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  • Ranking players depending on decision making during a game

    - by tabchas
    How would I go about a ranking system for players that play a game? Basically, looking at video games, players throughout the game make critical decisions that ultimately impact the end game result. Is there a way or how would I go about a way to translate some of those factors (leveling up certain skills, purchasing certain items, etc.) into something like a curve that can be plotted on a graph? This game that I would like to implement this is League of Legends. Example: Player is Level 1 in the beginning. Gets a kill very early in the game (he gets gold because of the kill and it increases his "power curve"), and purchases attack damage (gives him more damage which also increases his "power curve". However, the player that he killed (Player 2), buys armor (counters attack damage). This slightly increases Player 2's own power curve, and reduces Player 1's power curve. There's many factors I would like to take into account. These relative factors (example: BECAUSE Player 2 built armor, and I am mainly attack damage, it lowers my OWN power curve) seem the hardest to implement. My question is this: Is there a certain way to approach this task? Are there similar theoretical concepts behind ranking systems that I should read up on? I've seen the ELO system, but it doesn't seem what I want since it simply takes into account wins and losses.

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  • How should I describe the process of learning someone else's code? (In an invoicing situation.)

    - by MattyG
    I have a contract to upgrade some in-house software for a large company. The company has requested multiple feature additions and a few bug fixes. This is my first freelance style job. First, I needed to become familiar with how the application worked - I learnt it as if I was a user. Next, I had to learn how the software worked. I started with broad concepts, and then narrowed down into necessary detail before working on each bug fix and feature. At least at the start of the project, it took me a lot longer to learn the existing code than it did to write the additional features. How can I describe the process of learning the existing code on the invoice? (This part of the company usually does things in-house, so doesn't have much experience dealing with software contractors like me, and I fear they may not understand the overhead of learning someone else's code). I don't want to just tack the learning time onto the actual feature upgrade, because in some cases this would make a 'simple task' look like it took me way too long. I want break the invoice into relevant steps, and communicate that I'm charging for the large overhead of learning someone else's code before being able to add my own to it. Is there a standard way of describing this sort of activity when billing for a job?

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  • Can I minify Javascript that requires copyright notice?

    - by Nathan Long
    I guess this is actually a legal question, but it relates to software. I'm about to include a JS plugin in a project. The comments include: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. Is using this in my web site "redistribution?" If I minify this to conserve bandwidth, I assume it will strip all comments. If the answer to #1 is yes, doesn't that imply I'm legally not allowed to minify it? (That would stink, since I was planning to auto-minify all JS as part of the deploy process.)

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  • Pros and Cons of Session Replication

    - by techsjs2012
    Do I really need Session Replication? I am working on a number of web projects for a firm. Most of the projects are about one or two pages of input and then doing a save to a mysql database. Very Basic projects. My SA's are pushing to try to get session replication working in JBoss but I don't really see any need for it and all of its overhead. We need load balancing and clustering so if the server does go down we can move the new requests to the backup service but I am not to big in session replication. This is very low volume projects. In my eyes what is the odds of a user being in the project as the server goes down on the one or two pages. I need to convince the SAs that session replication is an un-necessary complication in this instance. I am looking for pros and cons of session replication so that I can better structure my argument.

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  • Is individual code ownership important?

    - by Jim Puls
    I'm in the midst of an argument with some coworkers over whether team ownership of the entire codebase is better than individual ownership of components of it. I'm a huge proponent of assigning every member of the team a roughly equal share of the codebase. It lets people take pride in their creation, gives the bug screeners an obvious first place to assign incoming tickets, and helps to alleviate "broken window syndrome". It also concentrates knowledge of specific functionality with one (or two) team members making bug fixes much easier. Most of all, it puts the final say on major decisions with one person who has a lot of input instead of with a committee. I'm not advocating for requiring permission if somebody else wants to change your code; maybe have the code review always be to the owner, sure. Nor am I suggesting building knowledge silos: there should be nothing exclusive about this ownership. But when suggesting this to my coworkers, I got a ton of pushback, certainly much more than I expected. So I ask the community: what are your opinions on working with a team on a large codebase? Is there something I'm missing about vigilantly maintaining collective ownership?

