๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 46056 points ยท Posted at 15:30:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sac_boy ยท 5912 points ยท Posted at 17:08:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would anybody want to do A?" asks another commenter with clockwork inevitability, without knowing any of your circumstances or constraints and just assuming you are an idiot.
"It's 2018, nobody uses A," answers another commenter smugly, the first year of his CS degree almost over.
When I'm answering question on StackOverflow I often answer like "I would try to avoid doing A, but here's how I would do it if I had no choice"--at least it's constructive. I don't know about any of you but my entire programming career has been 90% making things work under (apparently) bizarre constraints or combinations of technologies that apparently nobody has ever had to try before, so I have a lot of time and pity for the poor souls asking these kinds of questions.
phedre ยท 747 points ยท Posted at 18:11:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would anybody want to do A?" asks another commenter with clockwork inevitability
This one. This pisses me off SO FUCKING MUCH. We don't all have green fields to play in, with full access to the hardware/software we need to work with, and full autonomy to make changes. Believe me when I ask a question about how to do A and it looks like something only an idiot would do, it's because I'm working around constraints I'd MUCH rather not have. I often have weird requirements ("must work in X edge case"), in weird environments (hardened, custom Windows install, custom IE install), with weird restrictions (can't have root/admin access, can't mount drives, can't remote desktop in) to the point where it's hard not to scream sometimes.
I'd love to have full root access/control over every software and hardware environment I work on, but that just isn't the reality of life for a lot of developers.
vita10gy ยท 266 points ยท Posted at 18:35:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Agreed. The problem with things like S/O is that the X/Y problem is bound to be everywhere. The vets asking "rock and hard place" questions are indistinguishable from the noob that knows so little he's not even sure what to ask.
So it can be helpful to say "well, you shouldn't be using a to import b from c, you should just use d if possible, but [answer on how to use a]" (If nothing else, for the next person to find this.)
It's almost like websites such as stack overflow benefit from individuals providing as much relevant information as possible in good faith instead of trying to out-smug each other. PEBKAC. And with that I begin to wonder if the entire debate surrounding the website is just one giant X/Y problem.
[deleted] ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 21:11:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A lot of the people going, "Oh god, why would you do A?" Are doing so because they have no idea, no idea how to start, and think it's a really bad idea and should be avoided.
But, because of constraints x,y,z,a,b,c Guess which particular rabbit hole you may be forced down.
The annoying thing is that if someone wanted to know how to do Y they would have asked. Who cares if they are a noob? People should just answer the question.
NanoPish ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 21:40:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I get your point but the problem is that noobs will search for the same X thing and a lot of them want to do Y
But that's the whole point of the X Y problems. They don't want to do Y, they want to do X, they just decided Y was how, and can't figure out some hurdle Y threw up.
Is reading between the lines of someone's coding question really the best way to teach them proper technique? Shouldn't they learn that on their own or in a classroom?
Aetol ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:39:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow is part of "learning that on their own".
Yes yes yes. I am new to programming, and thus new to SO, and to top it all off I'm working with a "weird" programming language/system that is very out of the norm, but it's basic and most anyone could answer my questions.
So a few weeks ago I asked one about how do I solve this weird X case. First response is one of the top-level users, ranked really high, saying I should figure it out myself. I say I've already tried and can't. He said I should search SO for the answer. I said I did and there isn't one that I can find. He then says but I didn't post my work. I say oh, I'm new here, okay here's my work so far on what I've tried. Master guy says an answer is not possible. Then someone else responds giving me a possibility. The possibility didn't work, but seemed like it was on the right track and I responded I was working with it.
First "master" guy responds again, going, oh well, yeah if you have to do it that way, then do this. His response was totally incorrect and didn't even pay attention to my complete question (it included some things I specifically said couldn't be included). Second guy responds with a more useful update to his original proposed solution.
Second guy still wasn't right, but close enough that I could wiggle around and get it to work and I posted as such, and I very politely posted to the "master" guy that his didn't work and I needed XYZ as indicated in my question that his answer didn't include, but if he had any more advice I'd love to hear it (since the answer I got to work was kind of janky but still worked).
"Master" guy came back all pissy saying the other guy's answer can't work and his works, and then posted it as an answer. Other guy responds to master guy very deferentially saying he looked up the weird system I'm working with and detailed why something more like his response was needed, but very deferentially as if it's obvious "master" guy is right, but other guy posts his answer too. "Master" guy then goes on a diatribe about how stupid the system I'm using is and why would anyone want to use it or do A with it. Other guy deferentially agrees. "Master" guy then concludes with some condescending advice to me on how to act deferential to him on SO in the future because he knows so much more and it's obvious he was right.
I accept other guy's answer and post about how it solved my problem. My original question ended up with a negative score, other guy's correct answer only got one other upvote besides mine, while "master" guy's answer got lots of upvotes.
Being new to programming, you probably havenโt yet come to the uncomfortable realisation that arrogance, ego, status, etc. are problems with programmers more than problems with SO specifically.
The issue with SO is that people are theoretically judged purely on their technical competence, so thereโs no incentives that discourage acting like a giant douchebag.
I don't know. I'm getting into Rust, and I tried asking a question on SO. I got the usual grunts and non-answers telling me to make my question prettier and that I hadn't "tried" enough.
Tried asking a question on the Rust forums. Everyone's super friendly. Question got liked, got an answer very very fast that 100% solved my problem, AND included the "you're doing A and Y might be better" in a non-condescending way.
Specific question forums, when available, are 100 times better than stack overflow. Even leaving issues on libraries on GitHub is more helpful than SO. SO is somewhat useful when the question is already answered, but actually asking a question there is so stupid. Way too much of an effort in having "good questions" and too little effort in helping people. And they try to remove the human element completely from posts making them drab and uninteresting in hopes of mimicking everything wrong with text books and encyclopedias.
phihag ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 22:21:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the link to the question so that we can have a look ourselves and flag the offending comments?
Glad I could read this. A lot of the time I read down to the lesser voted answers and find something useful, but it always makes me second guess myself, like Who am I to suppose all these other ppl are wrong?
People with a trillion updoots can't possibly conceive of the simple fact that some people haven't been doing this for thirty years, and therefore lack the knowledge to even search properly in some cases. It's fine for a duplicate question to be deleted (upon provision of a link to a different question that the OP verifies solves their problem), but they not only do that but actively punish users for "wasting their time" by moving them one step closer to being permanently banned from ever asking questions. As if they didn't have free will and were totally allowed to just scroll past a question.
The core of the problem is that what users want SO to be (and what it used to be, to some degree) is a place where people go to get help. What the owners/moderators of SO want it to be is a place where you go to find an answer to a question that you have, but has already been answered.
They fail to recognize potential knowledge gaps in users and answerers, and they are indirectly failing to keep up with the progression of technology; as a technology progresses, the way you do X may change, but the older an answer is, the more updoots it gets, so the out-of-date answers tend to dominate the more recent ones.
Stack Overflow is a shitty place built for people to answer questions, disguised as a nice place built for people to ask questions.
TBatWork ยท 88 points ยท Posted at 18:51:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
We don't all have green fields to play in
Exactly. You frame a very specific question due to very specific circumstances, and they respond with, "No, you're doing it wrong," even if you provide all the details of what you're working against.
My previous job had their website held hostage by a web dev company that supposedly charged for any contact at all, and had excessive rates for any work that we requested. We could only work in HTML because they were the exclusive gatekeepers to the CSS.
So you know, Stack Overflow was rarely a source of help when all the answers were, "No, but CSS."
As long as you attempt to answer a question, it won't be deleted, which is a good policy in theory, except it means that "didn't read the entire question" isn't a valid reason to delete comments and answers.
[deleted] ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 19:59:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
TBatWork ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 20:20:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, when necessary. We had a handful of canned style classes to use for most things. The rest was creative use of tables with a 0px border and arranging page layouts via column widths, row spans and col spans.
The most information I ever got was a Lynda class that started with a module on 90's web design, and the rest of the class modules were, "Check out all the cool stuff we can do today!"
Wow, CSS gatekeeping, that's a niche if I ever heard one.
koshgeo ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:22:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's true, but if posing an "A" question it's really helpful to say something like "I know wanting to do A seems crazy, but for reasons too long to go into, it's a hard constraint and is really what I'm trying to do here, awful though it might seem with existing B alternatives out there. Any ideas?"
Heh, probably still wouldn't stop the "Just how thoroughly have you explored B?" questions but it should help.
As someone working on a Angular SPA running on a Backbone+Jquery frontend plugged to a Tapestry server only commented in German (I don't speak German) and displayed only on Japanese hardware, I know your pain
TransPM ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:26:03 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would anybody want to do A?"
LEGACY SYSTEMS
I don't want to, I have to, because the customer wants to, and somebody had to go and tell them they're "always right".
Quite frequently, the train of thought of a frustrated developer is:
I want to do X.
I don't know how to do X.
I think I should start with A.
I don't know how to do A.
StackOverflow, how do I A?
Really, the question should be, "How do I do X?". Sometimes, experienced developers have been down that road frequently enough that the question about how to A betrays the original problem. Sometimes, it requires a little bit of probing.
It's still no reason to be an arse about it, though. :D
(Edit: apparently regurgitating the A/B problem for the 70th time in this thread)
Avoiding the X/Y problem is really hard when answering questions on stack overflow or anywhere else.
Sometimes they really are trying to solve X because they tried everything else and it didn't work, sometimes they are trying to solve X because they've been looking at the problem too long and have tunnel vision. That's when it's useful for someone from the outside to go "OK, well let's step back a second, what are you actually trying to accomplish?"
My issue with the X/Y problem is that if I describe the full problem ("I want to do X, because I have constraints A, B and C, and so I try method Y"), the question is so long that nobody replies.
I use this approach with clients all the time. It's easier to get them to tell what they really want if I first throw something at them that they can correct.
Yeah, what you're saying is just a myth and completely wrong. It has practically never happened. Only correct stuff gets attention He's name was Efinmhon by the way. Get your facts straight .
My solution to that problem is to say โHow do I do Yโ and then in the comments or an edit explain the real problem.
Usually people decide to answer the short problem and then donโt mind reading the background in more detail.
FUZxxl ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:07:31 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While that works, it can lead to things like this where I had to spend over an hour arguing back and forth that yes, I am actually interested in an answer to my question. Afterwards, it went rather smoothly.
Itโs beautifully ironic that you missed the meaning of their comment because you stopped reading too early, which is exactly what they were complaining about.
Looks like the maximum comment length is about one line. Otherwise people may not read it entirely.
Zei33 ยท 403 points ยท Posted at 17:28:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's true enough, sometimes you just need to take a step back and reset. I spent 23 hours in the last 3 days trying to get C++ and C# sockets to talk to each other. Realised earlier that I was doing something completely retarded and just needed to keep it simple. Problem solved.
Edit: If anyone's curious, my most recent problem solved by combining strings and then turning into byte array rather than trying to merge two byte arrays lol
Nalivai ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:39:39 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I get it. They remove wrong submittion, it's not premoderation, it's postmoderation.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:37:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's not how the switcheroo joke works, mate. Op says something, person b switches the statement around in a silly way, and then person c says "ah, the old Reddit something-a-roo"
Valiade ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:41:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
More often than not, that code ends up in production. Somewhere down the line a contractor is brought in to deal with some bugs after excluding all other possibilities they realise "They wrote their own itoa() function?!"
That seems harmless. It's the converse that I would be concerned about. Especially if I'm converting a string in to a large number format. I'd want to make sure this code is IEEE standards compliant
otterom ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:41:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I got the of all stupidness... I was trying to create a recursive dictionary for a nested structure in Python and i took me around 20 to realize I wasnโt actually writing a nested dictionary I was writing spaghetti code and trying to add โifโ conditions for each edge case I could think about. 10 min after I made that discovery I had my bloody dictionary. (Iโve been working as a programmer for the past 8 years) :)
I do shit like this all the time. Lately with Linux. I end up telling myself I'm learning but most of the time I still feel like an idiot for spending 3 hours trying to do something one way when I realize there's a thing I can apt-get or already have and if I only tried that earlier by stepping back and trying alternatives before diving into troubleshooting...
Haha my mom says that, but definitely something I should keep in mind since I seem to be prone to wheel-invention
Zei33 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:05:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm sitting here using GDB to try and debug my socket server atm. Debugging by command line is not my idea of fun, that's for sure.
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:40:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโm pretty new to programming and I was doing coursework yesterday and spent like 5 hours staring at a problem just to find out I had an extra โi++โ from when I turned a while loop into a for loop
-_Dan_- ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 11:14:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Might be time to learn how to use a debugger. You'd probably have picked that up pretty quickly!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:33:48 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Probably good that I occasionally learn the hard way, but yeah, itโs on the list
Zei33 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:04:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
lol amazing. Well you won't forget that one in a hurry.
Realised earlier that I was doing something completely retarded
That's like 90% of my code.
apajx ยท 47 points ยท Posted at 18:51:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I personally find people assuming I have an X/Y problem very annoying. Often I ask questions out of curiosity. I want to know how someone would do X, yet I'm asked what I'm trying to solve. Nothing! I just want to know about X!
apnorton ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:09:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The issue is that, 98% of the time, it's an X/Y problem when someone is asking how to do something stupid. I'm in the same boat as you --- I like thinking about I'd do X for the sake of doing X because I'm curious, but I also know I'm in the vast minority of askers on SO.
I've learned to stay far, far away from stack overflow if I'm not trying to get a dependency working. Questions get redirected to some other comprehensive but tenuously related answer that that I already looked at. But I have never, not once in the last six years, found such an answer useful.
Yserbius ยท 62 points ยท Posted at 18:21:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or they may just be looking at old code that they don't have a budget to refactor. Yes, I know that writing raw SQL queries in a servlet is a terrible design, but that's how the data is read in and that's how it's going to stay unless I spend the next six weeks re-writing 14 year old Java code.
MooFu ยท -9 points ยท Posted at 20:36:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And three months later, you're kicking yourself for not spending those six weeks re-writing the code.
Yserbius ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 20:46:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Nope. Deadline for bug fixes is next week. If it ain't off the bug tracker by next week, someone will be angry. And that's when the next milestone starts to add the latest feature.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 21:29:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why, as a Team Lead, I began to cheat a little.
I got all the bugs for the order generation system together. Estimated time to solve them all was a year.
I offered Support to fix them all in two months. They agreed.
We did a complete refactor which any single bug wouldn't have allowed but which in itself took way less time than fixing existing bugs.
It was the buggiest (and most called) code in the system.
The whole app became a lot more stable. And I threw in a shitload of logging, which Support had never had before.
And in more than a few cases - you've got <6 weeks of runway, or a vital contract to fulfill, or something else that genuinely justifies doing it the messy way. "Just refactor now!" is honestly the wrong answer in some cases.
MooFu ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:57:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well, I'd still be kicking myself, but only because I can't kick the project manager.
I've had the guys over there berate me for being an idiot dealing with problem x, when if I was developing the software for OS b instead of OS a the problem wouldn't exist.
Maybe, just maybe, I can't force my entire company to stop supporting OS a just because it has an OS specific bug.
it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X
OK, that's great, but what if I really did want help with Y? How do I make SO believe and accept that? Nobody is forced to answer the question if they don't think I should be doing Y, but it's a waste of everyone's time to talk about X in that case.
motdidr ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:14:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
can you think of a specific example where you really legitimately wanted help with Y but nobody believed you and insisted there was an X somewhere you weren't telling them? because this scenario they are talking about is one where a programmer is convinced Y is their problem, when it's really X, but they don't think to mention anything about X. if you legitimately want help with Y, they will help you, but it's unlikely that it's something that everyone else is convinced you are hiding the truth. usually the XY problem is a little more obvious because the question being asked is very strange and it's not really something anyone tries to do, and that scenario 9 times out of 10 is a newer programmer having the XY problem. if you are just curious and realize it's a strange thing to do you can just clearly state that. but this is all very strange to talk about without an example.
Yes, that's happened to me. Not that I was hiding the truth per se, it's just that the full context of the problem was very complex - huge enterprise system with all sorts of dependencies and limitations - and it was totally impractical to describe it in enough detail on SO to convince people that I've ruled out a lot of options and Y was really my best one. The question was long enough as it was.
This philosophical debate is not unlike the Windows vs Linux approach to protecting the user from shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes Windows prevents you from stuffing up your OS and no doubt that saves MS support a lot of time, but it also frustrates the hell out of experienced users sometimes. In Linux you say the magic word "sudo" and you can change pretty much anything. I basically want to be able to say to SO: sudo answer my question
that scenario 9 times out of 10 is a newer programmer having the XY problem
Yes, and 1 time out of 10?
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:09:04 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the 1 time out of 10 is someone either curious doing something strange for fun, or a competent programmer dealing with bizarre constraints or requirements that they have no power to change.
and in those cases, my main point is that the competent programmer asking the question for those reasons should absolutely make that info plainly obvious, because it's much rarer than the newer inexperienced programmer with an XY problem, and it's only sensible to assume the common case rather than the rare case, if only to help the inexperienced from shooting themselves in the foot. not necessarily triple the length of your question not at least mention that those constraints exist, if only to indicate that you're well aware the question sounds strange, and you can always elaborate in a comment later if requested.
bartekko ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:31:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess it's because it's not actually an X/Y problem, it's an X/Y/Z/B/C/D/F/H/I/S problem. The reason you need three letters is because you need to know a file extension. The reason you need to know a file extension is because you need to know how to interpret, say an image file. The reason you need to interpret an image file is because you've been handled a bunch of them. You were handled a bunch of image files because you're writing a website for images. The reason you're writing a website for images is because...
When you divide and conquer, it's not always exactly clear what the lowest level of divide is
misbug ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:07:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
SO system encourages the Y case. If you ask for X you shall be closed as duplicate or off-topic.
[deleted] ยท 63 points ยท Posted at 17:27:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It also helps if the person asking the question notes any restrictions upfront. Like, if you absolutely must use a certain technology or absolutely must not add new tech to your stack, then fucking say so clearly so that you can get an answer specifically for your situation. Otherwise you're going to be told to use a different method or piece of tech because it's generally helpful to not be allowed to do stupid shit.
Zei33 ยท 70 points ยท Posted at 17:31:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am kinda sick of people recommending Google libraries for things when I'm trying to learn how to do things from scratch.
Or this one whizbang application developed by someone whose never worked in a corporate environment, which is entirely proxy unaware and the first thing it does is try to phone home :/
Gatling (REST load tester) calls to Gatling website instead of your own endpoint by default to warm up. Was one of things which was just an annoyance of huge error messages until I had time to look into it. Can change this though.
Swagger (REST endpoint GUI) attempts to validate JSON by calling out to somewhere. No way to change this via config. Forever have an "error" message on GUI unless I hack the JavaScript, but I just don't have time.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:05:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Forever have an "error" message on GUI unless I hack the JavaScript, but I just don't have time.
Fuck, I know. The website I maintain uses an old video wrapping JS library that worked on desktop browsers, but not on iOS devices. Turns out that the JS engines work a bit differently, and autoplaying videos throws errors (funny thing is, the videos only autoplay in the sense that they're triggered to buffer, paused on start by default). I had to dig through minified JS and modify that shit directly because the library was no longer being supported. Would not recommend.
svick ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 18:43:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Did you tell them that your goal is to learn and that's why you don't want to use libraries?
subdep ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:53:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Itโs almost as if there should be a standard tag for posts:
Open to other approaches - OTOA
Strict limitations on environment - SLOE
svick ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 20:06:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Tags are a means of connecting experts with questions they will be able to answer by sorting questions into specific, well-defined categories.
Since there is no such thing as "expert in questions that are open to other approaches", I don't think it's well suited to being a tag on SO.
Though you could create a discussion about this on meta.SO.
[deleted] ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 17:57:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
aiij ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:39:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's a difference between assuming that someone is and idiot and assuming that someone is confused.
Assuming that someone is not really trying to shoot themselves in the foot seems more polite than the converse.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:09:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yep, you've got it.
Besides, smart people can do stupid shit and stupid people can do smart shit. It's never as simple as being only one or the other. Whether smart, stupid, or somewhere in between, the general idea is that if you're doing something generally considered bad practice and you don't specify that it's a requirement you can't work around, you're going to get people telling you not to do it.
Noob programmer here, what is a stack in this context?
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:15:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The other reply doesn't seem very noob-friendly, so I'll chime in myself as well:
The "tech stack" is basically the collection of software used for your application. This can include the operating system (if you're discussing e.g. a web server), any programming languages, databases, third-party libraries (e.g. jQuery for JavaScript), or a number of other possibilities.
As a general rule of thumb, if it's something you have to download or install in order for the program you're writing to work, then it's probably a part of your tech stack.
motdidr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:07:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the stack of software responsible for the environment in question, whether it's an application or a series of applications, a server backend, a website in one form or another, or some combination of everything, stack in that context just means "all the stuff currently involved."
not adding new tech to the stack means that a solution can't involve running a new program, or a new service, or adding a new library, or adding an endpoint somewhere, a new machine in Amazon, whatever the case may be. sometimes the solution to a problem is "use this program instead" or "use this library to do it," but sometimes you legitimately cannot add any new tech anywhere in the application stack.
Tayl100 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:03:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I find far more people complaining about/mentioning the x/y problem than I do people actually having the problem.
But even if that poster needs Y, you should still answer X so that the poor fuck who tried Y first and now realises they need X can find anything at all about it.
I can confirm, almost every silly complicated Excel question I get an answer is usually a X/Y problem, where they think they need to do X, when really Y will also get them there.
The other half of the silly complicated Excel questions are solved with "You formatted your data terribly, and that's why we're here now. Let's fix it with...."
This is why I try to write a tiny test program that does exclusively the problem I'm trying to solve.
Not only does it narrow the problem enough to be useful, but I can post the full source on StackOverflow without worrying about copyright infringement or other nonsense.
The number of times I had coworkers approach me, open their mouth to explain a problem, pause for a second, closing their mouth and come back to their computer with a solution is more than five.
I get this all the time with end-users and it's even worse, somehow.
"Hey can you dump a list of all users and their security roles and put the file on the shared drive and schedule that for every day?"
"Sure, we could do that.... Wait why??"
"Well we want to be able to audit what changes are happening over the year by doing comparisons..."
"......what. There's a built in audit log for that you just need to ask us or get management to agree to security changes that will grant audit log access to key users..."
Reminds me of like a reddit Pcmasterrace thing where a guy asked like "Hey what's best gaming laptop I can get?" and one of top answers was basically "You should just get a gaming PC, they are much better in many ways such as X, Y ... etc" .
It's like, main point of a lot of these questions is that there are constraints. Not that I could just get anything I want..
I guess at worst you could fit a Truckman top to it, or something. A pickup isn't that useful for what I do, since the back isn't covered so it's not not secure and everything gets rained on ;-)
Remind me of adobe premiere variable frame rate support thread.
"please add support to variable frame rate, i use camera phone"
"you're poor, get a real camera."
MSB3000 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:25:05 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I SAW THAT THREAD. The "master" got really defensive about having "proper equipment" if you're going to use Adobe Premiere.
Video sources can come from anywhere these days. Who the hell knows where the video you HAVE to work with is coming from? He was hearing none of it, he was dead set on, "if you're going to work with professional software, you can only use expensive equipment, end of story".
I can only wish whoever that was the absolute worst, a plague on their house and a turd in their cereal bowl.
FYI to everyone who needs to use the travesty that is Adobe Premiere: try Handbrake to convert it.
"Oh you are editing at a news station where you have to use phone camera footage that's been email in for your segments? Tell those plebs that they aren't going to make the news."
MSB3000 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:27:19 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is literally and un-ironically what that guy was saying. I was surprised he could breath, with his head so far up his ass.
I used to like PCMR but when I actually started heavily PC gaming I realized it's just unhelpful shitposting and left. r/pcgaming and r/buildapc were a lot more useful.
I think you misunderstood what PCMR is for. It literally started out as a circle jerk. It's not somewhere you're supposed to go for help but rather post about the "glorious PC masterrace".
enyoron ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:30:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What's especially frustrating about that is the fact that current generation gaming laptops are actually really fucking good. You get basically the same i5s/i7s and 1060s/1070s that you get in desktops (the benchmarks of the mobile versions are within 5% or so their desktop counterparts). Honestly I would consider having a desktop tower to be more niche/constrained than having a laptop! Most people just use a computer to the end of its useful life cycle and then replace it completely, rather than upgrade individual parts over time. The portability is generally more useful than the modularity.
What? No. Gaming laptops are very questionably even worth the price, because their market is far more niche than a desktop. First of all, gaming doesn't even come close to defining what people use computers for. Someone who doesn't want to play a bunch of high-spec games should never buy a gaming monster laptop because it'll be overpriced for what they want, probably less portable, and have a shorter battery life. That's the group that uses a computer to the end of its life before replacing it, because barring some purposes like rendering and simulation many hobbies/fields don't benefit directly from hardware upgrades.
So what that leaves are the people who want to play high-requirement games comfortably over time, and will need to upgrade specs to do so at some point. Why would they pick a gaming laptop unless they personally need to be mobile a lot? It'll be less powerful than what you can get on a desktop of the same price, many gaming laptops have shit battery life, and for the one group who probably will want their hardware to stay up-to-date you lose the modularity.
It's the difference between paying 400-800 for a new, top-end GPU in your desktop or 1200-1500 at once to replace even the parts that were up-to-date in a laptop with the second-best option. One of those expenses is much easier to justify over multiple instances of updating hardware, with the only excuses being "I need to travel a lot" or "I'm comfortable paying almost twice as much for the convenience fee of not opening a computer up myself" (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think many people should happily say this. If you're in a hard place financially it's a horrible decision, and if you're well-off you could be putting the extra money towards something else). I would also argue that just because some people don't upgrade their computer parts, that doesn't make the modularity something they should throw away. Yes, it might be smart for Little Billy to get something portable if he's not gonna upgrade the parts anyhow. If the portability does nothing for him, it'd be even smarter for Little Billy to learn how to open up a computer and stop wasting his money. It's not a difficult, complicated or dangerous task so long as you take proper measures.
Is a desktop more constrained than a laptop? Absolutely. But you're using the word "niche" wrong, because the only people who should use a gaming laptop are the relatively small intersection of "dedicated gamer" and "can't sit down in one place to play reliably." For anyone else a desktop computer or a normal laptop are better deals depending on whether playing games is important to them.
enyoron ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 04:29:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You've probably not been in in the market for gaming laptops or desktop GPUs recently, and have distorted views of what average users that aren't redditors on /r/programmerhumor or /r/buildapc actually want out of their computers. You know that modern 'gaming' laptops come in <5lb form factors, with 8+hrs of battery life when the GPU is idling, right? And 1050tis and 1060s are becoming more and more standard for high end laptops in general.
The techie gamer that wants to tinker with his tower all the time to play the newest games at highest settings possible is incredibly niche. Most people, as you mentioned, just want a general use laptop - something that's already assembled for them. A significant portion of that group - larger than the tinkering gamer - want that laptop to also be able to run games reasonably well. Medium settings, 1080p, 60pfs. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago they'd be better with a midrange gaming desktop and a netbook/tablet. But now the gaming laptop is clearly the better option, because Intel and nVidia have made amazing advancements with efficient, low power consumption processors over the last 2 years, and GPU miners have utterly fucked the desktop GPU market.
Stack overflow makes way more sense when you look at it that 80% of commenters are freelancers that are very good at their jobs actually but work in ideal โfrom-scratchโ environments.
Theyโve probably never looked down the barrel of a VB6 legacy app โupdateโ
Eh, I don't think that's true. The SO survey shows 70% employed as full time. Only 10% are contractors, freelancers, or self employed.
Not sure what questions you view, but I see all sorts of mentions about working with legacy code (both in questions and answers). That includes both questions where legacy nature is directly relevant as well as commonly in questions about library issues (eg, "oh, that version was broken, here's a work around"). That said, I'd expect that legacy status isn't really relevant for the vast majority of questions. Especially if you skim the top questions, it's very evident that most of these questions can be examined in a vacuum.
Also, when examining questions as they appear over time, it's evident that a great deal of them are honestly very poorly written to the point that it's hard to help. It's of course understandable that people don't all know how to ask good questions, but when you consider it from the PoV of people taking the time to answer them (which is IMO very good of them, so the least you can do is make it easy for them), such low quality questions get tiring.
Excal2 ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:25:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
such low quality questions get tiring.
I used to be surprised at how hard some questions got swatted down back when I started on SE.
Then I got enough rep in one of the communities to start reviewing queues. You're not kidding, sometimes it's downright impossible to even form a meaningful response because they give you zero information.
Zexks ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 21:50:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I see a lot of the questions that fall into these categories are generally from non-english native speakers.
Excal2 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 22:09:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eh I've chewed through plenty of questions from non-native speakers, you can still tell when they're giving an honest and complete effort to ask a properly defined question.
It's questions like this:
What parts do I need for a machine learning build?
... asked on Hardware Recs or Machine Learning that fucking get me. That question isn't detailed or on topic for either community but I see it posted to both places regularly.
I mean you need computer parts ya dunce, anyone could have told you that.
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 00:09:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What parts do I need for a machine learning build?
I wish we could answer questions like these with answers that match their silliness. Answers like "lots of graphics cards," "an Internet connection to AWS and a credit card," or "a grad program somewhere with a compute cluster" would all fit nicely, and they're even all partially accurate!
Zexks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:14:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This 100%. I spent the better part of three years on Math.SE before it became really big. It started off as really fun, but once it became the 4th or 3rd largest network site, question quality went through the floor and it became miserable to sift through it all. Certain high-rep users would literally search for questions on the autodelete boundary to give a downvote and trigger the Roomba script, because 5 delete votes a day simply wasn't enough to make even a dent in the crud that gets posted.
SO/SE politics is actually really fun, in a related note.
Excal2 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:51:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'll check out politics over there, it's tough to find good discussion on reddit these days in that arena. Thanks for the tip!
Oh I actually meant the inner politics of people running for moderator, deciding what norms should be regarding votes, etc. :P Thought the politics-related StackExchanges do seem to be pretty cool.
Slight0 ยท 50 points ยท Posted at 18:08:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You start to learn to frame your question with enough context clearly indicating that A is your only option so that anyone suggesting doing B looks like an idiot and thus doesn't post. It's unfortunate that people will just assume you're the biggest idiot in the world otherwise, but that's what it's come to.
I realize it's not always possible to give context or the context is too complex, but you must insist in the question that you need to do A and not anything else.
Kurvco ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 20:18:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People could also just not be condescending to someone asking a question (someone who probably already feels stupid for having to ask questions).
Yes, people could not be shit to each other, but where's the fun in that?
chylex ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:52:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's also some questions I occasionally run into, that simply ask "how to do A" and the replies are pretty much "don't do A, it's bad and you're bad for wanting to do A". Fuck that shit, if I'm googling how to do A, usually I already know it's bad but don't have another option/don't care, and I hate those dickheads who think they're being super helpful by telling others not to do something without providing any actual solution.
Like ok, I get it, B is more efficient or whatever, and does things 3000% faster. Except I don't need all that complexity/overhead for my weekend boredom project, plus, I need to do it by method A because I have other bits I am going to strap onto this code and I need the bits from doing it via A to do that, which is why I am not doing it with B.
To be fair, I think a lot of people assume that the conditions that other people's code was written in were just perfect and ideal. I've seen people on SO and reddit say that "no one should do X" without any consideration for nuance and giving any reason.
arvy_p ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:47:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"It's 2018, nobody uses A," answers another commenter smugly, the first year of his CS degree almost over.
LOL yes. And then everyone always ignores "this is what my boss wants, this is the framework we have, this is the vendor API I have to use, and I can change none of these, so that's why I have to A".
Post on a forum regarding how to solve problem B...no less than 3 people answer the unasked problem A they wish you had. Then the camera operators come in insisting you should have filmed differently and you are fucked because your dumb ass didn't do it right.
And I'm all here thinking "goddamn I know it's wrong. That's why I asked the question...if I could have controlled the shoot it would have been done right, but on this gig I'm just the fucking editor! Now how do you solve problem B!?!"
I'm somewhat guilty of asking questions and not fully explaining the parameters/circumstances/constraints (so get plenty of answers along the lines of OP).
More often than not though, the problem itself is bigger than the scope of a SO question but there is a particular part I'm having an issue with. Rather than put in paragraphs of content, extra information, sections of code etc, I try to abstract the specific problem a little. I'm looking for an understanding of the problem and ways of solving it, not the an integer answer to a maths equation.
It can be difficult to find the right balance - if the question is too long it is often ignored. If it is too short, it gets snarky answers and then locked.
SO is a hell of a great resource but there is definitely an art to describing your problem well so that you get useful answers.
Jarhyn ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:03:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
God... I ran into that a few times when I was trying to run some Power architecture binaries on a PPC board, and was running into some invalid instructions. Of course, I didn't have source for the binaries because they were made by a different company from whom we could not get source for various reasons. Long story short, I was forced to figure out how to recover from a SIGILL
Of course all these assholes jump down my throat for wanting to do "something that nobody should ever do", and it didn't help that nobody answering me by telling me "DON'T" even knew much about power architecture (including myself, at the time; I didn't know Power32 used fixed-width 32 bit instructions). The requirement was to set the next instruction in the context that interrupted, run the assembly replacement for the missing instruction, step forward to the next instruction, and continue executing. And for what it's worth I figured out how to do this, did it, and the fix worked well while we worked on figuring out a better solution, which I'm unsure whether we ever did.
What frustrates me more than anything is that I still don't know how to pull off a similar hack in x86/x64. Apparently on Intel architecture, it requires libraries that are deep in the realms of black hat.
As a new programmer and student I often have to use A due to the constraints of my assignment.
For example, I had to make a Java program when first taking an OOP class that was very difficult to create without using objects. My instructor wanted us to feel this pain so we would have a better understanding of objects as we started our semester.
I always appreciate the "that's stupid, do it like B" feedback because I genuinely learn from it, but wish there was also a place to ask those kinda silly prog questions as well.
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:33:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I actually like that technique a lot, I mean maybe not having to build an entire application but certainly a few assignments. with I was in school everyone kind of immediately understood why once are great, we didn't really need to do it the hard way, but it's a nice idea in theory. when I learned calculus we had to solve derivatives the long way for every single problem for a week before he showed is the power rule. our minds were blown but we also really felt comfortable with them, too.
I got in a big fight with SO commenters one time because of this exact same problem. I was on a client machine trying to figure out a command for an old version of PHP and every poster on stack overflow was chiding me for not updating as though it was my option to do so. They could not fathom that somebody might be required to work on an old software version.
My brother just had that moment, when I asked him for help on a CS assignment. He looks it over, and is like, Why TF did you write it ABC way, this Dumb AF.
I'm like, becuse that what the teacher wanted.
Hes like, but if you did it XYZ way instead, it would be way easier and more efficient.
I'm like, I agree. But I cant do it XYZ way because teacher wants it ABC way.
So we argued for like 20 minutes why I couldn't do it the more efficient way, trying to explain that she literally would fail me if i did.
making things work under (apparently) bizarre constraints or
combinations of technologies that apparently nobody has ever had to try before
Most of the time I search SO, I'm in this situation (I've never asked a question there).
I develop embedded software, which is like an incubator for weirdness scenario. Often trying to make some strange combination of libs work together. Like, try dealing with not having dynamic memory allocation or avoiding it. Or thinking in algorithms that are perhaps slower than usual, but use less of your scarce RAM.
The good thing is that usually these questions are raised and answered by those who have been in similar situations, which leads to useful responses most of the time. Otherwise we would only get responses like RAM is super cheap, don't bother optimizing that. I'm very glad at least some people try to provide a solution to what was asked, even if sometimes the OP is in fact being a derp and should be doing it some other way.
LB-- ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:36:03 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I frequently encounter error messages with either no google results or the only results are the source code of the error message. Doing what "nobody has ever had to try before" is probably what most programmers are doing when they're not inventing a properly-sized wheel for their project needs, and it amazes me that Stack Overflow is not supportive of that.
What really gets me about this is even outside of stack overflow this happens and programmers hate it and you would think programmers would understand but programmers are the ones doing
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:42:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Love this one. We're all creatures of entropy production, but the amount of possibilities these people rule out on all their answers is really something special.
It's an ancient problem of asking for any kind of help on the internet and doesn't even have to be especially complex. I remember once asking how to boost my laptop speakers on some tech forum and the responses were things like "get some headphones" or "use external speakers."
Working for a large company that doesn't want to upgrade anything will lead me to StackOverflow asking how to do A.
JackU_U ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:21:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This. Exactly
Netcob ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:24:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly this. If you want to use the latest tools and versions and paradigms, you'll either have to be self-employed or you'll only be doing that in your spare time.
Take software from five years ago, add crushing technical debt, subtract any time you thought you'd have in order to do things properly and you get the kinds of constraints that leave you with very little patience for coding hipsters.
I do B after work. I preach B at work. But I still need to do A right now ffs.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:33:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Last time I used SO, it was because I was trying to make a Caesar Cypher for a class. I asked how to make it so that the user needed to input everything on one line on the command line in C++. Similar to the way Nmap works, you know? Everything on one line. All that happened was that I got scolded by users for asking for homework help and got banned for 3 days. I eventually figured it out after several hours, but I don't think I will be posting there again.
You forgot about the guy that disdainfully criticizes you for not googling the answer better, even though other noobs like me often find these answers by googling.
"Why would anybody want to do A?" asks another commenter with clockwork inevitability, without knowing any of your circumstances or constraints and just assuming you are an idiot.
Well, in all fairness, the assumption that you are an idiot is frequently correct.
bantab ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know about any of you but my entire programming career has been 90% making things work under (apparently) bizarre constraints or combinations of technologies that apparently nobody has ever had to try before
90% of the time that I have a question for an online forum, it is a more efficient use of my time to solve it by random trial and error. 10% of the time I break down and post a question, which only adds to the time it takes to solve the problem by trial and error since the question is inevitably unanswered.
It can be ridiculous constraints, like mine was "My teacher has no idea how an Arduino works -- I need to program this in such a way that I can explain it to him and he can understand why it works"
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:42:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I work in public service, the solutions I work on involve extremely sensitive data on people all over the country, so there's a rule aimed at mitigating risk that you simply can't use anything outside the standard library. Is this a good decision? I don't know, but it's a decision made well above my pay grade, so I have no choice but to deal with it. I look up how to do something without an external library and of course there's always those people on stackoverflow just smugly saying that this is the point of X external library so why are you wasting your time? Thanks dude, thanks so much, I had no idea how cool these libraries are, that was the only thing holding me back!
MogwaiK ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:20:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, you just need a fix that works for 4-5 different generations of the same architecture.
foonix ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:20:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you for doing this. Sometimes the best way to explain why to do B instead of A is to just show how B works, and then it becomes obvious why B is better. Answers like that have made me a much better programmer.
Had a question and the teacher told us how he wanted it answered and in the future after we handed in how we would do it in that particular way he would show us the more "mainstream" way to do it.
Did the script, thought I'd see how others did it and it was just "why would you even consider doing that" nonsense and never a proper answer.
The teacher wanted us to do that for a few reasons...
A) Nobody writes their code the same
B) There are other solutions, some will only work in specific applications
C) Showing that there really isn't a right way to do it. There are better ways but they will have the same outcome if written correctly.
I don't know about any of you but my entire programming career has been 90% making things work under (apparently) bizarre constraints or combinations of technologies that apparently nobody has ever had to try before, so I have a lot of time and pity for the poor souls asking these kinds of questions.
Yeah, this is something people with only theoretical knowledge of programming like teachers or students wouldn't get.
"Why would anybody want to do A?" asks another commenter with clockwork inevitability, without knowing any of your circumstances or constraints and just assuming you are an idiot.
Mention these constraints in question so that they do know. "I can't use B because blah" is helpful for everyone.
People ask this because a large number of questions ask how to do really-difficult X, when more-common Y is actually the solution. It saves a lot of time getting to the bottom of why the answerer is trying to do X.
Mention these constraints in question so that they do know. "I can't use B because blah" is helpful for everyone.
No, not really. The pedants need to learn not to constantly question the competence, character, honesty and motivation of the questioner. They also need to learn not to direct their own frustration at not knowing an answer to problem 'A' by deflecting to the questioner and demanding a problem 'B' instead: a problem they are actually competent to solve.
If you don't know the answer, don't always assume the X/Y problem and just move on. Despite the elevated sense of self-importance of regulars, they are not a panacea, and the friction they cause by preemptively assuming X/Y problem is a huge distraction and time sink. It also raises the interaction temperature and that further complicates communication. Such people might best find other uses for their time than trying to be the consummate oracle of information technology. It ends up causing support fatigue and a hostile climate for newcomers especially.
Speaking from experience working in support as well as running support channels, where I have zero tolerance for this behaviour. This is not about eliminating X/Y solutions altogether: this is about rampant X/Y overuse.
Below another Redditor describes being victimised by this horrible bullshit.
The pedants need to learn not to constantly question the competence, character, honesty and motivation of the questioner.
Not that the questioner is being dishonest, just more often that the OP hadn't considered/known about Y than it is that they have some odd restriction that only X can work with. So it helps to ask (and admittedly a lot of users come off as condescending in doing so) if there's a specific reason they need X or whether Y would work instead.
Contrived example, but say someone asks:
Can I use print() in Javascript to put an output message in the console?
If they state that they know the normal way is console.log() and/or give a reason why they need to use print() (even if it's just "I have a bet with a friend that it's possible specifically with print") then people can give a proper answer, maybe with some obscure trickery.
Otherwise it's best to ask why OP is wanting to use print(), because it's most likely that they don't actually require print(). Just answering their exact question would be a waste of time, what they actually want is console.log().
If you don't know the answer, don't always assume the X/Y problem and just move on. Despite the elevated sense of self-importance of regulars, they are not a panacea, and the friction they cause by preemptively assuming X/Y problem is a huge distraction and time sink.
The comments that sac_boy is complaining about are trying to figure out whether it's an X/Y problem or OP actually needs to do it in this obscure/never-used way.
I'd agree that there's a balance needed though. Too quick to assume that it's Y, and you get a useless answer that OP is probably already aware of. Too quick to assume that it's X, and you get a useless obscure answer when OP was just looking for the more common answer.
So it helps for the actual askers of Y (the obscure problem) to clarify that they know of X but that solution doesn't work for whatever reason. And helps for answerers to ask questions ("Is Y actually required, or would it be fine to do X?") rather than jumping the gun and taking it as X.
motdidr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:42:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I also think these people complaining about this don't understand how often they get the confused XY question. they are acting like most of the time the question is legit, and only occasionally is the asker misguided, so it's annoying to assume incompetence. but realistically, these problems are asked way way more frequently by confused or new devs, and if the problem really is strange or there are unusual constraints, it just makes way more sense to mention these things up front, not to just assume every person who asks a really weird or obviously misguided question is actually competent and that there must be a really good reason, because most of the time no, there isn't.
This is just a thing about human nature. I don't think people are particularly evil or cruel- I believe most people have the capacity for kindness and mean well.
But empathy? The ability to actually understand and sympathize with another human being's differences as well as similarities? Rare as fuck. People generally believe themselves to be the hero of their own story, and do not understand why anyone would want anything other than what they want.
