@animuson It might be a little bit, for folks who are new to the site.
Anonymous
"People on this site think being polite is garbage?!"
Anonymous
@Chris I now think the bounty was a poor choice. I'd seen a couple of questions about this, but I just looked at the related questions and realized there were several more that I missed. The point I was making had already been made, and the subject has been talked about a lot. It might be appropriate to start a new discussion on this, with some fresh points, but just reopening that old one now seems silly.
On second thought, I don't have much to write about, and writing a book is a lot of work. I might do one of those endorsements/reviews that goes on the rear cover of someone else's book, though.
We're excited to announce a beta of our new iPad app, StackTrace.
With StackTrace, we have taken a unique approach to consuming Stack Overflow content. Instead of focusing on finding answers to your current problems we're tailoring the experience for reading and discovery. There is significant...
It feels like nothing more than an advertisement to me, albeit an on-topic one
1 hour later…
Anonymous
2:38 AM
If anyone with 10k on meta wants to do me a favour, I'd like to know the GUIDs of the latest revisions of thesetwo deleted posts.
Thanks for the info. If you're wondering, I was curious because I'm tired of having to deal with my own data and just want to push it all out into the Internet and only pull down what I need. My Internet connection speed is way too slow for that, unfortunately, and I was wondering if others were in roughly the same boat.
@jadarnel27 In a nutshell, I don't want to have to worry about backing up my personal data and filling up my hard drive, etc. etc. Others are much better at dealing with that sort of thing, especially at scale. If I could just shove all of my files out into "the cloud" and only pull down what I needed at any particular time, it would be perfect. I would also be able to get at anything I needed from anywhere (in theory). Something along the lines of Apple's iCloud or Dropbox, but better.
@cdeszaq my conclusion was that it's just not feasible on any sort of reasonable scale. I run RAID1 at home with a snapshot archive and a remote (spinning) backup+archive at my parents with whom I have a reciprocal arrangement. Overnight syncs almost always are sufficient to keep this up to date
I was just in CVS looking for a mechanical pencil. I spent like 10 minutes looking at packages before I realized that I knew little about the pencils themselves. I pulled out my iPhone and started scanning the pencils and reading amazon reviews.
@Moshe Were you looking for a particularly nice one? In my experience, they are mostly "ok" but all break eventually, so you are just as well off getting the cheaper ones
Although there's nothing wrong with being thorough
Actually, I hate writing with thin pencils because my hand begins to hurt. And quite frankly, the yellow ones that are designed to look "real" are manufactured poorly, from what I've seen.
Also, I'm awesome because I have cookie monster on the front page of my blog.
@Moshe Haha, yes. I used to travel alot for my last job, and I remember paying $8 or so for a average sized sandwich (in an airport). I wanna say I was in DC that time.
@Moshe Yeah, these are definitely not high quality by any means (just a basic 70-sheet, metal spiral), but they get the job done.
Once I was done with school and didn't have to bring paper around with me as much I switched to just using printer paper (or whatever white space I could find to scratch / draw on, really)
@Moshe I do like it. Fun little songs make everything easier to remember. And you have to use the Cookie Monster voice when you sing it in your head too.
@awoodland I do realize you're joking, but from Wikipedia: "CVS Pharmacy used to be a subsidiary of Melville Corporation, where its full name was initially Consumer Value Stores. Melville later changed its name to CVS Corporation in 1996, after Melville sold off all of its non-pharmacy stores. Former CEO Tom Ryan has said he now considers 'CVS' to stand for 'Customer, Value, and Service.'"
Apparently CVS is also a faux acronym in some areas for ConVenience Store.
Haha, thanks @TRiG. That's what I linked to. I have an unhealthy obsession with xkcd.com, so I try to avoid one-boxing it every time I remember a relevant comic. Mostly because I would do it all the time =P
@TRiG Since I've been using chat it's been the squeek...I find it semi-subtle, and sufficiently different from other notifications that I can easily identify it.
<rant> This guy that I work with excessively uses ellipses in e-mails. Example "I was just wondering...why can't we do X...? Do you know what I mean...?" That gets on my nerves for some reason </rant>
@Incognito Ah, you mean the pending suggested edit? Copying it over into the question with a note about how it came from a suggested edit on the answer seems safe enough.
Oh, wait, never mind
I see he attempted to edit a new answer into the existing one.
Could maybe reject it with a custom reason explaining that it should be added as a new answer...although in that case the OP might not realize what happened.
@Incognito If you ask on EL&U, you'll see very little love for Strunk & White.
Okay. There's a discussion of grammer in chat.meta.SO. There's a discussion of Christian theology in chat.EL&U. I'm off to check what's going on in chat.Christianity.
@Incognito Off hand. I'm not sure. One of the best-known is Fowler's Modern English Usage. I grew up on an annonymous book published by the Reader's Digest, called The Right Word at the Right Time. And then there's the manual for clarity, instructing people how to avoid jargon, called The Complete Plain Words.
Of those, the only one I know well enough to recommend is the RD one, which is well-written and straightforward.
@Incognito Well, linguistics is a hobby of mine (want a lecture on why Nicaraguan Sign Language is of special importance?). Your interests may be different. I suspect that Plain Words might be the best bet, but I'm not actually familliar with that book.
