Tavern on the Meta

Benny

02:00

@MichaelMrozek yes please I want to start to lern.

The Renamed Exception

@Benny you can edit previous messages using the up arrow on your keyboard, FYI

or using the arrow to the left of each message when you hover over it

Benny

@TheRenamedException sorry I am new to chat

Trufa

@Benny do you mean a program that download from the api?

The Renamed Exception

@Benny no problem, I'm just letting you know some of the neat features :-)

Moshe

is So tense having to start the review wait AGAIN

Trufa

02:02

@Benny or how to build something like stackoverflow

?

Michael Mrozek

This is my new favorite conversation:

Benny

I mean how to build something using the api

Michael Mrozek

5

Moshe

Does the userscript have a /waffles command?

The Renamed Exception

@MichaelMrozek AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA

Yi Jiang

02:03

@Moshe Not... yet :)

Moshe

@YiJiang I need to build it then!

When I have time...

Chris Jester-Young

@MichaelMrozek Is that shooped, or is there a context link?

Michael Mrozek

@Benny There's some "getting started" links on the right side of StackApps

Moshe

Shopped, or shooped?

Michael Mrozek

@ChrisJesterYoung It's in a non-public room. It's real, although if you could see the message rchern is replying to it would be somewhat less disturbing

Rebecca Chernoff

02:04

hey |:

Chris Jester-Young

@Moshe Opls.

@MichaelMrozek I figured as much.

The Renamed Exception

it was hysterical though

Moshe

Any updates from Egypt?

The Renamed Exception

@Moshe yes

Michael Mrozek

@RebeccaChernoff Less tavern chat, more updating the /about pages

Chris Jester-Young

02:05

@Moshe urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shoop

Michael Petrotta

@Moshe: aren't you, like, right next door?

The Renamed Exception

@Moshe ifwnewsletters.newsletters.infoworld.com/t/7172018/474647389/…

Michael Petrotta

want to knock and ask?

Rebecca Chernoff

There are probably better places to get world news than in here...

@MichaelMrozek next build.

Michael Petrotta

Charlie Sheen is in rehab. All you need to know.

Chris Jester-Young

02:06

@RebeccaChernoff Indeed. I've been watching Al Jazeera English for the last two days: livestation.com/channels/3-al_jazeera_english

Moshe

@MichaelPetrotta, Since when are all "Moshe"s in Israel?

Michael Mrozek

Ok, I'm now positive that the Enthusiast badge is broken. I keep getting it on sites I swear I never go to; I just got it on StackApps

I've been to StackApps like 15 times in my life

Michael Petrotta

@Moshe: thought I heard you say you were. Sorry if I was wrong.

Chris Jester-Young

@MichaelMrozek Maybe API and/or feed accesses touch your last access time too.

Moshe

I'm actually not. No problem.

Trufa

02:10

@Benny you know youve got the same profile picture as:

CrazyJugglerDrummer, The Milky Way, Earth

6.9k 1 13 46

javascript html css c# jquery java c++

The Renamed Exception

@Trufa his name is better though! ;-)

Yi Jiang

@ChrisJesterYoung API access can't, because it doesn't authenticate, so there's no way it can get you any badges

Trufa

@TheRenamedException one would argue

...

Chris Jester-Young

@YiJiang But what if you're using a browser-based app, and it sends your cookies along anyway?

Moshe

Tis alright.

Yi Jiang

02:11

@ChrisJesterYoung Yeah, I know of widgets like StackApplet that does that

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek lmao

(which may, oddly enough, have been on topic)

The Renamed Exception

@TimStone Haha I originally had "ROFLMAO" as a comment, and changed it before sending :-)

Tim Stone

Hah :P

Rebecca Chernoff

|:

Tim Stone

Hey, blame @MichaelMrozek, not us.

The Renamed Exception

02:14

@Rebecca Oh we're just messing with you :-) Here, this will make you feel better: blame.josh.gitlin.name

Rebecca Chernoff

Tim Stone

Kinect has made me sleepy, hahahah

Rebecca Chernoff

I'm ok with this.