Deep down the vast majority of human beings, when preferring say vanilla over chocolate, only pretend to get why someone else would pick chocolate. They nod and smile, and look away... but deep down
My "favorite" scenario has happened to me a few times now. Some piece of software or hardware gets a poorly or un-documented change, none of the documentation or guides describe what's different or how to use the new version. Desperate, I finally click SO links. Of course, there are dozens of questions about that exact problem, many of them explicitly mentioning that there's been some version change and linking old questions that are no longer accurately answered. Every single one of them has been closed as "already answered".
Some piece of software or hardware gets a poorly or un-documented change
This is what I find really annoying with programming these days, especially in the javascript/node world. Googling an answer these days will returns you 50 different variations of solving a problem, but oh wait!! You forgot to limit search to last 6 months because you know since the API releases in 2013 there have been 1204210 revisions where the function definitions and call methods have changed!!!
Yeah, sorry that menu doesn't exist in the current version, also the command structure has changed with the new compiler so that block of code which perfectly addressed the issue, it doesn't work any more...
Me too. Half the time the changes just seem like change for the sake of change. Or when some new wizbang framework comes out and we all have to learn it because it's cool and new, and everyone is doing it.
It's all still just buttons, links, images, data, etc. Same shit we've been doing forever.
Yepp, not to mention people can't agree on a standard for naming conventions, project structures. Is it a middleware? Do we go for models/schemas or do we go for /thisspecificpart/
Oh you are still using jquery? Sad story mate, we only use that for legacy these days!!! Oh you are trying to do promise chains with reduce? Well.... Here you have a 4 indentation nested reduce call for sequential chaining! Nah mate we just decided to use promise-reduce from npm and call it 'reduce'.
I mean go through 100 different projects on github and you'll find 100 different ways of doing module export and naming. Ok at least 5 different ways!
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:49:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
why it that a bad thing? who are you imagining is going to be in charge of the "rules" for javascript open source libraries? the reason there are so many ways to do stuff is because the platform is super free and open, everyone gets to have an opinion and most of them are valid. there are many conventions within the just world, and they all have their pros and cons, but the fact that there can be do many valid ideas is really beautiful to me. just write your stuff the way you think is right.
But if you make a library you should probably plan it out in advance a bit and also make sure that if you redo the library to work a certain way that you make it very obvious where and how. Also try to keep consistency in your own library so that everything functions and is called the same way.
I too like the variety in JS, but it pains me that a single library might change so much that answers to questions a year ago are no longer viable. Also that articles, coders, libraries all talk in "absolutes" when speaking of how to structure projects.
But I do think that at least through all the varieties and ideas that many of the same gathered into "loose guidelines" is a good idea so at least one can be aware of how it's done. I personally suck at structuring projects. But I do think the variety and looseness can be a bit overwhelming at times, especially for new coders. When a project can be written 20 different ways and all are "great/acceptable" that can create some confusion.
Because all of them have their own little quirks and shortcomings, depending on what problem they're trying to solve, and each library wants you to use a different one. This one supports conditional includes, but that one doesn't, but that one makes static analysis simple, but doesn't integrate with the other one, but this tool for generating sourcemaps only works with these two...
It's got to the point where JavaScript has enough module managers to start requiring a module manager manager.
Nothing pisses me off more than undocumented code or code that refuses to compile out of the box despite having all dependencies set up properly.
HeKis4 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:15:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's pretty much the reason why I wouldn't touch anything node.js with a long pole... Stuff changes too fast, frameworks and libs, or even paradigms that start to mature are replaced by the new hip thing, and in the end everyone is a beginner and nothing actually gets done.
Too much money and freedom in not picking it up imho especially for fresh coders. But I might be wrong.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:47:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same with Android. Almost anything posted more than a year ago will throw up warnings or fail to compile if used in the newest version. I do think Android is more or less well documented, but it can be a pain figuring out which of the million documented ways of doing something is best practice.
Or you get people answering for the old, deprecated version of the language because for some reason it's just as popular as the current branch (seriously Python, WTF)
mogoh ยท 258 points ยท Posted at 17:35:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's worse: It's when you ask a question and there is one who dosn't bother to listen, gives you answers that don't help and won't allow any further questions.
I have seen users admitting that they downvote every single question until they hit their limits allowed. It is truly an arrogance.
One point, I wrote out some instructions on question a user posted. The issue that they were having was pretty common because the documentation was not clear and made some assertions that were not correct. But it did answer the question that they posted.
Anyways, the question and my answer got downvoted and then it was closed after being moved into off-topic.
The down voting sprees that get auto reversed are โI vote on all your posts.โ
The โI go to the JavaScript tag and down vote each question that says โmy site doesnโt work, here is the linkโโ isnโt auto flagged. Furthermore, itโs really easy to find 40 of those questions each day.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:16:52 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Also understandable. "My site isn't working, here is the link" is a bad question. You're supposed to isolate the problem and reproduce it in a minimal, complete and verifiable example instead of just linking to your code hoping people will fix it.
Also when you find a thread or SO question asking exactly what you want to know, the only response is "Google it", and the only relevant Google hit is that very thread/question. Or the dreaded "nm I fixed it" self-response.
Once I found someone who helpfully edited their post to say, "I was able to follow instructions <here> and that solved my problem!" but the link they gave was no longer working.
A lot of us do this stuff for work. And sometimes those companies that pay us money to do this stuff have internal knowledge bases. When you solve an undocumented problem, you write it up there.
If you posted every solution freely on the internet, people wouldn't need your expertise.
I've occasionally found where someone had forked a project or was working on a patch, left a very exciting and promising string of updates as they worked on it, culminating in something along the lines of "I'm just about finished, just a few final touches, expect the final release sometime next week!"
I have problem X, find others posting about having problem X with no causes/solutions.
Guy 20540 says, couldn't find out what was causing problem X, took it to a shop, head mechanic found and fixed the problem cause in 5 minutes solving problem X. (end of reply)
WHAT WAS THE CAUSE AND SOLUTION?? why would you even post that without providing any of the information?!!?!
"No need to discuss the solution, my issue is solved", they say, because once it's working for them, who gives a crap about anyone else? Even though a dozen people have tried to sort things out for them.
Apparently, it could be the gears in the differential, the bearings in the differential, the axle bearings, the brake pads, brake calipers, brake rotors, or brake lines causing the problem. Better just replace the whole back half of the vehicle.
Hah, I have an old Honda, and it suddenly started shutting down after getting warm. The shop told me it was the distributor, and would only replace the entire distributor. For 1k++. On a 20 year old car. I googled distributor+Honda+shutsdown. Cost me 100 bucks and a few hours to do it myself. I bet they want to squeeze a few trouble shooting hours out of you.
Oh, I didn't take it to a shop (I'm not paying $120/hr for them to dick around under it with a stethoscope). The noise it's making is a pretty common issue in Mustangs, just trying to track down the cause before I go replace parts on it.
Not quite the same but like people who comment on recipes "looks great - I'm going to cook this next week". Like who tf cares, only comment if you have feedback or something
Or, I made the recipe, but substituted water for the milk, oil for the butter, and quinoa for the rice and left out everything else. What bitch? you just made something entirely different, that's not even the same dish at that point...
Probably because it becomes more common. As more questions are created, there will be more of these scenarios, and more people can relate to this comic.
It's called "support fatigue". People tasked with voluntarily overseeing support channels tend to become bullish, intolerant and draconic over time, due the stress of repetition: they become jaded and assume bad faith on the part of the questioner.
Questions that seem difficult to deal with or solve can remind them of their fallibility, and they can be tempted to blame the messenger.
This is not necessarily the explanation, but from experience, I submit to you that that is the likeliest explanation.
Edit: also, you shouldn't be asking "why" without searching the forum for an answer first. We're not here to spoonfeed you and cater to your every whim. /s
Well, yes, avoid toxic channels and start your own. If a channel is toxic, but the toxic ones can't use moderation powers against you, then contradict their attitude and treat the visitor/questioner with decency and respect. After all, if a questioner is really annoying you have the option of just ignoring him/her. Publicly tell the questioner to ignore the other ones if you have to and explain their behaviour is inappropriate. Obviously, if the toxic people in question are moderators, then don't do that, you'll have to be more subtle, but in that case the ultimate outcome is always to set up an alternative channel/forum/subreddit.
I don't like bullies. I'm guilty of gleefully treating bullies like shit, so I'm no saint, but in terms of support and standing up to this sort of thing, this is my advice.
One more thing: if it is you who is in charge, try to cultivate equality among everybody present. To undermine naturally evolving hierarchies of power in groups gets rid of the ape-like territorial tendencies people have.
People do this even without the change of versions.
I've definitely asked about some tool or framework (Android, usually), with the specific question "the documentation is wrong in this way, does anyone know a fix?" And gotten, predictably, the incorrect documentation quoted back at me as an answer.
DrQuint ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:42:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
SO only has themselves to blame for this. If a question on a nontrivial subject is 2 years old, then there's a 50% chance it is outdated in some shape or form. It can even be 100% correct, but missing context from a more modern approach.
The fact they even allow linking duplicates to any question with a tree that goes as far back as 5 years is a disgrace. The moment they put a restriction on it, users would stop running their site search scripts.
I don't blame the users, I blame the admins for letting it go this far.
Why does StackOverflow care about duplicates anyway? In the old days, a question had to be asked a thousand times until someone took the time to write the all time best answer. After that, everyone would link to the all time best answer. Until maybe the technology changes since the all time best answer was written five years ago and a new best answer emerges.
Itโs the linking that is key. First off, it prevents additional answers on that post. Do we need another answer for how to deal with a NPE in java? In theory, the single duplicate should be easy to find... if people search first.
Secondly, itโs seo. A duplicate with no answers automatically redirects a user who isnโt logged in to the duplicate post.
If the technology has changed, then ask (and answer) a new question that calls out specifically the change and how the previous canonical answer doesnโt apply to the new problem. However, make sure that hasnโt been done already prior to doing this.
If the technology has changed, then ask (and answer) a new question that calls out specifically the change and how the previous canonical answer doesnโt apply to the new problem. However, make sure that hasnโt been done already prior to doing this.
This seems exactly backwards for how Stack Overflow is meant to function as a help site, though.
It means that when an answer goes out of date, the only possible solution is for someone who already knows the old and new answers to visit the page, then take the time to create a new question and answer. (And that new answer won't get traffic, because the old answer has many views and inbound links, plus superusers will keep pointing new questions to the old duplicate they know about.)
From personal experience, I regularly run into questions for which the responses are 1+ versions out of date, and plausibly no longer valid. But I don't know whether the answer has changed - I'm there because I don't know the answer! (And if I find the answer elsewhere, I still can't update SO in a way that anyone will see.)
I suppose in theory I could post "I see $answer, but has the answer changed?" I've tried that exactly once, and was promptly closed as a duplicate of $answer.
Consider the question Concatenating elements in an array to a string which has a 1.4 answer accepted (it was later modified to be 1.5 with StringBuffer to StringBuilder), and then a score of other answers for different versions of Java.
Arrays.toString is from 1.5 (note that several are answers working on that one with different forms of replace or ignoring the requirement - though the OP even says that in revision 1 that isn't what they want.
There's a Guava one, a Java 8 String.join, two += (ick!), a Spring version, Apache commons StringUtils version, another Guava version, android TextUtils, another Java 8 version using String.join, and two more Arrays with replacement.
I contend that this isn't useful.. and certainly isn't maintained or curated. And this is the big issue for Stack Overflow... and why Stack Overflow Examples Documentation failed (which would have been a good place for this material). There is too much "rep farming" in Stack Overflow with not enough people curating the material. There should be at most one "use Arrays with the following replacement" and the other ones should call out the minimum version or library necessary. A bunch of those answers should be down voted and deleted so that there is less duplication of content making it easier for people doing the search to find the answer on one page.
The "I see $answers, but has the answer changed?" by itself isn't sufficient - it probably was a duplicate. To post such, you would need to do the answer too - knowing that it has changed and writing both a good question and good answer. Writing a good self answered question is one of the more difficult skills to acquire on Stack Overflow. Often it means engaging with the community on Stack Overflow that maintains that tag to create the best possible Q&A pair and make sure that other people link to it so that it can become properly canonical for that version.
I agree that the concatenation question is an absolute mess, and that leaving questions open for years or answering them repeatedly degrades quality. I don't think "just allow dupes" is actually a good solution here. But my impression is that Stack Overflow fails badly to handle versioning issues whether or not it closes more recent questions.
As is, it looks like there's a choice between absurd messes like the ones you link, and woefully out of date answers that never get updated. Most of the time, option 3 - emphasizing good and current answers - doesn't actually happen, and I don't think SO offers any effective path for it to happen. Writing up a neat, concise, Java 9 answer for String concatenation wouldn't do anything to mitigate traffic to the existing mess.
On that last point... I appreciate that "This is out of date, I will write up a canonical answer no one closes and then encourage the tag maintainers I already know to link to it" is an ideal outcome. But that has to wait for a power user who doesn't actually need to ask the question for their own sake. Are we really concluding that when an answer gets old and dated, there's literally no way for a new user to ask about the current solution? Because that seems to be the current situation - if you know enough to see the old answer is now wrong, but not enough to replace it, then the old answer is actively impeding you from getting support.
Because storage is needed to store those duplicates and storage isn't free. Also, it's to help keep things somewhat tidy and organized, though we all know that it's a fruitless endeavor with popular sites.
Edit: Well don't mind me. That shit is cheaper than I realized. I guess I've been working from within AWS for so long that I have forgotten how cheap regular hosting services cost for basic things like forums. The real answer on why they care about duplicates is actually covered by StackOverflow itself: https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates
For onesies, twosies, even a few thousand, sure. Multiply that by millions over time, then not so much. It also isn't just storage, but computing resources used to pull that record from a database. Shit adds up after awhile, but The actual cost really depends on if they're maintaining their own dedicated solution or if they're leasing/renting one.
People literally aren't able to produce manually enough posts to fill stackoverflow, or any site. Different orders of magnitude in what content humans can produce vs what can be stored. You know that.
aperx ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 19:57:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The duplicates aren't deleted though are they? They're just closed.
They're not deleted, but they're locked so no new records (user posts) can be added to it.
Jackeea ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:07:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If a good answer is 10kB of data (so like 10,000 characters), then you can store 100,000,000 answers on a ยฃ40 1TB drive... the storage cost really isn't that much!
Well I was thinking from a managed solution standpoint. 1TB of data is handled much differently when critical services depend on it and its service is delivered over the internet. So now you need redundancy, backups, bandwidth, computing resources to handle it, etc. Additionally, server storage isn't your average drive that comes off the shelf like you'd use at home. It's SAS or NL-SAS spinning at least 10k RPM (ideally 15k) or SSD in an array. A 500TB Enterprise SAN costs anywhere from $450k-750k+, and that's not including backups. It averages out to around $200-300+/TB (with licensing) depending on your solution (much higher for a cloud solution, for instance).
But anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of page requests/storage/computing resources/hosting/etc, and AWS has warped my sense of how much cheaper relatively low-demand applications like StackOverflow's front/backend requires. I was forgetting that there are hosting solutions that allow like 10 million page views for pretty cheap.
My hosting provider offers block storage priced at $5/TB/mo and "unlimited bandwidth." SQL offload is only $1/mo.
AWS/Azure/GCE is expensive AF. I honestly don't understand why so many people use it when they really don't need to or even benefit from what the platform has to offer.
Or alternatively you're looking in a framework related issue, where the framework doesn't do A. The duplicate links to the language's post with the same issue because its "not the frameworks fault its the language". The language post just contains comments saying "not the languages fault, its the framework".
Eventually you find a linked post from 1997 where someone tells you that you can change a server configuration file to enable A, but it isn't compatible with the framework you were originally looking at.
You make a new post on stack Overflow asking how to enable the configuration in the language for the framework and its immediately closed as a duplicate of the first issue.
Man, I'm so triggered right now. Almost half the times I google something and end up in SO the first three results are for deprecated/too old frameworks or versions of a language and the fourth one links to any of them saying "duplicate".
Also, apparently the vast majority of people in SO believe that a simple programmer working in a 20+ people project can change server configurations, the JDK/JRE/whatever, switch IDEs, change the pom or any of those things whenever necessary.
Had a race condition problem in my application that I didn't realize, marked as a duplicate to something about a framework problem in a language I wasn't using. Thanks, SO...
SodaAnt ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 18:05:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In my experience, you search for questions for your problem, find one that's pretty similar but subtly different in an important way, and since it is different enough you decide to ask your own question. When you ask it, you even call out what makes it different. It still gets closed as a duplicate of the question you already looked at.
This is where you private message the person in charge and explain your situation. And if that doesn't work this is where you go all out shitposting and get banned and later realize that that was stupid and now you're banned from asking more questions.
Assess ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:12:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Good. Fuck SO
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:23:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind posting or PM'ing me the question? I'd like to reopen it.
There's nothing quite as frustrating as having your question closed as a duplicate of the same question you specifically referenced not being helped by in your question.
Not sure I've ever seen one high-rep guy do both, but I've definitely seen the tag-team approach where someone "clarifies" a question to be something entirely different, and then a second person closes that as off-topic or duplicate.
Or even, and this is the most annoying, the linked post is technically a duplicate if you squint your eyes a bit, but you offered a bounty on your question and the answer you got as a result was much better and more detailed.
To be fair, the "new" off-topic questions probably has been asked hundreds of times before, too, you just don't see that because the previous questions have been deleted. But I agree that SO closes way too much as "off-topic".
Question that's been asked hundreds of times of before
"Just Google it"
Google returns this thread as the top result, along with all the other top results being people saying to just Google it. The worst answer someone can give.
codear ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:12:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And here I am thinking it was just my SO luck... Happens all too frequently, especially if question is not trivial...
"Welcome to Stack Overflow, where anyone can get the answer to any question!"
"How do I do this thing?"
"Off-topic question. Does not adhere to our standards. Question closed. User banned. IP address perma-banned. You need 500 reputation to appeal to the ban."
Right? The topic is programming, how is a question "off-topic"?
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:19:18 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The help center specifies what it needs to be, e.g. no tool request, specific enough, containing a minimal verifiable example for debugging problems, sufficiently narrow, not overly opinion based, actual question, etc.
Bro some dude marked my question as duplicate when it was a completely different situation and one couldn't derive the solution from the other question. I was so pissed but helpless :(
Need 5 votes to close, not just one guy. The only way you can unilaterally close is if you have a gold tag for the question and you close it as a duplicate of another question.
Diamond moderators can single vote close. That's happened plenty of times. One will encounter a question they don't know the answer to and think to themselves, "well I don't know this and I know everything, so obviously it's a bad question".
No, it doesn't. There are very few diamond moderators, and they generally don't spend their time closing bad questions unless it's spam. The community can handle closing bad questions all by themselves.
"well I don't know this and I know everything, so obviously it's a bad question"
haha, diamond moderators don't close questions because they don't know the answer
I guarantee you, if you have a closed question, it's because 5 people agreed the question should be closed. Show me an actual question (not spam) that was unilaterally closed by a diamond moderator. I'd like to see that.
[deleted] ยท 2073 points ยท Posted at 16:32:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My only question on stackoverflow.
Top answer didn't even give me a solution, just straight denied my problem was even possible.
Meanwhile the answer that actually solved it was deleted a few minutes after appearing.
Reelix ยท 286 points ยท Posted at 17:28:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've often found that the answer that works is the greyed-out one with -3 votes...
[deleted] ยท 275 points ยท Posted at 17:31:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because they'll actually answer your question rather than explain how your question itself is wrong.
That means you don't have an account which has 15 points on that specific site, or you don't have an account which has 200 points on any site in the network.
15 points equals a single accepted answer or 3 upvotes (and no downvotes) received.
Din182 ยท 76 points ยท Posted at 18:41:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And when you try to get points by answering questions, you end up being the one who's answer is at -3 points.
phihag ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:26:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind linking to your best answers? I mean, just two upvotes and you're there.
[deleted] ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 19:45:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
phihag ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:27:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While I'm not much of a voter (less than I really should be), I think my upvote to downvote ratio is easily 2:1. Mind pointing us to your best answer so we can all upvote it?
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:52:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
phihag ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 23:23:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The reason that top posts (questions and answers) are usually older is that they addressed more fundamental questions (How do I parse JSON? instead of MyCoolJSONParser crashes when input contains strange character and timezone is in Antarctica), and had more time to accumulate votes.
But thanks to the outstanding community at stackoverflow, the title got replaced, the tags got cleaned up, and somebody fixed the formatting.
It also looks that you are really operating on bytes. If you are parsing these anyways, a solution not involving relatively slow strings may be faster and cleaner.
From the example, it's not clear why 4x is not one of the desired substrings. So that could have been clearer.
It is also not obvious why the solution must involve regex - although in this case, if you are operating on strings, that is probably the best option.
In summary, I concur that this question is actually pretty decent, with only minor flaws. I'm guessing all the downvotes came before the question got cleaned up by other stackoverflow users. For future questions, try to find a descriptive title, maybe include a little context, and allow other ways of solving the problem than the one you took so far.
kurjax ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:06:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is it already + voted? ;)
wnoise ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:24:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Downvotes are actually fairly rare, because they cost reputation.
I mean, I've got to give Linux credit -- it's a lot more accessible than it was a decade ago. But its proponents often seem willfully blind to the fact that it doesn't always have the features that some people are looking for.
But the point is, most of the time it does not have those "features" because of artificial limitations, not because it wouldn't theoretically be capable of covering them
You could theoretically have any feature on any system. Just because an OS can be programmed for doesn't mean you can't complain that certain things haven't been programmed yet.
Windows is not open source. Its modification to a certain degree would require source code or a lot of reverse engineering, money, time and maybe even legal trouble. On Linux, implementing several things would be stupid easy, if there weren't artificial limitations like DRM et cetera. But still, an OS is chosen because of what it does to you, so if Linux doesn't do what you need, then yes - you are right - choose the OS that helps you do your stuff better. Sometimes more than one OS is needed, and there are many solutions to this: dual booting, VMs, Wine...
Linux documentation is the worst, and I could swear it's on purpose. I only noticed how deeply atrocious it was when I took a look at freebsd's handbook, that thing taught me more about the OS and unix than Linux did in a decade of using it.
[deleted] ยท 171 points ยท Posted at 16:59:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.
The original statement of the adage, by Nathan Poe, was:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.
And as someone who only really codes to model mechanical systems for engineering purposes in MATLAB, this is exactly why I never use stack overflow.
I know python is better. But not having to learn a new language as well as a language that I've used regularly for the past ten years is even better than Python's enhanced capabilities.
It was a while ago. I don't recall the specifics, but it was causing a huge battery drain for some unknown reason. The difficult part was the battery reporting/tests I had done were very odd, acting in ways it shouldn't, and maybe couldn't, like continuing to draw battery after i had killed it (android app).
But i know it's something specific to that app and not a problem with the battery report, because everything else was totally fine. And it didn't have any background processes, unless that's something I could have created on accident which seems unlikely.
Anyway, the problem ended up just... Going away. Or at least it stopped being a noticeable problem. So... Whatever.
Entaris ยท 347 points ยท Posted at 16:55:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah. I got really into trying trying to be a part of the stackoverflow community for a little while...and then I realized that it's generally a terrible place to seek information.
My go to example is a question I posted that went something like this:
"I'm trying to accomplish A, to do this, I'm trying to do X. I realize X isn't a recommended way to do A, and that Y is really the better way to do it. But do to reasons C, D, and E in our environment, Y isn't an option, and X is the best thing I can come up with, but it's giving me problem Z, thoughts on how to fix it?"
Response with millions of up votes "X isn't recommended, you should do Y instead"
That was the day I swore off stackexchange forever.
Even on Superuser I asked a simple question for some Mac software similar to PicPick for Windows that will allow me to press a shortcut, then draw a box at a 1:1 aspect ratio and save a snip screenshot. And I need to move the box because both the location on the screen and the size of the box will change for every snip. The built in OSX tool cannot lock the aspect ratio to 1:1, nor do most other programs.
I got like 4 replies telling me to use the in built OSX command with designated coordinates for the corners of the box (ie: a fixed location which doesn't work for me). Then the post was locked and attached to something like "automate taking screenshot of a designated area".
And just in case anyone is wondering, I did eventually find some software, not listed anywhere on stackoverflow called Simplecap that does this.
...huh, you know, I think I've had a similar question before.
My favourite stack overflow story is the time I wrote a question pretty much perfectly, and within ~2 hours some guy had changed parts of it to be capitalized in a different way (subjective stuff), another guy had changed part of it back, and the previous guy had changed some of it back again.
I believe that question went wholly unanswered. But thankfully some pedants did... something? I'm pretty sure what it ended up with was objectively wrong, too.
Yep, looks like it. How do you like that? 3 incorrect edits in the span of a day.
That question was asked well over a year ago and was never answered. Ah well. I ended up just deleting the drive, lol.
And somehow, your "Thank you" was offensive to the first guy...
Ah man. I quickly lost any faith I had in stack* after that entire thing. It was just so laughably bad. "Bootcamp is not a VM" makes up for the tears in laughter, I guess.
The math stack exchange is quite decent. People are still pricks that want to avoid at all costs to do anyone's homework by accident, but if you post a question you don't know there you'll always get 5 very detailed if overly passive aggressive answers. One time I posted a pretty easy differential equation that I was having troubles wrapping my head about (I came up with it so I wasn't really sure it could be solved with pen and paper), turned out if you integrated both sides it got fairly trivial. So he integrated both sides and said "you should be able to solve the rest" like it would take them any time at all to finish it.
Hah, sounds about right. Not that bad though, if it was trivial at that point. Still...
juckele ยท 221 points ยท Posted at 16:59:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's so sad, because up until maybe 2012 or so it was amazing. 2009 it was such a haven of free information. Now it's turned into this 'curator tyrant' trash heap where people with 100k rep just close things randomly. The terrible thing is how often I hit something as closed as off-topic with a Google search. I just want to reach out and punch perma-ban that curator tyrant who denied me the chance to get my question answered. :|
Entaris ยท 220 points ยท Posted at 17:10:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The terrible thing is how often I hit something as closed as off-topic with a Google search.
That is infuriating... Like...Great the top 5 hits on google are different tech troubleshooting forums saying "This problem is easily found by a simple google search, stop wasting peoples time."
juckele ยท 53 points ยท Posted at 18:04:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ooooh, that really rustles my jimmies. It happens on forums a lot too.
[deleted] ยท 82 points ยท Posted at 18:37:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once got banned from a forum because I "necrod" a thread. The thread was the first google result but it didn't have an answer, so i registered just to leave an answer. Sorry for making your forum actually be useful! I won't do it again.
juckele ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 20:34:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No you won't, because you got banned! :D
phihag ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 22:31:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Backstop ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 19:38:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Car forums are really bad about this.
I'm looking for a way to convert the rear end to disc brakes, anyone done this?
"Use the search noob"
I did search and there's nothing.
Right here, everyone knows of this famous thread: (link)
Yeah okay here's a thread from 2009 with all broken Photobucket links titled "ass-end breaks covetion 2disk DIY" ... and the search was supposed to hit on what, positive thoughts?
Yep, I reply to those with โby not answering, and saying to google the answer, youโve made this irrelevant post the top answer.โ
Honestly, thatโs as frustrating as posting an explationless URL to another forum with the answer that inevitably returns a page not found error once the forum updates their platform and changes all their URLs with no logical way of finding what post 345656677 correlates with the new site layout. Are forum posts copyrighted? Is it illegal to copy an answer from one forum and post it to another rather than linking to the original? Never understood why it seems so common to say โlook hereโ rather than paste the answer. Sometimes people do google before posting.
They are unless otherwise stated. TOS can make it even more complicated. There have been stories people have written only to have a movie deal fall through because the author posted all or part of it on Reddit at some point. Because of Reddit's TOS, people didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot poll even though Reddit had said in the past they wouldn't pursue legal action in situations like that.
I am convinced that Google intenionally moves these posts to the top of everyone's search results to get the "just google it" people to learn the error of their ways.
Entaris ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:25:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I actually had my answer edited by a Stack Overflow tyrant once. No warning. Just "we're going to change your answer because someone else said it should be different." What it was changed to didn't even work for me! I edited back and left a nasty note not to change my answers ever again.
Probably the most immoral thing they could do right here. I honestly believe it should be illegal to edit someone else's comments on the internet like that.
People's internet comments have been used in the court of law and yet people think it's okay to change the words attributed to another human being.
Cyhawk ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:00:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lets assume the Tyrant is correct, OP's answer sucked and was wrong. People will read OP's answer and try it/misuse it/do it wrong/etc and won't bother to read Tyrants or OP2's correct reply, thus they edit the upvoted reply to provide the correct information.
Unfortunately Programmer egos show up and they don't pay attention so shit like this happens.
If they want to provide a better way to do it, the correct way would be to hide/collapse the 'wrong' answer and have Tyrant's reply show up instead of allowing an edit to the fucking comment itself.
Why would have OP's answer have been downvoted out of sight if it had no value?
Cyhawk ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:15:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just like Reddit people up/downvote for seemingly no reason. Just look at how many wrong top comments in say, TIL exist. Just because its wrong doesn't mean it won't get upvotes. People are weird.
cjg_000 ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 18:15:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow does say who most recently edited a post. It might not be as obvious as it should be but it certainly shouldn't be an issue to point out that for a court.
For scenarios where you're making clarifications to an existing answer, it can be easier for people viewing the page to consume an edited answer than to post clarification in a separate answer or in the comments. Especially since comment areas can often get quite large.
I think the issue is that there's no safeguards to punish people for making bad edits.
It has the whole version history of the posts (not comments though).
SodaAnt ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 18:10:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think that's a bit harsh, but I get the idea. I think that proposing edits to other people's answers should be okay, but the user who posted the answer should be able to accept or reject them.
svick ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:54:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the user who posted the answer should be able to accept or reject them
What if that user hasn't logged in to Stack Overflow for several years?
svick ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:15:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That sounds like terrible user experience: Here is a years old answer in its original form, followed by a dozen modifications trying to improve and update it.
Yeah I think it should be the opposite. The original author should always be able to reject a change, but anyone should be able to make an edit subject to moderator approval.
That certainly makes it better. I still think it's wrong to edit someones comment. Stack Overflow is just one example though. There have been news sites that routinely edit their comment section. Not delete or moderate or remove, but edit comments. So it's a subject I'm pretty salty about.
khazhyk ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:23:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Editing in ideal should be fine, you need rep to do it and sometimes answers have small mistakes or become out of date. Just ppl make mistakes or don't have the best judgement.
(I've had my answers edited for small typos etc., there is a full edit log with diff and notes and such, and you can revert edits last I checked)
svick ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:53:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
you need rep to do it
Small correction: Anyone (even those who are not logged in) can propose an edit. Though if you don't have enough rep, those who do have to review your edit for it to be actually applied to the post.
I'd say that specific problem isn't as much of an issue nowadays, since cyber forensics has advanced to the point where you can see all the previous iterations of a comment.
svick ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:51:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Then you should not be writing anything on Stack Overflow. If you do, you agree to release anything you say under a Creative Commons license, which gives anyone the right to edit what you said, as long as attribution is maintained (which is why every post has an edit history).
KlittanW ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:41:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
did something similar on another forum... i got banned for 1 week
Now it's turned into this 'curator tyrant' trash heap where people with 100k rep just close things randomly.
This is precisely why I feel StackOverflow fails at being a resource. It's a community driven by popularity, hence their rep system. You should not, and cannot, put factual information into a game of popularity.
Does A work? If so, then it's a solution.
Does B work? If so, then it's a solution. Is it more efficient than A? Who cares, because not everyone has the exact same situation.
One answer should not be 'more popular' or 'more correct'. I can say "1+1+1=3", and be equally correct as saying "3x1=3". StackOverflow would deem the latter choice 'better'. If it works and can be implemented, it's a solution. That doesn't mean it should be implemented, but that's on the user to decide. They are the ones who are trying to find a solution, so it should follow they are responsible. It's not for the community to judge.
Entaris ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 18:30:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah.
I mean, I understand why the rep system is the way it is...To a degree... And I frankly can't imagine a way of designing a community that would be much better...But the whole thing does fail overwhelmingly.
I think a big part of the problem is how much you have to grind for Rep in order to participate. In order to become a useful part of the community you have to grind at the popularity contest to gain the privileges needed to make a difference...and People that have the time to win at that popularity contest are not always the people who deserve to have the power to drive the community.
And I frankly can't imagine a way of designing a community that would be much better
They could start by dropping the whole elitist "this site exists as a repository for unique cases" attitude which they use as a justification. The site is too big and complex for this to be enforced without some sort of abuse.
Either keep an open door when it comes to people asking for advice or questions, or close it. Don't bitch about your door being open, then complain that the people you don't want come through it. This is why moderation exists. Moderate your shit, don't leave it up to the community.
Entaris ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:41:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For sure. The attitude of SE sites in general leans towards the "yes yes, aren't we amazing" attitude, which doesn't help.
My personal solution to the stackexchange problem has been "join mailing lists/Google Groups for software I have problems with, and save solutions that are interesting to my personal blog for my own use, and hey if someone else should happen to find it and make use of it, woot"
Thankfully Mailinglist's/ Google groups seem to be...Mostly acceptable still, but there are definitely cases where they are aggravating haha.
I think sites like StackOverflow and RapGenius, and even Reddit - to snow extent - start to break down once you get enough people who care more about their upvotes than anything else.
The issue is the way points are distributed on the first two sites.
On RapGenius, all editors of an annotation get a share of the upvotes, related to how much of the annotation was their content. This leads to users with edit privledges making very minor changes in phrasing or word usage, but getting the majority of the upvotes.
On StackOverflow, you don't get rep for making an edit, but you do get badges.
It's a system that rewards people with lots of points and people can abuse that...to get more points.
The alternative is the unimaginable amount of pure bullshit that gets asked. Sticking to your question and addressing all the concerns related to your question gets it restored most certainly. You can also ping any of the guys that voted to close the question for an explanation.
juckele ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:08:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's not my question that gets closed. It's someone elses question that I find with a Google search. The question is perfect, and an answer to this question will solve my problem. But unfortunately some idiot who thought they were being useful closed it as a dupe or off-topic. I can ping them for an explanation, but they closed in 18 months ago and I'm looking for an answer today.
Are there good actors? Yes. But there are also bad actors, and as an information seeker, I literally have no recourse against the curator tyrants. They've already done the damage by the moment our paths cross. I'm not talking about the people who close trash questions. I'm talking about the people who close things as dupes without linking to the exact same question or close something as off-topic when it's a fine question (enough that I found it from a Google search for the same information). Those people exist in sufficient quantity that they've destroyed Stack Overflow more than the trash questions ever could have (hint, trash questions can get downvoted or ignored too, there's very little value in formally closing them).
I work at a largeish IT company and this is how the conversation goes 99% of the time you ask a question to a group of experts. No matter how much background you give, "well why don't they just do Y. You know we don't recommend X right? Why are you letting them do X?"
[deleted] ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:13:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fourth reply: A demand that you post your entire life's story, DNA test results, social security number, every tool you've ever purchased, and a list of all sexual partners, and the highest prime number you can count to by noon and then maybe they'll help you.
I asked a question recently on a forum, the first answer was this guy who from his forum profile seems to be the person you want to give you the answer. Instead of telling me that the answer is no, he kept asking me these redundant questions, like did I do "X", and I tried to be polite because there are absolutely 0 ways to for me to have asked my question if I didn't don't "X", he asked me about my location, my location was irrelevant, he asked about the method I used to arrive at "X", then accused me of not being forthcoming. After all of that, he says: Nope you can't do it. So why you fucker had to ask me all these questions that has absolutely 0 bearing on the answer??? After all of that, a second user jumps in says something like this: Sorry, you can't do this because [insert link], however, if you are worried about the time, don't worry because the thing you want to accomplish actually happens a lot faster than you think [another link to prove what he said] so it won't matter that much to you and no need for you to do what you wanted to do.
There should be a "didn't even read the question" button for each reply. It should delete the reply and damage the poster's reputation with 10 downvotes.
All of my points on stackoverflow have been coming from a single question I asked that fits this pattern, that I ended up adding my own answer to after everyone else suggested I try having a different problem.
Last week I discovered someone had edited my now 5 year old answer to a totally different solution that I'd already discounted in the problem.
I give up.
mbo1992 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:24:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Do you mind posting that question?
Entaris ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:05:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh jeez it was so long ago... I looked through my history and it looks like the question in question is missing. Must have been deleted. Kind of funny.
The last time I asked a question on stack overflow, I asked a sql question and was accosted by 5 people for not using the apparent standard way of formatting questions for sql on stack overflow, even though my question had nothing to do with how any of those people wanted me to format it. I haven't asked a question since.
I remember having trouble with implementing some concept in one of my class a year or two ago and posting my code with the explanation that the goal is to implement said concept. I was having a hard time with the concept and after reading through the book and getting help from my teacher I started to understand it a little. The issue was I did something wrong and the program wasn't working and for the life of me I couldn't understand why. As a last resort I decided to post a to SO and I was only getting answers along the lines of, "you should read the book and study more." or, "maybe you should look into a different career." I won't post to SO anymore.
Entaris ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:37 on March 22, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've taken to just joining mailing lists or google groups for things that I end up with problems with. Generally speaking the communitites for a specific program tend to be A) more knowledgeable, and B) less hung up on weird "we have a specific culture here, you better fit in or get out" things.
Not looking to give anyone a life-changing eureka moment here, but, having worked in IT support in various senior positions over 21 years, the easiest problems to solve with the information given are the ones that just state the problem. In your go-to example, you are trying to show that you kind of know what youโre talking about, which I guess people do because alot of IRC and support forums have kind of pushed this way of asking for support (e.g. RTFM).
Also, just because your company expects thing to be done a certain way just means youโve limited yourself to less solutions, not the answers you should get. Your example question should really be one question about Problem Z. You are muddying the problem with your own troubleshooting.
Entaris ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:26:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The problem is with that is, My muddying the question is due to experience in stack overflow of saying, "How do I Solve Z?" and people replying by telling "You'd only get Z if you are trying to do X, X isn't recommended, Do Y"
There is no winning. If you leave a question simple "i have problem Y, how do I fix it" You get roasted with "Tell us what you've tried, provide more information, what are the details? We're here to help, not to do your job for you"
if you provide tons of information people either a) ignore the question as a whole, or b) Ignore it, and tell you to do something you specifically said you couldn't do.
Yeah, thats kind of what Iโm saying. The internet support arena doesnโt really support things the way I do in real life. I hope to solve this problem someday with blockchain.
What should I use for my problems, then? Reddit seems cool, but I've always heard of stackoverflow as the holy grail.
Yserbius ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 18:13:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use StackOverflow but be prepared for your question to get ignored or a lot of angry comments about how wrong you are.
Better yet, find a chat channel for whatever it is you're working on and ask your question there. Someone will either answer you or tell you where to ask.
Speaking as a React developer, I don't go to Stack Overflow for help. I go to the Reactiflux Discord channel, where I'm much more likely to get answers to whatever my specific issue is.
I still use it too, I just have to search "site:stackoverflow.com" and then open up 50 tabs because the first 48 of them are going to be duplicates or suggestions to use the answer that doesn't work for everyone asking, then then maybe 2 of them will have useful info.
We all use SO, otherwise we wouldn't be opinionated about it, and most of us still use it.
As others have described, this is not just SO, it's a general phenomenon. It's been rampant on IRC and Usenet since time immemorial. SO is just another platform for this phenomenon to manifest ever so often.
TRUE! that was me, i posted right answer that solves OP's question.
But, was deleted with no obvious reason. (but i don't care).
Sarsoar ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:40:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"So what are you trying to do?" <- response after explaining explicitely what you are trying to do and what you have tried that isnt working.
"Why would anyone need to do this?" <- response to a fairly common use case that the responder hasn't encountered before because your jobs dont overlap and so he dismisses your question.
I know it feels unfair when you have a genuine well meant question you want to learn from for yourself but yes the amount of crud people on those various websites have to wade through just so it can be downvoted and won't show up for the average user is quite staggering. I can understand that by the sheer repetitiveness mistakes will be made.
I was helping someone with some non spoilery tutoring on some university Haskell homework for a course I did the year before and I copypasted one of the runtime errors into Google because it confused me a bit and I thought I just had to brush up on stuff since the homework problems were all slightly updated.
Now ocassionally with these errors (C++ C# especially) I sometimes need to edit out the 'personalised stuff' like filenames but I was lazy and hoped google would just ignore those parts. But imagine my anger when google literally found exactly that error on stack overflow because some student posted their homework there and couldn't even be arsed to scrub out those details.
He was so lazy he even used a handle that he had listed with his real name on a different site. In fact looking for his handle and just "Haskell" in google revealed a whole bunch of earlier homework problems he was asking people to write the code for around the web. Which proved very usefull when I emailed one of the TAs archived copies of all that crud.
Like getting help with homework is one thing that maybe isn't always allowed but ok. Plagiarising is bad okay. But publicly reproducing the homework with soluttions by you or others in a course with easily 50 to 100 students is just so incredibly stupid. You already have the problem of people independently discovering identical solutions... but if some solution is posted online like that and comes up in any kind of cross reference check it just means almost nobody can get credits for their homework.
On another note more than one Twitch channel hat I hang out in (that has programming content) has a command that yells they will not help you with your CS homework. Like we will have at length discussions about various programming problems if you seem interested in a topic but there is just a very steady tide of lazy questioning for the basic homework problems. It is like they haven't really took the time to understand the problem statement and are just word for word asking you for a ready to go solution.
I've asked three questions on StackOverflow. One top response was "You're going about it the wrong way" one was "Why would you want to do that?" and the third was "That's not how you use that".
I've since taken to browsing new questions and no matter how dumb the question seems to be, trying to at least give a reasonable answer (unless the asker is just straight out looking for homework solutions).
Hello /u/UndeadMeme, welcome to Stack Overflow! Please make sure you read the FAQ and rules. Please keep your sorry ass from being taken seriously until you have 10k reputation!
_Wolfos ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:14:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I asked a question about transformation matrices there and expected the same result. Some person spent what mustโve been at least an hour writing a detailed post helping me understand what was wrong with my code.
Ixilary ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:11:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same for me. I still have my post, it's at -3 and the first answer is someone accusing me of lying, because my issue definitely could not be possible. Here, I even copied the exact comment:
"You are making something up. Your initialization cannot and does not generate "cannot be used to initialize" error. Don't post fake code. Post real code that illustrates the problem."
I ended up solving it a few days later and answered my own question though.
Answering your own question is always a possibility. Sometimes people just don't understand your problem. There are lots of good self-answered questions on SO.
dtfinch ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:10:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's a playground for trolling, since there's no penalty for bad moderation.
ssnazzy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:03:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Every experience is the same on SO for me that Iโve ever asked.
Hey guys check out my program Iโm trying to get it to do this, this is my code and itโs doing this
Then thereโs about 3 people who tell me thereโs a different method they wouldโve done, and how my way is irrelevant. A couple of people who say just use from the libraries. Then thereโs a mod who shuts it down because they donโt do peopleโs homework
When all along I just had was a pointer error that took one sec to fix.
