Tavern on the Meta - 2017-10-27

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user315433

12:03 AM

> Upgraded Exceptional on Stack Overflow from v1 to v2. No exceptions coming in. That must mean it's working. Or it's not working. Who knows? -- Nick Craver at 11:46 AM - 26 Oct 2017

12:34 AM

> Too many people look at games - or especially "gamification" - as a silver bullet that will turn the efforts of lazy and unproductive players into gold... This is exceedingly naive. Any game played in bad faith will have disappointing results, whether the mechanics of that game involves throwing a ball around or answering programming questions.

1:06 AM

...just like flopping in basketball or simulation (diving) in soccer.

best actors of our generation

2 hours later…

user202362

3:11 AM

What if you have a hobby farm with 100 chickens and 2 border collie chickherd dogs? Do you think it would work? Like 2 dogs are able to protect those chickens?

@Telkitty Presumably you would have coops and fences, too... right?

user315433

3:26 AM

What if 100 chicken-size collies were to fight 2 collie-sized chickens... who would win?

Everyone... because tiny collies would be adorable and giant chickens would be hilarious.

user202362

3:50 AM

@Catija of course, although to be realistic, fences are not too ... err ... firm

Good fences make good neighbors... and keep out foxes... usually.

user202362

when you have a 10 hectares of land, it would be hard to bullet proof your fence

4:05 AM

Why would you try to bullet proof a chicken fence... they're mostly holes.

user202362

bullet proof the fence against foxes :p

user202362

thus ... collie dogs, I mean dogs are bigger, so using bigger dogs to fend off smaller foxes ...

TheLittleNaruto

4:38 AM

Yo o/

@Catija foxes are good.

TheLittleNaruto

5:16 AM

This AS new release is really faster.

The build process takes not too much time like before <3

Yeah, love AS 3.0! ❤

TheLittleNaruto

I had to tweet that to AndroidDev

They deserve the appreciation :)

user202362

5:38 AM

hope they have fixed the gradle

TheLittleNaruto

That's what I was talking about.

1 hour later…

6:43 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer (batch report: post 1 out of 2): How does a mobile wallet vouch for credit card data? by Arjun Verma on security.SE

→ 10 messages moved to Chimney

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer: How do I reverse an unconfirmed transaction to the original wallet by Gerald Parker on bitcoin.SE

1 hour later…

8:05 AM

@Shog9 Sorry I'm not actually sure what your trying to say here. That I'm trying to game the system?

8:33 AM

@Shog9 Doesn't look like they're goin to. chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/40800717#40800717 (They chose the shorter path out)

@BhargavRao Private room is private

i guess that's intentional

yep

checkout this link, superuser.com/users?tab=NewUsers&sort=creationdate. 90% of the users there are those type.

Heh

Shog said you tracked the people responsible

8:48 AM

nopes, not the people responsible. I just track every user who's created on a few SE sites and run their profiles through SD and HD. (I used it initially to track a serial offender on SO). I found the spam wave on SU a few days back and reported it to the SU mods in TL. (I guess Geoff must have noticed it before that).

hmm

2 hours later…

10:42 AM

Did SE ever implement a form of shadowbanning?

10:54 AM

No I was never banned.

@ShadowWizard kek

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted website in answer: What is a good etiquette to correct a person using wrong title for me? by Halimat Salako on academia.SE

11:11 AM

@Magisch kik

user315433

-1

Q: Self-destructive users: let them go or bring them back?

I just want to know how does the site want to approach self destructive users? Should anything be done?

discussion site-policy

user315433

The surprising thing about this post... it's by a moderator.

11:24 AM

I can be a dilemma - say someone that's contributing a lot of good content, but is also very rude or doesn't care about certain rules. When a site is still in beta, it is difficult to make the choice to let someone like that go.

Journeyman Geek

12:03 PM

@Oded you can be a dillemma. So can they ;p

I'd say, words and actions. Say you're sorry or this is why it happened, be a good, constructive user, and sure.