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  • How to cut the line between quality and time?

    - by m3th0dman
    On one hand, I have been taught by various software engineering books ([1] as example) that my job as a programmer is to make the best possible software: great design, flexibility, to be easily maintained etc. One the other hand although I realize that I actually write software for money and not for entertainment, although is very nice to write good code and plan ahead and refactor after writing and ... I wonder if it is always best for the business (after all we should be responsible). Is the business always benefiting from a best code? Maybe I'm over-engineering something, and it's not always useful? So how should I know when to stop in the process to achieving the best possible code? I am sure that experience is something that makes a difference here, but I believe this cannot be the only answer. [1] Uncle Bob's in Clean Code says at page 6 about the fact that: They [managers] may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that’s their job. It’s your job to defend the code with equal passion.

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  • I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

    - by tieTYT
    My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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  • Should a primary key be immutable?

    - by Vincent Malgrat
    A recent question on stackoverflow provoked a discussion about the immutability of primary keys. I had thought that it was a kind of rule that primary keys should be immutable. If there is a chance that some day a primary key would be updated, I thought you should use a surrogate key. However it is not in the SQL standard and some RDBMS' "cascade update" feature allows a primary key to change. So my question is: is it still a bad practice to have a primary key that may change ? What are the cons, if any, of having a mutable primary key ?

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  • in memory datastore in haskell

    - by Simon
    I want to implement an in memory datastore for a web service in Haskell. I want to run transactions in the stm monad. When I google hash table steam Haskell I only get this: Data. BTree. HashTable. STM. The module name and complexities suggest that this is implemented as a tree. I would think that an array would be more efficient for mutable hash tables. Is there a reason to avoid using an array for an STM hashtable? Do I gain anything with this stem hash table or should I just use a steam ref to an IntMap?

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  • Catching typos or other errors in web-based scripting languages

    - by foreyez
    Hi, My background is mainly strongly typed languages (java, c++, c#). Having recently gotten back to a bit of javascript, I found it a bit annoying that if I misspell something by accident (for example I'll type 'myvar' instead of 'myVar') my entire script crashes. The browser itself most of the time doesn't even tell me I have an error, my program will just be blank, etc. Then I have to hunt down my code line by line and find the error which is very time consuming. In the languages I am used to the compiler lets me know if I made a typo. My question to you is, how do you overcome this issue in scripting (javascript)? Can you give me some tips? (this question is mainly aimed at people that have also come from a strongly typed language). Note: I mainly use the terminal/VIM ... this is mainly b/c I like terminal and I SSH alot too

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  • How to handle monetary values in PHP and MySql?

    - by Songo
    I've inherited a huge pile of legacy code written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. The thing I noticed is that the application uses doubles for storage and manipulation of data. Now I came across of numerous posts mentioning how double are not suited for monetary operations because of the rounding errors. However, I have yet to come across a complete solution to how monetary values should be handled in PHP code and stored in a MySQL database. Is there a best practice when it comes to handling money specifically in PHP? Things I'm looking for are: How should the data be stored in the database? column type? size? How should the data be handling in normal addition, subtraction. multiplication or division? When should I round the values? How much rounding is acceptable if any? Is there a difference between handling large monetary values and low ones? Note: A VERY simplified sample code of how I might encounter money values in everyday life: $a= $_POST['price_in_dollars']; //-->(ex: 25.06) will be read as a string should it be cast to double? $b= $_POST['discount_rate'];//-->(ex: 0.35) value will always be less than 1 $valueToBeStored= $a * $b; //--> any hint here is welcomed $valueFromDatabase= $row['price']; //--> price column in database could be double, decimal,...etc. $priceToPrint=$valueFromDatabase * 0.25; //again cast needed or not? I hope you use this sample code as a means to bring out more use cases and not to take it literally of course. Bonus Question If I'm to use an ORM such as Doctrine or PROPEL, how different will it be to use money in my code.