One thing that I noticed more and more is the overuse of ... at the end of answer, makes them feel really passive aggresive, I always just add a "...dumbass" at the end of those answers in my head
There is undoubtedly a more concise and reliable way to do this (with jQuery, most likely). Use on the fly, or plug into a script injector to make it automatic.
var posts = document.getElementsByClassName('post-text');
var comments = document.getElementsByClassName('comment-copy');
var elems = [];
for (var i = 1; i < posts.length; ++i) {
var post = posts[i];
var children = post.children;
elems.push(children[children.length - 1])
}
for (var i = 0; i < comments.length; ++i) {
elems.push(comments[i]);
}
for (var i = 0; i < elems.length; ++i) {
var elem = elems[i];
var text = elem.innerText;
if (text.substring(text.length - 3) === '...') {
elem.innerText = text + atob('ZHVtYmFzcw==');
}
}
Iโd much more prefer it they did tell that, because then their shitty passive-aggressive non-answers would at least get downvoted and not be hogging the top spotlight in the question thread.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:57:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Colopty ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:42:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Did they ask "why computer break when thrown off a cliff"?
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:11:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, they asked about randomness and seeding.
jfq722 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:01:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If you would just use LINQ you'd find the computer would withstand the fall.
It's nothing compared to ServerFault. SF has a real superiority complex and has decided if your question isn't related to your network engineering job, and not training at your job but a real immediate problem, you aren't worthy. "Go to Superuser," they say, but ignore the fact that if you have a question about networking or server administration the only place where you can actually ask it is ServerFault. Superuser is supposed to be for more basic computing questions, "how do I install the drivers for my new mouse", not "how do I get dnsmasq to stop handing out default routes".
I can't remember what it was, but I had a question about some server software I was using on a Raspberry Pi, but because I provided too much information the only answer I got was "use better hardware you idiot" (which wouldn't have addressed the question, since the hardware wasn't relevant) along with a downvoted and closed question. I deleted my account after thatโI don't want to be associated with such a toxic environmentโand I've never looked back.
Yeah in a Software Engineering student in my last year of college and most of my posts to stack over flow have not been recieved very well. I just needed help understanding what I was doing wrong because whatever it happens to be its something I'm learning about for the first time. I know that the questions I posted were fairly basic in the grand scheme of things but I didn't expect some of the toxic responses I have gotten.
you're using the same k in suka and cyka, and you're using the rest of the letters in cyka and cyะบa the same. What's the difference?
Also, we know what's intended by cyka.
Bad bot.
jsideris ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 17:29:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At least they changed it from back when it was "exact duplicate" and closed your question even when the linked question doesn't give you the answer you need.
thratty ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:17:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question closed for being too potentially helpful
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:38:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do A?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do B?"
"How do I do B?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do C?"
"How do I do C?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do D?"
...
"How do I do Y?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do A, but not quite as how I need in my own question, making it useless."
Colopty ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:44:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And God help you if you want to change a default windows UI elements behavior, like trying to change colors or redirect keyboard input into a fixed control regardless of which one has focus.
And then you get these contrived explanations instead.
"So you see B is a metaphysical manifestation of the original API writers fantasies regarding promise chains where each chain actually works like an internal combustion engine with lasers".
... "But I just wanted to know why I should use B and why it returns A..."
3226 ยท 241 points ยท Posted at 17:53:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I remember playing some cookie clicker type of game, and I was looking for an autoclicker (which a lot of these games assume you will use).
First hit I found was on a Linux forum with someone asking for an auto clicker and the response he got was "I can't think of a legitimate use for an auto clicker, so you are probably doing something unethical, so I wont help you. "
It seems to be that case that if you ask a technical question on a linux forum, someone will always tell you why you shouldn't be doing the thing you're doing.
linux is horrible for shit like that. i remember back when the wifi driver wasn't installed by default in the OS so after booting to linux i literally couldn't go online. my college campus didn't have ethernet ports easily available(i didn't wanna lug my gaming pc to the labs) so i asked on the forums/
cue a deluge of absolute nonsense about gaming pcs not being useful with only ONE useful reply out of a thread of 30 replies(barring my replies begging for a solution)
i remember back when the wifi driver wasn't installed by default in the OS so after booting to linux i literally couldn't go online.
I did a fresh install on my PC with Windows once and had the same thing. I got it booted up and realized no internet, it can't recognize the ethernet port. Crap.
Luckily I was able to connect my phone with USB and tether it to get internet long enough for it to find the drivers it needed. I now keep bootable Linux USBs near all my PCs, just in case.
I don't miss the times on windows xp when there was litterally no ways to install drivers, cause it missed EVERY driver, included usb ports, ethernet, wifi, sata. So to install a driver to make the pc usable in any way you needed a damn floppy and use an ide port.
That's true, but as it aged more and more hardware was rolled out that fell into the pile of devices that were not supported out of the box simply because the devices didn't exist when the disc was pressed.
When I was running XP on newer hardware, I actually burned uncompresed (no ZIP support) chipset and Ethernet drivers to a CD so that I could get the box online enough to download current drivers for everything else.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:12:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The problem is also reversed nowadays. Laptops don't support ethernet natively so if you don't have a USB-to-ethernet adapter, you better pray your network card is supported out of the box.
I once found a college student asking how to implement a CPU crypto currency miner on a technical forum (not SO but canโt remember which one). The guy explicitly mentioned that itโs for a course project and itโs for educational use only, but all the replies are either telling him that CPU mining is not profitable or even saying that heโs trying to build a botnet because โwhy would you develop a CPU miner except for tricking people to use it and use their PCs as botnet?โ. Nobody was trying to help the OP and the poor kid had to explain to everyone that he doesnโt even know what a botnet is...
Part of the reason for that is that there are degenerates out there who are looking either A) cheap answers without putting in the hard work or B) people looking to be malicious.
It's why some IRC channels seem to act "elitist" and have been for 25+ years.
Linux also seems to be the hacker OS to do dodgy stuff in, so...
baudday ยท 896 points ยท Posted at 16:41:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sucks cause SO used to actually be a great place to ask questions with very little toxicity. Now I just gawk at the brave souls who dare ask a question
vancity- ยท 383 points ยท Posted at 17:09:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've seen GitHub Issues become a lot more prevalent in the past year or so. Partly due to GitHub building out their issues platform more, partly because so many libraries are open source, partly because you get access to the developers themselves.
That should really be concerning for SO. We've been saying for years that antagonizing the userbase is going to kill the site. They've had years to address the issue. Instead they decided to put their effort into being a LinkedIn competitor, despite no one using SO to get a job.
My feeling is it's already too late for SO. They'll be as useful as Google Groups, which is to say a small niche not particularly useful.
That's a really good point. I haven't even been using StackOverflow for this reason. Lately. GitHub has been a better alternative. I think the gameification of the point system in StackOverflow, now with the added career incentives from StackOverflow careers (and making that information public to recruiters or companies) has led to a much more competitive atmosphere. It makes sense since some people now have a stronger incentive to capitalize on their points. Even if it means stepping on toes. Reminds me of opportunity hoarding.
qqqyqnz ยท 69 points ยท Posted at 17:36:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
True.
GitHub shouldn't expand issues to encompass questions (that's not what they are for), but it should just add a Questions feature/tab that can be turned on per repo. It would seriously dent SO traffic, and then each community can enforce norms as they want instead of power users arbitrarily enforcing them.
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:36:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They probably don't want to turn into a Q and A platform since their business model is charging repository owners a flat fee.
qqqyqnz ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:39:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They added wiki and agile/kanban ("story") boards, and they host static websites. Q&A doesn't feel that far off.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:51:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Big difference in traffic between those things though.
God that would be amazing. I would love just ask seasoned developers of specific libraries things like โwhat is the most efficient way to do X?โ or โhow do usually deal with Y?โ It would be great for common issues that arenโt really bugs and just interesting problems with various solutions.
qqqyqnz ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:17:53 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A lot of prominent developers are active on twitter, I would recommend trying them there.
hey thanks for applying but your profile seems to suck ass so go fuck yourself and die in a ditch. no one wants to employ you
baudday ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:16:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah agreed their time is past. Would love if GH Issues highlighted answers in some way though. SO hasnโt been my primary source for answers in quite a while
That's a good point, but that's a fairly narrow space to compete in. Now if they expanded to questions about best practices, or better yet questions about architecture, code design, etc. you'd have yourself a competitive site. Unfortunately non-concrete questions are literally ananthema to SO.
I think the benefit of archived SO posts over Google Groups is that (despite the joke this post is making) it's easy to find the best solution to the problem because of the upvoting. It's annoying scrolling through forum threads trying to figure out which reply is actually correct. GitHub Issues is decent at least because you can scan for the one with the most ๐๐โฅ๏ธ's.
At this point I'm not sure SO cares a ton about new questions and users, they already have plenty of valuable content and it doesn't take much more new content to keep it viable.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:05:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They'll be as useful as Google Groups, which is to say a small niche not particularly useful.
The number of times I've hit a Google Groups link on Google's first page of results only to be told I need to be authorised to access that thread...
We've been saying for years that antagonizing the userbase is going to kill the site. They've had years to address the issue. Instead they decided to put their effort into being a LinkedIn competitor, despite no one using SO to get a job.
While I agree with this completely, I see the shift to be more like linkedin as an attempt to keep the atmosphere professional and not toxic. However, like many of you guys in this sub know, arrogance is a gigantic problem in software business to the extent that every coding interview self-help book lists "Don't be arrogant" or "Don't come off as arrogant" as their #1 rule. I even know a few people who failed interviews because they had everything going for them except attitude.
This sounds like a re-hash of Google's failed attempt at keeping comment sections from being a zoo without bars by prompting everyone to use their real name. It is simply not effective. A much better solution would be to stop spending money trying to clone linkedin and instead hire a team that gives out points for being nice independent of answering questions. Of course, it is entirely possible that there is no solution and SO has run its course. We shall see in the next decade or so! I'm excited.
Baranix ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:58:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I haven't even noticed I've slowly been transitioning to looking into Github Issues instead SO (except for jQuery questions, because SO has a jQuery cult as we all know). I suddenly appreciate Github more.
This is why open source is so great. Code doesn't lie.
Vok250 ยท 91 points ยท Posted at 17:23:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've gone back to using language docs directly. When the docs are lacking I resort to desperate Googling and trial and error. I've even cracked open textbooks as a reference.
The biggest issue I find with SO is that it has become very focused on the lowest common denominator, which is basic programming theory. Any niche questions go unanswered, have useless answers, or get closed as a duplicate of a long outdated question.
For example I have had many cases where A above is something unintuitive or poorly documented in a library we use in production. B is just someone suggesting to use a different library. Sure that's fine and dandy on some CS2000 homework, but I'm not going to spend months refactoring production code just so I can reverse the order of a JSon list in 5 fewer lines of code. "nobody uses A" is just them jacking of their superiority complex and ignores the tens of thousands of industry products running on A.
pxan ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 18:38:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I know I must finally be an adult because I check docs before googling around for answers. True maturity.
I'm definitely not a mature programmer in any sense, but I always have docs open when I'm programming. I mean, the answer is THERE! Stated in very precise language! What more could I ask. Some docs leave a lot to be desired, but 99% of the time it's faster than googling.
I got into this habit mostly from my microprocessors chair, where we couldn't use any libraries and had to program the registries. I wasn't going to understand shit of what I was doing without reading the Datasheet. And after you get over the intimidation factor, there's nothing too complex about it. Meanwhile my colleagues were busy trying to understand examples or googling questions where the obvious answer is Y, not X because of our constraints.
The thing is, the SoftwareEngineering stack overflow site is supposed to be the one about basic programming theory. Stack Overflow is meant to solve the specific question about the annoying problem that you've encountered that has nothing to do with design patterns.
Common-law marriage, also known as sui iuris marriage, informal marriage, marriage by habit and repute, or marriage in fact, is a legal framework in a limited number of jurisdictions where a couple is legally considered married, without that couple having formally registered their relation as a civil or religious marriage. The original concept of a "common-law marriage" is a marriage that is considered valid by both partners, but has not been formally recorded with a state or religious registry, or celebrated in a formal religious service. In effect, the act of the couple representing themselves to others as being married, and organizing their relation as if they were married, acts as the evidence that they are married.
The term common-law marriage has wide informal use, often to denote relations that are not legally recognized as common-law marriages.
Yes I am sure all of us saying the same experience happened are just collectively conspiring against SO.
Tbh I haven't signed in my account in literally years because I don't use it to post. I don't even recall what my credentials are and I am certainly too lazy to prove someone who is looking to argue about it.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 06:59:41 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still have luck with SO, as long as you know the proper question to ask
baudday ยท 96 points ยท Posted at 17:01:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It really shouldnโt be that way though. Is it a community for people who know what theyโre doing to ask questions, or is it a place to ask a question you donโt know the answer to? How is someone new to software supposed to know what is and isnโt fair game?
Zei33 ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 17:18:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've found that asking the question in the most self deprecating way possible usually helps. Usually still get a few smug comments though.
HOW DARE YOU CALL ME SMUG. i'll have you know i'm the MOST SELF EFFACING MOFO on this site! here the mods(who i may or may not work with) will chime in! Oh you posted to reddit? trying to bandwagon! trying to suppress my le elite status on this godly shitstain of a website!
oh jeff atwood told me to chill out? well i guess it was kinda both our faults. your question is gonna get deleted and your account hit with negative karma though
rxnaij ยท 22 points ยท Posted at 17:55:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This exact issue applies to me not only with SO but with my college's CS students Facebook group. New students post questions about their code/errors all the time, which can get repetitive but is very expected. Yet the same admin(s) will leave very terse, condescending comments telling the students that their questions makes no sense.
That always perplexed me. Why are they holding new students' questions to standards that these students aren't even aware of? Shouldn't members of an academic community want to make their discipline accessible to, not gated from, these new students? I honestly felt like this whole elitist attitude is what ultimately turned me off of majoring in CS.
It is primarily a platform for finding answers.
Asking questions is honestly only a small part of it.
For most people the ratio of answers found to questions asked is probably well over 100:1
I think it sort of is that. Most of the people who actively participate in stackoverflow are at least moderately experienced. It's not supposed to be a free debugging service for people to come in, ask "what's wrong with my code," and then leave. You're expected to read the rules and F.A.Q before posting, and research your question extensively.
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:28:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I agree with that. I feel like that's the way it used to be. Now, I feel like everyone on there thinks they're doing that job and it's gotten to a point where they're basically looking for reasons to throw out your question. I'm just glad for the most part I don't have to ask questions on there anymore.
[deleted] ยท -40 points ยท Posted at 17:11:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How is someone new to software supposed to know what is and isnโt fair game?
step 1 - noobs need to know their role
baudday ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 17:14:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lil too self righteous for my taste...
[deleted] ยท -13 points ยท Posted at 17:18:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
if you want an example of how low quality questions ruin the ability to get help look no further than googling anything like this :
"ubuntu [problem name]"
you get 50,000 half baked forum post with 100,000 half baked replies. one can (and will) spend hours reading endless pages of forum post trying to find the solution (that often never comes)
[deleted] ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:45:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Youโre down voted because you were an ass before this comment but I totally agree. Most of the times the threads are derailed into something not even close to the original question asked and I dread at the 30 page posts, no way Iโm gonna spend 1 hour reading all that. Iโve been subconsciously avoiding that Ubuntu forum that shows coffee beans under profile names because of that.
Edit: askouija, above this comment on my profile, is gonna reply FUCKYOU
[deleted] ยท -28 points ยท Posted at 17:16:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
communities and standards exist to keep quality of content high.
baudday ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 17:18:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Never seen a โnoobs need to know their roleโ community standard anywhere. Youโre promoting elitism.
[deleted] ยท -24 points ยท Posted at 17:18:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You must be new to the internet
"Noobs know your role" is part of the fabric of the internet, including reddit.
baudday ยท 30 points ยท Posted at 17:20:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You sound like me in High School
[deleted] ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 17:33:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
His post history is really sad :/
Itโs mostly suicidal depression, alcoholism, gatekeeping other alcoholics who arenโt miserable enough and far-right politics.
I donโt want to make any more fun of him, heโs already in a lot of pain, even though heโs a miserable ass.
[deleted] ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 17:21:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
k
baudday ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:22:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That is exactly what my dumb ass 15 year old self would've said. Which was over a decade ago... fuck
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:34:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol of course you post to The_Donald
snp3rk ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 17:26:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No it's not you dick wad. New people join reddit all the time and if they are out of a loop for an inside joke other users always jump in to assist them. Heck we even have a sub for outoftheloop. Reddit, excluding a few subreddits, is no where as noob unfriendly, or toxic as toxicoverflow
baudday ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:18:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol k
[deleted] ยท -4 points ยท Posted at 17:22:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol k it's been this way since BBS's, IRC and usenet.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:45:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Cal1gula ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:31:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
All the questions I've asked got answered. I'm not surprised the average Redditor can't form a SO post though. I've seen the content here.
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:57:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Begs the question, why are you here then? What's more, why have you made an account here? WHY ARE YOU COMMENTING?? Holy shit are you aware that you are now actually part of the very community you so despise?!
Hey I still voluntarily answer questions on SO. Unlike pretty much any person complaining in this thread that I've seen so far.
The anti-SO circle jerk is some of the most misdirected, ignorant complaining from people who probably couldn't even function at their job without it. But by all means, keep jerking away for that sweet internet karma.
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:03:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Neat, I voluntarily answer questions too! I'm not sure what that has to do with your original comment, but I think you came to the wrong place to insult "the average Redditor". The communities overlap probably by a lot. I'm willing to bet just about everyone in this sub has an SO account. This post wouldn't be this highly voted if it didn't resonate with a lot of folks, many of whom I'm sure, like myself, are more than capable of forming well thought-out, reasonable questions.
How would this be the wrong place for that? Why would I want to make a point to an empty room? Maybe that's what you do when you've got something controversial to say, but that seems pretty pointless to me.
And I hope the irony of you claiming high upvotes = relevant and popular isn't lost on you considering the content of the post itself right? You are the equivalent of "You do B."
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:13:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's the wrong place because you're essentially saying everyone else in here except you is some sort of blubbering idiot that can't ask a proper question. You understand the likelihood of that? Seeing as you are part of the community, it's like setting a bomb off in a room you're in and thinking it would somehow hit everyone else except you. You comment on this shit and read it and vote on it, yet somehow you're the exception to the rule.
Your comparison isn't relevant because in this community an upvote is like saying "haha that's funny I can relate to it". Whereas, on SO a vote is just saying it's a good or bad question, not "I can somehow relate to this question".
Every single upvoted response here is an anecdote about poor posting habits.
Like I said, just a misguided circle jerk.
Just like every thread where SO is mentioned.
Sometime someone has to be a voice of reason.
baudday ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:25:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No I don't think you care, but I feel better knowing that you know that you're not somehow special or separate from the people you're insulting.
For what it's worth, in the 8 years since I joined StackOverflow I've gotten just about every single one of my questions answered, I've answered many questions and many of those answers have been accepted. I've seen it go from a place where you feel like you need to make sure you know what you're asking and that you've done your research, to a place where that just doesn't even matter anymore. I've seen so many well-intentioned questioned get downvoted to hell for no apparent reason. Erroneous flags all over the place. It's a cesspool compared to how it used to be. I'm just lucky I started when I did I suppose, because if I were starting out now, god knows SO is the last place I'd ask for help.
Same goes for you insulting me. And I'm sure you still use SO hourly.
baudday ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:33:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sorry, where exactly did I insult you? If this counts as an insult... It was after you basically called everyone in here stupid and it was 100% not intended to be an insult. More of a tongue-in-cheek way to point out that you're part of the community you're insulting.
Wozago ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:25:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What actually is the difference between the two?
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:27:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackExchange is the umbrella that holds it all. You can find an exchange for pretty much anything from EE to Car Maintenance to Crafts!. Pretty much if you have a hobby you can probably find an exchange for it.
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users.
I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
There is a reason why I have a smurf SO account purely for posting questions, we're now at a stage where people are afraid to ask questions. What a world.
I had a similar experience on r/writtingpromts. Thought of a good one, read the rukes and posting guidlines, posted it. It got removed 2 minutes later with a link to "suggestions" on how to post a prompt..... Why aren't the suggestions in the rules then?!
I always have to think 10 times before asking a question in fear of getting chewed...
Diesl ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:36:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still use it for my C questions. You gotta take the good with the bad and prepare to be looked down on with utter disdain while they casually toss you the correct answer.
I've had a few times wanting to respond to unanswered or incorrectly answered questions, but apparently you need to jump through hoops to get "points" in order to do that.
You don't need any reputation to answer (or ask) a question in general.
Exception for protected questions, but I don't think an unanswered question has ever been protected, normally just the super-popular questions that already have many working answers.
aman207 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:18:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think rasherdk is talking about commenting, which you need 50 rep for.
You can give answers on any of the stack exchange site, and once you have 200 points on any single site, you get a free 100 points on all other sites, removing the initial barriers on all the sites.
My only experience with stack overflow has been while learning how to program, googling the issue, the first result being someone repeating my exact issue, and the only answer being "this is closed because its been asked too many times, use Google".
I've asked and answered around 100 questions and never had problems with toxicity
Ajedi32 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 03:29:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I see people saying stuff like this on Reddit all the time, but I've personally asked over 100 questions on SO and only 3 of them have a negative score. (And of those three, two are blatently off-topic "recommend a tool for me" questions.)
I think asking a good SO question just requires a different mindset from what many folks are used to. If you go into SO trying to treat it like a forum, you're gonna have a bad time.
Oh cry me a river. Everyone wants to be a victim nowadays. Toxicity is subjective and people tend to act entitled to answers without investing enough themselves to formulate the right question.
SO is great.
baudday ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:46:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Response with nothing and a gif. I can see why stack overflow seems like a bad place for you.
baudday ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:53:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You're right it's cause you're smarter than me and I'm too thick headed. SO is just on another intellectual plane my feeble mind is unable to comprehend.
My response says plenty, your inability to connect the dots does too.
Wait... So you're telling me I'm conceited but at the same time telling me I'm too thick to understand what your ellipsis and gif are saying?
You're projecting, mate. Stop with the pathetic strawmen.
baudday ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:57:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm just repeating what you told me... mate.
baudday ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:59:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You simultaneously complained about the subjectivity of my response while giving your own subjective opinion. I pointed that out with what I thought was a blindingly obvious comment. You said that was "nothing" and proceeded to insinuate that I have issues with StackOverflow because I'm stupid. That about cover it?
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:01:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And you keep downvoting me because you disagree with me
I downvoted you because you insulted me or added absolutely nothing. I didn't downvote comments with actual discussions. Feel free to do the same and feel free to keep whining.
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:09:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hahaha ok wait what? So I'm playing victim, but you feel the need to downvote because you feel insulted. Point out an insult please.
Vok250 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:16:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The irony is that this guy is all over this thread calling people entitled whiny "victims" and adding nothing to the discussion himself.
I didn't insinuate you were stupid but you're so hell bent on imagining an enemy that looks down on you that that's all you see.
You ARE playing the victim though and quite annoying at that.
Anyway. We don't really have anything productive to discuss. You keep posting your gifs and whining about toxicity. I suggest Tumblr.
baudday ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:08:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I can see why stack overflow seems like a bad place for you.
I must have misinterpreted what you meant by that then. I don't really feel victimized, so funny that I should come off as a victim to you.
I still think it's funny that you complain about how subjective my opinion was while simultaneously giving your own.
[deleted] ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 18:26:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know about this one. It's a really fine place from my experience. One thing to understand is that SO is not there to help random users who ask questions. It's there to build a database of questions and answers for future reference.
If someone asks a question that is already answered on the site - that's not welcome. The rules are to close them and link to the question that is already answered.
Unique, hard or unsolved questions typically are voted up very fast.
I guess what I like to say is that for me SO is good as it currently is.
Its like they don't understand that most coding assignments are a. don't allow you to use vectors or standard libraries b. the person asking the question does not even know what that means. I've asked questions before about working with character arrays and they get onto me for not using strings. I'm like the assignment wants me to use character arrays so answer the damn question, lol.
[deleted] ยท 70 points ยท Posted at 17:47:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wtf is the point of that? Like ok, cool, you paid your way to a passing grade, but now what? Do they not realise their employer is going to immediately realize they don't know their shit?
To be fair, my experience is that most people are perfectly willing to help iff they get the impression that they aren't doing your whole homework for you. I can fully understand them being skeptical towards you, especially since so many people try and abuse helpful question-answerers to do their whole homework and put no effort in themselves.
Best you can do, IMO, is be transparent about it being a homework problem, put effort into explaining what you've tried and why that didn't work, and generally keep the question focused and specific.
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:14:12 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's good advise. I would be so happy if more homework questions were like that.
Inetro ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:53:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Im having war flashbacks to the last year of my cs degree and trying to make a Trie data type that worked with 70 some odd BOOST unit tests...I hit about 11 before giving up..
hindey19 ยท 124 points ยท Posted at 17:27:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Send the values via AJAX and calculate server-side.
marcio0 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 00:59:27 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
and save the result on the blockchain
Neoro ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:57:00 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use the blockchain like a cache of your server's computations. Let the client get the cache themselves too. Computation answers become block addresses.
DjCim8 ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 18:57:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Actually, I'm seeing the opposite trend lately, people saying "why would you use jQuery just to call one method, when you can EASILY use these 90 lines of pure js code that does the same thing? Do you have ANY IDEA HOW MANY KILOBYTES THAT WASTES???
(yeah, I do, and they're not enough to bother anyone other than time-travellers that visit your site from a 28.8k dial-up modem, you paranoid premature optimizator)
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:10:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc is somehow more complex than that... a popular but nonstandard function "alloca" usually does what u want, dynamically expanding the stack frame
kindall ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:55:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc has the capability of reusing chunks of memory that have been released using free. It maintains a list of freed blocks, and will allocate within the first available block big enough to hold the request. Over time, malloc tends to end up with a "free list" that contains a growing number of very small blocks (so small they will, in practice, never be reused) which nevertheless must be checked on every new allocation. This can result in malloc getting gradually slower as a program runs. Many programmers have therefore written their own memory allocation functions, some of which have been released as libraries for general use. In practice, however, malloc isn't as bad as its reputation suggests.
Am I misunderstanding? Malloc is for heap memory. In C, allocating stack memory is really just declaring a variable. Malloc's assembly equivalent requires a syscall (likely to mmap or sbrk).
markhc ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:18:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc does not manipulate the stack pointer at all. Youre thinking about alloca
Thatโs a UNIX thing, the eventual sbrk()alloca() call that expands stack space. Windows is far more geared toward using heaps, for which the Rtl library exposes an API. I prefer it far more.
Thatโs obviously not the same Iโm sure you realize :-)
RtlHeapCreate allocates an internal heap structure and returns a handle that you can subsequently can RtlHeapAlloc and RtlHeapFree against. Want to blow away the entire heap and all memory associated with it? Simple via RtlHeapDestroy.
Thereโs no real equivalent to that on Unix. i.e. thereโs no ctx = heap_create(...); foo = malloc_ex(ctx, size).
The pointer returned by malloc can be freed at will, sure. It canโt be used to sub allocate and free chunks of memory within that block because itโs just an address, there are no supporting structures of functions provided with it, obviously.
Have you ever used HeapCreate et al? Itโs not the same as malloc, end of story.
The idea isnโt that you allocate blocks within another block that you allocated, the idea is that you just malloc() the small blocks when needed and your implementation of malloc() handles page sizes, re-use etc.
If you really wanted, you could stick your own allocator on top of the blocks returned by malloc() and hey presto, now you've got 3 levels of allocation (kernel page-level, malloc byte-level and custom) and youโre hated more than people that use alloca().
What youโre telling me about HeapCreate isnโt the same as malloc() because it has unnecessary extra functions.
I'm guessing you're saying this because you do not believe that a general purpose "HeapCreate" function cannot outperform a highly specialized and optimized allocator, which I designed top down to be as efficient as it can possibly get for my purposes? The very fact that "HeapCreate" will universally process "HeapFree" calls without error already makes my implementation faster, since my allocator has a flag to only allow symmetric allocations and deallocations, which turns allocation and deallocation into addition and subtraction respectively.
I simply do not understand why anyone would chose HeapCreate over anything that already exists or can be created in an hour, unless you're already being forced to program in a C-only Windows only environment anyway, and you aren't sufficient with C. I guess people would really rather use a broken subset of C than learn C++ or switch to Java/C#.
Also, I could simply benchmark my code vs Windows, no need to read any source code.
Stuff on the stack frame is still local I guess, even for assembly, they would be automatically released when rsp (stack pointer register for x64) jumps back to some earlier function
No, my computer canโt see stuff running locally on yours!
Ixilary ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Other people have pointed out that it's technically not global. However, just for fun, if you consider that assembly let's you access whatever you want from anywhere (in your address space), everything is global in C too. You can do the same thing with pointers and access any data.
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:12:36 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not true at all. Assembly programs on recent tool chains have largely the same linkage types and storage classes as C. Unless you write a piece of shit program, most variables are most definitely not global, even in an assembly program.
Q (+1): โHow do I do (thing) using OS X bash, without installing anything extra? I have to work within the bounds of my secure company image.โ
A1 (+6155): โJust install (list of open-source, unmaintained third-party binaries). Oh, and (popular library that would take months to get security vetting). Easy peasy.โ
The accepted answer is always placed above the top voted answer.
Ajedi32 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 03:33:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eh, if A1 is at +6155, then that's almost certainly the one 99% of the people coming from Google were looking for. Answers almost never get scores that high otherwise.
Sort of, and youโre right that itโll probably work for โmostโ people. Problem I have is that thereโs the world of tech in which people are free to install new software as they please to solve a problem - like telling someone โjust trade your hand saw for a jigsawโ - but in a restricted corporate setting (due to vetting policies) Iโm forced to work with the hand tools Iโm given.
My big issue is just that very often, even outside the requirements of my job, I just want to learn the โclose to bare metalโ way of doing something. Installing a new binary accomplishes the work task, but doesnโt teach me the foundational principles. Itโs like telling someone, โdonโt bother learning carpentry; just buy a new tableโ.
Iโve been working in school IT for five years now as an avid scripter, but even still, I havenโt memorized EVERY bash command. Thatโs the reason sites like StackOverflow are supposed to exist, as I understand it. Especially for weird stuff like modifying the OS X dock (damn near impossible without dockutil, turns out), for instance.
urda ยท 22 points ยท Posted at 21:35:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Hi welcome to company X! Here's our InfoSec policy on outisde libraries, some internally approved alternatives, and what you are allowed and not allowed to build out for security reasons"
Super fucking hard right mate? It's crazy I know, how could anyone work like that?!?!
Aetol ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:54:04 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"This is already been asked and answered multiple times so I'm locking this, but leaving this up so it ranks highest in search results and I'm also not going to link the other threads on the pate".
Hard to say without any concrete examples, but you might be looking at generic questions and not programming questions. SO is (and always has been) about answering straightforward programming questions, not theory/open ended ones.
I always feel that those who immediately suggest to use a different framework have never worked on mature, released software. If the project for my company is in X language with Y technologies, I can't just tell them to pay for and covert everything over to Z. If that would be my own suggestion, I would probably be let go and replaced by somebody who won't set the company back a year and however many tens of thousands of dollars.
[deleted] ยท 284 points ยท Posted at 16:57:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Post your code or we can't help you.
EagleZR ยท 226 points ยท Posted at 17:40:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I asked a conceptual question once, without any code, and it apparently offended and insulted some people
shmough ยท 85 points ยท Posted at 17:51:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Try softwareengineering.stackexchange.com.
EagleZR ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 17:56:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ooh, thanks. Didn't know that existed
ceeBread ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 19:46:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thatโs another issue, there are so many other sites in the stackexchange network that are useful, but not many people know about it. The people who close questions are too lazy to suggest the proper site and the UI hides the other sites. There used to be a community page that listed the other sites and a small description, but thatโs gone now.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:19:33 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Diesl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:31:27 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No but a lot of people didn't know that that existed, plus that's not very easy to use :P
I've definitely invented fictional code examples for SO before because the actual use case was complex enough that I was worried people would get confused or hung up on questioning some irrelevant aspect of the approach.
Shadax ยท 66 points ยท Posted at 17:38:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
posts code containing plain text passwords and sensitive company information
I got shit on for this once. I had a browser issue that was causing stuttering while scrolling. Had no idea where to start. Asked on StackOverflow hoping for some debugging help or maybe a culprit to start looking looking for.
โPost code or we canโt helpโ
โDUDE. Do you want my entire project...โ
Ugh.
ecefour ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:57:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
When I post my code people tell he how inefficient it is, and bash me for not knowing any better. But that's why I'm here.
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:17:50 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You don't need to post your actual code and you shouldn't. You should post a minimal, complete, and verifiable example (MCVE). That's a piece of code which exhibits the same issue as your actual code but is cut down to be self-contained and not longer than a page. Ideally, you should have made an MCVE as a part of your debugging process to nail down what causes the issue long before you ask a question so posting it should be a no-brainer. If you post a question without code or with twenty pages of garbage that doesn't compile, this just shows all other users that you don't want to put any effort into your question and prefer to let others do the grunt work of getting to the core of your problem.
"Why would you even want to do A? Everything about your decisions and thinking process is wrong, let me show you what I so pridefully believe to be correct, but is in fact an utter trash answer and just makes me feel all high and mighty, and serves as a replacement for the love my mother never gave me."
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:23:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That one hits looooow
[deleted] ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 18:42:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"And no, I haven't tested this reply, and have no experience as a professional software developer, why do you ask?"
ssnazzy ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:10:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
*gives a solution by using library because I taught myself to be an โelite coderโ and thatโs my way to solve everything.
โBtw use this wiki page of some method I just searched up 5 secs ago you pleb.โ
DasEvoli ยท 114 points ยท Posted at 18:40:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I add two numbers?"
"You need to send us your current code you are currently working on to help you. Everything. The whole program. Your hardware, your registry, all of your passwords and what you ate the last 3 months"
John_Fx ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 20:42:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I write accounting system in Scala? Must run on Amiga and support Swiss Francs. Send codez
uziau ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:08:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I have never made any question in SO. Almost all my questions have already been asked by someone else before, and if I canโt find any, usually Iโm pressed for time on the job that I donโt have time to create a question and wait for an answer
Honestly, a very good chunk of the questions I've asked on SO I'm not convinced many people know the answer to (or that there is a solution). The kinds of questions you'd want to ask on SO (ie, not specific to your codebase) tend to honestly have answers a lot of the time.
And yeah, it can frankly often be a lot easier to use an alternative, a workaround, or your own solution (eg, when asking about a library) when you're pressed for time, since you really can't depend on SO being able to answer you anyway. I find I'm usually decent enough at finding those and often by some point, I just wanna know the answer out of curiosity.
yeah the people who run stackoverflow really DON'T want last minute panic questions. they want "enlightened discussion" about code but that rarely happens coz once you got your slideshow to animate why do you give a fuck about how elegantly it does it anyways(esp if it's for your job you've only had for a month with your 1 month of experience in programming real world stuff)?
there's a real shizo split between what new users want out of SO and what kinda new users SO wants. they want college grads asking questions that dig deep but college grads have professors and classmates to ask questions to. they're not going to ask random people online.
"Oh, you asked a simple Linux question that would be answered by a two line command? Let me show you how to write a 15 line script to solve your problem which you will spend 2 hours to understand."
For Linux questions you always have to use the first part of the 2nd comment combined with the last part of the 19th, but only after installing the dependencies listed in the 11th. Preferably do it in a virtual machine with saved state, because there's a hidden trap, bonus points for finding it.
Cyhawk ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:08:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Those are good answers if they comment properly. Learning shell scripting is a pretty vital tool.
Is it you? Are you the one that was foretold? The one that understands regex?
Scorxcho ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 18:12:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why is stack overflow filled with a bunch of smug Nazis who think anyone who doesn't walk on a tight rope to ask a question should not be asking anything?
Prof- ยท 52 points ยท Posted at 18:08:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow is full of a bunch of pretentious assholes who think that itโs their way and no other. If youโre new to CS and ask questions theyโll come in like vultures. Used to be a great and inviting community, now itโs just constant down votes.
When I was going through a coding boot camp, they insisted I refer to SO every time I had a question and it was never helpful, but they relied on it for any questions to teach the learner how to find answers on their own. I get that but if I tried SO and was unable to get anything useful, I would have liked other resources to fall back on as well.
I wonder if not knowing your actual rep would help. Something similar to Slashdot's "Karma:Excellent", you have broad categories and no definitive number to endlessly chase upwards.
It would help fight the needless farming for points and general gaming of the system, surely?
CJ090 ยท 55 points ยท Posted at 18:52:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do A"
"Fuck yourself and die. You should learn how to code before trying to learn how to code. Didn't you start CS classes when you were in diapers? if not then you're behind the curve. Also, fuck you and die." - Stack Overflow
I'll ask something like "how do I do X" and each responder asks things like -
"Why would you want to do that?' - Uh, that's outside the scope of the question. Warn me it's bad practice, sure. But answer the fucking question I asked
"Why don't you do Y" - Because there's context to why I want to do X that I can't explain. Y is a good alternative for sure, but I'm asking about X godammit.
"What's the context for this question?" - Fair, but I can't explain the situation in my webapp to you and still keep this question general. You shouldn't care about the context, just answer X plzzzzzz
You really need to explain the context often. This is a very commonly known problem on SO called the XY problem. The issue is that by hiding the context, people don't actually know what your real problem might be. You're asking about problem Y, but your problem might actually be problem X. You wouldn't know that you're asking about the wrong thing, of course. It wastes everyone's time when you don't give appropriate context because they'll give you a solution that might not actually work.
It's also perfectly relevant to suggest doing Y when that seems like a suitable answer. If it really doesn't work, explain so. If you can easily preempt these answers, you should point it out in the question since otherwise questions may appear to be duplicates and frankly people waste their time on you because they don't understand your problem. It's hard to answer problems you don't understand and you're not exactly helping them by being vague.
My advice? Format questions nicely into clean sections using formatting to create headers, etc. Then you can have the context explained in one section, the problem (as you perceive it, which may not be the real problem) in another section, and maybe even separate questions in another. This lets people quickly skim relevant sections to not only be able to answer the question (I've seen many questions where both the "proper" question and the users not-quite-right question get answered separately) while also being able to find the relevant context (if they care enough -- not all answerers do).
I'd respectfully disagree that the XY problem is always a problem. Yeah sometimes I might fall in to that but numerous times I have something very specific and I'm not really looking for feedback on how to do it differently.
But you are correct about there being a responsibility on me (the question asker) to format the question correctly and convey the right information. I definitely see a ton of poorly phrased questions on SO.
I'd respectfully disagree that the XY problem is always a problem. Yeah sometimes I might fall in to that but numerous times I have something very specific and I'm not really looking for feedback on how to do it differently.
If you're descriptive enough in your question, that should be clear enough. The reality on SO is that the majority of questions are overly vague and often times don't even know what their problem is.
People ask things like this because a large number of questions ask how to do really-difficult-and-never-needed X, when more-common Y is actually the solution. It saves a lot of time getting to the bottom of why the answerer is trying to do X.
Might not be be the case in your situation, but do keep in mind that it's far more often that the OP hadn't considered/known about Y than it is that they have some odd restriction that only X can work with. If possible, explain that you've considered Y but that it wouldn't work because of reason R. It's fine to add context for why you wouldn't be able to use Y.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:41:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But isn't it totally irrelevant why the person isn't doing Y? The problem is that X isn't working, not that Y doesn't work. Y isn't even a part of the conversation.
If you really don't know the answer for X, just leave the question alone, let someone who does reply.
scandii ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:51:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"how do you make an omelette with a shoe?"
"why do you need to use a shoe? why not a frying pan?"
"please just tell me how to use a shoe, thanks"
sometimes you're barking up the wrong tree and just need to start all over, no matter how much you might like the idea of cooking omelettes in footwear.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 20:20:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is extreme hyperbole. It's more like "how do you make an omelette in this cast iron pan I inherited?" and the unhelpful answer is "use a nonstick pan instead".
And in any case your solution is the same: you don't know the answer to the question, so you can/should just skip it without comment.
Can I use print() in Javascript to put an output message in the console?
X is what OP has asked (using print() specifically to print an output message)
Y is what the actual problem is (printing an output message, regardless of method)
The vast majority of people who ask that question would actually be asking Y. The useful answer for them isn't some obscure way to use print() for debug messages, the useful answer is realizing that they actually want Y and giving them console.log().
If someone is actually asking X, then it helps for them to clarify that they know of console.log() and/or give a reason why they need to use print() (even if it's just "I have a bet with a friend that it's possible specifically with print").
svick ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:09:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's often hard to answer a question well without any context.
There's a million questions that can be asked stand alone without you needing the context to my app. If I'm asking how to manually check out a connection from the connection pool, I'm not looking for advice on why that's a bad idea. Sure, mention it as a disclaimer but answer the question I asked.
That does put some responsibility on me as the question asker to make sure that my question is understandable without the necessary background. Or if needed, I should provide some light context. But the key take away is that I'm not looking for feedback - I'm looking for a literal answer to exact question I asked.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:09:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Especially annoying when the answer is 'I don't want to do X, the last guy wanted to X, and now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to make X do Y because we've got 10,000 lines of legacy code and a deadline!'
This question can be easily googled, im locking the thread.
Cal1gula ยท -12 points ยท Posted at 17:34:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The context is often relevant or critical to the proper answer. If you understood that you probably wouldn't struggle with making a post on SO.
Edit: people won't give a bad code example just because you want one. Demanding someone write some free, bad code for you is even worse. Get a grip people.
More times than not, if you're on the lookout for an answer to a question that has probably already been answered, SO is okay. The sucky part comes when your problem is is extremely specific. Then SO acts like billion dollar value whore.
agisten ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 21:48:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Worst possible "answer" :
"Nvm, I figured it out". End post.
ALLEN: Hi, Iโm new to driving and I need to move my car back around 5 meters. How can I move the car backwards?
(2 days later.)
ALLEN: Hello? This is still a problem. Iโm sure someone knows how to do this.
BOB: I canโt believe you didnโt figure this out yourself. Just take your foot off the gas and let the car roll backwards down the hill. Tap the bake when you get to where you want to be. Boom. Done.
ALLEN: But Iโm not on a hill. Iโm in my driveway and itโs completely flat.
CARL: Dude, I donโt know what youโre trying to accomplish, but you should never be driving backwards. Itโs dangerous and will confuse the other drivers. See the big window in FRONT of you? Thatโs your first clue. Donโt drive backwards.
ALLEN: Iโm not trying to drive backwards. I just need to move back a little bit so I can get out of my driveway and start driving forwards.
CARL: So just drive in circle until youโre pointed the right way.
ALLEN: I donโt have enough room to turn around like that. I only need to move back a few meters. I donโt understand why this has to be so hard.
