wrong Tim...

Tim Post

I am totally changing my name to Wrong Tim

jadarnel27

6:29 PM

Hahaha, please do that.

Tim Post

Wait, I'm not sure I like what that implies.

Tim Stone

Excellent, I'll go become Right Tim.

Or just "Not Tim Post"

animuson

And Pekka can be "probably not Tim"

Tim Stone

@NotTheTimYouWantButPerhapsTheTimYouNeed

7

animuson

7:05 PM

@TimPost Do you know if faq-proposed is one of the "permanent" tags that can't be destroyed? If not, can it be? I just realized that if I go through them all and either FAQ-ify or reject FAQ-ification, the tag would be destroyed for not having any questions... That would be... bad.

Martijn Pieters

What about a faq question about faq-proposed with the faq-proposed tag added to the post?

That way you have at least one question with the tag still..

animuson

Hmmm, maybe add it to the FAQ index itself? That's the post that will discuss proposing new FAQ entries.

Tim Post

@animuson I'll find out, but an easy work around is to tag the central FAQ list with that tag (ugly) - let me double check before doing that.

Undo

8:26 PM

I have a Ubuntu home server now. What fun things could I do with it?

Can I make it cache something?

Then I can answer my parent's questions as to why something isn't working with 'caching'.

Johannes Kuhn

Install squid and let it cache.

Pops

@animuson Would that be so bad? It only exists by word of mouth anyhow.

jadarnel27

8:41 PM

@Undo How old are you? Just curious =)

animuson

@Pops Would you be able to get a list of error messages for that troubleshooting section? I don't even know where to begin with compiling a list like that...

Undo

@jadarnel27 Just barely old enough to be here without COPPA nabbing me :)

jadarnel27

Haha, that's an excellent answer.

Pops

@animuson "troubleshooting section"?

animuson

@Pops Yeah, I liked your idea from that question about having different sections with different formats for finding information. I think it's a great idea to add a separate list of all the error messages users can encounter on the FAQ index, and link them to their relevant FAQs.

Searching for error messages on Meta can be... a bit of a pain.

A lot of posts which mention error messages include a screenshot of the error message, but never the actual message itself.

Or some summarized version of the error message.

Pops

8:50 PM

I don't think such a list exists, and it'd probably take about as long to come up with one as it would to look up the existing FAQ entries for them.

animuson

Darn. Was hoping that would be an easy one. :P

jadarnel27

This website (warning: lots of profanity, some of it even in the URL) cracked me up.

I wonder if that's registered to Welbog.

Pops

@jadarnel27 Edward Tufte isn't German.

Johannes Kuhn

reminds me of a popular german blog.

Pops

The quotation is "No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it."

And apparently it's originally by Alan Cooper, not Edward Tufte.

Undo

9:05 PM

0

Q: Synonym request: [apns] -> [apple-push-notifications]

I noticed that we have both a in-app-purchase tag and an iap tag. Can these be synonymized? apns (1,079) excerpt: Apple Push Notification Service (APNS for short) is the centerpiece of iOS's push notifications feature. It is Apple's service for propagating information to devices (such as iPh...

discussion stackoverflow tags tag-synonyms synonym-request

please-do-the-above

that-was-fast

Undo

Hmm.... Windows' time-remaining thing is counting down by ten seconds every half-second :P

They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

animuson

@Undo Oh, I like that one. I'm going to add that to my printed collection.

I've been printing off my favorites because whenever I get my own place, I'm going to make an entire wall of XKCD comics.

Will be awesome.

Then when people come visit, they'll instantly know how much of a nerd I am.

Undo

The best part of it is that it's terribly accurate.

@animuson You need a wall of XKCD comics arranged around an SO logo with your mod hat over it... you can't beat that.

30

20s

10s

Good grief.

It counted down by ten seconds for the entire file download.

Putting Ubuntu on an old Windows PC, going to use it to play music in the background through my intercom.

Ubuntu is awesome.

(Watch, this is going to end in one of my home servers catching fire and burning my house down :P)

animuson

You have an intercom? What are you some sort of rich kid? ;P

Undo

@animuson No, just have an old house, back when they were still putting the things in.

It has... problems.

Pops

9:20 PM

@animuson Who are you going to be inviting over who won't already know how nerdy you are?

Undo

Unless the three volume knobs are in the exact right spot (we have sharpie tick marks for that), it emits an annoying high-pitched noise at about three in the morning, not unlike the sound made right before those weather service announcements.

But continuous. Not in bursts.

This brings with it an inability to change the volume.

(unless you use trial-and-error to find another sweet spot where it doesn't try to kill your eardrums at night)

@animuson Well, rich in some ways... I bet I'm in upper class in regard to mSO rep among kids my age. But not really in moneys.

jadarnel27

9:35 PM

@Undo That sounds terrifying.

Undo

10:55 PM

How is it that a peer-to-peer transfer over the local network is slower than an Internet download?

(#justasking)

user206222

11:42 PM

@Undo I read that as "monkeys."

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