The Renamed Exception

LOL

@TimStone everything makes you sleepy :-)

probably has to do with lack of sleep :-)

Tim Stone

I know, it's rather disheartening.

I refuse to accept that as an explanation.

Benny

02:18

@Trufa do you know when he got it?

Trufa

@Benny what, the image??

Benny

@Trufa yes

Trufa

@Benny it is a pretty well known picture

google.com/…

I have seen it in a million places (I like it though)

Tim Stone

yawns Hmm, sounds like it's raining again.

Trufa

:)

The Renamed Exception

02:22

You could always ask people in here to make a gravatar for you... :-)

Tim Stone

I should contemplate changing my gravatar to make life easier for badp...Hmm

The Renamed Exception

@TimStone you should!

You could use

Tim Stone

That...is a very large T.

The Renamed Exception

I made that when I was like 17 for a game I thought I would be developing, LOL

needless to say it never happened :-)

Tim Stone

Yes, so many things left undone sighs Heh

Trufa

02:31

@TheRenamedException got one for me

(or I could use the big T actually)

George Stocker

Evening.

Yi Jiang

{
		'#templateContainer': {
			'width': '400px',
			'position': 'fixed',
			'top': 0,
			'right': 0,
			'z-index': 100000
		},
		'#templateContainer textarea': {
			'width': '300px'
		}
	}

The Renamed Exception

@Trufa you don't want me designing for you. Isn't that T horrific enough? :-)

Yi Jiang

Sigh... there's a syntax error here, and I can't for the life of me find it

Tim Stone

@GeorgeStocker 'Ello

Trufa

02:33

@GeorgeStocker evening, congrats anyway on you ron for mod

!!

The Renamed Exception

@GeorgeStocker How are you?

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Are you sure it's actually there?

Trufa

},

should it be

};

???

Tim Stone

No, that's right.

Trufa

@YiJiang ?

Yi Jiang

02:34

@Trufa That's the correct notation for declaring JavaScript objects

Trufa

@YiJiang oki doki i'll shut up now :)

Yi Jiang

SyntaxError: invalid label
chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/17/javascript
Line 0

The Renamed Exception

@YiJiang SyntaxError: Unexpected token :

George Stocker

@TheRenamedException Doing well. Still reeling from the (expected) moderator results. The ego takes a licking, as it probably should.

And I'm coding Conway's game of life, #coderetreat style.

The Renamed Exception

@GeorgeStocker I was surprised at the results

Trufa

02:37

@GeorgeStocker sorry my ignorance, what is #coderetreat style.?

George Stocker

@Trufa coderetreat.com

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Erm, are you not assigning it to anything?

George Stocker

The jist is to use Conway as sort of 'programmers scales' (a la Musical scales)

Corey Haines gave a coderetreat at my place of work last week, and ever since then I've been using that particular exercise to improve my ability to write code.

Chris Jester-Young

@GeorgeStocker I had one of those Code Kata problems a while ago! Too bad it got closed/deleted. :-P

George Stocker

If you ever get the chance to go to one of his code retreats, I highly recommend it.

Yi Jiang

02:39

@TimStone I'm passing in it as an object literal into anon function

George Stocker

@ChrisJesterYoung I guess we need a bestpractices.stackexchange.com

(not serious).

Chris Jester-Young

@GeorgeStocker Hehehehehe.

codekata.stackexchange.com lol

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Interesting. Firefox gives me 'SyntaxError: invalid label' if I don't assign it, but it has no problem if I do..

George Stocker

Sometimes I don't understand downvotes. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/77593/…

Tim Stone

Let's see if I pass it to something.

George Stocker

02:40

A technically correct answer, and it offers an alternative.

Yi Jiang

@TimStone Yeah, and I really don't know why

Maybe the error is from somewhere else

The Renamed Exception

This is crazy @YiJiang

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Also works OK if I pass it (function(o) { })({ ... }), or were you doing something different?

Yi Jiang

I think it might have something to do with eval

@TimStone Yeah, the error was from elsewhere, I fixed it

Tim Stone

Ah

The Renamed Exception

02:43

@YiJiang I was going to say, I can't find any issues

Yi Jiang

But still, the console was reporting an error, hrm...