CARL: Sounds like your โdrivewayโ isnโt compatible with cars. Itโs probably made for bikes. Call a contractor and have them convert some of your yard into driveway to be standards-compliant with the turning radius of a car. Either way, youโre doing something wrong.
DAVE: I see your problem. You can adjust your car to move backwards by using the shifter. Itโs a stick located right between the passenger and driver seats. Apply the clutch and move the stick to the โRโ position.
ALLEN: But.. I donโt have a clutch. And there isnโt a stick between the seats.
CARL: Sounds like youโre trying to drive in Europe or something.
thedudehimself has the right answer. I don't need to eat or pay rent this month, I'd rather have neato code. Besides, nobody ever inherits awful projects and has to keep them running in production, that's just silly talk!
Willbo ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:34:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow is borderline useless for languages with newer versions. I usually Google my issue, land on SO, find a top voted solution, try the answer only to find out it's not supported in the newer version, Google the fuck out of it again, then find another SO thread where the real updated answer is at the bottom of the thread with 2 upvotes. Ridiculous.
phihag ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 23:40:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Upvote the correct answer and leave a comment at the other answer that it doesn't work in the new version!
Willbo ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:04:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I wish I could say that I do that, but I don't even bother logging into my account anymore. The community was just too intimidating so I stopped participating.
Downvoting questions should require a comment of more than 3 words tbh. Maybe the same for downvoting answers. People who abuse this or enter meaningless comments should lose downvote rights.
phihag ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:39:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind posting the link? I'd be happy to upvote if the question is good, and to try to explain why the question got downvoted.
moogeek ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 17:28:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
it stings a little.
And we kinda like it, don't we? ( อกยฐ อส อกยฐ)
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 17:57:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck no, I have a job to do. Not a fetish for unanswered questions and rude gatekeeping.
moogeek ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:06:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Even a little? ( อกยฐ อส อกยฐ)
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:08:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No.
DHSean ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:34:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I asked how to do a thing in Laravel and got downvoted and my post was removed for asking an easy question.
If it's so easy then help me you bastards!
phihag ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:42:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the URL of that question? If everything is as you say it is, I'd like to reopen it. "Easy" questions are definitely on topic on stackoverflow!
Genuine question, why do people use Frameworks such as Laravel?
DHSean ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:04:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Personally? I don't want to keep writing the same bullshit every time I start a project.
I can just deploy a laravel install and build my project, no faffing about with connecting to mysql or dealing with modals, it's already there ready to go. And the majority of projects that we use daily are built on ancient shit from tesco so I think i'll be fine making a site that attracts 3 people on laravel.
I've never really used frameworks, but the majority, especially front end stuff like React (although technically a library), I've always found to be clunky and pointless in so many situations. If you can do it in vanilla JavaScript, or the popular jQuery, why spend the time and effort to set up React or Angular? Just makes the code confusing and bulky needlessly
But my view doesn't matter because I'm just a hobbyist
DHSean ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:51:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If you can do it in vanilla JavaScript, or the popular jQuery, why spend the time and effort to set up React or Angular? Just makes the code confusing and bulky needlessly
I can totally see that view point and honestly it's something in the programming community that is quite divided on. Similar to tabs and spaces, people just like doing things differently.
I use laravel for time saving mostly. I likely won't use 60% of what is actually in there for anything but it's nice having it there in the event a project needs it.
But yeah, if you don't use a framework to it's fullest, your totally right it will just make your project bulky.
sprcow ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 20:23:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
good not a bot
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 16:57:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
now make one about how ones that can be googled in 2 seconds get billions of views and upvotes but ones that are real questions get no views or attention
agoesin ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:19:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because you're only allowed to complain about other things when you yourself are much better at it! Think about that when you rate a restaurant any less than 5 stars on Yelp or some shit.
Well... When your whining is entitled and wrong... It kinda does beget the question of what are YOU doing about it.
Few in this thread seem to have read "how to ask questions the smart way"
mycelo ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:00:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How to build up your reputation on Stack Overflow:
Criticize the question instead of just answering it. Then come up with your own "better" solution. Also, criticize and downvote any attempt to actually answer the original question.
TBSdota ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:22:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
more like "Whats the command to print screen?"
"I won't know unless you paste your entire script"
My favorite thing on stackoverflow is when people spend hours berating a person for asking a dumb question instead of spending 30 seconds to answer the dumb question. If you're above answering the dumb question, why is it worth it to berate the person back and forth over hours?
Fking hate Stackoverflow. Asked a couple of concept Qs about C++ and got downvoted and insulted. As a non compsci major and beginner SOverflow was downright demotivating.
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:45:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the links to those questions? It may be late now, but insulting answers or comments should be flagged as such, which I'd like to do. Anything pertaining not to you but to the question is fine though.
while_e ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:38:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This question is completely unclear, incomplete, overly-broad, primarily opinion-based or is not about programming as described in the help center, and it is unlikely to be fixed via editing.
One of my questions was deleted for being a duplicate. My question was about asking if there was an API similar to iOS' SiriKit for macOS. It was marked as a duplicate. The duplicate was before iOS' SiriKit was even announced and is for iOS, not macOS.
"I'm working in an environment with certain parameters which don't let me do B so I need something like A"
"I would rewrite everything so you can do B or quit and find a new job"
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:21:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's also always a reply that requires you to use some obscure library or import that has barely any documentation and that only fits a niche problem, but the person swears by it
Even well-known, established libraries are pretty annoying in answers tbh. I don't want to pull in a whole library just for a single line or a small block of code... Coding that way as a habit can create a lot of maintenance headaches down the line, especially when someone else inherits your code.
suppow ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:34:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the 0 vote answer that the bottom that is very involved and may or may not do A
My biggest pet peeve is when you ask a question and all of the elitist users come rushing like like "jfc didn't you see this post 5 years ago with a slightly related question and a very long and obscure answer that isn't much help in your specific situation?"
[deleted] ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:53:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I went to your history see what kind of programming experience you had to understand where you were coming from and... Oh boy....
Maybe you're not the one to call others cancer... With that obsession of going in subs and calling people retarded rednecks and focusing on their sexual kinks and shit.
I still use it all the time, and I think it is still mostly helpful, but I have seen every one of these bad examples on the site lol. I think a lot of people are just venting. It can be really, really frustrating to get unhelpful responses from people who probably could help if they weren't busy being pricks lol.
because people on there increasingly are pretentious douches
ze413X ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:37:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've honestly stopped asking questions on stackoverflow. Now when I've finally become an expert in the field I find it amazing how the people that lack the knowledge and hate the question has to voice that opinion. If you can't answer the question then you shouldn't answer the damn question. My last 5 questions are perfect questions in all shape and form. But because the answers in each case had unpredictable answers, or rather, answers which aren't immediately obvious. They got downvote and trashed on as if it was Trevor Noah meeting Trump himself.
The most hilarious questions though has to be the topics that tries to revitalize a topic. Like when something is "clear as day outdated" like a Visual studios question which has an answer directed towards Visual Studio 2008 and some poor little beginner coder on the forums tries to find that option in the 2017 edition. Even then people can close the thread with referal to an nonexisting answer and still hate on the poor man.
i sure wish i could replace bootstrap with css grids...i mean i can and make it exactly as good as the bootstrap grids, but if i want it to be BETTER, it will only work on firefox, chrome, and edge...but not IE. (by better i mean auto-rows, don't wanna have to SPECIFY the row and column this should go into, then i'd need all the ridiculous markup that i have to use with bootstrap, i want simple and clean...now i have simple and clean stuck in my head...dammit..)
I am a regular at an industry tech forum. A large chunk of my responses are "Don't to A". Frequently followed up by "but we need A" and I have to explain why A will give a ton of technical debt to your project that you really don't want when B gets you 90% there without any of the debt. Then close the gaps, instead of reinventing the wheel.
You guys exist on a much darker side of stackoverflow than me.
edave64 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 09:11:05 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once asked a question like that. Got told that what I was doing completely wrong.
Turns out: What I was doing was completely wrong. The responding person fixed my code and made it a lot more readable. Accepted their solution, even though my question went unanswered.
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:29:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Great! Getting the full fixed code as answer is rather rate, though.
Spocino ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 15:11:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โI solved itโ
-A StackOverflow user, on multiple occasions
I try to assume that they have a real reason for doing A that's just not obvious to me. But some As are really dumb.
I've been on the other side of it too. And you're fucked either way. If you explain yourself and why you need A, you get punished for that (plus lots of heckling... guys, I didn't choose this infrastructure, people paid five times my salary did 10 years before I hired on). If you don't explain then "do B".
Actually me a couple weeks ago. In our programming class we had to do pass in any number of ints and have the array display them so we needed to make the array as big as the number of things we pass in. I could not for the life me of find a way to make its size change as you pass things in because every answer was "lol use a list" but the assignment was for arrays so I can't do that. Finally I found some random blog post from like 2011 that was the the two words I needed to make it work.
I fucking hate StackOverflow for this (and the reasons listed in this thread). I remember bitching them out in a thread because you can't do shit until you have like 85 rep. Of course, you can't get that 60 rep because attempts to ask/answer questions etc. get closed by some wanker with 99999999999k rep. stroking his StackOverflow e-penis. Then, someone from StackOverflow appears and I just mysteriously receive 65 rep.
Well if I had to guess I'd say around here where it took a huge jump from 57 to 85 despite me not having logged in or done anything in months. It was literally within the hour of me complaining about basically being unable to do anything (including vote on things). I got an email saying I'd received like 30 rep. It was almost like "here - STFU and stop complaining".
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:52:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Um, what makes you think this is was an employee of stackoverflow? Your username is the same as on stackoverflow, so somebody might have just looked you up, looked at your questions and answers, and said "yup, that's a good question". No conspiracy needed.
Yeah, I mean basically you have like a small selection of people (who don't necessarily work for S.O) with like Number.MAX_VALUE rep who basically consider themselves god and sit there stroking their stack-overflow e-penis that they acquired about 10 years ago when you could get thousands of rep by answering basic "How-to" questions. Occasionally, they pause this activity as someone pointed out to close various questions and mark things as duplicate. When this happens there is no opportunity for discussion or appeal. It's just done. You're on your own buddy now. GL;HF, fuckface.
I hate that community so much. I like that it exists sort of and it has some useful information, but I don't think anyone could write me a cheque large enough that would incentivise me to invest my time and energy in it.
One interview I had when I was switching to software engineering after years of another engineering discipline without a software engineering related degree they asked what my SO rep was. I'm really glad I didn't get that job knowing what I know now.
Love this. Especially when I'm told to do A by a teacher. And not taught B or B doesn't work, so I throw together some janky shit from answers about A. Wouldn't have passed HNC Computing without janky shit.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:24:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
yOu dO ๐ ฑ๏ธ
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:46:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stack overflow is great when I'm trying to find something. But I would never post there. Just seems like if you don't write a doctoral dissertation complete with full scientific method on how you tried to solve your problem, people will harass you saying "I'm not going to do your homework for you."
StackOverflow has become worthless. The only questions that get answers are ones that can be answered by the docs in a few seconds. Everything else is marked off topic, or duplicate when the other answer isn't a duplicate or is for an obsolete version.
I am so glad to find out I'm not alone. I'm pretty thorough in my research through docs and my Google - Fu is strong, but there have been times where I've had nowhere else to turn other than StackOverflow. At first, it really turned me off from learning to program, but I've gotten past that. I have had several good questions answered even though they were down voted. I've also submitted some accepted answers while getting lectured that my answer wasn't right, even though it satisfied the OPs question.
Does anybody know of a way I can do X without doing Y? These are the circumstances why Y doesn't work in this instance even though I already know that way and read the article about it.
Response 1: Why don't you just do Y?
Response 2: Well, doing Y is better for me. This is how you do Y.
Response 3: I don't know, but I talk about this unrelated thing.
Response 4: I did Y; worked for me.
Response 5: Here's a link to the article to do Y. Hope it helps!
weinde ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:32:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This picture perfecrly sums up the SO... all that is missing on this picture is a comment from a guy that whrites "read a manual on how to post on SO hurr durr duurr"... SO is the f*cking cancer of comunity
Ha! I'm facing this exact problem now. I'm specifically required to use XmlHttpRequest for an assignment at university. When I needed help with it, people just tell me to use fetch instead.
iOSGuy ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:06:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is never a problem with iOS, this is ALWAYS the problem with Android answers. Yeah, looking at you Mr. HolierThanThou CommonWares.
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:44:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I suspect CommonWares was once very helpful and has just grown bitter over the years, to the point that he or she just shits on every question.
ITT people salty thier crappy questions get downvoted and no one brave enough to actually link an example to a question they asked.
SO might not be perfect, but most of the time your question fails, its your fault.
How many times a day do you google a question and get a high quality SO answer first result?
SO's curation is a large part of ehat makes that possible.
benabus ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:57:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How many times a day do you google a question and get a high quality SO answer first result?
0 to 1... 90% of the SO questions that google pulls up for my queries have no answers.
i've not figure out SO's commenting restrictions...either you can't comment til you have posted some number of questions...or you can't ask questions til you have posted some number of comments, or you can't post unless someone lets you...whatever it is any time i've tried posting i couldn't and i didn't care enough to figure it out.
New users can both ask and answer questions.
Yeah you can't comment against an existing question or answer, but that is to prevent the common mistake new users make of asking or answering questions via comments.
This isn't even just a programming joke, this is life.
fj333 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:39:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Very true, as I just wrote in another comment: like life, you get out of StackOverflow what you put into it. And I've found the site to be a great resource.
joke
It's only a joke if you're on the wrong side of things.
Brio_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:34:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Space before the question mark. This needs to be edited!
I used to see more people defending SO by saying โthey need to be douches to keep the site from being crap,โ
I am really glad after 20 minutes of scrolling that I didnโt see that comment.
StackOverflow has only been useful to me for surface level stuff lately. I look for solutions elsewhere on โhardโ questions. Iโll read some dudeโs blog before using SO.
corqezi ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh god that's so true it hurts
Odatas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
During my first internship I was working solo on a small project and I had to do something which seemed difficult with the tech I had, so I remembered stack overflow, made an account and asked.
Q: How do I get X using Z.?
A: Do A,B,C
Me: thanks a bunch that worked
Commenter: good, please upvote my answers as its standard courtesy if I helped you with your problem...
I couldnโt upvote him cause my account was too new and when I told him that he downvoted me :(
Never went on stackoverflow again regardless of my college professors bowing down and praising it over the years
This reminds me of when my company chose to write an ODBC driver in .net. if you're wondering why.... managed code fixes allot of flaws that ODBC drivers typically have regarding memory/handle leaks. Googling was like "not possible, don't bother" or "why not just use c/c++" we wrote it and the thing is a tank.
coomzee ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:36:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You can do this with jQuery and a 3GB image download.
Is there something about the Stack format that attracts certain types of people? I don't use StackOverflow but StackExchange is just as bad, both for legit professional questions and casual stuff.
However, there is something you can do: Improve the questions! Fix typos, clean them up (text like I understand this might be straight impossible. is not necessary). I apologize for being so direct, but as far as I can see you didn't do that either.
blgke ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:00:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Does anyone have the SO mock image of "help I'm trapped in a car trunk and the only way I can communicate is via stack overflow"? I can't find it anymore.
nsomnac ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:23:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What gets me is Iโll ask a question, have someone start a clarifying question then the โfuck me Iโm a moderatorโ who just closes your SO question because they think itโs off topic, and because SE is so fragmented they have no way of moving a question to the right place - as if there is a right place.
So I end up wasting most of a morning cross posting followup questions the various SO family of sites because the mods are assholes.
Korzag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:25:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Don't forget questions that follow the template:
Dear, I am of seeking to find an answer for the following questions, "Java compiles to binary? True/false?". Thank you dear.
i doubt one exists, if one was made it would be occupied by the same people. it's not a problem with the site...it's the people. you pretty much always find elitism where nerds congregate, and the programming community has lots of religious wars over tools and standards (i mean personally i hate bootstrap and jquery, and don't hate windows as much as i DID...but mostly because absence makes the heart grow fonder...and every time i get over my hatred of ie, i get some fucking ie related problem with some website i'm making, just. fucking. die. already!)
the programming community tends to be less jolly cooperation and more "the thing you like sucks" "nuh uh, the thing YOU like sucks, my thing is awesome"
I really don't like that site. Bunch of dick heads.
Corn_11 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:03:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I hate the fact that in computer programming there is this quota of how to do things.
โYes A is more simplistic has better readability, but B is more useful in this one very specific situationโ
โBut I know that I wonโt be in this specific situationโ
โShut up and follow standardsโ
Zexks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:04:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've successfully used SO about 5 or 6 times to find an actual answer (as in the answer was directly on an SO question). I've asked 6 questions. 1 was answered satisfactory (I was able to implement their suggestion and it fixed my issue), 1 answer said I can't do what I was asking to do, 2 of them had answers there were either unrelated to my question or didn't work, and 2 never got an answer at all.
I spent well over 2 hours crafting the ones that got any kind of replies. Pulling out my code, removing identifying or security risk info. Formatting all that I had tried, and justifications for what I had tried, why I can't do what the easy google searches tell you, and why the other 'similar' answers on SO are not answers. Without this, I'm sure even those that got replies would have been shut down or trailed off into unrelated threads.
You can't do A with B. Because A can't be done with B. B is not a tool that can be used to correctly do A. As I have answered in A-and-B questions here so many times before, the use of B will not allow you to do A. B is a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by A. A is not B-solvable problem and hence cannot be solved by B. B is not equipped to break down A into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me.
I tried using stack overflow at the start of college and quickly realized how dogshit it is. Itโs just a pissing contest of programming elitism, not helpful at all for asking questions when youโre a computer science student.
Does anybody here have an actual guide for using StackOverflow? I have questions, but they're always downvoted or removed. :(
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:56:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow has a pretty good help.
There's also the Internet classic How to ask smart questions (not specific to stackoverflow, long predating it, assumed to have been read by everyone). If you tell me your username (or link to the questions that were downvoted), I'd be happy to explain why I think they were downvote, and help you improve them, either in private chat or right here.
But really, even though no one does A in OP's use case, this is the post that will be atop DuckDuckGo/Google/etc. for anyone who has a real need to either do A, or understand why not to do A.
This is the biggest problem I have with stackoverflow. People care more about solving problems than answering questions, and that leaves us with rotten search results.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:32:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
can we get an AMA with a guy from StackOverflow who tells people off for a living? we could ask him questions like how do you live with yourself and other such mysteries.
I hate this too. I'm an experienced coder so I usually ask very specific questions and there is always the inevitable "tell me what you're trying to accomplish".
I'M TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH GETTING A STRAIGHT EFFING ANSWER TO MY QUESTION.
Am I the only one who doesn't have this problem? SO is almost always a solid source. The only time it doesn't answer my questions is when my question turned out to have a flawed premise, so when I see "Nobody does A" I reassess. Not always, but usually there was a good reason why they told me that.
This is literally why I stopped asking questions on stack overflow! Like i'm there asking because I don't know what isn't working, even when I think i'm being super like helpful by formatting stuff explaining every variable even linking the repo people still roast you.
Welcome to SO. Please understand SO is not a free coding service. You have to make some attempt to solve the problem yourself. If you can't get it working, post what you tried and we'll help you fix it. Also, see the How to Ask page.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:40:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Idk. Some people just go there without even read the question and apply the solution given. And u know what? It works like a charm
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:50:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I was recently trying to figure out why the Android emulator (AVD) kept crashing for me when using the hardware accelerated mode on Linux. So many people just telling people to switch to software mode. But the performance of the emulator without the hardware acceleration isn't that great... Still haven't fixed it.
it sounds like it would be a graphics card driver problem. nvidia?
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:52:44 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That is what I think. I have the open source Nvidia drivers installed because that is the only way I could get xrandr working for dual monitors because I had notable performance issues with xinerama. I haven't actually tested this theory out though.
that sounds about right, it's been some time since i've use the open source nvidia drivers but when i did they did not support hardware acceleration. have you tried the official drivers from nvidia (i don't know if i ever DID get opengl working though)
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:57:33 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Like, yeah, I would love to rewrite that stored proc as a table-valued function, but I'm a subcontracted cog in a corporate machine and don't have nearly that sort of access and if I had it my way I would have never ended up on this SQL server thing in the first place.
IceEye ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:00:10 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or:
"How do I do A"
+999999 Incredibly overcomplex answer that may do A, but it would take you about an hour to find out
-9 Answer that is significantly less complicated that worked instantly when tested
Comment saying not to use this technique without specifying why
The real problem is that SO is not a Q&A platform anymore (if it ever was). It is a solve-the-problem-for-the-OP-while-underestimating-the-OP-ability-to-think-and-fucking-use-Google-in-the-almost-2020s kind of platform.
There's a billion questions asking about A, with answers pointing to B. There are two possibilities:
1- The OP really wants to know about A and B is not the answer;
2- The OP actual problem is in fact in B. The answerer's problem though is the question and he/she should not attempt to solve the OP's problem instead of answering the question. If it does or not solve the OP's ultimate problem is out of the scope of the question. If A does not solve, the OP should investigate and possibly ask another question. SO shouldn't be a substitute for the user's own problem solving abilities.
Obs: Just realised I used "OP" a lot. Was referencing the imaginary SO's OP, not this post's OP.
Can you link us to the thread you screenshotted this from?
jfq722 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:58:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Its definitely a helpful place but when people roll their eyes at software developers its alot of the personality types there that are responsible for that stereotype.
[EDIT: serious comment in a humor sub... sorry in advance.]
The ultimate purpose of SO is not to answer your question. It is to curate the best answers to quality questions.
This doesn't mean that it is useless to beginners; in my experience, most beginners who get less-than-ideal results from SO suffer from poor question-asking skills. Many newbs take criticism of their question wrong; they aren't being shit on, they are being encouraged to improve their question's clarity & completeness, so that people can help them properly. If that sounds like too much effort, consider that you are asking people to help you for free. Think of the requests to improve your question first as the price of getting your answer.
Finally: if you are new & inexperienced, be ready to accept that your entire approach might be fundamentally flawed. In those cases, the "you do B" answers are better answers than the flawed "how do I A" questions could have ever hoped to have gotten.
So much entitled whining about stack overflow... When I've had questions I've asked them "the smart way" and usually don't need to ask anything in the first place because research covered it but if I do, people will recognize the uniqueness of the query and answer.
Maybe people should realize that no one owes them anything or set the example of what they wanted to see themselves.
fj333 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:36:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
+1e6
You get out of StackOverflow what you put into it. Much like life. And also like life, entitlement leads to nothing but sour grapes. As a total newbie some years ago, I had no issues getting answers to good questions. And as an experienced SWE today, I have no issues answering good questions. And while I rarely actual post questions anymore, I use the site daily for its massive repo of knowledge, to save me from asking repetitive questions, i.e. the way it was intended to be used.
fj333 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 07:26:50 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hilarious that you got downvoted while I got upvoted for agreeing with you.
Jarhyn ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:55:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, you have to do A.
Like for instance, continuing program execution after an illegal instruction was encountered. Usually this is on the list of things that are widely agreed on to be bad. But very rarely, you need to. Why would you ever want to not crash after an illegal instruction? Well, sometimes your binaries were compiled for a slightly different platform, you have no source, and you just have to make the incompatible binary work on the platform you have.
Or you get an obfuscated Java application dropped in your lap and told you need to figure out how to make it puke out baked in values so you can access the keys in the self-signed signing certificates it generates, and sign software in the same way it does because the actual signing tool is a huge pain to use, and the only way to do that and compile against the packages in the original is to change symbol names in the project because some happen to be renamed to keywords by the obfuscation utility. For the record, there's a Java class explorer utility out in the world that is capable of doing this, but according to stacko it just couldn't be done.
Yes you are right, sometimes you have to get dirty and hack yourself into a solution. And sometimes, the "right solution" is too long for a small application.
Nevertheless, sometimes programmers implement stupid solutions. As a security analyst, i've seen many hacks and workarounds for fictive problems that are simply stupid.
So context matters when asking a question in stackoverflow, if you find someone who can help you.
Jarhyn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 12:32:51 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Honestly, I still don't know what I would need to do to implement the fix for the illegal instruction problem in x86, because of the variable-length instruction set, and nobody anywhere was willing to tell me a heuristic for figuring it out or even a library that had that heuristic. It's apparently deep in the world of the black hat to be have a library capable of machine code analysis. The actual problem itself was between on Power/PPC arch, which has a fixed instruction width; I just had to figure out how to tell the OS not to crash me when I returned from an exception handler I wrote to read the failed instruction and do an equivalent task (copy 64 bits? Or maybe array copy? It's been a year or two since then)
sac_boy ยท 5912 points ยท Posted at 17:08:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would anybody want to do A?" asks another commenter with clockwork inevitability, without knowing any of your circumstances or constraints and just assuming you are an idiot.
"It's 2018, nobody uses A," answers another commenter smugly, the first year of his CS degree almost over.
When I'm answering question on StackOverflow I often answer like "I would try to avoid doing A, but here's how I would do it if I had no choice"--at least it's constructive. I don't know about any of you but my entire programming career has been 90% making things work under (apparently) bizarre constraints or combinations of technologies that apparently nobody has ever had to try before, so I have a lot of time and pity for the poor souls asking these kinds of questions.
phedre ยท 747 points ยท Posted at 18:11:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This one. This pisses me off SO FUCKING MUCH. We don't all have green fields to play in, with full access to the hardware/software we need to work with, and full autonomy to make changes. Believe me when I ask a question about how to do A and it looks like something only an idiot would do, it's because I'm working around constraints I'd MUCH rather not have. I often have weird requirements ("must work in X edge case"), in weird environments (hardened, custom Windows install, custom IE install), with weird restrictions (can't have root/admin access, can't mount drives, can't remote desktop in) to the point where it's hard not to scream sometimes.
I'd love to have full root access/control over every software and hardware environment I work on, but that just isn't the reality of life for a lot of developers.
vita10gy ยท 266 points ยท Posted at 18:35:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Agreed. The problem with things like S/O is that the X/Y problem is bound to be everywhere. The vets asking "rock and hard place" questions are indistinguishable from the noob that knows so little he's not even sure what to ask.
So it can be helpful to say "well, you shouldn't be using a to import b from c, you should just use d if possible, but [answer on how to use a]" (If nothing else, for the next person to find this.)
In other words, you can answer both questions.
FoxtrotZero ยท 148 points ยท Posted at 19:15:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's almost like websites such as stack overflow benefit from individuals providing as much relevant information as possible in good faith instead of trying to out-smug each other. PEBKAC. And with that I begin to wonder if the entire debate surrounding the website is just one giant X/Y problem.
[deleted] ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 21:11:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
humblevladimirthegr8 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:34:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
ryantheleach ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 00:43:41 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You really can't.
A lot of the people going, "Oh god, why would you do A?" Are doing so because they have no idea, no idea how to start, and think it's a really bad idea and should be avoided.
But, because of constraints x,y,z,a,b,c Guess which particular rabbit hole you may be forced down.
Billy_bob12 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:17:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The annoying thing is that if someone wanted to know how to do Y they would have asked. Who cares if they are a noob? People should just answer the question.
NanoPish ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 21:40:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I get your point but the problem is that noobs will search for the same X thing and a lot of them want to do Y
vita10gy ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 21:56:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But that's the whole point of the X Y problems. They don't want to do Y, they want to do X, they just decided Y was how, and can't figure out some hurdle Y threw up.
datchilla ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:14:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is reading between the lines of someone's coding question really the best way to teach them proper technique? Shouldn't they learn that on their own or in a classroom?
Aetol ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:39:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow is part of "learning that on their own".
blitheobjective ยท 206 points ยท Posted at 19:25:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes yes yes. I am new to programming, and thus new to SO, and to top it all off I'm working with a "weird" programming language/system that is very out of the norm, but it's basic and most anyone could answer my questions.
So a few weeks ago I asked one about how do I solve this weird X case. First response is one of the top-level users, ranked really high, saying I should figure it out myself. I say I've already tried and can't. He said I should search SO for the answer. I said I did and there isn't one that I can find. He then says but I didn't post my work. I say oh, I'm new here, okay here's my work so far on what I've tried. Master guy says an answer is not possible. Then someone else responds giving me a possibility. The possibility didn't work, but seemed like it was on the right track and I responded I was working with it.
First "master" guy responds again, going, oh well, yeah if you have to do it that way, then do this. His response was totally incorrect and didn't even pay attention to my complete question (it included some things I specifically said couldn't be included). Second guy responds with a more useful update to his original proposed solution.
Second guy still wasn't right, but close enough that I could wiggle around and get it to work and I posted as such, and I very politely posted to the "master" guy that his didn't work and I needed XYZ as indicated in my question that his answer didn't include, but if he had any more advice I'd love to hear it (since the answer I got to work was kind of janky but still worked).
"Master" guy came back all pissy saying the other guy's answer can't work and his works, and then posted it as an answer. Other guy responds to master guy very deferentially saying he looked up the weird system I'm working with and detailed why something more like his response was needed, but very deferentially as if it's obvious "master" guy is right, but other guy posts his answer too. "Master" guy then goes on a diatribe about how stupid the system I'm using is and why would anyone want to use it or do A with it. Other guy deferentially agrees. "Master" guy then concludes with some condescending advice to me on how to act deferential to him on SO in the future because he knows so much more and it's obvious he was right.
I accept other guy's answer and post about how it solved my problem. My original question ended up with a negative score, other guy's correct answer only got one other upvote besides mine, while "master" guy's answer got lots of upvotes.
Billy_bob12 ยท 104 points ยท Posted at 21:19:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's crazy how little power someone needs before it goes to their head.
Juankun96 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 12:47:13 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Of course Iโve gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? Itโs boring and no one listens to you!
steamruler ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 07:44:32 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Any power can go to someone's head. You see it with kids in the sandbox, even.
TexanPenguin ยท 110 points ยท Posted at 20:42:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Being new to programming, you probably havenโt yet come to the uncomfortable realisation that arrogance, ego, status, etc. are problems with programmers more than problems with SO specifically.
The issue with SO is that people are theoretically judged purely on their technical competence, so thereโs no incentives that discourage acting like a giant douchebag.
FuujinSama ยท 52 points ยท Posted at 22:20:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know. I'm getting into Rust, and I tried asking a question on SO. I got the usual grunts and non-answers telling me to make my question prettier and that I hadn't "tried" enough.
Tried asking a question on the Rust forums. Everyone's super friendly. Question got liked, got an answer very very fast that 100% solved my problem, AND included the "you're doing A and Y might be better" in a non-condescending way.
Specific question forums, when available, are 100 times better than stack overflow. Even leaving issues on libraries on GitHub is more helpful than SO. SO is somewhat useful when the question is already answered, but actually asking a question there is so stupid. Way too much of an effort in having "good questions" and too little effort in helping people. And they try to remove the human element completely from posts making them drab and uninteresting in hopes of mimicking everything wrong with text books and encyclopedias.
phihag ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 22:21:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the link to the question so that we can have a look ourselves and flag the offending comments?
eshansingh ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 16:07:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And also so that we can just enjoy the master's pretentiousness for ourselves.
Voltrondemort ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 00:56:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The correct approach when you've figured it out is to just answer your own question and accept that.
motsanciens ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 03:51:29 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Glad I could read this. A lot of the time I read down to the lesser voted answers and find something useful, but it always makes me second guess myself, like Who am I to suppose all these other ppl are wrong?
ocket8888 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 16:43:52 on May 23, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People with a trillion updoots can't possibly conceive of the simple fact that some people haven't been doing this for thirty years, and therefore lack the knowledge to even search properly in some cases. It's fine for a duplicate question to be deleted (upon provision of a link to a different question that the OP verifies solves their problem), but they not only do that but actively punish users for "wasting their time" by moving them one step closer to being permanently banned from ever asking questions. As if they didn't have free will and were totally allowed to just scroll past a question.
The core of the problem is that what users want SO to be (and what it used to be, to some degree) is a place where people go to get help. What the owners/moderators of SO want it to be is a place where you go to find an answer to a question that you have, but has already been answered.
They fail to recognize potential knowledge gaps in users and answerers, and they are indirectly failing to keep up with the progression of technology; as a technology progresses, the way you do X may change, but the older an answer is, the more updoots it gets, so the out-of-date answers tend to dominate the more recent ones.
Stack Overflow is a shitty place built for people to answer questions, disguised as a nice place built for people to ask questions.
TBatWork ยท 88 points ยท Posted at 18:51:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly. You frame a very specific question due to very specific circumstances, and they respond with, "No, you're doing it wrong," even if you provide all the details of what you're working against.
My previous job had their website held hostage by a web dev company that supposedly charged for any contact at all, and had excessive rates for any work that we requested. We could only work in HTML because they were the exclusive gatekeepers to the CSS.
So you know, Stack Overflow was rarely a source of help when all the answers were, "No, but CSS."
Bartweiss ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 00:24:30 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I know the usual answer is "tell SO your constraints and why you can't use the usual answer", but that never actually seems to work.
I can't count how often I've opened questions reading "I can't use X for these reasons, what else can I do?" and seen "Just do X, duh."
steamruler ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 07:47:14 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
As long as you attempt to answer a question, it won't be deleted, which is a good policy in theory, except it means that "didn't read the entire question" isn't a valid reason to delete comments and answers.
[deleted] ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 19:59:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
TBatWork ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 20:20:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, when necessary. We had a handful of canned style classes to use for most things. The rest was creative use of tables with a 0px border and arranging page layouts via column widths, row spans and col spans.
The most information I ever got was a Lynda class that started with a module on 90's web design, and the rest of the class modules were, "Check out all the cool stuff we can do today!"
pixeldust6 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 06:56:32 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโve had hobby websites, a college class, and an internship under similar constraints. People cringe in horror, but that would be my time to shine!
lkraider ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 00:29:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wow, CSS gatekeeping, that's a niche if I ever heard one.
koshgeo ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:22:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's true, but if posing an "A" question it's really helpful to say something like "I know wanting to do A seems crazy, but for reasons too long to go into, it's a hard constraint and is really what I'm trying to do here, awful though it might seem with existing B alternatives out there. Any ideas?"
Heh, probably still wouldn't stop the "Just how thoroughly have you explored B?" questions but it should help.
PM_ME__ASIAN_BOOBS ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:55:30 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
As someone working on a Angular SPA running on a Backbone+Jquery frontend plugged to a Tapestry server only commented in German (I don't speak German) and displayed only on Japanese hardware, I know your pain
TransPM ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:26:03 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would anybody want to do A?"
LEGACY SYSTEMS
I don't want to, I have to, because the customer wants to, and somebody had to go and tell them they're "always right".
uptokesforall ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:03:50 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If it is in your unsupervised possession, you can forge whatever certificates you need.
steamruler ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:42:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
So, basically, it has to work under Citrix. Fucking Citrix.
KazDragon ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:26:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In defense...
Quite frequently, the train of thought of a frustrated developer is:
Really, the question should be, "How do I do X?". Sometimes, experienced developers have been down that road frequently enough that the question about how to A betrays the original problem. Sometimes, it requires a little bit of probing.
It's still no reason to be an arse about it, though. :D
(Edit: apparently regurgitating the A/B problem for the 70th time in this thread)
shawncplus ยท 1129 points ยท Posted at 17:12:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Avoiding the X/Y problem is really hard when answering questions on stack overflow or anywhere else.
Sometimes they really are trying to solve X because they tried everything else and it didn't work, sometimes they are trying to solve X because they've been looking at the problem too long and have tunnel vision. That's when it's useful for someone from the outside to go "OK, well let's step back a second, what are you actually trying to accomplish?"
Milleuros ยท 169 points ยท Posted at 18:14:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My issue with the X/Y problem is that if I describe the full problem ("I want to do X, because I have constraints A, B and C, and so I try method Y"), the question is so long that nobody replies.
fighterace00 ยท 97 points ยท Posted at 19:47:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Effingham's Theorem: The internet only speaks out if what you said was blatantly wrong.
[deleted] ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 20:09:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
NotASpanishSpeaker ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 20:23:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You're wrong.
marcosdumay ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:34:07 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's not possible. Look at Effingham's Theorem.
You most certainly does not exist.
-_Dan_- ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 11:45:04 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You bloody Nazi! How else would they message if they didn't exist? Literally Hitler
marcosdumay ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:17:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess you got your laws and theorems mixed up.
MurderMelon ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 21:58:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
-- Michael Scott
Anla-Shok-Na ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 03:30:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I use this approach with clients all the time. It's easier to get them to tell what they really want if I first throw something at them that they can correct.
Nkar2018 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 09:28:56 on March 24, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, what you're saying is just a myth and completely wrong. It has practically never happened. Only correct stuff gets attention He's name was Efinmhon by the way. Get your facts straight .
Voltrondemort ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 00:53:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The trick is to get the Y fanboys involved. "Y SUCKS, IT CANT X".
BoootCamp ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 20:31:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My solution to that problem is to say โHow do I do Yโ and then in the comments or an edit explain the real problem.
Usually people decide to answer the short problem and then donโt mind reading the background in more detail.
FUZxxl ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:07:31 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While that works, it can lead to things like this where I had to spend over an hour arguing back and forth that yes, I am actually interested in an answer to my question. Afterwards, it went rather smoothly.
senperecemo ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:24:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's not the XY problem though. A big part of the XY problem is asking a question about Y without mentioning X.
Milleuros ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 20:25:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Indeed. But if you do mention X, then the question is so long that no one reads it.
senperecemo ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 20:29:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah! Sorry, that may've happened just now. I stopped reading after your example quote :x
Sorry!
juliand665 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 01:34:15 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Itโs beautifully ironic that you missed the meaning of their comment because you stopped reading too early, which is exactly what they were complaining about.
Milleuros ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 10:11:30 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Looks like the maximum comment length is about one line. Otherwise people may not read it entirely.
Zei33 ยท 403 points ยท Posted at 17:28:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's true enough, sometimes you just need to take a step back and reset. I spent 23 hours in the last 3 days trying to get C++ and C# sockets to talk to each other. Realised earlier that I was doing something completely retarded and just needed to keep it simple. Problem solved.
Edit: If anyone's curious, my most recent problem solved by combining strings and then turning into byte array rather than trying to merge two byte arrays lol
mindbleach ยท 311 points ยท Posted at 18:05:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's what rubber duck debugging is for... but sometimes your rubber duck is broken and you need to put it in time-out for a weekend.
Muroid ยท 223 points ยท Posted at 18:25:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You should get a second rubber duck that you can explain all the problems with the first rubber duck to.
mindbleach ยท 164 points ยท Posted at 18:27:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's rubber ducks all the way down.
TreatmentForYourRash ยท 69 points ยท Posted at 19:16:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Paging /u/fuckswithducks
sinkwiththeship ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 22:24:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That dude actually funded a porno about rubber duck debugging. It's pretty funny.
RepostsAreBadMkay ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 23:22:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Link for computer science please
PhantomTissue ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:20:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sketchiest click of the day
[deleted] ยท -16 points ยท Posted at 18:38:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
mindbleach ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 18:40:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not really, no.
PumpItPaulRyan ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:45:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I wonder if that guy went through the proper channels to have that added to the chain; I can't believe they approved it.
Nalivai ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:58:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Are there any proper channels? I always thought you just grab newest link and quickly submit your own.
PumpItPaulRyan ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:06:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's a subreddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/switcharoo/
They maintain the integrity of the chain.
Nalivai ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:39:39 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I get it. They remove wrong submittion, it's not premoderation, it's postmoderation.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:37:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's not how the switcheroo joke works, mate. Op says something, person b switches the statement around in a silly way, and then person c says "ah, the old Reddit something-a-roo"
Valiade ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:41:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's called therapy
midnightketoker ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:35:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Complete with duck-sized desk wedge thing that reads "the bug stops here" and it's dressed like an old school pimp
pellep ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:02:20 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Personally i got a pack of 3
cat5inthecradle ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:24:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Donโt use a rubber duck. Why would you use a rubber duck? Itโs 2018 just get a Funko vinyl Uncle Bob to pair with.
/s
jokes_for_nerds ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:24:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's when I throw the rubber duck at a coworker and ask him to come unfuck my thought process.
MCLooyverse ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:07:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I have put many un-traditional prefixes and suffixes on words in my time, but never have I even considered "unfuck".
jokes_for_nerds ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 04:09:32 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ha! Must be a side effect of working with too many government and military types.
Backronyms are the best. Everything is a SNAFU, when approached from a certain angle :)
MCLooyverse ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 04:14:43 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Backronyms are awesome. Speaking of acronyms, I looked up SNAFU on Google, and after a short, lazy search, I don't get it.
jokes_for_nerds ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 05:01:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Situation Normal, (comma, intake of breath) All Fucked Up
It's basically another version of Murphy's law.
Life is unpredictable. The best-laid plans still manage to blow up in your face
sometimesconstantly.So when you find yourself in a bind, it's a snafu. Something went wrong, and you need to fight your way out of it.
[deleted] ยท 51 points ยท Posted at 18:55:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
alexanderpas ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 19:54:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's actually pretty respectable.
Hyperman360 ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 20:15:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You want to make it on your own steam. I respect that.
beardedchimp ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 21:11:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
More often than not, that code ends up in production. Somewhere down the line a contractor is brought in to deal with some bugs after excluding all other possibilities they realise "They wrote their own itoa() function?!"
I have been in both positions :)
uptokesforall ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:06:33 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That seems harmless. It's the converse that I would be concerned about. Especially if I'm converting a string in to a large number format. I'd want to make sure this code is IEEE standards compliant
otterom ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:41:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What, ah...is an itoa() function?
matthoback ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:47:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
integer to alphanumeric, i.e. it converts a number to a string.
Aoloach ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:47:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Converts integers to strings I think.
danted002 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:26:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I got the of all stupidness... I was trying to create a recursive dictionary for a nested structure in Python and i took me around 20 to realize I wasnโt actually writing a nested dictionary I was writing spaghetti code and trying to add โifโ conditions for each edge case I could think about. 10 min after I made that discovery I had my bloody dictionary. (Iโve been working as a programmer for the past 8 years) :)
midnightketoker ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:32:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I do shit like this all the time. Lately with Linux. I end up telling myself I'm learning but most of the time I still feel like an idiot for spending 3 hours trying to do something one way when I realize there's a thing I can apt-get or already have and if I only tried that earlier by stepping back and trying alternatives before diving into troubleshooting...
immune2iocaine ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:38:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I have a sticky on my laptop that says โstop inventing wheelsโ for those exact types of things.
midnightketoker ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:42:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Haha my mom says that, but definitely something I should keep in mind since I seem to be prone to wheel-invention
Zei33 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:05:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm sitting here using GDB to try and debug my socket server atm. Debugging by command line is not my idea of fun, that's for sure.
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:40:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโm pretty new to programming and I was doing coursework yesterday and spent like 5 hours staring at a problem just to find out I had an extra โi++โ from when I turned a while loop into a for loop
-_Dan_- ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 11:14:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Might be time to learn how to use a debugger. You'd probably have picked that up pretty quickly!