If you do it again, we'll be sad, and suspend you again.

@JourneymanGeek How do the people who were suspended 20+ years for previous offenses fit into this?

"At some point we'll have enough and boot you off this site with a cannon"

Journeyman Geek

@Magisch there's ways around it

There's users who actually got out of it (the right way) and ended up being very constructive users.

135

A: Why don't we keep public records of suspensions?

My belief about account suspensions being somewhat private, is to protect the suspended user. There's cases where accounts are created purely for spamming the site, or trolling, these are not the types of accounts I'm referring to here. The type of accounts are users who have participated on the...

12:23 PM

@JourneymanGeek It makes sense (as much as my drama hungry self wants to enjoy in all the drama ever)

It's nice to not turn every time someone lost it into a permanent public record of them losing it

The big downside is that when someone very active gets suspended. Then (some) people want to know why and start meta drama over the "secrecy".

@Oded Is that a bigger downside then starting meta drama over every other suspension?

Methinks no

Never said it wasn't the lesser of two evils :)

on mcf we'd have semi-public suspensions and the amount of just outright drama that was put forth over it was staggering

then again that was a site a) about minecraft with b) mostly children on it

mcf?

12:27 PM

minecraftforums.net

ah

"official" minecraft forum site

I used to be a moderator for the mapping and modding section some years back

Big difference here is that we expect most participants to be adults.

And the kids that do participate are usually mature enough

from behavior, it's more people like @Mithrandir then actual kids that do kid things and have kid tempers

Some people never really grow up.

12:33 PM

I can confirm I was a massive airhead until like 19

still am to some extent

Well, lots of people never develop self-introspection. At all.

@Oded It's the most powerful tool for improvement though

And yet, some of the people that most need it, don't have it and because they don't are not likely to ever acquire it and benefit from it...

Even if you're a vain person beyond belief and ridiculously arrogant. You'll want to be better. Even if just for yourself. Bettering yourself doesn't happen without introspection because you don't know your shortcomings then

12:49 PM

Eh. Big assumption there :)

I agree that such a person would want to do better for themselves. They may very well not see self-improvement as the way get there.

Stepping on other people is much easier ;)

And some people - don't believe they have shortcomings.

@Oded I don't actually believe there are

You can't think you're perfect unless you're severely lacking in imagination about what you could be

@Magisch eater.com/2013/5/13/6435721/…

It is quite the episode to watch.

I really want to watch that show now

:D

1:04 PM

hahaha

@Magisch since you pinged me, I have to tell you that in your message that summoned me you're either missing a comma or have a typo, and the meaning of the sentence changes depending on which you meant. ;)

@Mithrandir I think I missed a "rather" in front of the "then"

@Magisch TBH I've never really understood what made Minecraft popular.

@Mithrandir I still love playing minecraft

playing modded minecraft is a lot like programming in that you come up with your own machinations and solutions to ~~take over the world of the server you're on~~ finish a modpack.

@Magisch it works without the rather, it should just be than then. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm trying to make my specialty English, plus it might help you ;)

@Magisch hmm

Journeyman Geek

1:13 PM

@Oded have had that happen.

meta.superuser.com/questions/12116/the-suspended-account this one

It happened on Puzzling.SE, before I got there.

Autocucumber...

@Mithrandir It's okay I got most of my mediocre english from internet conversations anyways

1:31 PM

I prefer Terraria than Minecraft, but to each his own

Just to clarify: @Success and @Desire are different people, right?