Tim Stone

The first rule of Firebug is to be skeptical of Firebug

The Renamed Exception

ug, I am so far behind

must finish this project.... must go on...

Chris Jester-Young

@TimStone The sooner browsers widely support let, the better.

Then rather than clunky-looking (function(foo, bar, baz) {...})(fooval, barval, bazval), you could write it a much more idiomatic way. </soapbox>

Yi Jiang

WTF?

Tim Stone

03:00

@YiJiang O_o

The Renamed Exception

@TimStone I am suffering from your syndrome now. I need food but am too lazy to go cook it

but my code is clearly suffering, LOL

Tim Stone

Uh oh, it's spreading over chat. My bad, everyone.

George Stocker

ACK, never use double for money: stackoverflow.com/questions/4882185/…

Tim Stone

Oh floating points, how you plague so many...

The Renamed Exception

LOL:

43

A: Is a double really unsuitable for money?

Very, very unsuitable. Use decimal. double x = 3.65, y = 0.05, z = 3.7; Console.WriteLine((x + y) == z); // false (example from Jon's page here - recommended reading ;-p)

Tim Stone

03:05

@TheRenamedException That's how you beat Jon Skeet! By using Jon Skeet against himself!

4

The Renamed Exception

Go @Marc!

George Stocker

I fear the world will explode should any mere mortals try that.

Marc is clearly one of the Eternals.

2

The Renamed Exception

@TimStone A Recursive Skeet?

@GeorgeStocker I am going to use up all tomorrow's stars again before tomorrow even starts, LOL

Tim Stone

Hmm, shower time....then back to figuring out what exactly I was doing before the Kinect beckoned to me.

The Renamed Exception

later @Tim

Dan Grossman

03:09

Why does that equality test fail in C#?

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman Because of rounding errors in floating-point. It's not just C#, but all binary-based floating point implementations.

Dan Grossman

:realizes he doesn't have an IDE or compiler for any compiled language installed on this computer:

The Renamed Exception

@DanGrossman are you asking technically?

It was explained to me in great detail once and I understood it.. for a moment :-)

Mark Elliot

@DanGrossman use ideone.com?

Chris Jester-Young

@TheRenamedException 0.1 has a recurring binary representation.

The Renamed Exception

03:12

@ChrisJesterYoung deals with the internals of how doubles work right?

Chris Jester-Young

@TheRenamedException Well, double is a binary floating point type; so therefore, it's impossible to represent 0.1 exactly.

In the same way that you can't represent 1/3 exactly as a decimal number.

The Renamed Exception

@ChrisJesterYoung ah, ok, that's right

OK, I am going to make food. back in a few...

Chris Jester-Young

Have fun!

Dan Grossman

I understand it technically, I don't understand it practically :/

If it prints out 3.7 and 3.7, why are they not equal when compared... is it really preserving two different representations yet displaying them the same?

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman 0.1 is 1/10, which is also 1/5 * 1/2. 1/2 can be represented in binary exactly (of course). 1/5 cannot.

Dan Grossman

03:14

So?

If two numbers are represented as the same repeating binary, why don't they evaluate to equal?

Chris Jester-Young

Okay, let's look at it from decimal numbers. 1/3 cannot be represented exactly in decimal. It's 0.333333333.

So say you have 0.33333333 + 0.33333333 + 0.33333333.

That's 0.99999999, not 1.

Dan Grossman

So? We didn't compare it to 1

Why is (1/3) != (1/3)

Chris Jester-Young

Right, but the example is comparing 3.65 + 0.05 with 3.7.

It's not comparing 1/3 with 1/3.

Dan Grossman

if you add x +y first, and print it, it'll print 3.7

then you compare 3.7 to 3.7, and it says false

why are they not equal if they are represented and displayed as the same number

Mark Elliot

@DanGrossman Consider: 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 != 3/3 when there's an imperfect representation of 1/3

Chris Jester-Young

03:16

@DanGrossman Because of rounding.

Mark Elliot

@DanGrossman display != representation

Chris Jester-Young

The fact that they have the same rounded display does not mean they are the same number.