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:33:48 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Probably good that I occasionally learn the hard way, but yeah, itโs on the list
Zei33 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:04:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
lol amazing. Well you won't forget that one in a hurry.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 21:50:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's like 90% of my code.
apajx ยท 47 points ยท Posted at 18:51:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I personally find people assuming I have an X/Y problem very annoying. Often I ask questions out of curiosity. I want to know how someone would do X, yet I'm asked what I'm trying to solve. Nothing! I just want to know about X!
apnorton ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:09:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The issue is that, 98% of the time, it's an X/Y problem when someone is asking how to do something stupid. I'm in the same boat as you --- I like thinking about I'd do X for the sake of doing X because I'm curious, but I also know I'm in the vast minority of askers on SO.
William_Robinson ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 02:37:51 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've learned to stay far, far away from stack overflow if I'm not trying to get a dependency working. Questions get redirected to some other comprehensive but tenuously related answer that that I already looked at. But I have never, not once in the last six years, found such an answer useful.
Yserbius ยท 62 points ยท Posted at 18:21:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or they may just be looking at old code that they don't have a budget to refactor. Yes, I know that writing raw SQL queries in a servlet is a terrible design, but that's how the data is read in and that's how it's going to stay unless I spend the next six weeks re-writing 14 year old Java code.
steamruler ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 07:41:40 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Only six weeks?
MooFu ยท -9 points ยท Posted at 20:36:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And three months later, you're kicking yourself for not spending those six weeks re-writing the code.
Yserbius ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 20:46:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Nope. Deadline for bug fixes is next week. If it ain't off the bug tracker by next week, someone will be angry. And that's when the next milestone starts to add the latest feature.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 21:29:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why, as a Team Lead, I began to cheat a little.
I got all the bugs for the order generation system together. Estimated time to solve them all was a year.
I offered Support to fix them all in two months. They agreed.
We did a complete refactor which any single bug wouldn't have allowed but which in itself took way less time than fixing existing bugs.
It was the buggiest (and most called) code in the system.
The whole app became a lot more stable. And I threw in a shitload of logging, which Support had never had before.
They were pretty chuffed.
Bartweiss ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:48:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And in more than a few cases - you've got <6 weeks of runway, or a vital contract to fulfill, or something else that genuinely justifies doing it the messy way. "Just refactor now!" is honestly the wrong answer in some cases.
MooFu ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:57:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well, I'd still be kicking myself, but only because I can't kick the project manager.
lemmeusereddit ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 20:01:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've had the guys over there berate me for being an idiot dealing with problem x, when if I was developing the software for OS b instead of OS a the problem wouldn't exist.
Maybe, just maybe, I can't force my entire company to stop supporting OS a just because it has an OS specific bug.
hadtoupvotethat ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 18:41:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
OK, that's great, but what if I really did want help with Y? How do I make SO believe and accept that? Nobody is forced to answer the question if they don't think I should be doing Y, but it's a waste of everyone's time to talk about X in that case.
motdidr ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:14:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
can you think of a specific example where you really legitimately wanted help with Y but nobody believed you and insisted there was an X somewhere you weren't telling them? because this scenario they are talking about is one where a programmer is convinced Y is their problem, when it's really X, but they don't think to mention anything about X. if you legitimately want help with Y, they will help you, but it's unlikely that it's something that everyone else is convinced you are hiding the truth. usually the XY problem is a little more obvious because the question being asked is very strange and it's not really something anyone tries to do, and that scenario 9 times out of 10 is a newer programmer having the XY problem. if you are just curious and realize it's a strange thing to do you can just clearly state that. but this is all very strange to talk about without an example.
hadtoupvotethat ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:19:01 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes, that's happened to me. Not that I was hiding the truth per se, it's just that the full context of the problem was very complex - huge enterprise system with all sorts of dependencies and limitations - and it was totally impractical to describe it in enough detail on SO to convince people that I've ruled out a lot of options and Y was really my best one. The question was long enough as it was.
This philosophical debate is not unlike the Windows vs Linux approach to protecting the user from shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes Windows prevents you from stuffing up your OS and no doubt that saves MS support a lot of time, but it also frustrates the hell out of experienced users sometimes. In Linux you say the magic word "sudo" and you can change pretty much anything. I basically want to be able to say to SO: sudo answer my question
Yes, and 1 time out of 10?
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:09:04 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the 1 time out of 10 is someone either curious doing something strange for fun, or a competent programmer dealing with bizarre constraints or requirements that they have no power to change.
and in those cases, my main point is that the competent programmer asking the question for those reasons should absolutely make that info plainly obvious, because it's much rarer than the newer inexperienced programmer with an XY problem, and it's only sensible to assume the common case rather than the rare case, if only to help the inexperienced from shooting themselves in the foot. not necessarily triple the length of your question not at least mention that those constraints exist, if only to indicate that you're well aware the question sounds strange, and you can always elaborate in a comment later if requested.
bartekko ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:31:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess it's because it's not actually an X/Y problem, it's an X/Y/Z/B/C/D/F/H/I/S problem. The reason you need three letters is because you need to know a file extension. The reason you need to know a file extension is because you need to know how to interpret, say an image file. The reason you need to interpret an image file is because you've been handled a bunch of them. You were handled a bunch of image files because you're writing a website for images. The reason you're writing a website for images is because...
When you divide and conquer, it's not always exactly clear what the lowest level of divide is
misbug ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:07:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
SO system encourages the Y case. If you ask for X you shall be closed as duplicate or off-topic.
[deleted] ยท 63 points ยท Posted at 17:27:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It also helps if the person asking the question notes any restrictions upfront. Like, if you absolutely must use a certain technology or absolutely must not add new tech to your stack, then fucking say so clearly so that you can get an answer specifically for your situation. Otherwise you're going to be told to use a different method or piece of tech because it's generally helpful to not be allowed to do stupid shit.
Zei33 ยท 70 points ยท Posted at 17:31:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am kinda sick of people recommending Google libraries for things when I'm trying to learn how to do things from scratch.
hashmalum ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 19:17:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or this one whizbang application developed by someone whose never worked in a corporate environment, which is entirely proxy unaware and the first thing it does is try to phone home :/
Chromana ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:32:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Gatling (REST load tester) calls to Gatling website instead of your own endpoint by default to warm up. Was one of things which was just an annoyance of huge error messages until I had time to look into it. Can change this though.
Swagger (REST endpoint GUI) attempts to validate JSON by calling out to somewhere. No way to change this via config. Forever have an "error" message on GUI unless I hack the JavaScript, but I just don't have time.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:05:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck, I know. The website I maintain uses an old video wrapping JS library that worked on desktop browsers, but not on iOS devices. Turns out that the JS engines work a bit differently, and autoplaying videos throws errors (funny thing is, the videos only autoplay in the sense that they're triggered to buffer, paused on start by default). I had to dig through minified JS and modify that shit directly because the library was no longer being supported. Would not recommend.
svick ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 18:43:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Did you tell them that your goal is to learn and that's why you don't want to use libraries?
subdep ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:53:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Itโs almost as if there should be a standard tag for posts:
Open to other approaches - OTOA Strict limitations on environment - SLOE
svick ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 20:06:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
From SO help:
Since there is no such thing as "expert in questions that are open to other approaches", I don't think it's well suited to being a tag on SO.
Though you could create a discussion about this on meta.SO.
[deleted] ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 17:57:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
aiij ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:39:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's a difference between assuming that someone is and idiot and assuming that someone is confused.
Assuming that someone is not really trying to shoot themselves in the foot seems more polite than the converse.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:09:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yep, you've got it.
Besides, smart people can do stupid shit and stupid people can do smart shit. It's never as simple as being only one or the other. Whether smart, stupid, or somewhere in between, the general idea is that if you're doing something generally considered bad practice and you don't specify that it's a requirement you can't work around, you're going to get people telling you not to do it.
WelletAtWork ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:21:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Noob programmer here, what is a stack in this context?
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:15:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The other reply doesn't seem very noob-friendly, so I'll chime in myself as well:
The "tech stack" is basically the collection of software used for your application. This can include the operating system (if you're discussing e.g. a web server), any programming languages, databases, third-party libraries (e.g. jQuery for JavaScript), or a number of other possibilities.
As a general rule of thumb, if it's something you have to download or install in order for the program you're writing to work, then it's probably a part of your tech stack.
WelletAtWork ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 12:57:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks ! great answer
motdidr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:07:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the stack of software responsible for the environment in question, whether it's an application or a series of applications, a server backend, a website in one form or another, or some combination of everything, stack in that context just means "all the stuff currently involved."
not adding new tech to the stack means that a solution can't involve running a new program, or a new service, or adding a new library, or adding an endpoint somewhere, a new machine in Amazon, whatever the case may be. sometimes the solution to a problem is "use this program instead" or "use this library to do it," but sometimes you legitimately cannot add any new tech anywhere in the application stack.
Tayl100 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:03:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I find far more people complaining about/mentioning the x/y problem than I do people actually having the problem.
SchroedingersHat ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:34:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But even if that poster needs Y, you should still answer X so that the poor fuck who tried Y first and now realises they need X can find anything at all about it.
Selkie_Love ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:20:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I can confirm, almost every silly complicated Excel question I get an answer is usually a X/Y problem, where they think they need to do X, when really Y will also get them there.
The other half of the silly complicated Excel questions are solved with "You formatted your data terribly, and that's why we're here now. Let's fix it with...."
And once in awhile, you get a unicorn.
uptokesforall ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:09:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
We're going to need to reformat this spreadsheet. Draw on a piece of paper what columns and rows you need.
Feel free to use several pages, but do not overlap anything.
mindbleach ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:04:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yak shaving.
mastercheeze ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:32:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
https://i.imgur.com/5yBamMp.jpg Actuallyyyy
the_Madman ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:31:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why I try to write a tiny test program that does exclusively the problem I'm trying to solve.
Not only does it narrow the problem enough to be useful, but I can post the full source on StackOverflow without worrying about copyright infringement or other nonsense.
N1ghtshade3 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:31:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sure, except when you're asking a question about something that you pretty obviously can't change, like the entire fucking framework of your app.
"How do I do X in Dropwizard/Play?"
"Use Spring"
astobie ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:46:41 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I mean I am a straight up tunnel snake after only 5 minutes so I do appreciate those answers
duelingdelbene ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:19:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
oh wow I never knew there was a name for that. been guilty of it before I'm sure hahaha
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:52:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Those examples are exactly what /u/sac_boy was describing. Whoever wrote that is a pretentious dickbag.
dread_deimos ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:59:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The number of times I had coworkers approach me, open their mouth to explain a problem, pause for a second, closing their mouth and come back to their computer with a solution is more than five.
slayer_of_idiots ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:23:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet that 99% of these are people that really don't want to do A, they want to do C, and B is the canonical way to do that.
llllIlllIllIlI ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:34:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I get this all the time with end-users and it's even worse, somehow.
"Hey can you dump a list of all users and their security roles and put the file on the shared drive and schedule that for every day?"
"Sure, we could do that.... Wait why??"
"Well we want to be able to audit what changes are happening over the year by doing comparisons..."
"......what. There's a built in audit log for that you just need to ask us or get management to agree to security changes that will grant audit log access to key users..."
Haplo12345 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:32:12 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think you meant to say when asking questions
Cr3X1eUZ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:19:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- HF
overwatchacct ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 18:52:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yea this is the stack overflow pro tip: start your question with some context about your goal and how you arrived at your current solution.
Skater_x7 ยท 134 points ยท Posted at 18:14:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Reminds me of like a reddit Pcmasterrace thing where a guy asked like "Hey what's best gaming laptop I can get?" and one of top answers was basically "You should just get a gaming PC, they are much better in many ways such as X, Y ... etc" .
It's like, main point of a lot of these questions is that there are constraints. Not that I could just get anything I want..
RenaKunisaki ยท 109 points ยท Posted at 19:00:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"What's a good brand of bicycle?" "You should get a car instead."
Excal2 ยท 65 points ยท Posted at 19:17:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"I need a new economy class pick up truck."
"Tesla's are really hot right now."
LashingFanatic ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:24:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How's about an electric semi to you?"
erroneousbosh ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:37:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know about a pickup, but I'd buy the absolute fuck out of Tesla vans. Something about SWB Transit sized. Come on Elon...
AquaeyesTardis ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:48:47 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I mean, theyโre coming out with a Tesla Pickup.
erroneousbosh ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 07:52:43 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess at worst you could fit a Truckman top to it, or something. A pickup isn't that useful for what I do, since the back isn't covered so it's not not secure and everything gets rained on ;-)
Billy_bob12 ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 21:21:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In a editing sofware forum.
"I need to stitch together footage that I took with X camera that has limited recording time."
"Get a new camera. with longer recording time."
So infuriating.
KlaireOverwood ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 22:46:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And go back in time to reshoot with the new camera.
You're welcome.
FarhanAxiq ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 08:21:51 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Remind me of adobe premiere variable frame rate support thread.
"please add support to variable frame rate, i use camera phone"
"you're poor, get a real camera."
MSB3000 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:25:05 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I SAW THAT THREAD. The "master" got really defensive about having "proper equipment" if you're going to use Adobe Premiere.
Video sources can come from anywhere these days. Who the hell knows where the video you HAVE to work with is coming from? He was hearing none of it, he was dead set on, "if you're going to work with professional software, you can only use expensive equipment, end of story".
I can only wish whoever that was the absolute worst, a plague on their house and a turd in their cereal bowl.
FYI to everyone who needs to use the travesty that is Adobe Premiere: try Handbrake to convert it.
FarhanAxiq ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:16:31 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They fix it for the new update, it took them almost 7 year (probably more) to get it fix.
MSB3000 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:35:04 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Now if only Illustrator supported SVG
Billy_bob12 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:03:05 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Oh you are editing at a news station where you have to use phone camera footage that's been email in for your segments? Tell those plebs that they aren't going to make the news."
MSB3000 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:27:19 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is literally and un-ironically what that guy was saying. I was surprised he could breath, with his head so far up his ass.
Hyperman360 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:32:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I used to like PCMR but when I actually started heavily PC gaming I realized it's just unhelpful shitposting and left. r/pcgaming and r/buildapc were a lot more useful.
CloudNineK ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:53:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think you misunderstood what PCMR is for. It literally started out as a circle jerk. It's not somewhere you're supposed to go for help but rather post about the "glorious PC masterrace".
enyoron ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:30:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What's especially frustrating about that is the fact that current generation gaming laptops are actually really fucking good. You get basically the same i5s/i7s and 1060s/1070s that you get in desktops (the benchmarks of the mobile versions are within 5% or so their desktop counterparts). Honestly I would consider having a desktop tower to be more niche/constrained than having a laptop! Most people just use a computer to the end of its useful life cycle and then replace it completely, rather than upgrade individual parts over time. The portability is generally more useful than the modularity.
T0astero ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:39:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What? No. Gaming laptops are very questionably even worth the price, because their market is far more niche than a desktop. First of all, gaming doesn't even come close to defining what people use computers for. Someone who doesn't want to play a bunch of high-spec games should never buy a gaming monster laptop because it'll be overpriced for what they want, probably less portable, and have a shorter battery life. That's the group that uses a computer to the end of its life before replacing it, because barring some purposes like rendering and simulation many hobbies/fields don't benefit directly from hardware upgrades.
So what that leaves are the people who want to play high-requirement games comfortably over time, and will need to upgrade specs to do so at some point. Why would they pick a gaming laptop unless they personally need to be mobile a lot? It'll be less powerful than what you can get on a desktop of the same price, many gaming laptops have shit battery life, and for the one group who probably will want their hardware to stay up-to-date you lose the modularity.
It's the difference between paying 400-800 for a new, top-end GPU in your desktop or 1200-1500 at once to replace even the parts that were up-to-date in a laptop with the second-best option. One of those expenses is much easier to justify over multiple instances of updating hardware, with the only excuses being "I need to travel a lot" or "I'm comfortable paying almost twice as much for the convenience fee of not opening a computer up myself" (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think many people should happily say this. If you're in a hard place financially it's a horrible decision, and if you're well-off you could be putting the extra money towards something else). I would also argue that just because some people don't upgrade their computer parts, that doesn't make the modularity something they should throw away. Yes, it might be smart for Little Billy to get something portable if he's not gonna upgrade the parts anyhow. If the portability does nothing for him, it'd be even smarter for Little Billy to learn how to open up a computer and stop wasting his money. It's not a difficult, complicated or dangerous task so long as you take proper measures.
Is a desktop more constrained than a laptop? Absolutely. But you're using the word "niche" wrong, because the only people who should use a gaming laptop are the relatively small intersection of "dedicated gamer" and "can't sit down in one place to play reliably." For anyone else a desktop computer or a normal laptop are better deals depending on whether playing games is important to them.
enyoron ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 04:29:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You've probably not been in in the market for gaming laptops or desktop GPUs recently, and have distorted views of what average users that aren't redditors on /r/programmerhumor or /r/buildapc actually want out of their computers. You know that modern 'gaming' laptops come in <5lb form factors, with 8+hrs of battery life when the GPU is idling, right? And 1050tis and 1060s are becoming more and more standard for high end laptops in general.
The techie gamer that wants to tinker with his tower all the time to play the newest games at highest settings possible is incredibly niche. Most people, as you mentioned, just want a general use laptop - something that's already assembled for them. A significant portion of that group - larger than the tinkering gamer - want that laptop to also be able to run games reasonably well. Medium settings, 1080p, 60pfs. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago they'd be better with a midrange gaming desktop and a netbook/tablet. But now the gaming laptop is clearly the better option, because Intel and nVidia have made amazing advancements with efficient, low power consumption processors over the last 2 years, and GPU miners have utterly fucked the desktop GPU market.
the_Madman ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:10:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For the past 10 years I've not lived in one place for longer than 12 months.
I built a desktop but most of my "upgrades" were to fit it on a smaller motherboard or in a smaller case.
I'm totally sympathetic to people who just want a gaming laptop.
IceSentry ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:00:23 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I move my computer almost every month for lan parties or things like that. This would never justify a gaming laptop, let alone an entire year.
KDBA ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 01:30:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't think moving your computer once a year counts as needing it to be portable.
burninrock24 ยท 113 points ยท Posted at 18:10:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stack overflow makes way more sense when you look at it that 80% of commenters are freelancers that are very good at their jobs actually but work in ideal โfrom-scratchโ environments.
Theyโve probably never looked down the barrel of a VB6 legacy app โupdateโ
ACoderGirl ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 18:35:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eh, I don't think that's true. The SO survey shows 70% employed as full time. Only 10% are contractors, freelancers, or self employed.
Not sure what questions you view, but I see all sorts of mentions about working with legacy code (both in questions and answers). That includes both questions where legacy nature is directly relevant as well as commonly in questions about library issues (eg, "oh, that version was broken, here's a work around"). That said, I'd expect that legacy status isn't really relevant for the vast majority of questions. Especially if you skim the top questions, it's very evident that most of these questions can be examined in a vacuum.
Also, when examining questions as they appear over time, it's evident that a great deal of them are honestly very poorly written to the point that it's hard to help. It's of course understandable that people don't all know how to ask good questions, but when you consider it from the PoV of people taking the time to answer them (which is IMO very good of them, so the least you can do is make it easy for them), such low quality questions get tiring.
Excal2 ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:25:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I used to be surprised at how hard some questions got swatted down back when I started on SE.
Then I got enough rep in one of the communities to start reviewing queues. You're not kidding, sometimes it's downright impossible to even form a meaningful response because they give you zero information.
Zexks ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 21:50:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I see a lot of the questions that fall into these categories are generally from non-english native speakers.
Excal2 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 22:09:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eh I've chewed through plenty of questions from non-native speakers, you can still tell when they're giving an honest and complete effort to ask a properly defined question.
It's questions like this:
... asked on Hardware Recs or Machine Learning that fucking get me. That question isn't detailed or on topic for either community but I see it posted to both places regularly.
I mean you need computer parts ya dunce, anyone could have told you that.
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 00:09:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I wish we could answer questions like these with answers that match their silliness. Answers like "lots of graphics cards," "an Internet connection to AWS and a credit card," or "a grad program somewhere with a compute cluster" would all fit nicely, and they're even all partially accurate!
Zexks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:14:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
wow, lol yeah i'll give you that.
apnorton ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:21:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This 100%. I spent the better part of three years on Math.SE before it became really big. It started off as really fun, but once it became the 4th or 3rd largest network site, question quality went through the floor and it became miserable to sift through it all. Certain high-rep users would literally search for questions on the autodelete boundary to give a downvote and trigger the Roomba script, because 5 delete votes a day simply wasn't enough to make even a dent in the crud that gets posted.
SO/SE politics is actually really fun, in a related note.
Excal2 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:51:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'll check out politics over there, it's tough to find good discussion on reddit these days in that arena. Thanks for the tip!
apnorton ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:32:05 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh I actually meant the inner politics of people running for moderator, deciding what norms should be regarding votes, etc. :P Thought the politics-related StackExchanges do seem to be pretty cool.
Slight0 ยท 50 points ยท Posted at 18:08:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You start to learn to frame your question with enough context clearly indicating that A is your only option so that anyone suggesting doing B looks like an idiot and thus doesn't post. It's unfortunate that people will just assume you're the biggest idiot in the world otherwise, but that's what it's come to.
I realize it's not always possible to give context or the context is too complex, but you must insist in the question that you need to do A and not anything else.
Kurvco ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 20:18:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People could also just not be condescending to someone asking a question (someone who probably already feels stupid for having to ask questions).
the_Madman ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:12:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes, people could not be shit to each other, but where's the fun in that?
chylex ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:52:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's also some questions I occasionally run into, that simply ask "how to do A" and the replies are pretty much "don't do A, it's bad and you're bad for wanting to do A". Fuck that shit, if I'm googling how to do A, usually I already know it's bad but don't have another option/don't care, and I hate those dickheads who think they're being super helpful by telling others not to do something without providing any actual solution.
RamenJunkie ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:23:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This shit drives me nuts.
Like ok, I get it, B is more efficient or whatever, and does things 3000% faster. Except I don't need all that complexity/overhead for my weekend boredom project, plus, I need to do it by method A because I have other bits I am going to strap onto this code and I need the bits from doing it via A to do that, which is why I am not doing it with B.
spaceneenja ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:30:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Does SO allow bots? They could probably eliminate the need for this by simply having a bot that asks on every post "Why would anybody want to do A?"
KlaireOverwood ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:47:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why would anybody want to eliminate this need?
UglyStru ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:54:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Welcome to programming.
creativeMan ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:36:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
To be fair, I think a lot of people assume that the conditions that other people's code was written in were just perfect and ideal. I've seen people on SO and reddit say that "no one should do X" without any consideration for nuance and giving any reason.
arvy_p ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:47:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
LOL yes. And then everyone always ignores "this is what my boss wants, this is the framework we have, this is the vendor API I have to use, and I can change none of these, so that's why I have to A".
JarnabyBones ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:36:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same problems in post production.
Post on a forum regarding how to solve problem B...no less than 3 people answer the unasked problem A they wish you had. Then the camera operators come in insisting you should have filmed differently and you are fucked because your dumb ass didn't do it right.
And I'm all here thinking "goddamn I know it's wrong. That's why I asked the question...if I could have controlled the shoot it would have been done right, but on this gig I'm just the fucking editor! Now how do you solve problem B!?!"
julsmanbr ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:07:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's 2018, nobody answers StackOverflow
uptokesforall ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:12:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Plenty find old questions that ask the same dumb questions as themselves.
Thus the firm faith in google that techies hold.
forgotten_epilogue ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:15:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Well, the place where I work requires that we do A, so I don't have a choice."
"Well you should tell them they really need to do B."
"I did and they said if I want to get paid I need to do A."
"Well you should find a job where they do B."
"..."
LNhart ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:36:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Tag yourself, I'm
1thief ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:20:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Cuz it's my job fool
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:54:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
wannaridebikes ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:20:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not tearing you apart at all! That's how I learned HTML, on MySpace back in the day.
SheolCodeMonkey ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:06:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A programmer who doesn't suck the dick of StackOverflow? I thought we were an endangered species
DiabloCanyonOne ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:38:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not to mention if you're coming to StackOverflow in the first place, it's probably because you're doing something out of the ordinary.
randomly_generated_U ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:43:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This applies to so much more than programming. The whole world is just a bunch of stuff people built slowly sinking back into the mud.
twitch1982 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:55:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If everything worked the way it was designed to, and we had ideal conditions most of the time, none of us would have jobs.
KlaireOverwood ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:51:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why would anybody want a job? /s
JigglesMcRibs ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:56:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You'd think after the number of times we've tried combinations of technologies no one has ever tried before, we'd have tried them all by now.
But no, they always find a way.
NoradIV ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:17:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I already know how to do B and it is not possible under my constraints. Thanks for wasting my time.
caretoexplainthatone ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:32:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm somewhat guilty of asking questions and not fully explaining the parameters/circumstances/constraints (so get plenty of answers along the lines of OP).
More often than not though, the problem itself is bigger than the scope of a SO question but there is a particular part I'm having an issue with. Rather than put in paragraphs of content, extra information, sections of code etc, I try to abstract the specific problem a little. I'm looking for an understanding of the problem and ways of solving it, not the an integer answer to a maths equation.
It can be difficult to find the right balance - if the question is too long it is often ignored. If it is too short, it gets snarky answers and then locked.
SO is a hell of a great resource but there is definitely an art to describing your problem well so that you get useful answers.
Jarhyn ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:03:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
God... I ran into that a few times when I was trying to run some Power architecture binaries on a PPC board, and was running into some invalid instructions. Of course, I didn't have source for the binaries because they were made by a different company from whom we could not get source for various reasons. Long story short, I was forced to figure out how to recover from a SIGILL
Of course all these assholes jump down my throat for wanting to do "something that nobody should ever do", and it didn't help that nobody answering me by telling me "DON'T" even knew much about power architecture (including myself, at the time; I didn't know Power32 used fixed-width 32 bit instructions). The requirement was to set the next instruction in the context that interrupted, run the assembly replacement for the missing instruction, step forward to the next instruction, and continue executing. And for what it's worth I figured out how to do this, did it, and the fix worked well while we worked on figuring out a better solution, which I'm unsure whether we ever did.
What frustrates me more than anything is that I still don't know how to pull off a similar hack in x86/x64. Apparently on Intel architecture, it requires libraries that are deep in the realms of black hat.
chlocodile ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:35:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
As a new programmer and student I often have to use A due to the constraints of my assignment.
For example, I had to make a Java program when first taking an OOP class that was very difficult to create without using objects. My instructor wanted us to feel this pain so we would have a better understanding of objects as we started our semester.
I always appreciate the "that's stupid, do it like B" feedback because I genuinely learn from it, but wish there was also a place to ask those kinda silly prog questions as well.
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:33:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I actually like that technique a lot, I mean maybe not having to build an entire application but certainly a few assignments. with I was in school everyone kind of immediately understood why once are great, we didn't really need to do it the hard way, but it's a nice idea in theory. when I learned calculus we had to solve derivatives the long way for every single problem for a week before he showed is the power rule. our minds were blown but we also really felt comfortable with them, too.
magiclasso ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:11:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I got in a big fight with SO commenters one time because of this exact same problem. I was on a client machine trying to figure out a command for an old version of PHP and every poster on stack overflow was chiding me for not updating as though it was my option to do so. They could not fathom that somebody might be required to work on an old software version.
PhantomTissue ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:18:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My brother just had that moment, when I asked him for help on a CS assignment. He looks it over, and is like, Why TF did you write it ABC way, this Dumb AF.
I'm like, becuse that what the teacher wanted.
Hes like, but if you did it XYZ way instead, it would be way easier and more efficient.
I'm like, I agree. But I cant do it XYZ way because teacher wants it ABC way.
So we argued for like 20 minutes why I couldn't do it the more efficient way, trying to explain that she literally would fail me if i did.
Way more effort than was needed.
BOB_DROP_TABLES ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:44:18 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Most of the time I search SO, I'm in this situation (I've never asked a question there). I develop embedded software, which is like an incubator for weirdness scenario. Often trying to make some strange combination of libs work together. Like, try dealing with not having dynamic memory allocation or avoiding it. Or thinking in algorithms that are perhaps slower than usual, but use less of your scarce RAM. The good thing is that usually these questions are raised and answered by those who have been in similar situations, which leads to useful responses most of the time. Otherwise we would only get responses like RAM is super cheap, don't bother optimizing that. I'm very glad at least some people try to provide a solution to what was asked, even if sometimes the OP is in fact being a derp and should be doing it some other way.
LB-- ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:36:03 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I frequently encounter error messages with either no google results or the only results are the source code of the error message. Doing what "nobody has ever had to try before" is probably what most programmers are doing when they're not inventing a properly-sized wheel for their project needs, and it amazes me that Stack Overflow is not supportive of that.
128Gigabytes ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 02:50:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What really gets me about this is even outside of stack overflow this happens and programmers hate it and you would think programmers would understand but programmers are the ones doing
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:42:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You and everyone else says this, and yet...
TheHighlightHub ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:04:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Love this one. We're all creatures of entropy production, but the amount of possibilities these people rule out on all their answers is really something special.
servohahn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:07:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's an ancient problem of asking for any kind of help on the internet and doesn't even have to be especially complex. I remember once asking how to boost my laptop speakers on some tech forum and the responses were things like "get some headphones" or "use external speakers."
ro_musha ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:09:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
same same! I'd just ignore the non-answering answers, they are basically garbage
ishibaunot ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:16:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Working for a large company that doesn't want to upgrade anything will lead me to StackOverflow asking how to do A.
JackU_U ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:21:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This. Exactly
Netcob ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:24:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly this. If you want to use the latest tools and versions and paradigms, you'll either have to be self-employed or you'll only be doing that in your spare time.
Take software from five years ago, add crushing technical debt, subtract any time you thought you'd have in order to do things properly and you get the kinds of constraints that leave you with very little patience for coding hipsters.
I do B after work. I preach B at work. But I still need to do A right now ffs.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:33:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Last time I used SO, it was because I was trying to make a Caesar Cypher for a class. I asked how to make it so that the user needed to input everything on one line on the command line in C++. Similar to the way Nmap works, you know? Everything on one line. All that happened was that I got scolded by users for asking for homework help and got banned for 3 days. I eventually figured it out after several hours, but I don't think I will be posting there again.
SirWigglesVonWoogly ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:46:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot about the guy that disdainfully criticizes you for not googling the answer better, even though other noobs like me often find these answers by googling.
iroflmaowtf ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:51:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You need jQuery for that
BurgerLaowai ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:05:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โThis has already been covered in this discussion:โ (link to not so related discussion with no answer)
SamJSchoenberg ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:07:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well, in all fairness, the assumption that you are an idiot is frequently correct.
bantab ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
90% of the time that I have a question for an online forum, it is a more efficient use of my time to solve it by random trial and error. 10% of the time I break down and post a question, which only adds to the time it takes to solve the problem by trial and error since the question is inevitably unanswered.
XirallicBolts ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:26:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It can be ridiculous constraints, like mine was "My teacher has no idea how an Arduino works -- I need to program this in such a way that I can explain it to him and he can understand why it works"
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:42:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I work in public service, the solutions I work on involve extremely sensitive data on people all over the country, so there's a rule aimed at mitigating risk that you simply can't use anything outside the standard library. Is this a good decision? I don't know, but it's a decision made well above my pay grade, so I have no choice but to deal with it. I look up how to do something without an external library and of course there's always those people on stackoverflow just smugly saying that this is the point of X external library so why are you wasting your time? Thanks dude, thanks so much, I had no idea how cool these libraries are, that was the only thing holding me back!
MogwaiK ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:20:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, you just need a fix that works for 4-5 different generations of the same architecture.
Tatux007 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:21:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you for answering questions.
foonix ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:20:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you for doing this. Sometimes the best way to explain why to do B instead of A is to just show how B works, and then it becomes obvious why B is better. Answers like that have made me a much better programmer.
waddlesticks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:20:12 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Especially when you're per-say learning.
Had a question and the teacher told us how he wanted it answered and in the future after we handed in how we would do it in that particular way he would show us the more "mainstream" way to do it.
Did the script, thought I'd see how others did it and it was just "why would you even consider doing that" nonsense and never a proper answer.
The teacher wanted us to do that for a few reasons... A) Nobody writes their code the same B) There are other solutions, some will only work in specific applications C) Showing that there really isn't a right way to do it. There are better ways but they will have the same outcome if written correctly.
LutesAndLasers ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:08:24 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You sir are da real MVP
DeirdreAnethoel ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:20:11 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, this is something people with only theoretical knowledge of programming like teachers or students wouldn't get.
treesprite82 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:14:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mention these constraints in question so that they do know. "I can't use B because blah" is helpful for everyone.
People ask this because a large number of questions ask how to do really-difficult X, when more-common Y is actually the solution. It saves a lot of time getting to the bottom of why the answerer is trying to do X.
ImSendingYouAway ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:34:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, not really. The pedants need to learn not to constantly question the competence, character, honesty and motivation of the questioner. They also need to learn not to direct their own frustration at not knowing an answer to problem 'A' by deflecting to the questioner and demanding a problem 'B' instead: a problem they are actually competent to solve.
If you don't know the answer, don't always assume the X/Y problem and just move on. Despite the elevated sense of self-importance of regulars, they are not a panacea, and the friction they cause by preemptively assuming X/Y problem is a huge distraction and time sink. It also raises the interaction temperature and that further complicates communication. Such people might best find other uses for their time than trying to be the consummate oracle of information technology. It ends up causing support fatigue and a hostile climate for newcomers especially.
Speaking from experience working in support as well as running support channels, where I have zero tolerance for this behaviour. This is not about eliminating X/Y solutions altogether: this is about rampant X/Y overuse.
Below another Redditor describes being victimised by this horrible bullshit.
treesprite82 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:57:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not that the questioner is being dishonest, just more often that the OP hadn't considered/known about Y than it is that they have some odd restriction that only X can work with. So it helps to ask (and admittedly a lot of users come off as condescending in doing so) if there's a specific reason they need X or whether Y would work instead.
Contrived example, but say someone asks:
If they state that they know the normal way is
console.log()and/or give a reason why they need to useprint()(even if it's just "I have a bet with a friend that it's possible specifically with print") then people can give a proper answer, maybe with some obscure trickery.Otherwise it's best to ask why OP is wanting to use
print(), because it's most likely that they don't actually requireprint(). Just answering their exact question would be a waste of time, what they actually want isconsole.log().The comments that sac_boy is complaining about are trying to figure out whether it's an X/Y problem or OP actually needs to do it in this obscure/never-used way.
I'd agree that there's a balance needed though. Too quick to assume that it's Y, and you get a useless answer that OP is probably already aware of. Too quick to assume that it's X, and you get a useless obscure answer when OP was just looking for the more common answer.
So it helps for the actual askers of Y (the obscure problem) to clarify that they know of X but that solution doesn't work for whatever reason. And helps for answerers to ask questions ("Is Y actually required, or would it be fine to do X?") rather than jumping the gun and taking it as X.
motdidr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:42:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I also think these people complaining about this don't understand how often they get the confused XY question. they are acting like most of the time the question is legit, and only occasionally is the asker misguided, so it's annoying to assume incompetence. but realistically, these problems are asked way way more frequently by confused or new devs, and if the problem really is strange or there are unusual constraints, it just makes way more sense to mention these things up front, not to just assume every person who asks a really weird or obviously misguided question is actually competent and that there must be a really good reason, because most of the time no, there isn't.
dieterschaumer ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:30:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is just a thing about human nature. I don't think people are particularly evil or cruel- I believe most people have the capacity for kindness and mean well.
But empathy? The ability to actually understand and sympathize with another human being's differences as well as similarities? Rare as fuck. People generally believe themselves to be the hero of their own story, and do not understand why anyone would want anything other than what they want.
Deep down the vast majority of human beings, when preferring say vanilla over chocolate, only pretend to get why someone else would pick chocolate. They nod and smile, and look away... but deep down
vanilla is better tho
GameNationRDF ยท 4739 points ยท Posted at 16:19:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
parlez-vous ยท 2012 points ยท Posted at 16:39:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question that's been asked hundreds of times of before --> 4 upvotes and 2 answers
New question --> -4 points and moved to off-topic
KoboldCommando ยท 1048 points ยท Posted at 16:59:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My "favorite" scenario has happened to me a few times now. Some piece of software or hardware gets a poorly or un-documented change, none of the documentation or guides describe what's different or how to use the new version. Desperate, I finally click SO links. Of course, there are dozens of questions about that exact problem, many of them explicitly mentioning that there's been some version change and linking old questions that are no longer accurately answered. Every single one of them has been closed as "already answered".
GoodGodJesus ยท 134 points ยท Posted at 18:23:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is what I find really annoying with programming these days, especially in the javascript/node world. Googling an answer these days will returns you 50 different variations of solving a problem, but oh wait!! You forgot to limit search to last 6 months because you know since the API releases in 2013 there have been 1204210 revisions where the function definitions and call methods have changed!!!
worldspawn00 ยท 51 points ยท Posted at 18:46:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, sorry that menu doesn't exist in the current version, also the command structure has changed with the new compiler so that block of code which perfectly addressed the issue, it doesn't work any more...
SchroedingersHat ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:32:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Don't worry, the next version is a kultiple of 17 so it will work again.
FirstDivision ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:52:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Me too. Half the time the changes just seem like change for the sake of change. Or when some new wizbang framework comes out and we all have to learn it because it's cool and new, and everyone is doing it.
It's all still just buttons, links, images, data, etc. Same shit we've been doing forever.
GoodGodJesus ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 19:03:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yepp, not to mention people can't agree on a standard for naming conventions, project structures. Is it a middleware? Do we go for models/schemas or do we go for /thisspecificpart/
Oh you are still using jquery? Sad story mate, we only use that for legacy these days!!! Oh you are trying to do promise chains with reduce? Well.... Here you have a 4 indentation nested reduce call for sequential chaining! Nah mate we just decided to use promise-reduce from npm and call it 'reduce'.
I mean go through 100 different projects on github and you'll find 100 different ways of doing module export and naming. Ok at least 5 different ways!
motdidr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:49:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
why it that a bad thing? who are you imagining is going to be in charge of the "rules" for javascript open source libraries? the reason there are so many ways to do stuff is because the platform is super free and open, everyone gets to have an opinion and most of them are valid. there are many conventions within the just world, and they all have their pros and cons, but the fact that there can be do many valid ideas is really beautiful to me. just write your stuff the way you think is right.
GoodGodJesus ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:23:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't mean there should be rules.
But if you make a library you should probably plan it out in advance a bit and also make sure that if you redo the library to work a certain way that you make it very obvious where and how. Also try to keep consistency in your own library so that everything functions and is called the same way.
I too like the variety in JS, but it pains me that a single library might change so much that answers to questions a year ago are no longer viable. Also that articles, coders, libraries all talk in "absolutes" when speaking of how to structure projects.
But I do think that at least through all the varieties and ideas that many of the same gathered into "loose guidelines" is a good idea so at least one can be aware of how it's done. I personally suck at structuring projects. But I do think the variety and looseness can be a bit overwhelming at times, especially for new coders. When a project can be written 20 different ways and all are "great/acceptable" that can create some confusion.
the_Madman ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:06:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because all of them have their own little quirks and shortcomings, depending on what problem they're trying to solve, and each library wants you to use a different one. This one supports conditional includes, but that one doesn't, but that one makes static analysis simple, but doesn't integrate with the other one, but this tool for generating sourcemaps only works with these two...
It's got to the point where JavaScript has enough module managers to start requiring a module manager manager.
ponybau5 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:16:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Nothing pisses me off more than undocumented code or code that refuses to compile out of the box despite having all dependencies set up properly.
HeKis4 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:15:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's pretty much the reason why I wouldn't touch anything node.js with a long pole... Stuff changes too fast, frameworks and libs, or even paradigms that start to mature are replaced by the new hip thing, and in the end everyone is a beginner and nothing actually gets done.
GoodGodJesus ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 23:27:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Too much money and freedom in not picking it up imho especially for fresh coders. But I might be wrong.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:47:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same with Android. Almost anything posted more than a year ago will throw up warnings or fail to compile if used in the newest version. I do think Android is more or less well documented, but it can be a pain figuring out which of the million documented ways of doing something is best practice.
Doyle524 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:50:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or you get people answering for the old, deprecated version of the language because for some reason it's just as popular as the current branch (seriously Python, WTF)
stalemane ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:36:23 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Gotta love breaking your app by updating a module.
nochangelinghere ยท 342 points ยท Posted at 17:06:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's like RTFM, except there is no M.
mogoh ยท 258 points ยท Posted at 17:35:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's worse: It's when you ask a question and there is one who dosn't bother to listen, gives you answers that don't help and won't allow any further questions.
GravityHug ยท 256 points ยท Posted at 18:13:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Arrogance Overflow
psych0ticmonk ยท 138 points ยท Posted at 18:35:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I have seen users admitting that they downvote every single question until they hit their limits allowed. It is truly an arrogance.
One point, I wrote out some instructions on question a user posted. The issue that they were having was pretty common because the documentation was not clear and made some assertions that were not correct. But it did answer the question that they posted.
Anyways, the question and my answer got downvoted and then it was closed after being moved into off-topic.
FartingWithASmile ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:38:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Those users donโt last long. The site automatically flags up downvoting sprees so users can be blocked.
shagieIsMe ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 20:25:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The down voting sprees that get auto reversed are โI vote on all your posts.โ
The โI go to the JavaScript tag and down vote each question that says โmy site doesnโt work, here is the linkโโ isnโt auto flagged. Furthermore, itโs really easy to find 40 of those questions each day.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:16:52 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Also understandable. "My site isn't working, here is the link" is a bad question. You're supposed to isolate the problem and reproduce it in a minimal, complete and verifiable example instead of just linking to your code hoping people will fix it.
datchilla ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 01:20:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Bro just google it!
Thread you're commenting in is the first search result.
sixgunbuddyguy ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:11:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Read The Fucking? Is that like walking into an orgy and knowing what everyone wants to do next?
DeviantLogic ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:45:21 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I read the fucking every day.
This is seriously the worst form of divination, I should have learned tea leaves.
asquared31415 ยท 218 points ยท Posted at 17:53:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
As always, a relevant XKCD
KoboldCommando ยท 192 points ยท Posted at 18:00:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes, so much.
Also when you find a thread or SO question asking exactly what you want to know, the only response is "Google it", and the only relevant Google hit is that very thread/question. Or the dreaded "nm I fixed it" self-response.
Visionary07 ยท 81 points ยท Posted at 18:35:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I hate when they manage to fix it and don't post how they did it.
[deleted] ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 18:54:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
alapleno ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 19:14:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once found my own Q&A, except I had said "nvm I fixed it". Lesson learned.
jokes_for_nerds ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 20:27:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At least you know who to blame, instead of some underpaid staffer at a corporate entity :)
Hyperman360 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:34:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same. Ironically I've been downvoted before for doing so, not sure why.
WooperSlim ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:45:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Once I found someone who helpfully edited their post to say, "I was able to follow instructions <here> and that solved my problem!" but the link they gave was no longer working.
Julian1224 ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 18:38:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Like wth, do you think you're the only one with said issue!?!
jokes_for_nerds ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:26:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sad reality check here...
A lot of us do this stuff for work. And sometimes those companies that pay us money to do this stuff have internal knowledge bases. When you solve an undocumented problem, you write it up there.