@Mithrandir unfortunately(?) yes. If you want to ask about SE and its history, ask @Desire. If you want to have a rather dumb conversation, ask @Success

That's... rather self depreciating, don't you think?

welp, maybe? :p

user202362

I like dumb conversations

user202362

1:41 PM

there is no correlation between how serious you are and how much you can contribute to the society

user310756

2:09 PM

a class photo of @rene in kinder garten

@YvetteColomb wait, didn't @rene already appear in "The amazing world of Gumball"?

user image

Yep, clearly @rene

user315433

2:30 PM

Quill ♦, Gold Coast, Australia

652 1 3 20

learning-methods terminology aspiration classroom ejectives immersion interference

@Derpy WUT? shakes fist

user315433

@Quill still has a diamond, despite JNat's edit

user315433

Quill was replaced, although it's not clear why LL needs 4 pro tem mods at all.

user315433

His rep was 652, which means we have a new lowest-rep mod on the network now.

bye all take care Good night

2:33 PM

@InsaneCat sleep well

@rene tata :) thank you

@Desire That's interesting. Huh.

They must have requested it.

user310756

3:09 PM

@Derpy love it

user310756

@rene erm, I made some flower jokes in socvr... I think I might just keep them in here..... tippy toes out of tavern

black flower... pfft

3:34 PM

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

3:52 PM

@Feeds in addition to thinking about a character's name in an RPG, this also happened to me.

1 hour later…

5:11 PM

Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met. The term satisficing, a combination of satisfy and suffice, was introduced by Herbert A. Simon in 1956, although the concept was first posited in his 1947 book Administrative Behavior. Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined. He maintained that many natural problems are characterized by computational intractability or a lack of information...

Satisfiction

I may hope these kind of bumps stay within limits ....

I guess NAA/VLQ flags only lead to declines in my flag history

Oct 23 at 15:18, by Adam Lear

"For now" apparently became almost two years. Huh.

5:27 PM

FR's on Meta are not a product backlog. At best they are wild idea's that might influence which features will make it towards a product backlog.

user315433

5:48 PM

> Three amazing years @StackOverflow ends today. Sad to leave but excited for the next chapter in my developer story: stackoverflow.com/story/gregbray -- Greg Bray at 9:23 AM - 27 Oct 2017

user315433

Greg should get a parting bonus for a much-needed plug of the DevStory feature.

user315433

Never mind that it mixes IEEE membership with employment, and lists his "top post" with the score of 0.

7:08 PM

I have re-read Oded's answer on that suspension multiple times but I either need a drink or something is off in that last sentence. How does the user know about their suspension on a no longer suspended account? Based on the comments and the answer I would expect every account for that user is banned/suspended.

It reads like the mods have gone the extra mile to not destroy sock-puppet accounts?

Hmm

I think it refers to that the person remembers the big incident that lead to that

But the reflection is indeed puzzling

@rene Sounds like there's a deleted sock... the primary account is no longer suspended but the sock account was deleted and then recreated.

Ok, so let's at least settle for that the non-native speakers can't understand that answer ....

@RobertHarvey - There's a possibility that the account was deleted with prejudice, which also triggers an automatic 7-day suspension on account recreation. This particular account would not have gotten the moderator warning, but I checked and their main, non-sock-puppet account did get a very clear warning. — Brad Larson 1 hour ago

@Catija so they mod-messaged the user on their active account to inform them about their suspended socks?

7:15 PM

@rene Or they mod messaged them on their main account that they were doing something inappropriate on their sock puppet accounts. They suspended the sock puppet and then someone decided to delete the sock entirely for some reason... the user decided to recreate the account that their sock had and was immediately suspended because the deleted account was still suspended.

I don't mind how the messages are sent. The no longer suspended is a weird outcome for something like that.

Well, if the sock is deleted/disabled, they're not necessarily going to get into any trouble with their main account, though... it's also possible that the suspension ended, not that it was shortened.

@Catija that sounds plausible ...

keep in mind that Oded's answer was meant primarily for the asker, who should know exactly what he's talking about; lots of extra explanation for other readers is optional.

@Catija that would be the only thing that would make sense

7:17 PM

You could always ping Oded if you wanted more info... but yeah... the answer isn't for us, necessarily.

