As someone who works in IT, and specifically networking and security, the “trade subs” are honestly what I miss.most from reddit. Places like sysadmin, Cisco, Fortinet, talesfromtechsupport, etc.
Context is always useful, though. Because sometimes the person asking has gone down the wrong path and you could help them see the problem from a completely different angle.
Or maybe that context will let you know that yes, they have to use that ancient tech because that’s what they have to use at work and no they can’t install the latest fancy tech that does it so easily…
“Here is the answer, but why do you want that?” is a tolerable invocation of the X-Y problem.
“But why do you want that?” is derailing. It’s an effortless, all-purpose, I’m-so-clever bot post, and it drags a straightforward technical hurdle into some MacGuyver-ass lateral thinking puzzle.
I was once trying to incorporate 2D characters into Blender, with normals. There was no higher goal. That was, itself, the point. But instead I got a bunch of useless advice about how to model my simple example object, and snippy bullshit about doing things properly in 3D. Nobody had a damn thing to say about the discrepancy between the scanline renderer and the path-tracing renderer.
ChatGPT is give you general answer not the right ones from my experience
Sometimes you get the right answer if you fine tune your question…but sometimes don’t
Stack Overflow isn’t a tutor site. It’s a wiki. Its usefulness would plummet if duplicate questions are allowed, since that would scatter all the answers.
Then it should allow to connect duplicates as sub questions to main question which they keep as original, Wikipedia allow additions to articles after all, i mean if you comment your question under main question, who gonna look at that?
It’s also weird to me that people seem to primarily use it to ask questions (and get butthurt about getting duplicates). It’s really rare that I ever don’t find an answer there (which often is buried in responses, but still). Like I’ve virtually never been motivated to post there.
Yeah, this list of sites is making me think of asking for a book by loudly asking a library, a series of coffeeshops, a chud microbrewery, and an 11-year-old bully. Try quietly reading in the library first, I guess.
It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting the other person to understand that Google exists and that they can use it, too. Too many people refuse to put in any effort of their own and go ask someone instead.
IMHO in that situation answering isn’t even the right thing to do, since it encourages that behaviour and prevents the asker from learning to find out stuff for themselves. Something about fishing for hungry people or so…
When someone is genuinely stuck, doing research themselves allows the answerer not to go down the same dead ends, which saves time for both.
Honestly, yeah sometimes. It’s my emotional reflex to frustration that was programmed into me by my parents and I haven’t done enough cognitive behavioral therapy to undo it.
As someone who discovered my Type 1 ASD at 40, the gods know that I have a lot more work to do on my self-awareness and abrasiveness.
Not saying you should adopt this, but sometimes I read aloud what I type and imagine myself replying to a student in real life in the way of and with the tone that people sometimes have on StackOverflow.
My gut reaction at that point, usually, is to rewrite a response or post completely with a more generous dose of humility and compassion.
I don’t always get it right, but when I remember to do that and read replies, I like myself a little bit more.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and I realized that I talk to other people the way I talk to myself. This probably wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t so critical of myself.
I think I need to not only put in the effort to reread the things I write when communicating with others, but also to just be kinder to myself in my internal monologue.
I spend too much time being frustrated inside my own head, and that makes it easy to use that same tone when I’m interacting with other people.
Thanks for sharing your advice. I think verbalizing my thoughts the way you suggested will be really helpful.
If it’s on Stack Exchange, you can help us keep the community decent by assuming good faith and being patient with newcomers. Yes, it’s frustrating. And yeah, sometimes, it’s basically impossible to avoid sarcasm and scorn, just like how HN sometimes needs to be sneered at, but we can still strive for a maximum of civility.
If all else fails, just remember: you’re not on Philosophy SE or any of the religious communities, it’s just a computer question, and it can be answered without devolving into an opinion war. Pat yourself on the back for being a “schmott guy!” and write a polite answer that hopefully the newbies will grok. Be respectful of plural perspectives; it’s a feature that a question may have multiple well-liked answers.