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  • String Formatting with concatenation or substitution

    - by Davio
    This is a question about preferences. Assume a programming language offers these two options to make a string with some variables: "Hello, my name is ". name ." and I'm ". age ." years old." StringFormat("Hello, my name is $0 and I'm $1 years old.", name, age) Which do you prefer and why? I have found myself using both without any clear reason to pick either. Considering micro-optimizations is not within the scope of this question. Localization has been mentioned as a reason to go with option #2 and I think it's a very valid reason and deserves to be mentioned here. However, would opinions differ based on aesthetic viewpoints?

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  • As an IT contractor, is it better to be a specialist or a jack-of-all-trades? [on hold]

    - by alimac83
    I've just entered the contracting market as a web developer and I've having a tough time figuring out how to plan for the future. Several developers I've worked with in the past have told me to become a specialist in one technology/area in order to secure the big contracts. However I've also heard from other sources that it's better to spread your expertise so that you're not limited in the types of work you can go for. Personally I've pretty much been involved in both back and front-end technologies during the course of my career, with slight variations in the weighting of each depending on the job. I don't really have a favourite - I enjoy it all. My question is mainly to the experienced contractors though: Do you feel specialising has helped your career or is it better to know a bit of everything? Thanks

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  • Understanding the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL)

    - by J.r. Hounddog
    I'm looking at using a few open source products in a commercial software application I'm working on. One of them is licensed under MIT, which I understand as allowing commercial software linking. However, the other open source product is licensed under MS-PL but I don't understand if that license is fully compatible with commercial software. So the question is, can I use MS-PL licensed OSS in a commercial/proprietary/for-sale application? Thanks.

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  • How to market R at your institute?

    - by ran2
    Okay, I admit there are lots of threads R vs. something. The strengths of R are obvious to most people here. Still though advertising R in an environment that has been preferring various kinds of other software for quite some time is not easy. Moreover, even in the limited time I´ve been dealing with R, it improved so dramatically that I would mention things among its strengths that I would not have listed when I started my personal R-evolution. So, what I am trying to do here is to collect the most recent and striking arguments that can be put in nutshell and be presented easily. What I got on my list so far is: the Springer useR series ggplot2 and its documentation open source CRAN Rapache rcpp rsocket What can you add to this list? SO threads are also very welcome as answers. EDIT: so far, though indeed very helpful, most answers are arguments (pros) why one would want to use R. Do you have some specific hints that I could include in some kind of overview presentation? EDIT2: I wanted to add this link about R's future to the list...

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  • Does anyone do hardware benchmarks on compiling code?

    - by Colen
    I've seen a bunch of sites that benchmark new hardware on gaming performance, zipping some files, encoding a movie, or whatever. Are there any that test the impact of new hardware (like SSDs, new CPUs, RAM speeds, or whatever) on compile and link speeds, either linux or windows? It'd be really good to find out what mattered the most for compile speed and be able to focus on that, instead of just extrapolating from other benchmarks.

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  • How do I get others to see past my prior inexperience?

    - by Kevin
    My core question is how do I proceed from the following predicament. I will be honest with you, I wasted my College Experience. I slacked off and didn't take any of my comp sci classes that seriously, somehow i still got out with a 3.25 GPA. But truth be told I learned nothing. I befriended most of my professors who went pretty lenient on me in terms of grading. However, I basically came out of College knowing how to program a simple calculator in VB.Net. I was (to my great surprise) hired by a very large respected company in Denver as a Junior developer. Well the long and the short of it is that I knew so little about programming that I quickly became the office pariah and was almost fired due to my incompetence. It has been 8 months now and I feel I have learned some basic things and I am not as picked on as I used to be by the other developers. However, everyone hates me and the first few months have given the other developers a horrible perception of me. I am no longer afraid of code or learning, but I have put my self in the precarious position of being the scapegoat of our department. I hate going to work every day because no one there is my friend and pretty much everyone is hostile to me. What should I do? Any advice?