Dan Grossman

Why does it round for display?

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman Because the alternative is to display about 16 digits, which is tl;dr for most people.

Dan Grossman

I don't like my language tricking me

If I want it rounded to 1 decimal place, I should be forced to say that

Chris Jester-Young

03:18

@DanGrossman Your lack of understanding of floating point is not the computer's fault. It's not tricking you.

Dan Grossman

It's tricking me by displaying a whole number when that's not what's stored

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman If you are in Java, you can use BigDecimal to see what the "real" number is.

Dan Grossman

And it's clearly bad for programmers to trick them like that, and hide the real value

Mark Elliot

In Java it'd print the whole number unless otherwise specified

Dan Grossman

So it's only C# that's dishonest

Mark Elliot

03:20

printf("%f %f", 0.3, 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1) should show the difference

Dan Grossman

0.300000 0.300000

hmmm

(not c# or java)

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman: Try these in Java:

Mark Elliot

that's annoying

Dan Grossman

I'd have to install javac first, no dev tools on this laptop

Chris Jester-Young

new BigDecimal(3.7);

new BigDecimal(3.65 + 0.05);

Mark Elliot

03:21

ideone.com/fX4bV

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman 's okay, I'll paste you the actual numbers.

Dan Grossman

I understand floats, I don't understand why some languages round them when you don't use a formatting function to tell it to round them... if I assign 0.5 to a variable and it can't be represented exactly, and I print that variable, I shouldn't see 0.5

Chris Jester-Young

irb(main):001:0> require 'java'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> import java.math.BigDecimal
=> Java::JavaMath::BigDecimal
irb(main):003:0> BigDecimal.new(3.7).to_s
=> "3.70000000000000017763568394002504646778106689453125"
irb(main):004:0> BigDecimal.new(3.65+0.05).to_s
=> "3.699999999999999733546474089962430298328399658203125"
irb(main):005:0> BigDecimal.new(0.3).to_s
=> "0.299999999999999988897769753748434595763683319091796875"
irb(main):006:0> BigDecimal.new(0.1+0.1+0.1).to_s
=> "0.3000000000000000444089209850062616169452667236328125"

Mark Elliot

sigh: ideone.com/o9hpI

Dan Grossman

^ that's what should happen

Just sayin', if I ever design a language, it's not gonna lie ;)

Chris Jester-Young

03:24

@DanGrossman Can you see what I mean by tl;dr though?

@DanGrossman Incidentally, 0.5 can be represented in binary exactly.

Dan Grossman

:wonders if there's a way to enforce some currency rounding scheme (as we currently round all prices to 1/100th of a dollar) where all numbers are representable in binary:

Chris Jester-Young

irb(main):007:0> BigDecimal.new(0.5).to_s
=> "0.5"

Dan Grossman

yeah yeah :/

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman Yes. Represent your numbers as integral values, in quantities of cents, or 1/100 of cents, etc.

Dan Grossman

I'd like an excuse to eliminate the penny anyway

they cost more than a penny to mint...

Chris Jester-Young

03:29

@DanGrossman: Sometime I'll write a webapp, where you can paste in arithmetic expressions and it will print you the result, in full precision (like what you saw above).

That way, you know exactly what you're dealing with. ;-)

Dan Grossman

I'm not arguing against rounding in user interfaces

I'm arguing against the most primitive output functions of languages building in automatic rounding

the default should be to show me what's really there, if I want something else, I should have to ask for it

Chris Jester-Young

@DanGrossman The thing is, few people use the string representation for roundtripping.

Dan Grossman

I'm really unhappy that PHP's debugging functions round floats

var_dump, of anything, should show me what's really in a float, not a prettified representation

Michael Mrozek

04:29

I came here to kick ass and assign IPv4 addresses. And I'm all out of IPv4 addresses.

Tweeted by secretsquirrel on February 2, 2011 at 12:30 AM

George Marian

heh

Yi Jiang

04:40

Is @TheRenamedException still here?

Michael Mrozek

Does he ever leave?

xiaohouzi79

Hey folks, is there a notification anywhere as to why the sites are all down?