Simultaneously the worst and funniest feeling, is searching for a solution and most of the responses/results are to go search for it. If your answer is that searching for an answer is an easy and quick solution, you contribute to disproving yourself.
Peple misunderstand “Closed as duplicate” as an insult, when it’s just the hint to look at the provided link. If you didn’t find the answer previously, this just means there are multiple ways to express the problem, which use different words and thus don’t all find the same google result.
That’s fair, but if you edit the question to explain how it’s different (without which, how could anyone even answer your question?), it can be (and often is) reopened.
Some times the question has no semblance at all. Other times the answer has no semblance at all. Some times there’s no answer at all. And obviously, modern SO is full of people that will just post a ridiculously incorrect answer. There is a wide variety of possibilities!
I remember being very surprised as a I followed one of those links and got the answer I needed. But I don’t remember exactly when.
They also changed the wording from “closed” to “on hold” years ago, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the people complaining about the site take any notice.
Yeah this is one of the main reasons why Stackoverflow’s question closing policies are bullshit. We’re going to close the question so nobody can answer it… but they can still upvote it and it will still be ranked highly on Google!
Bunch of idiots.
You know the SO Devs actually tried to improve this a while ago - I think you would be able to reopen your question once or something. Of course the power-hungry mods hated that idea and the abandoned it.
At this point it’s unfixable. They depend on their unpaid mods and they’ve already attracted the sort of people you absolutely don’t want to moderate a site.
The only hack I’ve found is that if your question gets downvoted/closed you are allowed to delete it, wait half an hour and ask it again. Much better odds of success than editing the question.
You can’t. The kinds of people who are nominated are the wrong kinds of people. I’ve participated in many SO elections and none of the candidates ever mention any of these issues.
The question is about “superpermutations”. The permutations of 1 and 2 are “12” and “21”. A “superpermutation” would be “1221”. It contains the numbers 1 and 2 as well as all permutations of 1 and 2. However “121” is also a superpermutation of 1 and 2. It also contains “12” and “21” and it’s shorter than “1221”.
The problem is finding the shortest superpermutation. Stand-up Maths has a video where he interviews a mathematician that published Anonymous’ solution. So yes, there is a math paper where the main author is “Anonymous 4chan Poster”.
I seriously could not believe what I was watching when I got to that part. I would start the next one thinking “there is no way… Yep, again”. How did the director even convince people to do it?
As annoying as it was to slog through the episodes (I think I went through 5 of them before realizing I wasn’t missing much skipping the other three), there is something to be said about how much it captures that feeling of uselessness that Kyo and Yuki have. Kyo begins to realize each time and Yuki is forced to be aware through each repetition. Haruhi is so powerful that she creates an endless time loop, that was both amazing and terrifying.
She can’t interfere, her job is to monitor and observe and only stop Haruhi if she’s going to endanger the universe. So even with the ability to stop her, she can’t do anything by the code of her position.
Thats the thing, she does interfere, but just enough that it keeps happening. 100% no interference would be not even telling them that there is a loop going on when they try to find out
most people don’t know how to properly formulate questions and it shows. 90% of new questions on SO are just bottom barrel which is why the rules are so strict about quality.
Absolutely true, but it’s also more difficult to ask a good question when you don’t know anything about what you’re asking.
People who know a lot about a topic can ask very good questions about that topic.
The problem I see with most questions people post online is that they make too many assumptions that their audience will will magically understand the context of their question.
Good questions require relevant context.
Determining relevancy requires expertise.
Expertise comes from experience.
No matter how many questions you ask and answers you get you’ll never “understand” something until you do it.
Instead of asking questions like “How do I do X?” people should be asking “I’m trying to accomplish X, I’ve tried Y, but I’m encountering Z. How could I resolve this?”
I guess my rule is that you should never ask someone a question without first trying to answer it yourself.
100% agree, and the new question page on SO makes most of those points but generally people dont read it. It would be kinda nice if they integrated an LLM to double check if questions need improvement before they get submitted.
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