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  • Execute a Managed bean from a JSF view in WEB-INF folder

    - by JonathanVila
    We are initiating in Spring + Primefaces development and the first problem we have encountered is about storing the xhtml pages into the WEB-INF folder. When we use a faces form in a view located inside the WEB-INF folder, then the commandButton does not execute the managed bean method. Our bean : In fact we think the problem is that with JSF , the pages are rendered using a link to the same page as the action of the form, so if the page is located in WEB-INF it is not public accessible. We know that having all our xhtml views in the web folder instead of WEB-INF actually solves the issue, but we would like to store that pages into WEB-INF. Thank you.

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  • Which pattern is best for large project

    - by shamim
    I have several years of software development experience, but I am not a keen and adroit programmer, to perform better I need helping hands. Recently I engaged in an ERP project. For this project want a very effective structure, which will be easily maintainable and have no compromise about performance issue. Below structures are now present in my old projects. Entity Layer BusinessLogic Layer. DataLogic Layer UI Layer. Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. For my new project want to change my project structure, I want to follow below steps: Core Layer(common) BLL DAL Model UI Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. Though goggling some initial type question’s are obscure to me, they are : For new project want to use Entity framework, is it a good idea? Will it increase my project performance? Will it more maintainable than previous structure? Entity Framework core disadvantages/benefits are? For my project need help to select best structure. Will my new structure be better than the old one?

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  • How ad retargeting works?

    - by Bojan Babic
    Recently, I read that Facebook ads are moving towards retargeting and got interested deeper into subject. Essentially, retargeting is technique advertisers use that tracks purchase intent by putting cookies into your browser and when you visit another website within ad network you will see ad for item you "wanted to buy". In order this to for, both publisher and advertiser need to work together. Publisher needs add couple of lines of javascript and publisher need to be able to read this info across sites. In most cases, javascript inserts iframe from adnetwork domain. Iframe script sets cookies for both host domain and remote adnetwork domain. However, Same Origin policy do not let iframes read/set content from parent domain. Is there something I'm missing here? Can someone explain how this technique actually works?

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  • Some hint to program a webservice "by subscription"

    - by Eagle
    I have some web sites programmed, I know to do it with python and PHP basically. Normally they are simple web sites, but now I want to provide REST web services but only for allowed users (allowed by me). I saw that a lot of services uses the "KEY" and "SECRET_KEY" concepts, which seems to be what I need (if I understand it right). My suppositions are: If I only do a GET service to retrieve, e.g., all my clients, without anymore, anyone can retrieve my clients without limitations. I will need some KEY generator to provide keys for my allowed users, so they can use my webservices. Only with a KEY is not enough: someone can steal a KEY and supplant my user (and this is the reason because exists a SECRET_KEY, right?). If all this is right, how can I make/use a system like that in my web services? Some open source example? Or maybe there are another easy solutions I'm not considering? My objective is to allow some users to use my web services.

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  • Architecture for a site "blog"/"news reel"

    - by DavidScherer
    I really don't want to undertake handling blog/news posts within a site I'm working on and would much rather use some other software that's fairly bare-bones that will manage the posts and then I can just pull posts from the DB or an API. Does anyone have any experience with a nice, lightweight OS Blog type software that has either an API or is basic enough to simply pull Data from the database? I really only need the software for managing, I plan to display all the posts programatically through MVC.

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  • Dependency injection: How to sell it