I checked the blog.

Michael Mrozek

Heads up #stackoverflow users, we'll be offline for a bit tonight around 11PM EST for some back-end work, planned outage for a few items

Tweeted by Nick_Craver on February 3, 2011 at 3:15 AM

xiaohouzi79

ah, forgot to check the twitter

cheers

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek Hmm, I've been working long enough not to have noticed. Disturbing.

Dan Grossman

04:47

Michael Mrozek

@TimStone How dare you

@DanGrossman He better turn down every promotion he gets from now on

Fosco

Wouldn't Admiral still work?

Michael Mrozek

Did he become an admiral? I don't actually watch star trek

Dan Grossman

Too much time travel in the series and the movies... which one was the real future?

Michael Mrozek

Every time I try to make myself like Star Trek I fail. I don't know what it is

I do love Doctor Who though, so that's good enough

Dan Grossman

04:51

What Star Trek did you try to watch?

It's hard to get into any 1960s TV series unless you have nostalgia for it... but the later series are pretty interesting just from a scifi perspective

Michael Mrozek

Whichever ones my friends told me to. DS9 and then I think TNG

Dan Grossman

TNG did The Matrix a decade before The Matrix! Holodecks inside holodecks....

George Marian

As I recall DS9 was a snoozefest.

Dan Grossman

►

Where else will you see Newton, Einstein and Hawking playing poker with an android?

Michael Mrozek

@DanGrossman Heaven?

mootinator

05:00

All Androids go to Hell (Coming Soon From Disney)

Moshe

05:12

@moot maybe, but who plays the devil?

And why do I think of a green R2D2 whenever anyone says Android?

mootinator

@Moshe I see what you did there.

Moshe

I'm thinking google android.

@moot what did I do?

mootinator

Okay, maybe you didn't do that. But it fits.

Dan Grossman

:facepalms:

I can't watch this episode of Law & Order: SVU... about "Another Universe" (Second Life)...

it's just too detached from reality

Moshe

05:27

Oy. Egypt is disintegrating. More violence.

Dan Grossman

We've got better things to worry about than Egypt.

Like Obamastroid. theonion.com/articles/…

George Marian

@DanGrossman Nice.

Dan Grossman

05:49

George Marian

OMG, is that a real headline?

Dan Grossman

Yeah, from this paper, apparently: archive.easternecho.com/content/…

(2009)

George Marian

Wow. Just. Wow.

Benjol

Morning all

in Election Bookie, yesterday, by Benjol

Robert Harvey, Tim Post & Lasse V. Karlsen

2 out of three, quite pleased with myself :)

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Hahaha

Benjol

05:53

@YiJiang, I should have done a copy of your page, didn't realise the data would no longer be available. I wanted to try some other metrics to see if I could improve my correlation :)

Looks like I need to add a smidgin of reputation :)

wasn't there some talk of a downloadable pdf with the results in?

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Eh, no - what you get is a dump of the OpenSTV compatible data

Benjol

oh yeah, way cool :(

Michael Mrozek

It's a text file with the complete voting history; what other results do you want?

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek The names of everyone who didn't vote for you so we can make them pay! Mwuahahahah. coughs I mean, err..

Yi Jiang

Anyway, the message templating thingadongdong for chat is done now

Dan Grossman

05:59

Firecane

Firecane refers to a hypothetical confluence of meteorological and man-made disasters, whereby a hurricane crossing an oil-laden expanse of water generates lightning which ignites the flammable fossil fuel, creating a vortex of fire. A fearful imagining born of recent cataclysms in the Gulf of Mexico, the term has gained currency in New Orleans, the city inundated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and which in 2010 was near the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Lightning strikes from thunderstorms may cause isolated fires, as happened on a drill ship near the spill. Another proposed sc...

Benjol

@YiJiang wassat?

(pretty talented bunch on photo.se):

8

Q: Image of the week "hall of fame"

You may know that http://photo.stackexchange.com/ (this site's parent :) has a "Photo of the week" contest. Here are all the images featured on the homepage from the beginning in cronological order. 4 November 2010 11 November 2010 22 November 2010 29 November 2010 6 December 2010 ...

discussion

Tim Stone

@DanGrossman We may have to go cause a industrial disaster just to make that happen.

