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Activity for matthewsnyderâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
A: For scripting what are the pros and cons of command line arguments versus capturing input at the start? I largely agree with existing answers, but wanted to add this: In many cases, there is no clear answer one way or the other. Take the program `wc` which counts characters and lines. Should the interface be `wc file.txt` or `cat file.txt | wc`? Compelling arguments can be made for the value of eith... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288671 |
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— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288671 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should I delete my trivial, lack-of-research question? I don't think the question is trivial. Maven is very complex and confusing at first. The documentation is also quite something. It's not easy to figure out what's going on unless you already know. Your question explains a valuable thing. My real concern is discoverability: It has nothing to do... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278190 |
To be fair, the "tutorial sites" are content farms that are SEO'd out the wazoo. They're not trying to promote knowledge, they are trying to get the most search hits with the least effort. The articles are by necessity always going for the whole headline. It's like the saying "all chiefs, no indians"... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278190 |
The quote reminded me of Wikipedia in the 2000's. This was exactly their problem, the biggest one by far, for many years. Back when you would get an F on your middle school homework for citing wikipedia, the early adopter experts (professors and other SMEs) were struggling to create "proper" content ... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288670 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Do we want a wiki (or similar) alongside Q&A? There are a few ways to understand "wiki". 1. Like wikipedia - an interlinked web of articles in a standardized format. 2. Like SO's documentation project or Github wikis - a stripped down wiki that is kind of sort of like a wiki but also weirdly shallow. 3. A post without answers, where the pos... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278211 |
I disagree that self-answering is "awkward". I get where you're coming from, but if you think about it, it's actually extremely natural. Self answering questions is one of the most popular teaching styles from K-12 to college and beyond. Everyone is familiar with it. The ancient Greeks used it to ela... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288668 |
SO had a neat thing where you could post your JS code as a https://jsfiddle.net/ and it would show up as interactive.
What is the feasibility of doing that, but for SQL, so that people can create tables and run queries? Obviously we would first have to find a program that does in browser SQL, but ... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288660 |
If this question reaches a conclusion, it would be good if the CD software could try to detect a user is trying to post tabular data (based on tags?), and display a link to here. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288668 |
Also, technically Markdown supports tables - SO is just not compliant and doesn't render them. But maybe CD could add support for rendering them? That would be pretty cool! (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288668 |
I know you're asking about spreadsheet, so SQL is kind of a weird option for you. But as a general solution to "tabular data", I think it's probably a great choice, so I included for other people who will see this answer later. You can always skip SQL and try CSV or Markdown. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288668 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Best practices for posting tabular data Some good options to consider: SQL `create table as` statements. This way you can define multiple tables all in one file, that can be copy/pasted easily. It also matches a very common thing: SQL exercises in things like Leetcode. CSV. It's a bit ugly, but it's very easy to work with it, and man... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #277930 |
Thanks for the edit, @#53177! I agree that this example is better.
Out of curiosity, why do you say the fuzzy wuzzy is problematic? Is it because `zz` is repetitive, and you could do a bad solution by merely counting chars? (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #277930 |
Post edited: I don't think all the history of the SO question helps and it distracts from the main point. I used a new example in case it's a copyright thing. IMO the new version is much shorter, but asks the same thing. |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288623 |
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— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288623 |
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| Edit | Post #288623 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
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A: What is a good modern language to use for a Business Rules project? SQL is the right tool for this job. You say the data is already in a database, probably a SQL database You don't have to deal with moving the data out of the database and "into a programming language" as you would with others This is an extremely common application of SQL, and you will find a... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Suggested Edit | Post #277930 |
Suggested edit: I don't think all the history of the SO question helps and it distracts from the main point. I used a new example in case it's a copyright thing. IMO the new version is much shorter, but asks the same thing. (more) |
helpful | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278366 |
The title says "combine the first character with another cell" but then in the example you are also doing case changes. The case change really doesn't have anything to do with the concatenation. IMO conflating two separate questions like this into one confuses things, and makes the question less usef... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288621 |
Another way to deal with the commas and dots is to use the https://help.libreoffice.org/6.0/en-US/text/scalc/01/func_numbervalue.html function, which lets you directly say what the digit and group separators are for that number. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288552 |
Wait, is this generating a requirements based on static analysis of the code? Wow, that definitely solves my problem, better! Thanks. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288490 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Queries to count points lying on arbitrary line Since you didn't mention memory, I'll assume O(N^2) is acceptable. Setup pseudocode: ``` for every p1, p2: ln = line(p1, p2) pointsonline[ln.m, ln.c] += [p1, p2] ``` If there are at least 2 colinear points on your line, you can get them in O(1) with `pointsonline[m, c]`. If not, yo... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288489 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
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A: How to prevent Visual Studio Code from opening an extra blank window? I was able to fix this by deleting the `/.config/VSCode/Workspaces` folder. To figure this out, I: Backed up my `VSCode` folder to `/var/tmp` Deleted `/.config/VSCode`, after this VS Code stopped opening two windows (and created a lot of new files in `VSCode/`) Used `fd` to make a list... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288201 |
It would be a lot easier to use something like Jinja for this, or even plain Python, or similar tools in other languages. `jq` can also do it. The advantage of these is that they are more flexible and better documented. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288488 |
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| Edit | Post #288488 |
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| Edit | Post #288488 |
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| Edit | Post #288488 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Question | — |
Automatically install all packages needed When running various Python scripts, I often need to do this annoying dance: ```shell $ python script.py ... ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'foo' $ pip install foo $ python script.py ... ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'bar' $ pip install bar $ python script.py ... ModuleNotFou... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288420 |
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— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288420 |
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— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288420 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
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A: When would one not want to return an interface? I think the main reason to do this is when the interfaces fail to account for some subtlety of the contract between caller and implementation. For example, let's pretend for a moment that your use case is a performance edge case, and `List` in particular can handle it due to a peculiarity of its i... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288419 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
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A: Why are commas not needed for modulo string formatting when printing? `%` is one of the oldest Python syntaxes for interpolating strings. It basically works like: ``` templatestring % datatuple ``` In fact, you can literally do that: ``` >>> s = "%d %d" >>> t = (1, 2) >>> s % t '1 2' ``` `templatestring` is the template, `datatuple` is the values to be... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288367 |
Hmm... That unfortunately didn't change anything, I tried both true and false. It wasn't set before. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288299 |
No, and yes alembic is probably the solution here :) I had forgotten about it. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288299 |
The test data is created ad-hoc and not managed.
For example, say I'm developing a microblogging webapp with users and tweets. I'll run it, create some users, post some test messages, and done: I have fairly realistic data in the database for testing features like a "feed" view.
I am looking fo... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288330 |
>Great answers both answer...
Yes, but IMO a great answer (generalized) is wasted on a specific troubleshooting question, because many people will ignore it because they think they have a different problem, even though the answer applies to them anyway.
My point is that generalized, great answe... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288304 |
I'd say I'm well aware of the duplicates. There is an antipattern on SO where a newbie asks "hey here's my code it's crashing why", and then the question gets closed as a duplicate, but the duplicate (for a newbie) is impossible to recognize as such. The close notice gives very little explanation, no... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288302 |
I'm on Arch Linux. This is likely not an issue that happens with a clean install, but something to do with my workspaces, or other configuration. I'm hoping someone might now where to look for the problem. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288330 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Are code troubleshooting posts allowed? These questions are very helpful to the person asking, and great for driving activity. I think it is good to allow these questions to be asked and to answer them. At the same time, they are not good for keeping on the site indefinitely. Many years ago, I did not understand what lambdas were and as... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288257 |
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— | 11 months ago |