@Shog9 And to some degree against policy... while we may discuss things if the OP starts it, we don't generally air these in public.

It makes sense to be direct in a way the OP would understand even if that leaves others slightly confused.

@Catija I could but I wanted to rule out a simple misunderstanding on my end, that happened before.

Okay, I settle for: it is clear enough for the OP, don't be bothered what it really means

Yeah, seems like a reasonable choice... and the post is gone, now, so you can additionally pretend like you never saw it.

I remember .... everything ....

Are you an elephant?

No, I'm a flower

7:24 PM

An annual or a perennial?

I wouldn't imagine that a flower would have a long memory.

perennial

also because I had to Google that

although the context was clear what it probably was....

Just had to be sure

I usually forget which is which, even though I know what they mean.

"Annual" sounds like "it comes back annually" instead of "you have to plant it annually".

I also made sure to Google the spelling because I didn't want to write "perineal" instead.

Probably not something you want to Google, though.

:p

too late ;)

Well, hopefully not too late for those who come later.

I'm way beyond legal age. I can google for whatever I want ...

7:34 PM

Well, that doesn't make it exactly work safe. :D

Yeah, at work that might lead to some weird looks

8:05 PM

lol

Same for annual without couple of letters.... ;)

... wow... that's amusing that both plant words turn into butt words. :/

9:00 PM

In the Annals of Stack Overflow, so let it be written, how the great Tavern on the Meta, in its Golden Age, Didst issue a Happy-Hour, whereby all who so Registered were required to Come, and did So.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Shortened URL in body: In search of the miraculous, know someone? by Anand on ai.SE

user315433

> You are like a zen monk => disciplined, persistent, systematic
You are a learning and debugging machine
You have the right kind of stubbornness
You live and breathe engineering/programming
You have taken classes or built something using Tensor Flow and/or other ML Frameworks; and aspire to become top 1% in this field
Programming comes naturally to you
You are exceptional
Your brain actively is a first principle thinker
You live in the future
You can’t wait to touch the lives of billions of human beings

@Desire How did my daily affirmation get on AI?

user315433

The Description part at the beginning was even better.

user315433

> "Men (and Women) Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” - Ernest Shackleton

9:07 PM

> Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

10:01 PM

@BhargavRao ah well. Wacked that mole too.

@Wes no. That rep is just a sideshow, an amusement for when stuff is otherwise boring.

@Shog9 Thanks! The last account created was 3 mins back, let's see if they finally stop now. ;)

@Shog9 Not strictly true if you want to participate in moderation

though I suppose 20k is quite attainable

@BhargavRao past behavior suggests maybe 10 hours before they'll adjust

@Magisch You really don't need anything above 10K for moderation purposes. Mod tools is great but analytics is just fun.

I'm slowly working towards 10k on SO

10:08 PM

@Magisch I believe what kicked this off was the observation that reputation tends to grow over time without much effort, once a few useful things have been posted.

@Shog9 hah, then we've got 10hrs of free time. :p

@Catija 20k, deleting answers.

@Shog9 depends on how narrow your definition of useful is

@BhargavRao You can recommend deletion, though... 6 vs 3 users but you can still delete.

Anything that got an upvote is useful by someone's opinion. That doesn't mean it'll get another one anytime soon though. I see what you mean though

@Magisch it's not your definition that matters here, it's random people with at least 15 rep

big chunk of my rep came (and continues to come) from a throw-away jQuery answer.

10:10 PM

Doesn't even have to be local rep.

@Shog9 My definition matters when someone else's rep is concerned

@Shog9 Yeah i got like 500 points from explaining what a float is

I suppose you can game these accidents if you're on the FGITW lookout for the questions with decent enough titles to get a lot of views & votes

@Catija only on those in the LQPQ. Also at 20k we'd not need to wait for 3 days for deleting -3 questions on the spot.

user315433

On SO it's 4 vs 3.

user315433

As it should be everywhere, imo.