Michael Mrozek

@Benjol Here's an HTML file from OpenSTV if that helps: so.mrozekma.com/election.html

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Josh wants a better way of doing the election digest thingadongdong - I said that I can create a GM script to pull in data from messages you select and rerender them using your own template

Benjol

@YiJiang, sounds good

@MichaelMrozek, ok, thanks

Tim Stone

06:02

@YiJiang Oh, maybe I won't finish my script then :P

Dan Grossman

Yi Jiang

Tim Stone

Nifty

Michael Mrozek

@YiJiang What you should really do is write a script that analyzes the candidate's complete histories to determine their likely answers to the questions and posts them automatically, so we can skip the THCs completely

It's one small step from that to determining who we'd all vote for, and then we don't need elections

Benjol

@MichaelMrozek, I really was close, Lasse was #4 :)

Dan Grossman

06:08

Benjol

@YiJiang, don't suppose you've got a not-too-old cached version of your page data for SO to hand?

Yi Jiang

@Benjol Lemme check

Dan Grossman

se.awio.com/old.html

doesnt seem to work, oh well

I grabbed that from google's cache

Yi Jiang

@DanGrossman No, because you'll need the old elections page itself too

Which could work, if you pull it from Google's cache

Tim Stone

@YiJiang Can't you just point at where the election page got moved to, or you need something that actually isn't available anymore?

Yi Jiang

06:16

@TimStone The original {sitename}/election page, with it's list of candidates, since that's where the script scrapes data from

Tim Stone

stackoverflow.com/election/1 ?

Yi Jiang

@TimStone It's still there, huh

Okay, lemme see if I can work with that

Tim Stone

Yeah, it's all archived post-election.

Hah, site's down now.

Dan Grossman

Michael Mrozek

Damn it, that's the third time I've hit the meta maintenance page in the last hour. Either it's been down more often or I've been more active than usual

Benjol

06:22

@MichaelMrozek, it's an automatic safety system, they've detected that @Yi is hacking again :)

No StackExchange sites, no mods. We're orphaned, we're doomed!!!

Yi Jiang

wonders what @NickCraver is doing right now to erhm... cause? the sites to go down like this

Benjol

WOB :)

Yi Jiang

I knew it! They should've just all switched over to jQuery, because it just $.works()

Dan Grossman

06:40

While it's down, you can read interesting discussion on StackOverflow's decision to use Microsoft products -- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2167776

George Edison

06:57

Dan Grossman

Why Google?

George Edison

@Dan: For humor.

Michael Mrozek

You should embed that on your website along with an animated "under construction" icon, it'll be like 1995 again

Benjol

07:22

@GeorgeEdison Tried that on an iPhone? :)

dumb question, possibly too dumb for SO. if I have two ranges a-b and c-d, what's the simplest way to check that they don't overlap and that they are at least 1 [unit] apart?

(I know for the overlapping bit: d > a && b > c)

Dan Grossman

c >= b + 1

you're assuming the first range begins below the second range?

Benjol

@Dan, not necessarily

Dan Grossman

i.e. not "10-20 1-5" as input

they don't overlap but they don't meet your overlap test

Benjol

@Dan, no they can be in either order

@DanGrossman, sorry, that equation is true if they do overlap

Dan Grossman

ok, then (c >= b + 1 || a >= d + 1) for the gap check?

what was i doing...

Benjol

07:32

@Dan, breaking out my FSI to test :)

Dan Grossman

oh yeah, poking @GeorgeEdison's script

Content-Type: image/jpg

5862
JFIF<CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 100

I wonder why that forces a download on my phone

should be image/jpeg?

Benjol

07:51

@DanGrossman Seems good, all my tests say OK :)

Dan Grossman

Yay, I'm not a 'tard.

badp

@TheRenamedException I got that twice the first time I tried it :°D

then it errored and gave me @MichaelMrozek instead, so you have a bug right there. Please fix.

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