If you posted every solution freely on the internet, people wouldn't need your expertise.
I hate it. But it's the truth.
wannaridebikes ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 21:50:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
...but you asked freely in the first place, right?
jokes_for_nerds ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:41:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Believe me man, I'm on your side. Just recounting something I've experienced.
worldspawn00 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:44:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Reply: Never mind, I fixed it, thanks guys :) :)
WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!
Utilitymann ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:32:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Alternatively finding a 3 year old github issue that is not solved, no comments.
KoboldCommando ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:53:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've occasionally found where someone had forked a project or was working on a patch, left a very exciting and promising string of updates as they worked on it, culminating in something along the lines of "I'm just about finished, just a few final touches, expect the final release sometime next week!"
5 years ago.
SuperFreakonomics ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:36:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
or when you realize you asked that question 3 years ago on a throwaway
Solid_Waste ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:36:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"nm I fixed it" warrants placement in the lowest circle of hell
worldspawn00 ยท 35 points ยท Posted at 18:42:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I just ran into this on my car.
I have problem X, find others posting about having problem X with no causes/solutions.
Guy 20540 says, couldn't find out what was causing problem X, took it to a shop, head mechanic found and fixed the problem cause in 5 minutes solving problem X. (end of reply)
WHAT WAS THE CAUSE AND SOLUTION?? why would you even post that without providing any of the information?!!?!
dgriffith ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 19:37:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"No need to discuss the solution, my issue is solved", they say, because once it's working for them, who gives a crap about anyone else? Even though a dozen people have tried to sort things out for them.
Hyperman360 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 20:22:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I always post my solution, not just for others but in case I run into the problem in the future.
Dynafat_norseman ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 21:40:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It was probably the ignition module in the distributor.
worldspawn00 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 21:46:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Apparently, it could be the gears in the differential, the bearings in the differential, the axle bearings, the brake pads, brake calipers, brake rotors, or brake lines causing the problem. Better just replace the whole back half of the vehicle.
Dynafat_norseman ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:53:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hah, I have an old Honda, and it suddenly started shutting down after getting warm. The shop told me it was the distributor, and would only replace the entire distributor. For 1k++. On a 20 year old car. I googled distributor+Honda+shutsdown. Cost me 100 bucks and a few hours to do it myself. I bet they want to squeeze a few trouble shooting hours out of you.
worldspawn00 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:03:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I didn't take it to a shop (I'm not paying $120/hr for them to dick around under it with a stethoscope). The noise it's making is a pretty common issue in Mustangs, just trying to track down the cause before I go replace parts on it.
savageronald ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:21:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not quite the same but like people who comment on recipes "looks great - I'm going to cook this next week". Like who tf cares, only comment if you have feedback or something
worldspawn00 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:28:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or, I made the recipe, but substituted water for the milk, oil for the butter, and quinoa for the rice and left out everything else. What bitch? you just made something entirely different, that's not even the same dish at that point...
savageronald ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:40:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Exactly - I know that was off topic but I was searching for dinner right before reading your comment so I had to vent somewhere lol
PhantomTissue ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:31:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This shit triggers me so hard.
CMDR_Bananenkeks ยท 48 points ยท Posted at 18:32:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I find this xkcd gets better the older it gets
asquared31415 ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 18:37:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Probably because it becomes more common. As more questions are created, there will be more of these scenarios, and more people can relate to this comic.
BlowsyChrism ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 18:01:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh my god yes.
CinnamonCereals ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:41:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/ExpectedXKCD
Matt07211 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:16:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You know, I'm getting way to good at geussing the comic before I click it
asquared31415 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:18:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eventually you know all the possible topics, and can pinpoint which one it is.
benjaminikuta ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:16:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why do they do that?
ImSendingYouAway ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 18:23:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's called "support fatigue". People tasked with voluntarily overseeing support channels tend to become bullish, intolerant and draconic over time, due the stress of repetition: they become jaded and assume bad faith on the part of the questioner.
Questions that seem difficult to deal with or solve can remind them of their fallibility, and they can be tempted to blame the messenger.
This is not necessarily the explanation, but from experience, I submit to you that that is the likeliest explanation.
Edit: also, you shouldn't be asking "why" without searching the forum for an answer first. We're not here to spoonfeed you and cater to your every whim. /s
LukeHauser ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:29:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks. Didn't know it had a name.
benjaminikuta ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:52:23 on May 31, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can I (or others) help?
ImSendingYouAway ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 12:28:46 on May 31, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well, yes, avoid toxic channels and start your own. If a channel is toxic, but the toxic ones can't use moderation powers against you, then contradict their attitude and treat the visitor/questioner with decency and respect. After all, if a questioner is really annoying you have the option of just ignoring him/her. Publicly tell the questioner to ignore the other ones if you have to and explain their behaviour is inappropriate. Obviously, if the toxic people in question are moderators, then don't do that, you'll have to be more subtle, but in that case the ultimate outcome is always to set up an alternative channel/forum/subreddit.
I don't like bullies. I'm guilty of gleefully treating bullies like shit, so I'm no saint, but in terms of support and standing up to this sort of thing, this is my advice.
One more thing: if it is you who is in charge, try to cultivate equality among everybody present. To undermine naturally evolving hierarchies of power in groups gets rid of the ape-like territorial tendencies people have.
Edit: spelling.
Encyphus ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:42:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You're making me angry. Stop.
-victorisawesome- ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:07:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If I ask a stackoverflow question I always link to older answere and explain why they didn't work for me
sargos7 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:08:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't think I've ever Googled something and clicked on a StackOverflow result that wasn't marked as already answered.
Bartweiss ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:42:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People do this even without the change of versions.
I've definitely asked about some tool or framework (Android, usually), with the specific question "the documentation is wrong in this way, does anyone know a fix?" And gotten, predictably, the incorrect documentation quoted back at me as an answer.
DrQuint ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:42:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
SO only has themselves to blame for this. If a question on a nontrivial subject is 2 years old, then there's a 50% chance it is outdated in some shape or form. It can even be 100% correct, but missing context from a more modern approach.
The fact they even allow linking duplicates to any question with a tree that goes as far back as 5 years is a disgrace. The moment they put a restriction on it, users would stop running their site search scripts.
I don't blame the users, I blame the admins for letting it go this far.
Root-of-Evil ยท 1129 points ยท Posted at 16:49:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"deleted as duplicate"
Linked post is completely different
eshansingh ยท 435 points ยท Posted at 17:24:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
So many fucking times.
PetsArentChildren ยท 143 points ยท Posted at 19:32:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why does StackOverflow care about duplicates anyway? In the old days, a question had to be asked a thousand times until someone took the time to write the all time best answer. After that, everyone would link to the all time best answer. Until maybe the technology changes since the all time best answer was written five years ago and a new best answer emerges.
shagieIsMe ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 20:33:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Itโs the linking that is key. First off, it prevents additional answers on that post. Do we need another answer for how to deal with a NPE in java? In theory, the single duplicate should be easy to find... if people search first.
Secondly, itโs seo. A duplicate with no answers automatically redirects a user who isnโt logged in to the duplicate post.
If the technology has changed, then ask (and answer) a new question that calls out specifically the change and how the previous canonical answer doesnโt apply to the new problem. However, make sure that hasnโt been done already prior to doing this.
Bartweiss ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 23:27:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This seems exactly backwards for how Stack Overflow is meant to function as a help site, though.
It means that when an answer goes out of date, the only possible solution is for someone who already knows the old and new answers to visit the page, then take the time to create a new question and answer. (And that new answer won't get traffic, because the old answer has many views and inbound links, plus superusers will keep pointing new questions to the old duplicate they know about.)
From personal experience, I regularly run into questions for which the responses are 1+ versions out of date, and plausibly no longer valid. But I don't know whether the answer has changed - I'm there because I don't know the answer! (And if I find the answer elsewhere, I still can't update SO in a way that anyone will see.)
I suppose in theory I could post "I see $answer, but has the answer changed?" I've tried that exactly once, and was promptly closed as a duplicate of $answer.
shagieIsMe ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 00:08:32 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Consider the question Concatenating elements in an array to a string which has a 1.4 answer accepted (it was later modified to be 1.5 with StringBuffer to StringBuilder), and then a score of other answers for different versions of Java.
Arrays.toString is from 1.5 (note that several are answers working on that one with different forms of replace or ignoring the requirement - though the OP even says that in revision 1 that isn't what they want.
There's a Guava one, a Java 8 String.join, two += (ick!), a Spring version, Apache commons StringUtils version, another Guava version, android TextUtils, another Java 8 version using String.join, and two more Arrays with replacement.
I contend that this isn't useful.. and certainly isn't maintained or curated. And this is the big issue for Stack Overflow... and why Stack Overflow
ExamplesDocumentation failed (which would have been a good place for this material). There is too much "rep farming" in Stack Overflow with not enough people curating the material. There should be at most one "use Arrays with the following replacement" and the other ones should call out the minimum version or library necessary. A bunch of those answers should be down voted and deleted so that there is less duplication of content making it easier for people doing the search to find the answer on one page.Without this you get things like How can I pad a value with leading zeros? and that's too many answers... or How do I redirect to another webpage?
The "I see $answers, but has the answer changed?" by itself isn't sufficient - it probably was a duplicate. To post such, you would need to do the answer too - knowing that it has changed and writing both a good question and good answer. Writing a good self answered question is one of the more difficult skills to acquire on Stack Overflow. Often it means engaging with the community on Stack Overflow that maintains that tag to create the best possible Q&A pair and make sure that other people link to it so that it can become properly canonical for that version.
Bartweiss ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:19:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm... halfway with you.
I agree that the concatenation question is an absolute mess, and that leaving questions open for years or answering them repeatedly degrades quality. I don't think "just allow dupes" is actually a good solution here. But my impression is that Stack Overflow fails badly to handle versioning issues whether or not it closes more recent questions.
As is, it looks like there's a choice between absurd messes like the ones you link, and woefully out of date answers that never get updated. Most of the time, option 3 - emphasizing good and current answers - doesn't actually happen, and I don't think SO offers any effective path for it to happen. Writing up a neat, concise, Java 9 answer for String concatenation wouldn't do anything to mitigate traffic to the existing mess.
On that last point... I appreciate that "This is out of date, I will write up a canonical answer no one closes and then encourage the tag maintainers I already know to link to it" is an ideal outcome. But that has to wait for a power user who doesn't actually need to ask the question for their own sake. Are we really concluding that when an answer gets old and dated, there's literally no way for a new user to ask about the current solution? Because that seems to be the current situation - if you know enough to see the old answer is now wrong, but not enough to replace it, then the old answer is actively impeding you from getting support.
koopatuple ยท -20 points ยท Posted at 19:37:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because storage is needed to store those duplicates and storage isn't free. Also, it's to help keep things somewhat tidy and organized, though we all know that it's a fruitless endeavor with popular sites.Edit: Well don't mind me. That shit is cheaper than I realized. I guess I've been working from within AWS for so long that I have forgotten how cheap regular hosting services cost for basic things like forums. The real answer on why they care about duplicates is actually covered by StackOverflow itself: https://stackoverflow.com/help/duplicates
fahrenheitisretarded ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 19:55:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The storage cost is negligible.
koopatuple ยท -15 points ยท Posted at 20:06:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For onesies, twosies, even a few thousand, sure. Multiply that by millions over time, then not so much. It also isn't just storage, but computing resources used to pull that record from a database. Shit adds up after awhile, but The actual cost really depends on if they're maintaining their own dedicated solution or if they're leasing/renting one.
Sie_Hassen ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 21:13:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People literally aren't able to produce manually enough posts to fill stackoverflow, or any site. Different orders of magnitude in what content humans can produce vs what can be stored. You know that.
aperx ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 19:57:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The duplicates aren't deleted though are they? They're just closed.
koopatuple ยท -9 points ยท Posted at 20:02:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They're not deleted, but they're locked so no new records (user posts) can be added to it.
Jackeea ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:07:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If a good answer is 10kB of data (so like 10,000 characters), then you can store 100,000,000 answers on a ยฃ40 1TB drive... the storage cost really isn't that much!
koopatuple ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well I was thinking from a managed solution standpoint. 1TB of data is handled much differently when critical services depend on it and its service is delivered over the internet. So now you need redundancy, backups, bandwidth, computing resources to handle it, etc. Additionally, server storage isn't your average drive that comes off the shelf like you'd use at home. It's SAS or NL-SAS spinning at least 10k RPM (ideally 15k) or SSD in an array. A 500TB Enterprise SAN costs anywhere from $450k-750k+, and that's not including backups. It averages out to around $200-300+/TB (with licensing) depending on your solution (much higher for a cloud solution, for instance).
But anyway, I was thinking more along the lines of page requests/storage/computing resources/hosting/etc, and AWS has warped my sense of how much cheaper relatively low-demand applications like StackOverflow's front/backend requires. I was forgetting that there are hosting solutions that allow like 10 million page views for pretty cheap.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:26:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My hosting provider offers block storage priced at $5/TB/mo and "unlimited bandwidth." SQL offload is only $1/mo.
AWS/Azure/GCE is expensive AF. I honestly don't understand why so many people use it when they really don't need to or even benefit from what the platform has to offer.
FistHitlersAnalCunt ยท 97 points ยท Posted at 17:50:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or alternatively you're looking in a framework related issue, where the framework doesn't do A. The duplicate links to the language's post with the same issue because its "not the frameworks fault its the language". The language post just contains comments saying "not the languages fault, its the framework".
Eventually you find a linked post from 1997 where someone tells you that you can change a server configuration file to enable A, but it isn't compatible with the framework you were originally looking at.
You make a new post on stack Overflow asking how to enable the configuration in the language for the framework and its immediately closed as a duplicate of the first issue.
PorkChop007 ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 20:29:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Man, I'm so triggered right now. Almost half the times I google something and end up in SO the first three results are for deprecated/too old frameworks or versions of a language and the fourth one links to any of them saying "duplicate".
Also, apparently the vast majority of people in SO believe that a simple programmer working in a 20+ people project can change server configurations, the JDK/JRE/whatever, switch IDEs, change the pom or any of those things whenever necessary.
ryumast3r ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:34:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At first I read pom as porn and all I could think is "why?"
UndyingJellyfish ยท 234 points ยท Posted at 17:38:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Had a race condition problem in my application that I didn't realize, marked as a duplicate to something about a framework problem in a language I wasn't using. Thanks, SO...
psych0ticmonk ยท 72 points ยท Posted at 18:37:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
race relations are at a pretty low point amongst threads. i am surprised that there aren't riots.
RenaKunisaki ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 19:02:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There are, hence the crashes.
SodaAnt ยท 44 points ยท Posted at 18:05:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In my experience, you search for questions for your problem, find one that's pretty similar but subtly different in an important way, and since it is different enough you decide to ask your own question. When you ask it, you even call out what makes it different. It still gets closed as a duplicate of the question you already looked at.
Stickyballs96 ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 18:43:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is where you private message the person in charge and explain your situation. And if that doesn't work this is where you go all out shitposting and get banned and later realize that that was stupid and now you're banned from asking more questions.
Assess ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 19:12:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Good. Fuck SO
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:23:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind posting or PM'ing me the question? I'd like to reopen it.
Bartweiss ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:33:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's nothing quite as frustrating as having your question closed as a duplicate of the same question you specifically referenced not being helped by in your question.
Stackhouse_ ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:18:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
We should have a website that caches deleted stack overflow questions and let's users continue to discuss. Maybe www.soofftopic.com
Reidenn ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:58:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the part where 999k rep guy edits your question to be a duplicate of another and then closes it.
Bartweiss ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:35:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not sure I've ever seen one high-rep guy do both, but I've definitely seen the tag-team approach where someone "clarifies" a question to be something entirely different, and then a second person closes that as off-topic or duplicate.
bob1689321 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:31:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโm having flashbacks to my computer science GCSE.
RightingWrite ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:22:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โThis question has been asked 3 times beforeโ
โYes, but it hasnโt been answered in any of those threadsโ
โThat is irrelevantโ
eshansingh ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:12:37 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or even, and this is the most annoying, the linked post is technically a duplicate if you squint your eyes a bit, but you offered a bounty on your question and the answer you got as a result was much better and more detailed.
(Case in point: my question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48274890/treat-an-emoji-as-one-character-in-a-regex)
RamenJunkie ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:21:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Old answer only applies to an old version and is no longer valid.
hadtoupvotethat ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:35:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
To be fair, the "new" off-topic questions probably has been asked hundreds of times before, too, you just don't see that because the previous questions have been deleted. But I agree that SO closes way too much as "off-topic".
squishles ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:17:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"can this be answered with jquery? If not, it is off topic."
Toysoldier34 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:18:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Just Google it"
Google returns this thread as the top result, along with all the other top results being people saying to just Google it. The worst answer someone can give.
codear ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:12:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And here I am thinking it was just my SO luck... Happens all too frequently, especially if question is not trivial...
user_48217 ยท 208 points ยท Posted at 18:23:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Welcome to Stack Overflow, where anyone can get the answer to any question!"
"How do I do this thing?"
"Off-topic question. Does not adhere to our standards. Question closed. User banned. IP address perma-banned. You need 500 reputation to appeal to the ban."
randomentity1 ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 21:18:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Except that when they suspend you, your rep automatically drops to 1 for the duration of the suspension, LOL.
lx45803 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 03:19:42 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
wontfixWorking as intended.[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 15:18:17 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You can appeal a suspension at any time with no requirement by using the contact us link or replying to the mod message you will have gotten with it.
svick ยท -41 points ยท Posted at 18:40:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Where is it advertised as "anyone can get the answer to any question"?
StarkillerX42 ยท 129 points ยท Posted at 17:59:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Closed as off topic is really just "fuck this I don't know" in disguise
XirallicBolts ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 01:32:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Right? The topic is programming, how is a question "off-topic"?
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:19:18 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The help center specifies what it needs to be, e.g. no tool request, specific enough, containing a minimal verifiable example for debugging problems, sufficiently narrow, not overly opinion based, actual question, etc.
aiz_saule ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 06:47:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โThe proof is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader.โ
styles__P ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 19:29:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Bro some dude marked my question as duplicate when it was a completely different situation and one couldn't derive the solution from the other question. I was so pissed but helpless :(
rJohn420 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 23:28:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same, I hate SO
randomentity1 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:11:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That has to be Jon Skeet, right? He's the only guy with that much rep I think.
swyx ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:45:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
yup he reached 1 mil in jan 2018
slayer_of_idiots ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:24:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Need 5 votes to close, not just one guy. The only way you can unilaterally close is if you have a gold tag for the question and you close it as a duplicate of another question.
NathanDrakeOnAcid ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 03:07:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Diamond moderators can single vote close. That's happened plenty of times. One will encounter a question they don't know the answer to and think to themselves, "well I don't know this and I know everything, so obviously it's a bad question".
slayer_of_idiots ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 08:21:12 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, it doesn't. There are very few diamond moderators, and they generally don't spend their time closing bad questions unless it's spam. The community can handle closing bad questions all by themselves.
haha, diamond moderators don't close questions because they don't know the answer
I guarantee you, if you have a closed question, it's because 5 people agreed the question should be closed. Show me an actual question (not spam) that was unilaterally closed by a diamond moderator. I'd like to see that.
[deleted] ยท 2073 points ยท Posted at 16:32:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My only question on stackoverflow.
Top answer didn't even give me a solution, just straight denied my problem was even possible.
Meanwhile the answer that actually solved it was deleted a few minutes after appearing.
Reelix ยท 286 points ยท Posted at 17:28:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've often found that the answer that works is the greyed-out one with -3 votes...
[deleted] ยท 275 points ยท Posted at 17:31:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because they'll actually answer your question rather than explain how your question itself is wrong.
alexanderpas ยท 102 points ยท Posted at 18:11:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
please upvote those, and comment that this was the answer that actually worked.
Reelix ยท 200 points ยท Posted at 18:15:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You do not have enough points to upvote"
NEVER_TELLING_LIES ยท 49 points ยท Posted at 19:50:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Asked a question and even though it solved my problem nope couldn't upvote. Utter shite
alexanderpas ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 18:23:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That means you don't have an account which has 15 points on that specific site, or you don't have an account which has 200 points on any site in the network.
15 points equals a single accepted answer or 3 upvotes (and no downvotes) received.
Din182 ยท 76 points ยท Posted at 18:41:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And when you try to get points by answering questions, you end up being the one who's answer is at -3 points.
phihag ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:26:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind linking to your best answers? I mean, just two upvotes and you're there.
[deleted] ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 19:45:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
phihag ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:27:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While I'm not much of a voter (less than I really should be), I think my upvote to downvote ratio is easily 2:1. Mind pointing us to your best answer so we can all upvote it?
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:52:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
phihag ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 23:23:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At the moment, there are 1,048,820 questions with negative vote score, and 7,266,684 with positive vote score. Even in the last year, there are still 10x as many upvoted questions as downvoted ones.
The reason that top posts (questions and answers) are usually older is that they addressed more fundamental questions (How do I parse JSON? instead of MyCoolJSONParser crashes when input contains strange character and timezone is in Antarctica), and had more time to accumulate votes.
So why was this particular question downvoted? Well, the original title was literally Pretty close to solving regular expression pattern just need a true master to show me the way, which is not really helpful. Stackoverflow's primary aim is to create a great resource that people can search in, and that title is not likely to be found.
But thanks to the outstanding community at stackoverflow, the title got replaced, the tags got cleaned up, and somebody fixed the formatting.
It also looks that you are really operating on bytes. If you are parsing these anyways, a solution not involving relatively slow strings may be faster and cleaner.
From the example, it's not clear why 4x is not one of the desired substrings. So that could have been clearer.
It is also not obvious why the solution must involve regex - although in this case, if you are operating on strings, that is probably the best option.
In summary, I concur that this question is actually pretty decent, with only minor flaws. I'm guessing all the downvotes came before the question got cleaned up by other stackoverflow users. For future questions, try to find a descriptive title, maybe include a little context, and allow other ways of solving the problem than the one you took so far.
kurjax ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:06:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is it already + voted? ;)
wnoise ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:24:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Downvotes are actually fairly rare, because they cost reputation.
DoublePostDormammu ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:37:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's like Reddit but worse
utnow ยท 951 points ยท Posted at 16:55:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โIโve been told that language/platform isnโt as good as {controversial/competing platform/language} because it canโt do A.โ
Let the answers roll in.
[deleted] ยท 560 points ยท Posted at 17:03:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
alex2003super ยท 649 points ยท Posted at 18:20:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"But Windows is better because you can watch Netflix in 4K"
proceeds and reverse-engineers Intel x64 Kabylake architecture DRM enforcement system, creates custom FOSS driver, publishes to GitHub, gets lawsuit from Intel, justifies with "Educational fair-use purposes only", posts link to repository *
"And once again, Linux is better"
OR
"How do I watch Netflix 4K on Linux?"
**"I'D LIKE TO INTERJECT FOR A MOMENT!! What you are referring to as Linux is actually GNU/Linux, you fool!"
scrazen ยท 73 points ยท Posted at 18:43:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
GNU + Linux
alex2003super ยท 43 points ยท Posted at 19:12:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
As I've recently taken to calling it
myhf ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 00:07:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components
Garrosh ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 20:57:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
GNU with Linux.
ProbablyMisinformed ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 19:05:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I mean, I've got to give Linux credit -- it's a lot more accessible than it was a decade ago. But its proponents often seem willfully blind to the fact that it doesn't always have the features that some people are looking for.
alex2003super ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 19:12:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But the point is, most of the time it does not have those "features" because of artificial limitations, not because it wouldn't theoretically be capable of covering them
ProbablyMisinformed ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 19:37:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You could theoretically have any feature on any system. Just because an OS can be programmed for doesn't mean you can't complain that certain things haven't been programmed yet.
alex2003super ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:16:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Windows is not open source. Its modification to a certain degree would require source code or a lot of reverse engineering, money, time and maybe even legal trouble. On Linux, implementing several things would be stupid easy, if there weren't artificial limitations like DRM et cetera. But still, an OS is chosen because of what it does to you, so if Linux doesn't do what you need, then yes - you are right - choose the OS that helps you do your stuff better. Sometimes more than one OS is needed, and there are many solutions to this: dual booting, VMs, Wine...
huiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:16:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the issue is documentation to implement the features and not that it hasn't been done yet.
HardlightCereal ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 00:29:16 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Linux proponent here. I'm trying to catch a chicken so I can have some eggs.
joshery420 ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 18:40:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
!redditsilver
alex2003super ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 19:13:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you. Such a shame they banned it...
joshery420 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 21:19:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The greatest mistake they ever made haha.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:54:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/interject
MKorostoff ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:34:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This comment made me laugh so hard I died. I'm dead now.
alex2003super ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:04:49 on August 26, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Are you still alive btw?
MKorostoff ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:33:48 on August 26, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am not
lKyZah ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:01:21 on March 16, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
haha
Beachcoma ยท 72 points ยท Posted at 17:06:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah it's all about gaming the system. Over and over again.
Amish-Jukebox ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:44:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You'd think the system would learn eventually, but pride on an individual level is a pretty powerful thing.
Zei33 ยท 57 points ยท Posted at 17:23:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck me, that's brilliant. I guess it wouldn't really work for the more complicated issues though.
anal_tongue_puncher ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:14:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Good ol bash.org!
anonymocities ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:34:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Linux documentation is the worst, and I could swear it's on purpose. I only noticed how deeply atrocious it was when I took a look at freebsd's handbook, that thing taught me more about the OS and unix than Linux did in a decade of using it.
[deleted] ยท 171 points ยท Posted at 16:59:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
An interesting extension of Cunningham's Law.
foodRus ยท 184 points ยท Posted at 17:01:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That doesn't fit Cunnigham's Law at all though
[deleted] ยท 137 points ยท Posted at 17:05:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sure it is.
"Post the wrong answer" <==> "Say a language can't do something that you know it can"
foodRus ยท 238 points ยท Posted at 17:07:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Would I have gotten an equivalent answer if I asked HOW it was an extension?
(My comment was an attempt at humor)
utnow ยท 120 points ยท Posted at 17:28:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My god.
skbharman ยท 54 points ยท Posted at 18:18:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, that was swallowed hook, line and sinker. Nicely done.
[deleted] ยท 52 points ยท Posted at 18:32:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Man, I totally missed it. But yes, I would have answered because I'm just that kind of guy. Excellent use of Poe's Law
NotASpanishSpeaker ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:26:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That doesn't fit Poe's Law at all though.
[deleted] ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 20:32:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Excellent use of Godwin's law, you Nazi.
WikiTextBot ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:34:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Poe's law
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.
The original statement of the adage, by Nathan Poe, was:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.
[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source | Donate ] Downvote to remove | v0.28
spaceneenja ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:38:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sunglasses removal jiff
joes_smirkingrevenge ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:25:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Nope
preseto ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:18:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/jesuschristreddit
FireHazard11 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:40:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fucking beautiful.
Vilengel ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:10:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
!redditsilver
Exist50 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 12:16:54 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is either a great save or a good troll.
woojoo666 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:24:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think he was making a reference to the main post lol
vancity- ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 17:03:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's heck overflow!
foodRus ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 17:04:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Perhaps my attempt at humor will be missed by most.
kybernetikos ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 17:49:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Let's rotate the board!
BobTheSheriff ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:50:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah nobody does Cunninghams Law
C4H8N8O8 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:20:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I do.
NoNameWalrus ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:26:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
QED
Artanisx ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:04:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Marked as duplicate.
whatevers_clever ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:06:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Can I do X with Python?"
"No, you cannot do X with Python"
so.. yeah.. it does fit the law.
Zei33 ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:21:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm just waiting for the "stop using PHP" answer.
Not that I'd ever ask a question in regards to PHP since it's such an easy language lol
utnow ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:30:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Php is actually quite a complicated... wait a second! Youโre a big fat phoney!
Lol
Zei33 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:47:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No it's not. PHP is one of the simplest languages I know. Try writing C++, that's complicated.
Here, I ironically just answered a PHP question on stackoverflow, no phoney here :P
Femaref ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:38:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
the language is mostly simple. The standard library isn't.
motdidr ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:55:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
std::chronois awesome but holy shit it's convoluted.Femaref ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:50:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I meant php. c++ is another thing, but at least the stdlib makes sense.
blasto_blastocyst ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:51:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Jesus fuck, why does nobody answer my problems clearly, succinctly, and not mentioning the one thing you need to add to make the whole thing work
XirallicBolts ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:39:14 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Somehow I successfully modified a php thumbnail script to show subfolders and stuff. Today I have no idea how I accomplished it
Zei33 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:02:02 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
haha yes, that's actually amazing.
jasonridesabike ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:39:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Clever.
MikeVladimirov ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:18:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And as someone who only really codes to model mechanical systems for engineering purposes in MATLAB, this is exactly why I never use stack overflow.
I know python is better. But not having to learn a new language as well as a language that I've used regularly for the past ten years is even better than Python's enhanced capabilities.
sonofaresiii ยท 88 points ยท Posted at 17:09:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same here. I even admitted that my problem didn't make sense, so I outright asked what might be causing symptoms that would look like my problem
crickets, besides the one guy who told me my problem wasn't possible.
phihag ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 22:33:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind pointing us to the question? I mean, if it's that mysterious, it sure sounds like an interesting challenge.
sonofaresiii ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:06:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It was a while ago. I don't recall the specifics, but it was causing a huge battery drain for some unknown reason. The difficult part was the battery reporting/tests I had done were very odd, acting in ways it shouldn't, and maybe couldn't, like continuing to draw battery after i had killed it (android app).
But i know it's something specific to that app and not a problem with the battery report, because everything else was totally fine. And it didn't have any background processes, unless that's something I could have created on accident which seems unlikely.
Anyway, the problem ended up just... Going away. Or at least it stopped being a noticeable problem. So... Whatever.
Entaris ยท 347 points ยท Posted at 16:55:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah. I got really into trying trying to be a part of the stackoverflow community for a little while...and then I realized that it's generally a terrible place to seek information.
My go to example is a question I posted that went something like this: "I'm trying to accomplish A, to do this, I'm trying to do X. I realize X isn't a recommended way to do A, and that Y is really the better way to do it. But do to reasons C, D, and E in our environment, Y isn't an option, and X is the best thing I can come up with, but it's giving me problem Z, thoughts on how to fix it?"
Response with millions of up votes "X isn't recommended, you should do Y instead"
That was the day I swore off stackexchange forever.
Forricide ยท 91 points ยท Posted at 17:54:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, I've only asked a few questions on stack-* sites, don't think I've ever actually fixed a problem through it.
The most obvious issue comes from this very typical workflow:
Have specific issue L
Google 'how to fix L'
Click first link, stackoverflow, "How to fix L"
Duplicate question of "How to change Not-L into Q?", closed
Cry
slainte-mhath ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 18:27:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Even on Superuser I asked a simple question for some Mac software similar to PicPick for Windows that will allow me to press a shortcut, then draw a box at a 1:1 aspect ratio and save a snip screenshot. And I need to move the box because both the location on the screen and the size of the box will change for every snip. The built in OSX tool cannot lock the aspect ratio to 1:1, nor do most other programs.
I got like 4 replies telling me to use the in built OSX command with designated coordinates for the corners of the box (ie: a fixed location which doesn't work for me). Then the post was locked and attached to something like "automate taking screenshot of a designated area".
And just in case anyone is wondering, I did eventually find some software, not listed anywhere on stackoverflow called Simplecap that does this.
Forricide ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 19:38:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
...huh, you know, I think I've had a similar question before.
My favourite stack overflow story is the time I wrote a question pretty much perfectly, and within ~2 hours some guy had changed parts of it to be capitalized in a different way (subjective stuff), another guy had changed part of it back, and the previous guy had changed some of it back again.
I believe that question went wholly unanswered. But thankfully some pedants did... something? I'm pretty sure what it ended up with was objectively wrong, too.
Edit: Found it
Bonus - "Bootcamp is not a VM"
Ah, SO...
Wokati ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 21:13:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And somehow, your "Thank you" was offensive to the first guy...
According to Wikipedia it's "Boot Camp" in two words btw.
Forricide ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 21:41:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yep, looks like it. How do you like that? 3 incorrect edits in the span of a day.
That question was asked well over a year ago and was never answered. Ah well. I ended up just deleting the drive, lol.
Ah man. I quickly lost any faith I had in stack* after that entire thing. It was just so laughably bad. "Bootcamp is not a VM" makes up for the tears in laughter, I guess.
slashuslashuserid ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:11:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. If people feel strongly enough to change it back and forth on StackOverflow, they'll do so on Wikipedia as well.
I know the other guy confirmed it but Wikipedia is not a useful source in this case in particular.
-jaylew- ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:57:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Usually when this happens to me I end up cobbling together pieces of different partial answers to my problem. So I end up with ugly working code.
FuujinSama ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:29:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The math stack exchange is quite decent. People are still pricks that want to avoid at all costs to do anyone's homework by accident, but if you post a question you don't know there you'll always get 5 very detailed if overly passive aggressive answers. One time I posted a pretty easy differential equation that I was having troubles wrapping my head about (I came up with it so I wasn't really sure it could be solved with pen and paper), turned out if you integrated both sides it got fairly trivial. So he integrated both sides and said "you should be able to solve the rest" like it would take them any time at all to finish it.
Forricide ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:31:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hah, sounds about right. Not that bad though, if it was trivial at that point. Still...
juckele ยท 221 points ยท Posted at 16:59:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's so sad, because up until maybe 2012 or so it was amazing. 2009 it was such a haven of free information. Now it's turned into this 'curator tyrant' trash heap where people with 100k rep just close things randomly. The terrible thing is how often I hit something as closed as off-topic with a Google search. I just want to reach out and
punchperma-ban that curator tyrant who denied me the chance to get my question answered. :|Entaris ยท 220 points ยท Posted at 17:10:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That is infuriating... Like...Great the top 5 hits on google are different tech troubleshooting forums saying "This problem is easily found by a simple google search, stop wasting peoples time."
juckele ยท 53 points ยท Posted at 18:04:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ooooh, that really rustles my jimmies. It happens on forums a lot too.
[deleted] ยท 82 points ยท Posted at 18:37:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once got banned from a forum because I "necrod" a thread. The thread was the first google result but it didn't have an answer, so i registered just to leave an answer. Sorry for making your forum actually be useful! I won't do it again.
juckele ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 20:34:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No you won't, because you got banned! :D
phihag ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 22:31:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But on stackoveflow, this is explicitly encouraged. You even get a shiny badge.
Backstop ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 19:38:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Car forums are really bad about this.
I'm looking for a way to convert the rear end to disc brakes, anyone done this?
"Use the search noob"
I did search and there's nothing.
Right here, everyone knows of this famous thread: (link)
Yeah okay here's a thread from 2009 with all broken Photobucket links titled "ass-end breaks covetion 2disk DIY" ... and the search was supposed to hit on what, positive thoughts?
Kramer7969 ยท 38 points ยท Posted at 18:45:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yep, I reply to those with โby not answering, and saying to google the answer, youโve made this irrelevant post the top answer.โ
Honestly, thatโs as frustrating as posting an explationless URL to another forum with the answer that inevitably returns a page not found error once the forum updates their platform and changes all their URLs with no logical way of finding what post 345656677 correlates with the new site layout. Are forum posts copyrighted? Is it illegal to copy an answer from one forum and post it to another rather than linking to the original? Never understood why it seems so common to say โlook hereโ rather than paste the answer. Sometimes people do google before posting.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:37:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They are unless otherwise stated. TOS can make it even more complicated. There have been stories people have written only to have a movie deal fall through because the author posted all or part of it on Reddit at some point. Because of Reddit's TOS, people didn't want to touch it with a 10 foot poll even though Reddit had said in the past they wouldn't pursue legal action in situations like that.
Zagorath ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:50:42 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Got a source on that? Last I heard Rome Sweet Rome was in development hell for generic Hollywood reasons, and nothing to do with copyright.
GLUE_COLLUSION ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 13:24:47 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am convinced that Google intenionally moves these posts to the top of everyone's search results to get the "just google it" people to learn the error of their ways.
Entaris ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:25:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Would not surprise me one bit
sloppychris ยท 123 points ยท Posted at 17:31:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I actually had my answer edited by a Stack Overflow tyrant once. No warning. Just "we're going to change your answer because someone else said it should be different." What it was changed to didn't even work for me! I edited back and left a nasty note not to change my answers ever again.
Macismyname ยท 108 points ยท Posted at 17:53:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Probably the most immoral thing they could do right here. I honestly believe it should be illegal to edit someone else's comments on the internet like that.
People's internet comments have been used in the court of law and yet people think it's okay to change the words attributed to another human being.
slainte-mhath ยท 39 points ยท Posted at 18:10:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why can't they just add a reply to it?
Cyhawk ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:00:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lets assume the Tyrant is correct, OP's answer sucked and was wrong. People will read OP's answer and try it/misuse it/do it wrong/etc and won't bother to read Tyrants or OP2's correct reply, thus they edit the upvoted reply to provide the correct information.
Unfortunately Programmer egos show up and they don't pay attention so shit like this happens.
If they want to provide a better way to do it, the correct way would be to hide/collapse the 'wrong' answer and have Tyrant's reply show up instead of allowing an edit to the fucking comment itself.
WatchDogx ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 20:40:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Edits arent supposed to change the intent of a question/answer.
If the answer is flat out wrong you should comment and leave your own answer.
Cyhawk ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:31:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
and this is the problem with a binary upvote/downvote system, no one will see the correct answer because it won't be upvoted.
asielen ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:53:53 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you track text being copied on a website? They should include a metric like, 'this answer has been the most copied and pasted'
Cyhawk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:10:49 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That would require work. Also most people going to Stackoverflow generally have stuff like noscript/adblock which would prevent things like that.
amazondrone ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:08:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why would have OP's answer have been downvoted out of sight if it had no value?
Cyhawk ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:15:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just like Reddit people up/downvote for seemingly no reason. Just look at how many wrong top comments in say, TIL exist. Just because its wrong doesn't mean it won't get upvotes. People are weird.
asswhorl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:28:06 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A highlighted and pinned comment is enough.
cjg_000 ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 18:15:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow does say who most recently edited a post. It might not be as obvious as it should be but it certainly shouldn't be an issue to point out that for a court.
For scenarios where you're making clarifications to an existing answer, it can be easier for people viewing the page to consume an edited answer than to post clarification in a separate answer or in the comments. Especially since comment areas can often get quite large.
I think the issue is that there's no safeguards to punish people for making bad edits.
haykam821 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:53:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It has the whole version history of the posts (not comments though).
SodaAnt ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 18:10:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think that's a bit harsh, but I get the idea. I think that proposing edits to other people's answers should be okay, but the user who posted the answer should be able to accept or reject them.
svick ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:54:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What if that user hasn't logged in to Stack Overflow for several years?
Buf0rdFr1nk ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 18:56:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Then make the proposed edits public.
svick ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:15:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That sounds like terrible user experience: Here is a years old answer in its original form, followed by a dozen modifications trying to improve and update it.
Zagorath ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:52:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah I think it should be the opposite. The original author should always be able to reject a change, but anyone should be able to make an edit subject to moderator approval.
Hullu2000 ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:08:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stack overflow shows a record of who has edited the comment
Macismyname ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:29:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That certainly makes it better. I still think it's wrong to edit someones comment. Stack Overflow is just one example though. There have been news sites that routinely edit their comment section. Not delete or moderate or remove, but edit comments. So it's a subject I'm pretty salty about.
Hullu2000 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:40:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I agree that is extremely shitty and should be illegal if not marking is left that someone else has edited the comment.
BiosElemental ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 03:52:11 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It does though...
khazhyk ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:23:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Editing in ideal should be fine, you need rep to do it and sometimes answers have small mistakes or become out of date. Just ppl make mistakes or don't have the best judgement.
(I've had my answers edited for small typos etc., there is a full edit log with diff and notes and such, and you can revert edits last I checked)
svick ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:53:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Small correction: Anyone (even those who are not logged in) can propose an edit. Though if you don't have enough rep, those who do have to review your edit for it to be actually applied to the post.
SafariMonkey ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:14:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's definitely an issue, but to be fair, it's possible to see the edit history.
jertyui ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:50:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
spez: hold up
cantfindthistune ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:32:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'd say that specific problem isn't as much of an issue nowadays, since cyber forensics has advanced to the point where you can see all the previous iterations of a comment.
svick ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:51:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Then you should not be writing anything on Stack Overflow. If you do, you agree to release anything you say under a Creative Commons license, which gives anyone the right to edit what you said, as long as attribution is maintained (which is why every post has an edit history).
KlittanW ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:41:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
did something similar on another forum... i got banned for 1 week
Grammaton485 ยท 46 points ยท Posted at 18:08:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is precisely why I feel StackOverflow fails at being a resource. It's a community driven by popularity, hence their rep system. You should not, and cannot, put factual information into a game of popularity.
Does A work? If so, then it's a solution.
Does B work? If so, then it's a solution. Is it more efficient than A? Who cares, because not everyone has the exact same situation.
One answer should not be 'more popular' or 'more correct'. I can say "1+1+1=3", and be equally correct as saying "3x1=3". StackOverflow would deem the latter choice 'better'. If it works and can be implemented, it's a solution. That doesn't mean it should be implemented, but that's on the user to decide. They are the ones who are trying to find a solution, so it should follow they are responsible. It's not for the community to judge.
Entaris ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 18:30:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah.
I mean, I understand why the rep system is the way it is...To a degree... And I frankly can't imagine a way of designing a community that would be much better...But the whole thing does fail overwhelmingly.
I think a big part of the problem is how much you have to grind for Rep in order to participate. In order to become a useful part of the community you have to grind at the popularity contest to gain the privileges needed to make a difference...and People that have the time to win at that popularity contest are not always the people who deserve to have the power to drive the community.
Grammaton485 ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 19:30:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They could start by dropping the whole elitist "this site exists as a repository for unique cases" attitude which they use as a justification. The site is too big and complex for this to be enforced without some sort of abuse.
Either keep an open door when it comes to people asking for advice or questions, or close it. Don't bitch about your door being open, then complain that the people you don't want come through it. This is why moderation exists. Moderate your shit, don't leave it up to the community.
Entaris ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:41:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For sure. The attitude of SE sites in general leans towards the "yes yes, aren't we amazing" attitude, which doesn't help.
My personal solution to the stackexchange problem has been "join mailing lists/Google Groups for software I have problems with, and save solutions that are interesting to my personal blog for my own use, and hey if someone else should happen to find it and make use of it, woot"
Thankfully Mailinglist's/ Google groups seem to be...Mostly acceptable still, but there are definitely cases where they are aggravating haha.
DoublePostDormammu ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:54:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think sites like StackOverflow and RapGenius, and even Reddit - to snow extent - start to break down once you get enough people who care more about their upvotes than anything else.
The issue is the way points are distributed on the first two sites.
On RapGenius, all editors of an annotation get a share of the upvotes, related to how much of the annotation was their content. This leads to users with edit privledges making very minor changes in phrasing or word usage, but getting the majority of the upvotes.
On StackOverflow, you don't get rep for making an edit, but you do get badges.