@BhargavRao You can't vote to delete something that's not low quality regardless of your reputation, though...

10:13 PM

@Magisch If I'd never done anything else, I'd still have over 14K from one answer that took me a few minutes to write three months after joining SO. But... You can't predict that. And I certainly wouldn't try.

@Shog9 Early adopters vs late in the game

Yeah, which is why people suggest stuff like "let reputation decay over time".

getting literally thousands of points from trivial answers used to happen a lot early in the site's life span. These days it's incredibly rare

@Catija You can vote to delete negatively voted posts (even if they're accepted) which are not there in the LQPQ.

Which is why I'm a little disappointed that rep is as big of a deal as it is

10:15 PM

@BhargavRao Yes. Sure... I'm not sure how often that's used outside SO, though. I have a diamond on two sites and 20K on two others and I very rarely have anything that needs to be voted to delete.

545

A: Why do all the C files written by my lecturer start with a #?

Wow, this requirement goes way back to the 1970s. In the very early days of pre-standardised C, if you wanted to invoke the preprocessor, then you had to write a # as the first thing in the first line of a source file. Writing only a # at the top of the file affords flexibility in the placement ...

Rep is as big of a deal as people make of it. If you don't care about rep or privileges, just bounty it away... lots of people like collecting it... I'm sure a lot of people put more weight on badges.

That answer is two months old and has earned its author about 1700 points in that time.

Votes are still coming in, probably because there's more than one lecturer who does that.

1244

A: Hide strange unwanted Xcode logs

Try this: 1- From Xcode menu open: Product > Scheme > Edit Scheme 2- On your Environment Variables set OS_ACTIVITY_MODE = disable

Just over a year old, that answer has earned its author about 11K

@Catija On SO, I had used it some 3k times before becoming a mod. (~50k after) .... :|

user315433

Mostly on questions, I suppose.

10:20 PM

Huh

So people are still getting tons of votes for trivialities

What about that ID question on SFF that netted the person who finally answered it something like almost 4K in bounties?

user315433

People are still winning in a lottery.

357

A: Story where the number 3 is the monster?

The story is "The Homework Horror" by Greg Cox. It was originally printed in Amazing Stories Vol. 62 #1, but was reprinted in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares II: More Tales to Make You Scream, which is probably where you read it. And the evil number in the book is 5, not 3. Five stayed ...

user315433

I should get to 10K on SO reasonably soon, but don't know if I want to do anything with the delete privilege. Some stupid stuff with stupid accepted posts, maybe.

@BhargavRao Eeesh. Sorry.

10:22 PM

@Magisch there was definitely some of that, but a bigger factor is simply that an answer that stays useful will continue to gain reputation for its author over time - so the older it gets, the more rep it will have generated. Even 1 vote a month would generate > 1K if posted in the early days of SO.

@Shog9 Do you think the rep system still broadly serves its purpose then?

@Magisch yes

Or would a different way of distributing privileges be better by now?

consider that if there was no rep system, folks would tend to fixate on even dumber numbers, like total # of posts

(or... total # of comments...)

I don't mean it should be abolished

10:24 PM

I think those cases are outliers... I don't think having a few people hit the reputation jackpot makes it a bad system for the other ... 95% of the users.

But maybe a different method of dishing out what one can do would be in order

@Magisch more nuanced ways of awarding privileges are at least somewhat feasible now. For example, tag-based privileges.

Like judging their usage of what tools they do have access to so far and granting access to new tools based on that

The only tag based privilege we really have is the dupe hammer, right?

@Catija oh yeah. But then, earning any reputation at all is an outlier:

user image

10:27 PM

@Shog9 What the heck is that?

Oh, I see... total number of posts with X rep... wow.