@jadarnel27 Ok, one more comment about this and I'm done. He just tried to put up an emergency status message on one of our websites that consisted of this:
@jadarnel27 "Dear Sir or Madam, it looks like your <website/email> system has been compromised by an illiterate trouble maker. "<Quotation>" is such low quality that I can see no more plausible explanation for such an oversight from a respectable company like <company name>"
Add an additional form of "I agree" besides starring or pinning (since pinning is restricted to a smaller subset to begin with) or something that we can use to not clog up the right hand star bar.
This is because sometimes you want to say "I agree" but you don't want to star it because ... let's...
@jadarnel27 I'm not so sure. To me, the Star is akin to Favorite on a question (same icon even). What is missing is the "I agree" sentiment of an up-vote on a question/answer or the additional "I like this" on a comment (particularly the entertaining ones)
Of course, in Chat there can be different semantics, but I think having consistency is critical. One thing that Chat could do, since it has the notion of an important transcript, is essentially "promote" posts that have enough "up-votes", giving a less nuclear option for agreement.
Of course, altering the star semantics to do that would cover that same base, but losing the current star behavior is not desirable either.
@awoodland I almost never use it. I mostly treat Chat as a "3rd place" to hang with other people of similar interests, so the transcript doesn't do much for me. The more "solve a problem" oriented rooms may work differently.
My interest in linguistics was sparked by John McWhorter's popular book The Power of Babel, which, in its section on creoles, includes a small piece on Nicaraguan Sign Language, which really sparked my imagination.
According to that book, it's the only language which has been, in historical time...
@awoodland Nicaragua had a scattered rural population and a culture whereby having a disabled family member was considered shameful, so they were hidden away. Therefore, there was no Deaf community, and therefore no sign language.
There were "home sign" systems, so deaf people could communicate with members of their own families. Each one was different; none was a full language.
And then a school for the deaf was established. The school taught oralism (speech and lip-reading), not a sign language. But it didn't stop students signing if they wanted to.
And so a language was born.
(It's not quite as simple as that, of course, but that's the basic summary.)
Someone in the office recommended a restaurant called Latitude 43 for lunch. While everybody looked up its location and menu, I looked up whether or not it's actually on the 43rd parallel. It is not. If we eat there, I will have questions.
@Incognito But to answer this question, some people who post really terrible SO questions end up getting banned from asking further questions without losing the rest of their privileges. Some of them end up asking their questions on MSO in the hopes that we'll be so eager to migrate that we won't notice that they're trying to evade their bans.
@animuson Even still, I think the prevailing sentiment on MSO is to just close it and walk away. Migrations between main sites are common, but I don't think Meta sites bother as much.
I was looking at the SO source code to see how they are doing the div on the right side bar that changes from relative to fixed position.
I saw that the SO JS library is pretty much all included into the page with this code below...
My question is how is the code included like this, is this s...
For automated testing of web project we use Hudson, PHPUnit, and Selenium. The results of the build are stored in the JUnit XML format.
Unfortunately when I try to include generation of reports using the Hudson Publish JUnit test result report option, the build finishes with Failed status.
Bel...
How many people actually review posts? It seems like every time I look there's another boat load of posts in there. I mean, it only takes 2 people to mark it reviewed. Are there really that few people that browse them?
In spite of the fact that Jeff was against the idea of migrating from MSO to SO it would appear that it is now possible to do so since this question was.
However, the "migrated from" footer is not there. To get the link that shows the question on MSO I had to hand-craft the URL with the ?noredi...
Usually in first answers or late answers. First questions tend to already get covered by users viewing the questions. So by the time I see them all I'm doing is clicking a button, ya know? Kinda boring.
Anonymous
Ah, that makes sense. I've found the low-quality posts tab in particular to be very depressing; it rarely feels like I'm actually making a difference. (Often the posts are so bad [even when edited] that nobody cares about them, or it's a false positive.)
@animuson Unfortunately, that is a css background image with no form of alternate text, so anyone who can't see that (or read it) is left a bit out in the cold
@Chris Much of the follow-up article can be applied to contract development work as well as design work. (and likely any problem-solving contract work, really)
@Chris The only instance I can think of where that would happen would be if the art was fully "analogue" and was never composited with other effects. In that case, about all you could get would be a high-res scan, but it would take one hell of an artist for me to be OK with that set-up.
Why don't we have a Tab that shows only questions for our favorite tags, showing recent first? I keep having to scroll down the page to find the questions I'm interested in.
It'd be like the Unanswered Questions -> My Tags tab, but for all questions with my favorite tags.
After some time using StackOverflow it became clearly that it's difficult to browse the tremendous amount of questions that users posts.
The main reason for this is because there are so many posts tagged with subjects that are not interesting to me and filtering all those questions takes lots of...
At the moment, when I click on "Newest Questions", those questions with a tag matching ANY one of my favourites are highlighted. However, that amounts only to 3 to 6 questions out of 30 in my case (sorry, I'm just not a generalist). Rather than have to add ALL of my favourite tags with "OR" manua...
I spend a lot of time bouncing around from one site to another to another as I'm interested in the topics they have to offer. As stack exchange continues to grow, and as I continue to find more and more sites that interest me. Because I don't always have the time to go to each site to see what in...