It's a system that rewards people with lots of points and people can abuse that...to get more points.
Zagorath ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:00:44 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah you do. Though it's apparently capped at a lifetime of 1000.
DoublePostDormammu ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 16:43:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Suggested edits, yes. At some point, I believe you get the ability to edit free range.
alex2003super ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:23:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not to metion mods who make subjective questions and get upvotes galore
wengchunkn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:00:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/karmacourt
Let's make one subreddit to judge Stackoverflow.
sneakpeekbot ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:00:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Here's a sneak peek of /r/KarmaCourt using the top posts of the year!
#1: Taking u/BookerDeWittsCarbine to Court for Stealing my post and taking my Karma
#2: Mr. Titt Y. Fingers V. FCC for attempting to ruin the internet. | 108 comments
#3: Over 35 redditors owe me gold.
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact me | Info | Opt-out
Avamander ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:10:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The alternative is the unimaginable amount of pure bullshit that gets asked. Sticking to your question and addressing all the concerns related to your question gets it restored most certainly. You can also ping any of the guys that voted to close the question for an explanation.
juckele ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:08:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's not my question that gets closed. It's someone elses question that I find with a Google search. The question is perfect, and an answer to this question will solve my problem. But unfortunately some idiot who thought they were being useful closed it as a dupe or off-topic. I can ping them for an explanation, but they closed in 18 months ago and I'm looking for an answer today.
Are there good actors? Yes. But there are also bad actors, and as an information seeker, I literally have no recourse against the curator tyrants. They've already done the damage by the moment our paths cross. I'm not talking about the people who close trash questions. I'm talking about the people who close things as dupes without linking to the exact same question or close something as off-topic when it's a fine question (enough that I found it from a Google search for the same information). Those people exist in sufficient quantity that they've destroyed Stack Overflow more than the trash questions ever could have (hint, trash questions can get downvoted or ignored too, there's very little value in formally closing them).
Pontiflakes ยท 19 points ยท Posted at 18:07:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I work at a largeish IT company and this is how the conversation goes 99% of the time you ask a question to a group of experts. No matter how much background you give, "well why don't they just do Y. You know we don't recommend X right? Why are you letting them do X?"
[deleted] ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:13:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
znihilist ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:00:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I asked a question recently on a forum, the first answer was this guy who from his forum profile seems to be the person you want to give you the answer. Instead of telling me that the answer is no, he kept asking me these redundant questions, like did I do "X", and I tried to be polite because there are absolutely 0 ways to for me to have asked my question if I didn't don't "X", he asked me about my location, my location was irrelevant, he asked about the method I used to arrive at "X", then accused me of not being forthcoming. After all of that, he says: Nope you can't do it. So why you fucker had to ask me all these questions that has absolutely 0 bearing on the answer??? After all of that, a second user jumps in says something like this: Sorry, you can't do this because [insert link], however, if you are worried about the time, don't worry because the thing you want to accomplish actually happens a lot faster than you think [another link to prove what he said] so it won't matter that much to you and no need for you to do what you wanted to do.
PostExistentialism ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:24:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There should be a "didn't even read the question" button for each reply. It should delete the reply and damage the poster's reputation with 10 downvotes.
dismantlemars ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:27:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
All of my points on stackoverflow have been coming from a single question I asked that fits this pattern, that I ended up adding my own answer to after everyone else suggested I try having a different problem.
Last week I discovered someone had edited my now 5 year old answer to a totally different solution that I'd already discounted in the problem.
I give up.
mbo1992 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:24:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Do you mind posting that question?
Entaris ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:05:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh jeez it was so long ago... I looked through my history and it looks like the question in question is missing. Must have been deleted. Kind of funny.
migrainium ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:29:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The last time I asked a question on stack overflow, I asked a sql question and was accosted by 5 people for not using the apparent standard way of formatting questions for sql on stack overflow, even though my question had nothing to do with how any of those people wanted me to format it. I haven't asked a question since.
piemaster316 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:44:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I remember having trouble with implementing some concept in one of my class a year or two ago and posting my code with the explanation that the goal is to implement said concept. I was having a hard time with the concept and after reading through the book and getting help from my teacher I started to understand it a little. The issue was I did something wrong and the program wasn't working and for the life of me I couldn't understand why. As a last resort I decided to post a to SO and I was only getting answers along the lines of, "you should read the book and study more." or, "maybe you should look into a different career." I won't post to SO anymore.
rockidol ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:48:44 on March 22, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Do you use anything as a replacement?
Entaris ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:37 on March 22, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've taken to just joining mailing lists or google groups for things that I end up with problems with. Generally speaking the communitites for a specific program tend to be A) more knowledgeable, and B) less hung up on weird "we have a specific culture here, you better fit in or get out" things.
DangKilla ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 18:10:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not looking to give anyone a life-changing eureka moment here, but, having worked in IT support in various senior positions over 21 years, the easiest problems to solve with the information given are the ones that just state the problem. In your go-to example, you are trying to show that you kind of know what youโre talking about, which I guess people do because alot of IRC and support forums have kind of pushed this way of asking for support (e.g. RTFM).
Also, just because your company expects thing to be done a certain way just means youโve limited yourself to less solutions, not the answers you should get. Your example question should really be one question about Problem Z. You are muddying the problem with your own troubleshooting.
Entaris ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:26:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The problem is with that is, My muddying the question is due to experience in stack overflow of saying, "How do I Solve Z?" and people replying by telling "You'd only get Z if you are trying to do X, X isn't recommended, Do Y"
There is no winning. If you leave a question simple "i have problem Y, how do I fix it" You get roasted with "Tell us what you've tried, provide more information, what are the details? We're here to help, not to do your job for you"
if you provide tons of information people either a) ignore the question as a whole, or b) Ignore it, and tell you to do something you specifically said you couldn't do.
DangKilla ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:38:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, thats kind of what Iโm saying. The internet support arena doesnโt really support things the way I do in real life. I hope to solve this problem someday with blockchain.
useful_person ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 17:51:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What should I use for my problems, then? Reddit seems cool, but I've always heard of stackoverflow as the holy grail.
Yserbius ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 18:13:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use StackOverflow but be prepared for your question to get ignored or a lot of angry comments about how wrong you are.
Better yet, find a chat channel for whatever it is you're working on and ask your question there. Someone will either answer you or tell you where to ask.
useful_person ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:34:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks!
Striker654 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:22:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Where are those normally? Do you just search for "X chat channel"?
Existential_Owl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:45:51 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Pretty much, yeah.
Here's a good resource to start with: Tech Community Slacks
Speaking as a React developer, I don't go to Stack Overflow for help. I go to the Reactiflux Discord channel, where I'm much more likely to get answers to whatever my specific issue is.
pmmeyourcum ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:55:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still use SO.
Dunno what these guys are talking about.
slainte-mhath ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 18:16:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still use it too, I just have to search "site:stackoverflow.com" and then open up 50 tabs because the first 48 of them are going to be duplicates or suggestions to use the answer that doesn't work for everyone asking, then then maybe 2 of them will have useful info.
ImSendingYouAway ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:40:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
We all use SO, otherwise we wouldn't be opinionated about it, and most of us still use it.
As others have described, this is not just SO, it's a general phenomenon. It's been rampant on IRC and Usenet since time immemorial. SO is just another platform for this phenomenon to manifest ever so often.
useful_person ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:55:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
brb making account
bluefish009 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:56:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
TRUE! that was me, i posted right answer that solves OP's question.
But, was deleted with no obvious reason. (but i don't care).
Sarsoar ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:40:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"So what are you trying to do?" <- response after explaining explicitely what you are trying to do and what you have tried that isnt working.
"Why would anyone need to do this?" <- response to a fairly common use case that the responder hasn't encountered before because your jobs dont overlap and so he dismisses your question.
TheJerseyDevil21 ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:59:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Worst board on the internet. Iโm a university student and the number of times a question is answered with โdo your own homeworkโ is insane.
ceeBread ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 19:40:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
To be fair, the amount of low effort questions where it is obviously a textbook question are staggering.
1bc29b36f623ba82aaf6 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:07:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I know it feels unfair when you have a genuine well meant question you want to learn from for yourself but yes the amount of crud people on those various websites have to wade through just so it can be downvoted and won't show up for the average user is quite staggering. I can understand that by the sheer repetitiveness mistakes will be made.
I was helping someone with some non spoilery tutoring on some university Haskell homework for a course I did the year before and I copypasted one of the runtime errors into Google because it confused me a bit and I thought I just had to brush up on stuff since the homework problems were all slightly updated.
Now ocassionally with these errors (C++ C# especially) I sometimes need to edit out the 'personalised stuff' like filenames but I was lazy and hoped google would just ignore those parts. But imagine my anger when google literally found exactly that error on stack overflow because some student posted their homework there and couldn't even be arsed to scrub out those details.
He was so lazy he even used a handle that he had listed with his real name on a different site. In fact looking for his handle and just "Haskell" in google revealed a whole bunch of earlier homework problems he was asking people to write the code for around the web. Which proved very usefull when I emailed one of the TAs archived copies of all that crud.
Like getting help with homework is one thing that maybe isn't always allowed but ok. Plagiarising is bad okay. But publicly reproducing the homework with soluttions by you or others in a course with easily 50 to 100 students is just so incredibly stupid. You already have the problem of people independently discovering identical solutions... but if some solution is posted online like that and comes up in any kind of cross reference check it just means almost nobody can get credits for their homework.
On another note more than one Twitch channel hat I hang out in (that has programming content) has a command that yells they will not help you with your CS homework. Like we will have at length discussions about various programming problems if you seem interested in a topic but there is just a very steady tide of lazy questioning for the basic homework problems. It is like they haven't really took the time to understand the problem statement and are just word for word asking you for a ready to go solution.
BlowsyChrism ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:12:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I agree with you there.
Liggliluff ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 03:06:57 on July 28, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But why not just answer them properly and farm points?
Having basic questions and answers is good for newcomers.
Yserbius ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:09:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've asked three questions on StackOverflow. One top response was "You're going about it the wrong way" one was "Why would you want to do that?" and the third was "That's not how you use that".
I've since taken to browsing new questions and no matter how dumb the question seems to be, trying to at least give a reasonable answer (unless the asker is just straight out looking for homework solutions).
CrispBit ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:23:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hello /u/UndeadMeme, welcome to Stack Overflow! Please make sure you read the FAQ and rules. Please keep your sorry ass from being taken seriously until you have 10k reputation!
_Wolfos ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:14:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I asked a question about transformation matrices there and expected the same result. Some person spent what mustโve been at least an hour writing a detailed post helping me understand what was wrong with my code.
The_JSQuareD ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:20:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Link?
Ixilary ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:11:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same for me. I still have my post, it's at -3 and the first answer is someone accusing me of lying, because my issue definitely could not be possible. Here, I even copied the exact comment:
"You are making something up. Your initialization cannot and does not generate "cannot be used to initialize" error. Don't post fake code. Post real code that illustrates the problem."
I ended up solving it a few days later and answered my own question though.
Montblanka ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:57:40 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Been coding 20 years and have asked 2 questions on stackoverflow, neither got answered. Guess they were too hard for them
benjaminikuta ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:17:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why do they do that?
bleuthoot ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:34:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What was the question about
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:24:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the link to the question so we can all downvote the bad answer?
slayer_of_idiots ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:25:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Answering your own question is always a possibility. Sometimes people just don't understand your problem. There are lots of good self-answered questions on SO.
dtfinch ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:10:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's a playground for trolling, since there's no penalty for bad moderation.
ssnazzy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:03:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Every experience is the same on SO for me that Iโve ever asked.
Hey guys check out my program Iโm trying to get it to do this, this is my code and itโs doing this
Then thereโs about 3 people who tell me thereโs a different method they wouldโve done, and how my way is irrelevant. A couple of people who say just use from the libraries. Then thereโs a mod who shuts it down because they donโt do peopleโs homework
When all along I just had was a pointer error that took one sec to fix.
RedWulfie ยท 2982 points ยท Posted at 16:14:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Then you try B and it doesn't work
So you search stackoverflow again:
"How do I B?"
"You do C"
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 1912 points ยท Posted at 16:23:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Possible duplicate of "How do I B?"
enoua5 ยท 867 points ยท Posted at 16:30:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
FTFY
daneelr_olivaw ยท 244 points ยท Posted at 17:22:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At least they're not telling people to KYS... yet. SO has gotten toxic over the last few years.
Mranth0ny62 ยท 204 points ยท Posted at 17:46:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
One thing that I noticed more and more is the overuse of ... at the end of answer, makes them feel really passive aggresive, I always just add a "...dumbass" at the end of those answers in my head
58working ยท 261 points ยท Posted at 17:53:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I love those answers. They are still going through the effort of helping, but they are letting you know they aren't happy about it. It is so tsundere.
MisterMetronome ยท 123 points ยท Posted at 17:58:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I hadn't thought of it like that. I guess everyone on SO is waifu material now.
58working ยท 145 points ยท Posted at 18:06:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"It isn't even like I wanted to help you b-baka! I just wanted the points..."
* angry scribble cloud above head *
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:21:46 on August 2, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ohh god I laughed out loud so much for this one.
Super_Hooman ยท -23 points ยท Posted at 18:17:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Who would've thought a mini KotakuInAction is full of cringy weeboos
AerThreepwood ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 19:02:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's good to see you're back. I missed your low effort downvote trolling.
FailSmite ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:07:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
pyrophoenix100 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:21:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/nocontext
MercuryDrop ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:36:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I go to SO to find SO's
Emerl ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:17:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"It's.. It's not like I spent 20 mins typing this answer because I wanted to help you or anything... Go kys baka!" runs away
BunnyTeemo ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:12:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There is undoubtedly a more concise and reliable way to do this (with jQuery, most likely). Use on the fly, or plug into a script injector to make it automatic.
holy_shott ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:22:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
....dumbass....
GravityHug ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:57:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโd much more prefer it they did tell that, because then their shitty passive-aggressive non-answers would at least get downvoted and not be hogging the top spotlight in the question thread.
[deleted] ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:57:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Colopty ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:42:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Did they ask "why computer break when thrown off a cliff"?
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:11:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, they asked about randomness and seeding.
jfq722 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:01:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If you would just use LINQ you'd find the computer would withstand the fall.
demize95 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:28:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's nothing compared to ServerFault. SF has a real superiority complex and has decided if your question isn't related to your network engineering job, and not training at your job but a real immediate problem, you aren't worthy. "Go to Superuser," they say, but ignore the fact that if you have a question about networking or server administration the only place where you can actually ask it is ServerFault. Superuser is supposed to be for more basic computing questions, "how do I install the drivers for my new mouse", not "how do I get dnsmasq to stop handing out default routes".
I can't remember what it was, but I had a question about some server software I was using on a Raspberry Pi, but because I provided too much information the only answer I got was "use better hardware you idiot" (which wouldn't have addressed the question, since the hardware wasn't relevant) along with a downvoted and closed question. I deleted my account after thatโI don't want to be associated with such a toxic environmentโand I've never looked back.
daneelr_olivaw ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 20:49:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm got furious just reading your comment. Fuck those entitled assholes.
piemaster316 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:34:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah in a Software Engineering student in my last year of college and most of my posts to stack over flow have not been recieved very well. I just needed help understanding what I was doing wrong because whatever it happens to be its something I'm learning about for the first time. I know that the questions I posted were fairly basic in the grand scheme of things but I didn't expect some of the toxic responses I have gotten.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:51:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Honestly, I'd prefer to be told to KYS but get an actual answer.
PhantomTissue ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:37:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why I bring all my questions about random stuff to the appropriate sub-reddit. Hasn't failed me yet. :)
Milanga_de_pollo ยท 144 points ยท Posted at 16:37:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do i ๐ ฑ๏ธ?
adamski234 ยท 126 points ยท Posted at 16:59:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You rush it, it's simple
vancity- ยท 42 points ยท Posted at 17:02:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's not long A
bladedvoid ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 01:35:01 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Nobody goes long A
MilkoPupper ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:34:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Banana is not compiling. Help.
ThinkerTanker ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 17:44:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
RUSH ๐ ฑ๏ธ
EziPziLmnSqzi ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:05:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
CYKA BLYAT
sukabot ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:05:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
ััะบะฐ is not the same thing as "cyka". Write "suka" instead next time :)
EziPziLmnSqzi ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:07:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Good Bot
htmlcoderexe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:26:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sooqa dniwe ebanoe
o0Rh0mbus0o ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 22:43:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
you're using the same k in suka and cyka, and you're using the rest of the letters in cyka and cyะบa the same. What's the difference?
Also, we know what's intended by cyka.
Bad bot.
jsideris ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 17:29:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
At least they changed it from back when it was "exact duplicate" and closed your question even when the linked question doesn't give you the answer you need.
thratty ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:17:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question closed for being too potentially helpful
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:38:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
idcjustmakesomething ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:05:18 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wish I could shank you with a spear
iiEviNii ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:08:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
To B or not to B?
Neckbeard_Prime ยท 222 points ยท Posted at 17:01:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Just use jQuery"
[deleted] ยท 285 points ยท Posted at 17:08:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Perkelton ยท 284 points ยท Posted at 17:19:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Github link to GCC jQuery plugin with twentynine million dependencies and a single maintainer, DabbingHacker03
Reelix ยท 197 points ยท Posted at 17:27:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
uefigod ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 18:09:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Man all this sounds too real
ajbpresidente ยท 79 points ยท Posted at 17:27:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
thedomham ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 18:20:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Zero open issues, one closed. Someone asked DabbingHacker03 to fix a bug. He closed the issue a minute after because 'worksforme'.
CarthOSassy ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 23:32:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In 1492, Columbus asked for a pull request review.
petervaz ยท 77 points ยท Posted at 17:34:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do A? (Jquery is not an option)"
"Just use JQuery."
Lost4468 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:14:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You shouldn't work for a company that uses embedded microprocessors"
PostExistentialism ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:19:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"I'm trying but I'm getting this error: $ is undefined"
prospectre ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:47:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
~ Solution because MVC is stupid and loads jQuery at the bottom.
InfernoForged ยท 112 points ยท Posted at 17:16:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question closed as "off-topic"
OR BETTER YET:
Question marked as duplicate of: "How do I do A?"
randomentity1 ยท 56 points ยท Posted at 18:07:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Circular duplicates?
"How do I do A?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do B?"
"How do I do B?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do A?"
Kidiri90 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:30:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do A?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do B?"
"How do I do B?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do C?"
"How do I do C?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do D?"
...
"How do I do Y?" marked as duplicate of "How do I do A, but not quite as how I need in my own question, making it useless."
Colopty ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:44:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question marked as duplicate of itself.
commit_bat ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:07:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
DiabloCanyonOne ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:36:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And God help you if you want to change a default windows UI elements behavior, like trying to change colors or redirect keyboard input into a fixed control regardless of which one has focus.
"You're going to confuse your users."
"I AM THE USER GOD DAMN IT!"
Liggliluff ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:54:38 on July 28, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I change the default behaviour of my website?"
"Users can override the behaviour"
"I know, that's why I want to change the DEFAULT behaviour"
GoodGodJesus ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:21:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And then you get these contrived explanations instead.
"So you see B is a metaphysical manifestation of the original API writers fantasies regarding promise chains where each chain actually works like an internal combustion engine with lasers".
... "But I just wanted to know why I should use B and why it returns A..."
erroneousbosh ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:43:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Okay, so C doesn't work, how do I do C?"
"Ah well you do D"
"D doesn't work either"
"Yup, D is one of those things that looks great to comp sci undergrads but doesn't actually work. Have you tried doing A?"
Thehusseler ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:16:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or someone replies with a link to the first post about "How do I A?"
shuggies ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:08:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh god itโs recursive
ThePeskyWabbit ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:29:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do i do x?
You do x = x + 1
Oh ok, how do i do x now?
You do x = x + 1
Nanne118 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:36:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Infinite recursion :)
THREETOED_SLOTH ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:54:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I believe that is called recursion
Zequez ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:25:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey now, not all the questions in StackOverflow are about JavaScript.
Liggliluff ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:59:22 on July 28, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
According to SO, none of them are, all those are about JQurey.
greengrasser11 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:34:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"But that one guy just said-"
"Yeah that guy was banned years ago"
-100-Broken-Windows- ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:37:24 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People do, however, use C. :)
3226 ยท 241 points ยท Posted at 17:53:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I remember playing some cookie clicker type of game, and I was looking for an autoclicker (which a lot of these games assume you will use).
First hit I found was on a Linux forum with someone asking for an auto clicker and the response he got was "I can't think of a legitimate use for an auto clicker, so you are probably doing something unethical, so I wont help you. "
It seems to be that case that if you ask a technical question on a linux forum, someone will always tell you why you shouldn't be doing the thing you're doing.
dedicated2fitness ยท 117 points ยท Posted at 19:59:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
linux is horrible for shit like that. i remember back when the wifi driver wasn't installed by default in the OS so after booting to linux i literally couldn't go online. my college campus didn't have ethernet ports easily available(i didn't wanna lug my gaming pc to the labs) so i asked on the forums/
cue a deluge of absolute nonsense about gaming pcs not being useful with only ONE useful reply out of a thread of 30 replies(barring my replies begging for a solution)
Hyperman360 ยท 40 points ยท Posted at 20:32:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The Arch Linux forums can be like that. Usually they're useful but there's always one guy who posts condescending and unhelpful answers.
JayInslee2020 ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 04:11:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Couldn't be worse than looking at Microsoft help for anything. "Here's the 4 things you can try that you already tried before looking for help".
Toysoldier34 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 21:29:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I did a fresh install on my PC with Windows once and had the same thing. I got it booted up and realized no internet, it can't recognize the ethernet port. Crap.
Luckily I was able to connect my phone with USB and tether it to get internet long enough for it to find the drivers it needed. I now keep bootable Linux USBs near all my PCs, just in case.
littlefrank ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 21:34:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't miss the times on windows xp when there was litterally no ways to install drivers, cause it missed EVERY driver, included usb ports, ethernet, wifi, sata. So to install a driver to make the pc usable in any way you needed a damn floppy and use an ide port.
Silencement ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:41:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm pretty sure XP had USB and Ethernet support out of the box. I remember installing it on my old laptop which definitely didn't have a floppy drive.
Majik_Sheff ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 23:52:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's true, but as it aged more and more hardware was rolled out that fell into the pile of devices that were not supported out of the box simply because the devices didn't exist when the disc was pressed.
When I was running XP on newer hardware, I actually burned uncompresed (no ZIP support) chipset and Ethernet drivers to a CD so that I could get the box online enough to download current drivers for everything else.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:12:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The problem is also reversed nowadays. Laptops don't support ethernet natively so if you don't have a USB-to-ethernet adapter, you better pray your network card is supported out of the box.
let_me_gimp_that ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:53:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I use xdotool occasionally for clicker games like that.
zgembo1337 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:49:55 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This!
Wisdom_is_Contraband ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:13:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
AHK would be what you could use for that :)
hkalexling ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 06:58:05 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once found a college student asking how to implement a CPU crypto currency miner on a technical forum (not SO but canโt remember which one). The guy explicitly mentioned that itโs for a course project and itโs for educational use only, but all the replies are either telling him that CPU mining is not profitable or even saying that heโs trying to build a botnet because โwhy would you develop a CPU miner except for tricking people to use it and use their PCs as botnet?โ. Nobody was trying to help the OP and the poor kid had to explain to everyone that he doesnโt even know what a botnet is...
cgameing ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:07:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Dude I'll send you my source for a multiplatform java auto clicker.
cgameing ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:07:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Dude I'll send you my source for a multiplatform java auto clicker.
greyli ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:29:03 on September 6, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ask it like โWhy canโt linux even have an autoclicker!?!?!??โ and you get millions of helpful, angry responses
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:09:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Even though you helpfully provided an example of how you would use it, I still can't think of a legitimate use for an auto clicker.
3226 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:21:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm guessing that's sarcasm, but you sound so sincere!
XelNika ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:27:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just a small joke, yes :)
Chordreich_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:53:58 on April 29, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Part of the reason for that is that there are degenerates out there who are looking either A) cheap answers without putting in the hard work or B) people looking to be malicious.
It's why some IRC channels seem to act "elitist" and have been for 25+ years.
Linux also seems to be the hacker OS to do dodgy stuff in, so...
baudday ยท 896 points ยท Posted at 16:41:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sucks cause SO used to actually be a great place to ask questions with very little toxicity. Now I just gawk at the brave souls who dare ask a question
vancity- ยท 383 points ยท Posted at 17:09:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've seen GitHub Issues become a lot more prevalent in the past year or so. Partly due to GitHub building out their issues platform more, partly because so many libraries are open source, partly because you get access to the developers themselves.
That should really be concerning for SO. We've been saying for years that antagonizing the userbase is going to kill the site. They've had years to address the issue. Instead they decided to put their effort into being a LinkedIn competitor, despite no one using SO to get a job.
My feeling is it's already too late for SO. They'll be as useful as Google Groups, which is to say a small niche not particularly useful.
joyoyoyoyoyo ยท 140 points ยท Posted at 17:30:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's a really good point. I haven't even been using StackOverflow for this reason. Lately. GitHub has been a better alternative. I think the gameification of the point system in StackOverflow, now with the added career incentives from StackOverflow careers (and making that information public to recruiters or companies) has led to a much more competitive atmosphere. It makes sense since some people now have a stronger incentive to capitalize on their points. Even if it means stepping on toes. Reminds me of opportunity hoarding.
qqqyqnz ยท 69 points ยท Posted at 17:36:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
True.
GitHub shouldn't expand issues to encompass questions (that's not what they are for), but it should just add a Questions feature/tab that can be turned on per repo. It would seriously dent SO traffic, and then each community can enforce norms as they want instead of power users arbitrarily enforcing them.
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:36:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They probably don't want to turn into a Q and A platform since their business model is charging repository owners a flat fee.
qqqyqnz ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 18:39:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They added wiki and agile/kanban ("story") boards, and they host static websites. Q&A doesn't feel that far off.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:51:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Big difference in traffic between those things though.
MalusSonipes ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 00:02:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
God that would be amazing. I would love just ask seasoned developers of specific libraries things like โwhat is the most efficient way to do X?โ or โhow do usually deal with Y?โ It would be great for common issues that arenโt really bugs and just interesting problems with various solutions.
qqqyqnz ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:17:53 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A lot of prominent developers are active on twitter, I would recommend trying them there.
dedicated2fitness ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 19:51:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
hey thanks for applying but your profile seems to suck ass so go fuck yourself and die in a ditch. no one wants to employ you
baudday ยท 18 points ยท Posted at 17:16:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah agreed their time is past. Would love if GH Issues highlighted answers in some way though. SO hasnโt been my primary source for answers in quite a while
slayer_of_idiots ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:28:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I really doubt that github users are really more accepting of open-ended basic programming questions like "should I use a list or a set?"
The scope of questions on any github project is far narrower than the majority of what SO gets every day.
vancity- ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:19:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's a good point, but that's a fairly narrow space to compete in. Now if they expanded to questions about best practices, or better yet questions about architecture, code design, etc. you'd have yourself a competitive site. Unfortunately non-concrete questions are literally ananthema to SO.
poop-trap ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:02:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think the benefit of archived SO posts over Google Groups is that (despite the joke this post is making) it's easy to find the best solution to the problem because of the upvoting. It's annoying scrolling through forum threads trying to figure out which reply is actually correct. GitHub Issues is decent at least because you can scan for the one with the most ๐๐โฅ๏ธ's.
At this point I'm not sure SO cares a ton about new questions and users, they already have plenty of valuable content and it doesn't take much more new content to keep it viable.
XelNika ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:05:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The number of times I've hit a Google Groups link on Google's first page of results only to be told I need to be authorised to access that thread...
vancity- ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:20:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Google groups is a smell that your googlefu is off
P90RooshB ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:37:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While I agree with this completely, I see the shift to be more like linkedin as an attempt to keep the atmosphere professional and not toxic. However, like many of you guys in this sub know, arrogance is a gigantic problem in software business to the extent that every coding interview self-help book lists "Don't be arrogant" or "Don't come off as arrogant" as their #1 rule. I even know a few people who failed interviews because they had everything going for them except attitude.
This sounds like a re-hash of Google's failed attempt at keeping comment sections from being a zoo without bars by prompting everyone to use their real name. It is simply not effective. A much better solution would be to stop spending money trying to clone linkedin and instead hire a team that gives out points for being nice independent of answering questions. Of course, it is entirely possible that there is no solution and SO has run its course. We shall see in the next decade or so! I'm excited.
Baranix ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:58:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I haven't even noticed I've slowly been transitioning to looking into Github Issues instead SO (except for jQuery questions, because SO has a jQuery cult as we all know). I suddenly appreciate Github more.
Existential_Owl ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 14:49:58 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Heh, yeah, I decided to give SO a shot in my job search. It's such a waste.
I have zero clue why companies even bother spending money on that platform, since those very same companies don't seem to respond to anyone, ever.
CityYogi ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:25:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I tried telling them so many times what they were doing wasn't good. But they would not listen
theLorknessMonster ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:56:20 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why open source is so great. Code doesn't lie.
Vok250 ยท 91 points ยท Posted at 17:23:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've gone back to using language docs directly. When the docs are lacking I resort to desperate Googling and trial and error. I've even cracked open textbooks as a reference.
The biggest issue I find with SO is that it has become very focused on the lowest common denominator, which is basic programming theory. Any niche questions go unanswered, have useless answers, or get closed as a duplicate of a long outdated question.
For example I have had many cases where A above is something unintuitive or poorly documented in a library we use in production. B is just someone suggesting to use a different library. Sure that's fine and dandy on some CS2000 homework, but I'm not going to spend months refactoring production code just so I can reverse the order of a JSon list in 5 fewer lines of code. "nobody uses A" is just them jacking of their superiority complex and ignores the tens of thousands of industry products running on A.
pxan ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 18:38:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I know I must finally be an adult because I check docs before googling around for answers. True maturity.
FuujinSama ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 22:50:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm definitely not a mature programmer in any sense, but I always have docs open when I'm programming. I mean, the answer is THERE! Stated in very precise language! What more could I ask. Some docs leave a lot to be desired, but 99% of the time it's faster than googling.
I got into this habit mostly from my microprocessors chair, where we couldn't use any libraries and had to program the registries. I wasn't going to understand shit of what I was doing without reading the Datasheet. And after you get over the intimidation factor, there's nothing too complex about it. Meanwhile my colleagues were busy trying to understand examples or googling questions where the obvious answer is Y, not X because of our constraints.
Entripital ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:49:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The thing is, the SoftwareEngineering stack overflow site is supposed to be the one about basic programming theory. Stack Overflow is meant to solve the specific question about the annoying problem that you've encountered that has nothing to do with design patterns.
crowseldon ยท -18 points ยท Posted at 18:41:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You've even. Holy shit, man. To were supposed to research in the first place.
More examples of entitlement when talking about SO.
As for the niche questions part. Sometimes they get answers, sometimes they don't. Are YOU answering niche questions or just complaining?
Vok250 ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 19:51:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Getting triggered and jumping straight to the personal attacks and condescension I see. You're attitude isn't doing any good for SO's reputation.
[deleted] ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 20:45:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[removed]
Metalgaiden ยท 362 points ยท Posted at 16:54:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah my SO won't let me ask questions anymore either.
HopperBit ยท 75 points ยท Posted at 17:06:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Next time propose on a fancy public place (facebook does not count)
Metalgaiden ยท 247 points ยท Posted at 17:09:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Me: let's get married
SO: Can we just move in together
Me: that doesn't marry us
SO: yeah no one gets married anymore
omni_whore ยท 201 points ยท Posted at 17:44:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Relationship closed for being off topic
Metalgaiden ยท 115 points ยท Posted at 17:50:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Closed for being duplicate
Cited duplicate is relationship with mother
[deleted] ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:31:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I break my arms?
Scarbane ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:59:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
\/ยฏยฏ\(ใ)/ยฏยฏ\/
kohbo ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:55:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is marriage really on the decline?
Metalgaiden ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 17:58:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Idk but A definitely is
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:32:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess Gas and Grass must be on the rise then.
MibitGoHan ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:13:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, so is childbirth in the US at least.
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:43:20 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Also people buying houses.
TWALL9 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:35:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Me_irl, except I'm your SO
Metalgaiden ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:52:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
So... Us_irl?
Exit42 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:24:34 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes it does though
WikiTextBot ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:24:39 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Common-law marriage
Common-law marriage, also known as sui iuris marriage, informal marriage, marriage by habit and repute, or marriage in fact, is a legal framework in a limited number of jurisdictions where a couple is legally considered married, without that couple having formally registered their relation as a civil or religious marriage. The original concept of a "common-law marriage" is a marriage that is considered valid by both partners, but has not been formally recorded with a state or religious registry, or celebrated in a formal religious service. In effect, the act of the couple representing themselves to others as being married, and organizing their relation as if they were married, acts as the evidence that they are married.
The term common-law marriage has wide informal use, often to denote relations that are not legally recognized as common-law marriages.
[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source | Donate ] Downvote to remove | v0.28
Exit42 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:27:11 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Good bot
Artanisx ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:07:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But be sure to be protected.
randomentity1 ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:48:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They put a 'question-ban' on you if you're voted down too much or have too many questions closed.
MySQ_uirre_L ยท 37 points ยท Posted at 17:44:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โLet me redirect you to an irrelevant post and mark yours as duplicateโ
BlowsyChrism ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:04:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's what happened to me years ago, the one and only time I bothered to post there.
[deleted] ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 19:00:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
BlowsyChrism ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:57:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Are you going to be ok?
[deleted] ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 20:18:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
BlowsyChrism ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:31:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes I am sure all of us saying the same experience happened are just collectively conspiring against SO. Tbh I haven't signed in my account in literally years because I don't use it to post. I don't even recall what my credentials are and I am certainly too lazy to prove someone who is looking to argue about it.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 06:59:41 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
BlowsyChrism ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:03:23 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am a joy actually. Guys come to my desk all day to ask for my advice ๐Sorry you lack social skills
BlowsyChrism ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:06:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah man and you live in Norway and you're nor very nice. Sad. Was hoping to move there one day:'(
bsmitty358 ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 16:58:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still have luck with SO, as long as you know the proper question to ask
baudday ยท 96 points ยท Posted at 17:01:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It really shouldnโt be that way though. Is it a community for people who know what theyโre doing to ask questions, or is it a place to ask a question you donโt know the answer to? How is someone new to software supposed to know what is and isnโt fair game?
Zei33 ยท 26 points ยท Posted at 17:18:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've found that asking the question in the most self deprecating way possible usually helps. Usually still get a few smug comments though.
Double_A7 ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:17:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Quickest way to get the right answer, is to post the wrong answer and have someone correct you.
Make sure you argue with them so they teach you more shit.
dedicated2fitness ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:54:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
HOW DARE YOU CALL ME SMUG. i'll have you know i'm the MOST SELF EFFACING MOFO on this site! here the mods(who i may or may not work with) will chime in! Oh you posted to reddit? trying to bandwagon! trying to suppress my le elite status on this godly shitstain of a website!
oh jeff atwood told me to chill out? well i guess it was kinda both our faults. your question is gonna get deleted and your account hit with negative karma though
rxnaij ยท 22 points ยท Posted at 17:55:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This exact issue applies to me not only with SO but with my college's CS students Facebook group. New students post questions about their code/errors all the time, which can get repetitive but is very expected. Yet the same admin(s) will leave very terse, condescending comments telling the students that their questions makes no sense.
That always perplexed me. Why are they holding new students' questions to standards that these students aren't even aware of? Shouldn't members of an academic community want to make their discipline accessible to, not gated from, these new students? I honestly felt like this whole elitist attitude is what ultimately turned me off of majoring in CS.
WatchDogx ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 21:34:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It is primarily a platform for finding answers.
Asking questions is honestly only a small part of it.
For most people the ratio of answers found to questions asked is probably well over 100:1
1halfazn ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:24:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think it sort of is that. Most of the people who actively participate in stackoverflow are at least moderately experienced. It's not supposed to be a free debugging service for people to come in, ask "what's wrong with my code," and then leave. You're expected to read the rules and F.A.Q before posting, and research your question extensively.
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:28:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I agree with that. I feel like that's the way it used to be. Now, I feel like everyone on there thinks they're doing that job and it's gotten to a point where they're basically looking for reasons to throw out your question. I'm just glad for the most part I don't have to ask questions on there anymore.
[deleted] ยท -40 points ยท Posted at 17:11:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
step 1 - noobs need to know their role
baudday ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 17:14:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lil too self righteous for my taste...
[deleted] ยท -13 points ยท Posted at 17:18:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
if you want an example of how low quality questions ruin the ability to get help look no further than googling anything like this :
"ubuntu [problem name]"
you get 50,000 half baked forum post with 100,000 half baked replies. one can (and will) spend hours reading endless pages of forum post trying to find the solution (that often never comes)
[deleted] ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:45:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Youโre down voted because you were an ass before this comment but I totally agree. Most of the times the threads are derailed into something not even close to the original question asked and I dread at the 30 page posts, no way Iโm gonna spend 1 hour reading all that. Iโve been subconsciously avoiding that Ubuntu forum that shows coffee beans under profile names because of that.
Edit: askouija, above this comment on my profile, is gonna reply FUCKYOU
[deleted] ยท -28 points ยท Posted at 17:16:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
communities and standards exist to keep quality of content high.
baudday ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 17:18:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Never seen a โnoobs need to know their roleโ community standard anywhere. Youโre promoting elitism.
[deleted] ยท -24 points ยท Posted at 17:18:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You must be new to the internet
"Noobs know your role" is part of the fabric of the internet, including reddit.
baudday ยท 30 points ยท Posted at 17:20:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You sound like me in High School
[deleted] ยท 21 points ยท Posted at 17:33:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
His post history is really sad :/
Itโs mostly suicidal depression, alcoholism, gatekeeping other alcoholics who arenโt miserable enough and far-right politics.
I donโt want to make any more fun of him, heโs already in a lot of pain, even though heโs a miserable ass.
[deleted] ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 17:21:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
k
baudday ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:22:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey thatโs what I wouldโve said!
The_Pert_Whisperer ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:09:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You must be new to the internet"
That is exactly what my dumb ass 15 year old self would've said. Which was over a decade ago... fuck
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:34:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol of course you post to The_Donald
snp3rk ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 17:26:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No it's not you dick wad. New people join reddit all the time and if they are out of a loop for an inside joke other users always jump in to assist them. Heck we even have a sub for outoftheloop. Reddit, excluding a few subreddits, is no where as noob unfriendly, or toxic as toxicoverflow
baudday ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:18:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol k
[deleted] ยท -4 points ยท Posted at 17:22:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol k it's been this way since BBS's, IRC and usenet.
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:45:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Your username...ironic
bluefish009 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:01:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"proper" == "political correctness"
Cal1gula ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:31:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
All the questions I've asked got answered. I'm not surprised the average Redditor can't form a SO post though. I've seen the content here.
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:57:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Begs the question, why are you here then? What's more, why have you made an account here? WHY ARE YOU COMMENTING?? Holy shit are you aware that you are now actually part of the very community you so despise?!
Cal1gula ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:58:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey I still voluntarily answer questions on SO. Unlike pretty much any person complaining in this thread that I've seen so far.
The anti-SO circle jerk is some of the most misdirected, ignorant complaining from people who probably couldn't even function at their job without it. But by all means, keep jerking away for that sweet internet karma.
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:03:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Neat, I voluntarily answer questions too! I'm not sure what that has to do with your original comment, but I think you came to the wrong place to insult "the average Redditor". The communities overlap probably by a lot. I'm willing to bet just about everyone in this sub has an SO account. This post wouldn't be this highly voted if it didn't resonate with a lot of folks, many of whom I'm sure, like myself, are more than capable of forming well thought-out, reasonable questions.
Cal1gula ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:04:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How would this be the wrong place for that? Why would I want to make a point to an empty room? Maybe that's what you do when you've got something controversial to say, but that seems pretty pointless to me.
And I hope the irony of you claiming high upvotes = relevant and popular isn't lost on you considering the content of the post itself right? You are the equivalent of "You do B."
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:13:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's the wrong place because you're essentially saying everyone else in here except you is some sort of blubbering idiot that can't ask a proper question. You understand the likelihood of that? Seeing as you are part of the community, it's like setting a bomb off in a room you're in and thinking it would somehow hit everyone else except you. You comment on this shit and read it and vote on it, yet somehow you're the exception to the rule.
Your comparison isn't relevant because in this community an upvote is like saying "haha that's funny I can relate to it". Whereas, on SO a vote is just saying it's a good or bad question, not "I can somehow relate to this question".
Cal1gula ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:17:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Do you think I care about the votes for myself?
Every single upvoted response here is an anecdote about poor posting habits.
Like I said, just a misguided circle jerk.
Just like every thread where SO is mentioned.
Sometime someone has to be a voice of reason.
baudday ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:25:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No I don't think you care, but I feel better knowing that you know that you're not somehow special or separate from the people you're insulting.
For what it's worth, in the 8 years since I joined StackOverflow I've gotten just about every single one of my questions answered, I've answered many questions and many of those answers have been accepted. I've seen it go from a place where you feel like you need to make sure you know what you're asking and that you've done your research, to a place where that just doesn't even matter anymore. I've seen so many well-intentioned questioned get downvoted to hell for no apparent reason. Erroneous flags all over the place. It's a cesspool compared to how it used to be. I'm just lucky I started when I did I suppose, because if I were starting out now, god knows SO is the last place I'd ask for help.
Cal1gula ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:27:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Same goes for you insulting me. And I'm sure you still use SO hourly.
baudday ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:33:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sorry, where exactly did I insult you? If this counts as an insult... It was after you basically called everyone in here stupid and it was 100% not intended to be an insult. More of a tongue-in-cheek way to point out that you're part of the community you're insulting.
AnneBancroftsGhost ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 16:55:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It depends. The EE stack is still a nice community.
baudday ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 16:58:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, but thatโs StackExchange. Iโm talking StackOverflow specifically
AnneBancroftsGhost ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:02:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fair enough.
Wozago ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:25:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What actually is the difference between the two?
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:27:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackExchange is the umbrella that holds it all. You can find an exchange for pretty much anything from EE to Car Maintenance to Crafts!. Pretty much if you have a hobby you can probably find an exchange for it.
FatFingerHelperBot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:27:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!
Here is link number 1 - Previous text "EE"
Please PM /u/eganwall with issues or feedback! | Delete
Wozago ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:29:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Are they owned by the same company still?
baudday ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:35:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah I'm pretty sure. And if one doesn't exist you can go to https://meta.stackexchange.com and request it
Wozago ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:37:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That would make sense. Thanks.
sweetcuppingcakes ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:33:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My question:
I tried to do A but I keep getting the following error message:
I'm not sure what this means, can anyone shed some light on this?
First few answers:
You don't know what it means? Did you not read the message?
ToosterReeth ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:33:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There is a reason why I have a smurf SO account purely for posting questions, we're now at a stage where people are afraid to ask questions. What a world.
summonsays ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:59:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I had a similar experience on r/writtingpromts. Thought of a good one, read the rukes and posting guidlines, posted it. It got removed 2 minutes later with a link to "suggestions" on how to post a prompt..... Why aren't the suggestions in the rules then?!