    - by Mel
    Let it be known that I am a big fan of dependency injection (DI) and automated testing. I could talk all day about it. Background Recently, our team just got this big project that is to built from scratch. It is a strategic application with complex business requirements. Of course, I wanted it to be nice and clean, which for me meant: maintainable and testable. So I wanted to use DI. Resistance The problem was in our team, DI is taboo. It has been brought up a few times, but the gods do not approve. But that did not discourage me. My Move This may sound weird but third-party libraries are usually not approved by our architect team (think: "thou shalt not speak of Unity, Ninject, NHibernate, Moq or NUnit, lest I cut your finger"). So instead of using an established DI container, I wrote an extremely simple container. It basically wired up all your dependencies on startup, injects any dependencies (constructor/property) and disposed any disposable objects at the end of the web request. It was extremely lightweight and just did what we needed. And then I asked them to review it. The Response Well, to make it short. I was met with heavy resistance. The main argument was, "We don't need to add this layer of complexity to an already complex project". Also, "It's not like we will be plugging in different implementations of components". And "We want to keep it simple, if possible just stuff everything into one assembly. DI is an uneeded complexity with no benefit". Finally, My Question How would you handle my situation? I am not good in presenting my ideas, and I would like to know how people would present their argument. Of course, I am assuming that like me, you prefer to use DI. If you don't agree, please do say why so I can see the other side of the coin. It would be really interesting to see the point of view of someone who disagrees. Update Thank you for everyone's answers. It really puts things into perspective. It's nice enough to have another set of eyes to give you feedback, fifteen is really awesome! This are really great answers and helped me see the issue from different sides, but I can only choose one answer, so I will just pick the top voted one. Thanks everyone for taking the time to answer. I have decided that it is probably not the best time to implement DI, and we are not ready for it. Instead, I will concentrate my efforts on making the design testable and attempt to present automated unit testing. I am aware that writing tests is additional overhead and if ever it is decided that the additional overhead is not worth it, personally I would still see it as a win situation since the design is still testable. And if ever testing or DI is a choice in future, the design can easily handle it.

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  • What to do when you inherit an unmaintainable codebase?

    - by GordonM
    I'm currently working at a company with 2 other PHP developers aside from me, and 1 junior developer. The senior developer who originally built the system we're all working on has resigned and will only be here for a matter of weeks. The other developer, who is the only other guy who knows anything about the system, is unhappy here and is looking for a new job. I'm very real danger of being left behind as the only experienced developer on this codebase. Since I've joined this company I've tried to push for better coding standards, project documentation, etc and I do think I've made some headway, but the vast majority of the code is simply unmaintainable and uncommented. A lot of this has to do with the need to get things done fast at points in the project before I joined, but now the technical debt is enormous, even with the two developers who do understand the system on board. Without them, it will simply be impossible to do anything with it. The senior developer is working on trying to at least comment all his code before he leaves but I think the codebase is simply too vast to properly document in the remaining time. Besides, when he does comment it still doesn't make things as clear as it could. If the system was better organized and documented I could probably start refactoring it incrementally, but the whole thing is so tightly coupled that it's very difficult to make any changes in one module without having unintended knock-on effects in other modules. Naturally, there's no unit tests either, and I honestly don't think this codebase could possibly be unit tested anyway given how it's implemented. There also never seems to be enough time to get things done even with 3 developers and 1 junior developer. With one developer and one junior, neither of which had significant input into the early design of the system, I don't see how we could possibly get anything done with keeping the current system working, implementing new features as needed and developing a replacement for the current codebase that is better organized. Is there an approach I can take to cope with this situation, or should I be getting my own CV in order as well at this point? If it was just me and the junior designer who would be left I'd go for the latter option almost without question. However, there's a team of front-end developers and content managers as well, and I'm worried what would become of them if I left and put them in a position where there would be no developers at all. The department might just be closed down altogether under such circumstances, and then I'd have their unemployment on my conscience as well!

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  • How to proceed when a bug in open source libraries is suspected?

    - by Suma
    We are using some open source libraries in our projects. Sometimes there are some issues found in some of them (most likely library bugs, but it may also be a wrong usage from our side, especially when sometimes documentation is not exactly 100 % complete). As the libraries are often quite complex, debugging them to pinpoint the source of the problem is sometimes quite hard. Can you help me to summarize what other options are there and how to exactly proceed with them? I have just recently hit some strange problems when using TCMalloc (Google scalable memory allocator) on Windows, so I would most welcome answers which would apply to this particular library, but more general answers are good as well. 1) Ask the maintainer/owner of the project for assistance. How can this be done? 2) Hire someone to identify and fix the issue. How to do this? How can I find someone with enough expertise in some particular library? ... any other options?

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