Is that SO only or network wide?

that's SO only

Includes deleted or no?

includes deleted

user image

^ network-wide (but score, not rep)

Can you break it up by Q/A?

buckets of 100

10:31 PM

SO gets a lot of deleted posts though, right?

user image

@Catija ^ doesn't look any less dumb

user image

@Shog9 No... but... when you have a site like IPS seeing zero score questions and answers be so close together is really intriguing.

Excluding deleted ^

user image

^ network-wide, by post type, no deleted, without buckets

Rep or score? I'm guessing rep?

score

can't readily do rep network-wide

10:36 PM

Ah. Hmmm. Well, it makes more sense for comparing Q&A anyway, since the reward difference between the two.

It is interesting... there are a lot more blue dots but the top dot is a question.

Wait... but the top voted post on SO is just shy of 20K votes... is it cropping the range or is there a time frame it's limited to?

@Catija last two years

So the number of votes received by all posts over those two years or only including posts made in the last two years?

@Catija only posts made in the last 2 years

@Catija essentially this, but posts on all sites

Ah. Hmmm. So those graphs actually exclude posts earning lots of residuals if they're older than 2 years.

@Shog9 But that exactly shows my surprise... with the sheer volume of answers IPS gets, there are tons more of one than the other. Those network-wide charts really emphasize (or seem to) that the network tends to have a closer to 1-1 ratio for Q&A.

you're surprised that IPS is non-typical? ;-P

10:49 PM

@Shog9 IPS is an extreme, sure... but even on the questions I've used for my little project, they generally have several answers (on SO)... so while I don't expect the network to average 8-10 answers per question, I do expect it to be more than ~1.3 or so.

user315433

Questions we encounter in search are atypical. Pearls.

select Avg(AnswerCount*1.0)
from Sites..NetworkPosts

~ 0.5

user315433

The vast pile of unanswered and once-and-poorly-answered lies underground... without being really noticed. Which raises the question of why we even need to delete anything.

Clean up the mess?

dead-end searches are costly

could probably optimize deletion by looking for questions folks bounce on

user315433

10:52 PM

When looking for pearls, remove all that's not pearls; then you have reached the goal. Valid but not an efficient method.

user315433

Google already does that, doesn't it?

user315433

Down-ranking rather than deleting, but in practice it's about the same.

user315433

Using anonymous feedback to nominate posts for deletion would be interesting.

I'm not sure how well Google's ranking works for stuff that doesn't get searched for very often

user315433

But feedback is prone to abuse if someone is determined enough.

10:54 PM

May just end up penalizing the entire site if folks bounce too much

@Desire would be, if folks used it. Original thought was, it'd be a high-volume high-noise signal... Instead it's a low-volume high-noise signal

user315433

Why? Maybe the bounce-back UI is too discouraging.

user315433

Folks post nonanswers to say "I can't upvote, so posting to say thanks"...

user315433

Or, I guess, they just don't expect to be able to vote/like/whatever without an account. Can't do that anywhere.

@Desire Or more commonly "I can't comment, so posting to say you're an idiot".

yes, the UI probably hurts a lot. The original UI was even worse; almost no one used it. Switching to "try to vote, record feedback" jacked up the numbers a lot, but I gotta figure it tends to discourage people from using it twice

if we made a number increase or something, that'd be a lot more reassuring that you weren't just wasting your time

user315433

11:02 PM

What is an anonymous rating UI that people actually see and use?

user315433

5-star ratings on Google documentation pages come to mind.

user315433

But I don't know if anyone uses those.

Movie ratings on rotten tomatoes?

Only 652091 unique voters on SO in the past 90 days, vs 3748492 unique anon / low-rep voters

user315433

@Catija Tried it, was asked to login.

user315433

11:06 PM

I guess voting without registration is just not a common thing on the web.

That's 31852 low-rep voters and 3716640 anonymous voters

@Desire Huh, weird.

gah. sede is not doing copy-paste well these days

("unique" here is defined as "unique IP addresses", so probably more people)

11:38 PM

Sure do have great happy hours in here.

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