Ellsworthless ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:15:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Only in severe desperation.
Rudy_258 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:44:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I always have to think 10 times before asking a question in fear of getting chewed...
Diesl ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:36:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still use it for my C questions. You gotta take the good with the bad and prepare to be looked down on with utter disdain while they casually toss you the correct answer.
rasherdk ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:33:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've had a few times wanting to respond to unanswered or incorrectly answered questions, but apparently you need to jump through hoops to get "points" in order to do that.
Sorry for annoying you by wanting to help.
treesprite82 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:08:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You don't need any reputation to answer (or ask) a question in general.
Exception for protected questions, but I don't think an unanswered question has ever been protected, normally just the super-popular questions that already have many working answers.
aman207 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:18:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I think rasherdk is talking about commenting, which you need 50 rep for.
treesprite82 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:22:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah that's true yeah.
alexanderpas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:16:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You can give answers on any of the stack exchange site, and once you have 200 points on any single site, you get a free 100 points on all other sites, removing the initial barriers on all the sites.
Reacher-Said-Nothing ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:36:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My only experience with stack overflow has been while learning how to program, googling the issue, the first result being someone repeating my exact issue, and the only answer being "this is closed because its been asked too many times, use Google".
Skullqween ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:47:42 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've managed to get every question answered there recently. It just took two alt-accounts and sifting through a lot of angry comments =/
randomentity1 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:15:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Rename that site to StuckOverflow, because you still won't have an answer after checking the site.
ThraShErDDoS ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:44:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've asked and answered around 100 questions and never had problems with toxicity
Ajedi32 ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 03:29:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I see people saying stuff like this on Reddit all the time, but I've personally asked over 100 questions on SO and only 3 of them have a negative score. (And of those three, two are blatently off-topic "recommend a tool for me" questions.)
I think asking a good SO question just requires a different mindset from what many folks are used to. If you go into SO trying to treat it like a forum, you're gonna have a bad time.
crowseldon ยท -3 points ยท Posted at 18:38:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh cry me a river. Everyone wants to be a victim nowadays. Toxicity is subjective and people tend to act entitled to answers without investing enough themselves to formulate the right question.
SO is great.
baudday ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:46:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
...
Checks out
crowseldon ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 18:50:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Response with nothing and a gif. I can see why stack overflow seems like a bad place for you.
baudday ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:53:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You're right it's cause you're smarter than me and I'm too thick headed. SO is just on another intellectual plane my feeble mind is unable to comprehend.
My response says plenty, your inability to connect the dots does too.
this_usr ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:47:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Careful, there. I think this one's watched the 6th season of Rick and Morty.
crowseldon ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 18:56:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wait... So you're telling me I'm conceited but at the same time telling me I'm too thick to understand what your ellipsis and gif are saying?
You're projecting, mate. Stop with the pathetic strawmen.
baudday ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:57:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm just repeating what you told me... mate.
baudday ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:59:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You simultaneously complained about the subjectivity of my response while giving your own subjective opinion. I pointed that out with what I thought was a blindingly obvious comment. You said that was "nothing" and proceeded to insinuate that I have issues with StackOverflow because I'm stupid. That about cover it?
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:01:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And you keep downvoting me because you disagree with me
crowseldon ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:03:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I downvoted you because you insulted me or added absolutely nothing. I didn't downvote comments with actual discussions. Feel free to do the same and feel free to keep whining.
baudday ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:09:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hahaha ok wait what? So I'm playing victim, but you feel the need to downvote because you feel insulted. Point out an insult please.
Vok250 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:16:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The irony is that this guy is all over this thread calling people entitled whiny "victims" and adding nothing to the discussion himself.
crowseldon ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:01:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I didn't insinuate you were stupid but you're so hell bent on imagining an enemy that looks down on you that that's all you see.
You ARE playing the victim though and quite annoying at that.
Anyway. We don't really have anything productive to discuss. You keep posting your gifs and whining about toxicity. I suggest Tumblr.
baudday ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:08:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I must have misinterpreted what you meant by that then. I don't really feel victimized, so funny that I should come off as a victim to you.
I still think it's funny that you complain about how subjective my opinion was while simultaneously giving your own.
[deleted] ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 18:26:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't know about this one. It's a really fine place from my experience. One thing to understand is that SO is not there to help random users who ask questions. It's there to build a database of questions and answers for future reference.
If someone asks a question that is already answered on the site - that's not welcome. The rules are to close them and link to the question that is already answered.
Unique, hard or unsolved questions typically are voted up very fast.
I guess what I like to say is that for me SO is good as it currently is.
moralesnery ยท 396 points ยท Posted at 16:33:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
use jQuery
OhItsuMe ยท 105 points ยท Posted at 17:12:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use react-vue-js-plugin-addition-arithmetic-plus-wrapper-library-framework
946789987649 ยท 69 points ยท Posted at 18:21:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
that i wrote
quentin-coldwater ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 21:42:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Relax, James Madison
moogeek ยท 53 points ยท Posted at 17:23:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You meant heck Query
[deleted] ยท 46 points ยท Posted at 19:37:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 00:24:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 126 points ยท Posted at 16:34:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
use generic Arrays (obviously)
charles_milette ยท 61 points ยท Posted at 17:05:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use a vector
davidjohnmeyer ยท 64 points ยท Posted at 17:36:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Its like they don't understand that most coding assignments are a. don't allow you to use vectors or standard libraries b. the person asking the question does not even know what that means. I've asked questions before about working with character arrays and they get onto me for not using strings. I'm like the assignment wants me to use character arrays so answer the damn question, lol.
[deleted] ยท 70 points ยท Posted at 17:47:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[removed]
Selkie_Love ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 18:21:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Homework I'm happy to help with.
It's when I get sent a picture with the words "FINAL EXAM" on the top that I get grumpy
Colopty ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 19:51:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
With the added description "please help, it's urgent".
summonsays ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 20:02:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
i once discovered a person buying all their final exam questions online for large bounties, was like 500per question. Not sure how much in $ that is.
very_bad_programmer ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 04:57:40 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wtf is the point of that? Like ok, cool, you paid your way to a passing grade, but now what? Do they not realise their employer is going to immediately realize they don't know their shit?
ACoderGirl ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 18:38:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
To be fair, my experience is that most people are perfectly willing to help iff they get the impression that they aren't doing your whole homework for you. I can fully understand them being skeptical towards you, especially since so many people try and abuse helpful question-answerers to do their whole homework and put no effort in themselves.
Best you can do, IMO, is be transparent about it being a homework problem, put effort into explaining what you've tried and why that didn't work, and generally keep the question focused and specific.
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:14:12 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's good advise. I would be so happy if more homework questions were like that.
cgameing ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:05:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Uh yeah, I'm trying to understand how to do my homework but thanks anyway.
ssnazzy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:14:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh you just need some help on some concepts and understanding a technique a bit more?
Closed.
BadBoy6767 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:29:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use boost
GregTheMad ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:36:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Boost already does that for you.
Inetro ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:53:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Im having war flashbacks to the last year of my cs degree and trying to make a Trie data type that worked with 70 some odd BOOST unit tests...I hit about 11 before giving up..
ProgramTheWorld ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 17:23:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I add two numbers in JavaScript?
hindey19 ยท 124 points ยท Posted at 17:27:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Send the values via AJAX and calculate server-side.
marcio0 ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 00:59:27 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
and save the result on the blockchain
Neoro ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:57:00 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use the blockchain like a cache of your server's computations. Let the client get the cache themselves too. Computation answers become block addresses.
moralesnery ยท 40 points ยท Posted at 17:35:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
var a= 1; var b= 1; Number($(a).val())+Number($(b)(.val());
ProWaterboarder ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 17:46:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
var a = 1;
var b = 2;
return (a - (-b));
//3
ProgramTheWorld ยท 48 points ยท Posted at 17:47:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
-1 not enough jQuery
ConfuzedAndDazed ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 19:19:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Add letters. Nobody adds numbers.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:09:39 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
ProgramTheWorld ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 11:22:31 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Itโs a joke
DjCim8 ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 18:57:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Actually, I'm seeing the opposite trend lately, people saying "why would you use jQuery just to call one method, when you can EASILY use these 90 lines of pure js code that does the same thing? Do you have ANY IDEA HOW MANY KILOBYTES THAT WASTES???
(yeah, I do, and they're not enough to bother anyone other than time-travellers that visit your site from a 28.8k dial-up modem, you paranoid premature optimizator)
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:10:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That was the bane of my js course.
wwwwvwwvwvww ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:47:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
While writing a UI application in C#.
moralesnery ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:54:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
just embed a webview inside your UI :'D
ptitz ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:28:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's a boost lib for that...
LiraNuna ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:44:03 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Super relevant: https://i.stack.imgur.com/ssRUr.gif
ptgauth ยท 1016 points ยท Posted at 16:08:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But I want all my variables to be global :(
daddya12 ยท 551 points ยท Posted at 16:42:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Solution: use assembly. Everything is global
mkalte666 ยท 189 points ยท Posted at 16:56:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
lies. you can still call stuff like malloc and store the pointers on the stack when using assembly. Thats not global!
You want bare metal without initialized/using the stack, and that is madness.
Entirely possible though. Sometimes.
wotanii ยท 93 points ยท Posted at 17:12:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
what's keeping you from reading the entire stack?
CSKING444 ยท 158 points ยท Posted at 17:29:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sleep deprivation
Scarbane ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 18:57:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Freddy is getting creative with his nightmares.
TedFartass ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:25:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Meh, I just always use Malbolge.
Usagi-Nezumi ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:44:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm studying this language.
I also want to die.
MushinZero ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:18:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Malloc is C. It's just incrementing the stack pointer in assembly.
Edit: as everyone has pointed out I'm thinking of alloca
geekfolk ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 17:23:39 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc is somehow more complex than that... a popular but nonstandard function "alloca" usually does what u want, dynamically expanding the stack frame
kindall ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:55:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
mallochas the capability of reusing chunks of memory that have been released usingfree. It maintains a list of freed blocks, and will allocate within the first available block big enough to hold the request. Over time,malloctends to end up with a "free list" that contains a growing number of very small blocks (so small they will, in practice, never be reused) which nevertheless must be checked on every new allocation. This can result inmallocgetting gradually slower as a program runs. Many programmers have therefore written their own memory allocation functions, some of which have been released as libraries for general use. In practice, however,mallocisn't as bad as its reputation suggests.ACoderGirl ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:22:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Am I misunderstanding? Malloc is for heap memory. In C, allocating stack memory is really just declaring a variable. Malloc's assembly equivalent requires a syscall (likely to
mmaporsbrk).markhc ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:18:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc does not manipulate the stack pointer at all. Youre thinking about alloca
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:29:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thatโs a UNIX thing, the eventual
sbrk()alloca() call that expands stack space. Windows is far more geared toward using heaps, for which the Rtl library exposes an API. I prefer it far more.cookie545445 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:27:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
sbrk() expands heap, not stack.
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah, I meant alloca(), not sure why I said sbrk().
cookie545445 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:49:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
alloca() is not used often. malloc() is much more common. Heaps are used as often as they should be in UNIX.
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:28:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I was more trying to convey that thereโs not really an analog to HeapCreate on Windows.
cookie545445 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:03:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
malloc(dwMaximumSize)?
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:12:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thatโs obviously not the same Iโm sure you realize :-)
RtlHeapCreate allocates an internal heap structure and returns a handle that you can subsequently can RtlHeapAlloc and RtlHeapFree against. Want to blow away the entire heap and all memory associated with it? Simple via RtlHeapDestroy.
Thereโs no real equivalent to that on Unix. i.e. thereโs no ctx = heap_create(...); foo = malloc_ex(ctx, size).
cookie545445 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:18:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
They are the same unless MaximumSize is just a hint and you can extend past it, in which case:
std::vector<int> v;A malloc()โd heap can be free()โd at will, freeing the whole thing is equivalent to destroying it.
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:23:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The pointer returned by malloc can be freed at will, sure. It canโt be used to sub allocate and free chunks of memory within that block because itโs just an address, there are no supporting structures of functions provided with it, obviously.
Have you ever used HeapCreate et al? Itโs not the same as malloc, end of story.
cookie545445 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:31:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The idea isnโt that you allocate blocks within another block that you allocated, the idea is that you just malloc() the small blocks when needed and your implementation of malloc() handles page sizes, re-use etc.
If you really wanted, you could stick your own allocator on top of the blocks returned by malloc() and hey presto, now you've got 3 levels of allocation (kernel page-level, malloc byte-level and custom) and youโre hated more than people that use alloca().
What youโre telling me about HeapCreate isnโt the same as malloc() because it has unnecessary extra functions.
littlelowcougar ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:33:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโll take that as a no, you havenโt ever used HeapCreate. It is very useful when used correctly. Iโm not going to argue the point more.
YoYoYonnY ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 10:47:31 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It seems like bad practice to do all your deallocations at once, though... If you don't care about memory management you should stick to C++.
Also, Linux has mmap which essentially does the same thing, but is more explicit and low level.
On top of all that, I wrote my own ANSI C allocator library, in less than 200 lines of code, and is far more efficient than HeapCreate can ever be.
littlelowcougar ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 15:20:30 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I didnโt realize you either had access to the Windows source code or had disassembled the implementation of HeapCreate.
It sounds like youโre a college kid. Good for you for being enthusiastic. Pro tip: donโt shit on something just because you donโt know about it.
YoYoYonnY ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:37:10 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm guessing you're saying this because you do not believe that a general purpose "HeapCreate" function cannot outperform a highly specialized and optimized allocator, which I designed top down to be as efficient as it can possibly get for my purposes? The very fact that "HeapCreate" will universally process "HeapFree" calls without error already makes my implementation faster, since my allocator has a flag to only allow symmetric allocations and deallocations, which turns allocation and deallocation into addition and subtraction respectively.
I simply do not understand why anyone would chose HeapCreate over anything that already exists or can be created in an hour, unless you're already being forced to program in a C-only Windows only environment anyway, and you aren't sufficient with C. I guess people would really rather use a broken subset of C than learn C++ or switch to Java/C#.
Also, I could simply benchmark my code vs Windows, no need to read any source code.
littlelowcougar ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 21:03:21 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not only do you not understand, youโve already made up your mind regarding the answer. Itโs pointless continuing this discussion. Goodbye.
geekfolk ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:07:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stuff on the stack frame is still local I guess, even for assembly, they would be automatically released when rsp (stack pointer register for x64) jumps back to some earlier function
daddya12 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:10:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I stand corrected
asquared31415 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:49:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, my computer canโt see stuff running locally on yours!
Ixilary ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:16:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Other people have pointed out that it's technically not global. However, just for fun, if you consider that assembly let's you access whatever you want from anywhere (in your address space), everything is global in C too. You can do the same thing with pointers and access any data.
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:12:36 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Not true at all. Assembly programs on recent tool chains have largely the same linkage types and storage classes as C. Unless you write a piece of shit program, most variables are most definitely not global, even in an assembly program.
pomfritten ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 16:56:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is the correct answer.
antlife ยท 83 points ยท Posted at 16:44:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Now that's open source. ๐ฅ
mcergun ยท 45 points ยท Posted at 16:58:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
it's not truly open source if everything is not accessible from everywhere
antlife ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:27:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's when I enable the accessibility options.
retardedearthling ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:49:15 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/madlad
lukedink ยท 60 points ยท Posted at 16:15:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Now that's just good practice ;)
lasiusflex ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 17:58:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's just confusing and hurts readability if the same variable name can refer to different things depending on where you are.
Ixilary ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 22:17:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just qualify the names with all the data you need!
SonicFlash01 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 17:12:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The elders forbid it :( That knowledge is dangerous and you will curse us all!
petervaz ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:36:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just put all your logic inside a big static singleton.
XkF21WNJ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:36:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Use Haskell.
Meatslinger ยท 350 points ยท Posted at 17:57:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Q (+1): โHow do I do (thing) using OS X bash, without installing anything extra? I have to work within the bounds of my secure company image.โ
A1 (+6155): โJust install (list of open-source, unmaintained third-party binaries). Oh, and (popular library that would take months to get security vetting). Easy peasy.โ
A2 (-4): โ(the actual answer)โ
alexanderpas ยท 59 points ยท Posted at 20:01:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Did you mark A2 as the accepted answer?
Meatslinger ยท 123 points ยท Posted at 20:07:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I do, yes. Votes be damned; Iโm picking the answer that actually fixed the problem and met the conditions.
alexanderpas ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 01:01:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And as a result, you have improved the site.
The accepted answer is always placed above the top voted answer.
Ajedi32 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 03:33:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Eh, if A1 is at +6155, then that's almost certainly the one 99% of the people coming from Google were looking for. Answers almost never get scores that high otherwise.
Meatslinger ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 15:16:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sort of, and youโre right that itโll probably work for โmostโ people. Problem I have is that thereโs the world of tech in which people are free to install new software as they please to solve a problem - like telling someone โjust trade your hand saw for a jigsawโ - but in a restricted corporate setting (due to vetting policies) Iโm forced to work with the hand tools Iโm given.
My big issue is just that very often, even outside the requirements of my job, I just want to learn the โclose to bare metalโ way of doing something. Installing a new binary accomplishes the work task, but doesnโt teach me the foundational principles. Itโs like telling someone, โdonโt bother learning carpentry; just buy a new tableโ.
dedicated2fitness ยท -28 points ยท Posted at 19:56:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
how are companies who need to work in secure environs hiring newbs anyways?
Meatslinger ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 20:06:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Iโve been working in school IT for five years now as an avid scripter, but even still, I havenโt memorized EVERY bash command. Thatโs the reason sites like StackOverflow are supposed to exist, as I understand it. Especially for weird stuff like modifying the OS X dock (damn near impossible without dockutil, turns out), for instance.
urda ยท 22 points ยท Posted at 21:35:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Super fucking hard right mate? It's crazy I know, how could anyone work like that?!?!
Aetol ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:54:04 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, why don't all companies just hire veterans?
TheNorthComesWithMe ยท 257 points ยท Posted at 18:17:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You can easily Google the answer to this, so I'm locking it" says the top Google result for that exact question.
MagicLeaves ยท 71 points ยท Posted at 19:51:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This drives me crazy. Thank god for the people who come back later and update their answers even after years.
thomasloven ยท 51 points ยท Posted at 20:02:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
*says the ONLY google result for the words from the error message.
JayInslee2020 ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 04:10:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"This is already been asked and answered multiple times so I'm locking this, but leaving this up so it ranks highest in search results and I'm also not going to link the other threads on the pate".
Dank_Memer_IRL ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 16:14:50 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Every. Single. Time.
alexanderpas ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 20:03:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Just Google it" is considered a harmful answer on the stackexchange network of sites.
RedAlert2 ยท -5 points ยท Posted at 21:27:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
what question did you see this on? I'm pretty sure I've only ever heard of this happening by people complaining on reddit.
seolfor ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 22:38:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This happens to me when I look up something very basic - like interacting with a programming language for the first time or trying a new concept.
RedAlert2 ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 22:44:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hard to say without any concrete examples, but you might be looking at generic questions and not programming questions. SO is (and always has been) about answering straightforward programming questions, not theory/open ended ones.
TheNorthComesWithMe ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 08:34:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't keep links to bad SO answers.
[deleted] ยท 167 points ยท Posted at 17:03:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Zei33 ยท 52 points ยท Posted at 17:14:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or you'll get told to bit shift instead of just giving you a function lol
[deleted] ยท 35 points ยท Posted at 17:23:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
wasdie639 ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 18:56:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I always feel that those who immediately suggest to use a different framework have never worked on mature, released software. If the project for my company is in X language with Y technologies, I can't just tell them to pay for and covert everything over to Z. If that would be my own suggestion, I would probably be let go and replaced by somebody who won't set the company back a year and however many tens of thousands of dollars.
SamJSchoenberg ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:12:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I suppose you just can't please everyone
[deleted] ยท 284 points ยท Posted at 16:57:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Post your code or we can't help you.
EagleZR ยท 226 points ยท Posted at 17:40:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh, I asked a conceptual question once, without any code, and it apparently offended and insulted some people
shmough ยท 85 points ยท Posted at 17:51:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Try softwareengineering.stackexchange.com.
EagleZR ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 17:56:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ooh, thanks. Didn't know that existed
ceeBread ยท 25 points ยท Posted at 19:46:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thatโs another issue, there are so many other sites in the stackexchange network that are useful, but not many people know about it. The people who close questions are too lazy to suggest the proper site and the UI hides the other sites. There used to be a community page that listed the other sites and a small description, but thatโs gone now.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:19:33 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
Diesl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:31:27 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No but a lot of people didn't know that that existed, plus that's not very easy to use :P
spaceneenja ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 18:41:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why should we bother with tagging when you can easily post your question on the only correct one of of x12.073e subdomains? You obvious moron.
Arancaytar ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 07:52:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've definitely invented fictional code examples for SO before because the actual use case was complex enough that I was worried people would get confused or hung up on questioning some irrelevant aspect of the approach.
Shadax ยท 66 points ยท Posted at 17:38:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
posts code containing plain text passwords and sensitive company information
... though maybe that's just scripting forums.
alex2003super ยท 39 points ยท Posted at 18:25:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh dear
greengrasser11 ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 20:36:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Are those passwords?
No those are hashes.. err with salt
password123boobies is salted?
The salt is commonly used passwords
[deleted] ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:39:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And then you post the code only to have the person requesting that code never reply again.
Xhynk ยท 8 points ยท Posted at 17:43:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"My thing doesn't work"
[see look][1]
[1]: Link to shitty MS Paint "mockup" with some red and black lines/vague shapes on it
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:27:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I posted code and still got that response. Like bruh.
zahaco ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:54:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Post your entire development build, logs and hashes or I can't even read your initial question...
jlewallen18 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:33:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I got shit on for this once. I had a browser issue that was causing stuttering while scrolling. Had no idea where to start. Asked on StackOverflow hoping for some debugging help or maybe a culprit to start looking looking for.
โPost code or we canโt helpโ
โDUDE. Do you want my entire project...โ
Ugh.
ecefour ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:57:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
When I post my code people tell he how inefficient it is, and bash me for not knowing any better. But that's why I'm here.
gottahavemycaffeine ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 05:33:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Proceeds to post 20 pages of code
FUZxxl ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:17:50 on August 21, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You don't need to post your actual code and you shouldn't. You should post a minimal, complete, and verifiable example (MCVE). That's a piece of code which exhibits the same issue as your actual code but is cut down to be self-contained and not longer than a page. Ideally, you should have made an MCVE as a part of your debugging process to nail down what causes the issue long before you ask a question so posting it should be a no-brainer. If you post a question without code or with twenty pages of garbage that doesn't compile, this just shows all other users that you don't want to put any effort into your question and prefer to let others do the grunt work of getting to the core of your problem.
serial_crusher ยท 151 points ยท Posted at 17:27:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โIโve got this minor bug in my 10 yeah old jQuery page. Production is on fire, plz help. โ
โSwitch to React, dudeโ
summonsays ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 20:06:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just upgrade from version1 to version8, what's so hard about that?
John_Fx ยท -15 points ยท Posted at 20:39:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thatโs why there is a downvote button.
Arancaytar ยท 134 points ยท Posted at 16:58:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just install jQuery and then do
$().a().PostExistentialism ยท 41 points ยท Posted at 18:27:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Uncaught ReferenceError: $ is not definedThraShErDDoS ยท 31 points ยท Posted at 18:45:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
He said to install jQuery first. Otherwise: var $ = jQuery;
UltraCitron ยท 124 points ยท Posted at 17:22:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Why would you even want to do A? Everything about your decisions and thinking process is wrong, let me show you what I so pridefully believe to be correct, but is in fact an utter trash answer and just makes me feel all high and mighty, and serves as a replacement for the love my mother never gave me."
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:23:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That one hits looooow
[deleted] ยท 29 points ยท Posted at 18:42:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"And no, I haven't tested this reply, and have no experience as a professional software developer, why do you ask?"
ssnazzy ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:10:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
*gives a solution by using library because I taught myself to be an โelite coderโ and thatโs my way to solve everything.
โBtw use this wiki page of some method I just searched up 5 secs ago you pleb.โ
cgameing ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:09:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Almost belongs on r/murderedByWords
DasEvoli ยท 114 points ยท Posted at 18:40:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I add two numbers?"
John_Fx ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 20:42:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I write accounting system in Scala? Must run on Amiga and support Swiss Francs. Send codez
Foremanski ยท 150 points ยท Posted at 16:37:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
AQTheFanAttic ยท 56 points ยท Posted at 18:38:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
this really helped my problem
4d656761466167676f74 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:45:15 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Me too thanks
DarkStarFTW ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 21:02:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
this really problemed my help
merger3 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 23:55:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really removed my duplicate
gandalfx ยท 48 points ยท Posted at 16:40:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Do you mean
$(B)or$(A)?cgameing ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:08:48 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Possible duplicate of $ ( C )
dtfinch ยท 86 points ยท Posted at 16:58:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
percity ยท 33 points ยท Posted at 17:06:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Duplicate question
WhatsAGame ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 18:00:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
THIS POST HAS BEEN MARKED AS DUPLICATE
uziau ยท 32 points ยท Posted at 17:08:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I have never made any question in SO. Almost all my questions have already been asked by someone else before, and if I canโt find any, usually Iโm pressed for time on the job that I donโt have time to create a question and wait for an answer
ACoderGirl ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:53:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Honestly, a very good chunk of the questions I've asked on SO I'm not convinced many people know the answer to (or that there is a solution). The kinds of questions you'd want to ask on SO (ie, not specific to your codebase) tend to honestly have answers a lot of the time.
And yeah, it can frankly often be a lot easier to use an alternative, a workaround, or your own solution (eg, when asking about a library) when you're pressed for time, since you really can't depend on SO being able to answer you anyway. I find I'm usually decent enough at finding those and often by some point, I just wanna know the answer out of curiosity.
dedicated2fitness ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:02:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
yeah the people who run stackoverflow really DON'T want last minute panic questions. they want "enlightened discussion" about code but that rarely happens coz once you got your slideshow to animate why do you give a fuck about how elegantly it does it anyways(esp if it's for your job you've only had for a month with your 1 month of experience in programming real world stuff)?
there's a real shizo split between what new users want out of SO and what kinda new users SO wants. they want college grads asking questions that dig deep but college grads have professors and classmates to ask questions to. they're not going to ask random people online.
rickityrixkityrick ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:29:10 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Tell me more
EddieViscosity ยท 35 points ยท Posted at 18:00:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Oh, you asked a simple Linux question that would be answered by a two line command? Let me show you how to write a 15 line script to solve your problem which you will spend 2 hours to understand."
Brillegeit ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 00:56:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For Linux questions you always have to use the first part of the 2nd comment combined with the last part of the 19th, but only after installing the dependencies listed in the 11th. Preferably do it in a virtual machine with saved state, because there's a hidden trap, bonus points for finding it.
Cyhawk ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 19:08:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Those are good answers if they comment properly. Learning shell scripting is a pretty vital tool.
If its worth doing twice, it's worth scripting.
Ginkgopsida ยท 36 points ยท Posted at 18:35:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just use regex: [)(())()(U('))(())()('''')][][]]]
abstrarie ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 21:45:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ahh good old intuitive Regex. Why do I avoid using it again?
Majik_Sheff ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:54:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Looks like Lisp to me.
Liggliluff ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:29:30 on July 28, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's an invalid code with some useless content. But it does reflect some answers.
Ginkgopsida ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:04:52 on August 8, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is it you? Are you the one that was foretold? The one that understands regex?
Scorxcho ยท 28 points ยท Posted at 18:12:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Why is stack overflow filled with a bunch of smug Nazis who think anyone who doesn't walk on a tight rope to ask a question should not be asking anything?
eshansingh ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 16:21:31 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/261593/4014075
Prof- ยท 52 points ยท Posted at 18:08:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow is full of a bunch of pretentious assholes who think that itโs their way and no other. If youโre new to CS and ask questions theyโll come in like vultures. Used to be a great and inviting community, now itโs just constant down votes.
VWVWVXXVWVWVWV ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:37:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
When I was going through a coding boot camp, they insisted I refer to SO every time I had a question and it was never helpful, but they relied on it for any questions to teach the learner how to find answers on their own. I get that but if I tried SO and was unable to get anything useful, I would have liked other resources to fall back on as well.
bluefish009 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:38:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
yeah SO had changed in bad way.
retardedearthling ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:00:06 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yep.
I honestly don't understand why the community on SO changed so much.
dgriffith ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:12:46 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I wonder if not knowing your actual rep would help. Something similar to Slashdot's "Karma:Excellent", you have broad categories and no definitive number to endlessly chase upwards.
It would help fight the needless farming for points and general gaming of the system, surely?
CJ090 ยท 55 points ยท Posted at 18:52:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do A"
"Fuck yourself and die. You should learn how to code before trying to learn how to code. Didn't you start CS classes when you were in diapers? if not then you're behind the curve. Also, fuck you and die." - Stack Overflow
UnderwaterPenguin ยท 134 points ยท Posted at 17:16:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This infuriates me to no end about StackOverflow.
I'll ask something like "how do I do X" and each responder asks things like -
snugghash ยท 40 points ยท Posted at 17:55:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You don't need to keep the question general, that's the point. It's not Quora
NotALameUsername ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 05:47:12 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Except you do have to keep it relatively generic, because I've had questions closed for being "too specific" before.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 15:41:25 on March 27, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
that close reason was removed years ago precisely because being super specific doesn't make a question off topic anymore.
DanskOst ยท 27 points ยท Posted at 17:47:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Duplicate question
itspinkynukka ยท 23 points ยท Posted at 18:55:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Then you go to the duplicate. Closed for being off topic.
UnderwaterPenguin ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:42:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
lol
ACoderGirl ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:44:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You really need to explain the context often. This is a very commonly known problem on SO called the XY problem. The issue is that by hiding the context, people don't actually know what your real problem might be. You're asking about problem Y, but your problem might actually be problem X. You wouldn't know that you're asking about the wrong thing, of course. It wastes everyone's time when you don't give appropriate context because they'll give you a solution that might not actually work.
It's also perfectly relevant to suggest doing Y when that seems like a suitable answer. If it really doesn't work, explain so. If you can easily preempt these answers, you should point it out in the question since otherwise questions may appear to be duplicates and frankly people waste their time on you because they don't understand your problem. It's hard to answer problems you don't understand and you're not exactly helping them by being vague.
My advice? Format questions nicely into clean sections using formatting to create headers, etc. Then you can have the context explained in one section, the problem (as you perceive it, which may not be the real problem) in another section, and maybe even separate questions in another. This lets people quickly skim relevant sections to not only be able to answer the question (I've seen many questions where both the "proper" question and the users not-quite-right question get answered separately) while also being able to find the relevant context (if they care enough -- not all answerers do).
UnderwaterPenguin ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 20:41:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks for the feedback there.
I'd respectfully disagree that the XY problem is always a problem. Yeah sometimes I might fall in to that but numerous times I have something very specific and I'm not really looking for feedback on how to do it differently.
But you are correct about there being a responsibility on me (the question asker) to format the question correctly and convey the right information. I definitely see a ton of poorly phrased questions on SO.
Appreciate the advice!
RedAlert2 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:31:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If you're descriptive enough in your question, that should be clear enough. The reality on SO is that the majority of questions are overly vague and often times don't even know what their problem is.
treesprite82 ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:32:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
People ask things like this because a large number of questions ask how to do really-difficult-and-never-needed X, when more-common Y is actually the solution. It saves a lot of time getting to the bottom of why the answerer is trying to do X.
Might not be be the case in your situation, but do keep in mind that it's far more often that the OP hadn't considered/known about Y than it is that they have some odd restriction that only X can work with. If possible, explain that you've considered Y but that it wouldn't work because of reason R. It's fine to add context for why you wouldn't be able to use Y.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:41:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But isn't it totally irrelevant why the person isn't doing Y? The problem is that X isn't working, not that Y doesn't work. Y isn't even a part of the conversation.
If you really don't know the answer for X, just leave the question alone, let someone who does reply.
scandii ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 19:51:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"how do you make an omelette with a shoe?"
"why do you need to use a shoe? why not a frying pan?"
"please just tell me how to use a shoe, thanks"
sometimes you're barking up the wrong tree and just need to start all over, no matter how much you might like the idea of cooking omelettes in footwear.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 20:20:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is extreme hyperbole. It's more like "how do you make an omelette in this cast iron pan I inherited?" and the unhelpful answer is "use a nonstick pan instead".
And in any case your solution is the same: you don't know the answer to the question, so you can/should just skip it without comment.
treesprite82 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:05:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Y refers to the actual problem OP wants to solve.
Contrived example, but say someone asks:
print()specifically to print an output message)The vast majority of people who ask that question would actually be asking Y. The useful answer for them isn't some obscure way to use
print()for debug messages, the useful answer is realizing that they actually want Y and giving themconsole.log().If someone is actually asking X, then it helps for them to clarify that they know of
console.log()and/or give a reason why they need to useprint()(even if it's just "I have a bet with a friend that it's possible specifically with print").svick ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:09:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's often hard to answer a question well without any context.
UnderwaterPenguin ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:39:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Respectfully disagree.
There's a million questions that can be asked stand alone without you needing the context to my app. If I'm asking how to manually check out a connection from the connection pool, I'm not looking for advice on why that's a bad idea. Sure, mention it as a disclaimer but answer the question I asked.
That does put some responsibility on me as the question asker to make sure that my question is understandable without the necessary background. Or if needed, I should provide some light context. But the key take away is that I'm not looking for feedback - I'm looking for a literal answer to exact question I asked.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:09:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Especially annoying when the answer is 'I don't want to do X, the last guy wanted to X, and now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to make X do Y because we've got 10,000 lines of legacy code and a deadline!'
retardedearthling ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:57:02 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This question can be easily googled, im locking the thread.
Cal1gula ยท -12 points ยท Posted at 17:34:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The context is often relevant or critical to the proper answer. If you understood that you probably wouldn't struggle with making a post on SO.
Edit: people won't give a bad code example just because you want one. Demanding someone write some free, bad code for you is even worse. Get a grip people.
nephelokokkygia ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:16:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Found thedudehimself.
GamingBit ยท 91 points ยท Posted at 16:51:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really stacked my overflow
Extract ยท 15 points ยท Posted at 17:48:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really overflow'd my stack
[deleted] ยท 17 points ยท Posted at 16:55:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This my stacked really overflow
Cyortonic ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:05:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My this really overflowed stack
[deleted] ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:17:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Flowed over really stack this my
cgameing ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:10:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That really duplicated my stackoverflow
fappolice ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:25:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
His stack overfloweth
VacuumViolator ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:05:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you do me a favor and just stack my overflow?
starius65 ยท 34 points ยท Posted at 17:01:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is why I never feel comfortable when I ask a question to a classmate and they say "ask stackoverflow"
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 97 points ยท Posted at 17:04:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
After asking it on SO: "Possible duplicate of question you asked your classmate"
yadelah ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 20:17:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Now theres your Black Mirror episode.
RealMatchesMalonee ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 04:08:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
More times than not, if you're on the lookout for an answer to a question that has probably already been answered, SO is okay. The sucky part comes when your problem is is extremely specific. Then SO acts like billion dollar value whore.
agisten ยท 16 points ยท Posted at 21:48:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Worst possible "answer" : "Nvm, I figured it out". End post.
Headhunter09 ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 04:40:41 on March 15, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Reminds me of this:
GreyMediaGuy ยท 13 points ยท Posted at 18:10:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
thedudehimself has the right answer. I don't need to eat or pay rent this month, I'd rather have neato code. Besides, nobody ever inherits awful projects and has to keep them running in production, that's just silly talk!
DollarAkshay ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 18:17:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question closed as it is too broad
Willbo ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 19:34:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow is borderline useless for languages with newer versions. I usually Google my issue, land on SO, find a top voted solution, try the answer only to find out it's not supported in the newer version, Google the fuck out of it again, then find another SO thread where the real updated answer is at the bottom of the thread with 2 upvotes. Ridiculous.
phihag ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 23:40:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Upvote the correct answer and leave a comment at the other answer that it doesn't work in the new version!
Willbo ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:04:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I wish I could say that I do that, but I don't even bother logging into my account anymore. The community was just too intimidating so I stopped participating.
Ballin_kapper ยท 20 points ยท Posted at 19:09:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Just posted a question a few minutes ago.
7 views -1 score.
Like I know I'm shit but at least tell me why...
heeerrresjonny ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 21:14:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Downvoting questions should require a comment of more than 3 words tbh. Maybe the same for downvoting answers. People who abuse this or enter meaningless comments should lose downvote rights.
phihag ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:39:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Mind posting the link? I'd be happy to upvote if the question is good, and to try to explain why the question got downvoted.
TheNamesCory ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 16:57:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
So true it stings a little.
moogeek ยท -2 points ยท Posted at 17:28:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And we kinda like it, don't we? ( อกยฐ อส อกยฐ)
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 17:57:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fuck no, I have a job to do. Not a fetish for unanswered questions and rude gatekeeping.
moogeek ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:06:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Even a little? ( อกยฐ อส อกยฐ)
[deleted] ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:08:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No.
DHSean ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 19:34:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I asked how to do a thing in Laravel and got downvoted and my post was removed for asking an easy question.
If it's so easy then help me you bastards!
phihag ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:42:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the URL of that question? If everything is as you say it is, I'd like to reopen it. "Easy" questions are definitely on topic on stackoverflow!
RetardedWhiteMan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:59:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Genuine question, why do people use Frameworks such as Laravel?
DHSean ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:04:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Personally? I don't want to keep writing the same bullshit every time I start a project.
I can just deploy a laravel install and build my project, no faffing about with connecting to mysql or dealing with modals, it's already there ready to go. And the majority of projects that we use daily are built on ancient shit from tesco so I think i'll be fine making a site that attracts 3 people on laravel.
RetardedWhiteMan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:04:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh right, makes sense
I've never really used frameworks, but the majority, especially front end stuff like React (although technically a library), I've always found to be clunky and pointless in so many situations. If you can do it in vanilla JavaScript, or the popular jQuery, why spend the time and effort to set up React or Angular? Just makes the code confusing and bulky needlessly
But my view doesn't matter because I'm just a hobbyist
DHSean ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:51:22 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I can totally see that view point and honestly it's something in the programming community that is quite divided on. Similar to tabs and spaces, people just like doing things differently.
I use laravel for time saving mostly. I likely won't use 60% of what is actually in there for anything but it's nice having it there in the event a project needs it.
But yeah, if you don't use a framework to it's fullest, your totally right it will just make your project bulky.
astheriae ยท 45 points ยท Posted at 17:42:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Image Transcription:
HeckOverflow
bork2121: How do I A ? [-1 votes]
thedudehimself: You do B. [+9999999999 votes]
I'm a volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!
sprcow ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 20:23:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
good not a bot
[deleted] ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 16:57:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
now make one about how ones that can be googled in 2 seconds get billions of views and upvotes but ones that are real questions get no views or attention
agoesin ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 18:19:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I use Actionscript?
You use C+
But that doesn't use Actionscript
No one uses Actionscript
orondf343 ยท 24 points ยท Posted at 17:50:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah, StackOverflow. That place where people answer questions inadequately and then proceed to downvote all other answers while they're at it.
John_Fx ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:41:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You could ask for a refund. Maybe they will dock the pay of the people who answered.
crowseldon ยท -19 points ยท Posted at 18:42:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ah... Reddit. The place where people complain about other communities while not doing anything constructive themselves.
FailSmite ยท 14 points ยท Posted at 19:13:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Because you're only allowed to complain about other things when you yourself are much better at it! Think about that when you rate a restaurant any less than 5 stars on Yelp or some shit.
crowseldon ยท -6 points ยท Posted at 19:21:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well... When your whining is entitled and wrong... It kinda does beget the question of what are YOU doing about it.
Few in this thread seem to have read "how to ask questions the smart way"
mycelo ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:00:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How to build up your reputation on Stack Overflow:
Criticize the question instead of just answering it. Then come up with your own "better" solution. Also, criticize and downvote any attempt to actually answer the original question.
TBSdota ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 20:22:46 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
more like "Whats the command to print screen?"
"I won't know unless you paste your entire script"
isotopes_ftw ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 20:54:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My favorite thing on stackoverflow is when people spend hours berating a person for asking a dumb question instead of spending 30 seconds to answer the dumb question. If you're above answering the dumb question, why is it worth it to berate the person back and forth over hours?
tuseroni ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 09:06:34 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
maybe they feel it's better for the community...reduce the number of people asking dumb questions
AndroidDoctorr ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 20:22:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My impression of StackOverflow:
Q: Whatโs the temperature of the surface of the sun, in K?
Answers:
phonzie ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 17:59:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Enverex ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:07:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
ElRedDevil ยท 12 points ยท Posted at 17:54:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fking hate Stackoverflow. Asked a couple of concept Qs about C++ and got downvoted and insulted. As a non compsci major and beginner SOverflow was downright demotivating.
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:45:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you post the links to those questions? It may be late now, but insulting answers or comments should be flagged as such, which I'd like to do. Anything pertaining not to you but to the question is fine though.
ElRedDevil ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:08:20 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thank you for the offer but I deleted the threads after being downvoted. But I found a CS major friend who helped me out so it worked out.
Asoxus ยท 9 points ยท Posted at 17:28:42 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is a duplicate, question marked closed.
Please see this solution using outdated framework/language from 7 years ago.
caitline215 ยท 11 points ยท Posted at 22:11:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[-3] me: โHow do I do Aโ
[+278] answer: โwhat are you talking aboutโ
I edit...
[-37] me: โHow do I do A, I tried this, but it doesnโt work. Hereโs my codeโ
[+367] answer: โnobody wants to read a wall of textโ
I edit or resubmit...
[-67] me: โHow do I do A, for exampleโ
[+3657] answer: โstop spammingโ
iCanHasIcetea ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:34:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A: "How do I do x without using y"
B: "Just use y, everyone does it."
while_e ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:38:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
stdexception ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:28:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Uses Google to find an answer to a problem
Finds a question similar to your issue
The first reply:
tuseroni ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:54:57 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
semi-relevant xkcd
haykam821 ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 23:05:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
One of my questions was deleted for being a duplicate. My question was about asking if there was an API similar to iOS' SiriKit for macOS. It was marked as a duplicate. The duplicate was before iOS' SiriKit was even announced and is for iOS, not macOS.
harryhho ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 23:13:49 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"I'm working in an environment with certain parameters which don't let me do B so I need something like A"
"I would rewrite everything so you can do B or quit and find a new job"
[deleted] ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:21:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's also always a reply that requires you to use some obscure library or import that has barely any documentation and that only fits a niche problem, but the person swears by it
heeerrresjonny ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:25:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Even well-known, established libraries are pretty annoying in answers tbh. I don't want to pull in a whole library just for a single line or a small block of code... Coding that way as a habit can create a lot of maintenance headaches down the line, especially when someone else inherits your code.
suppow ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 18:34:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the 0 vote answer that the bottom that is very involved and may or may not do A
ryanooooo ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:48:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow has saved my ass numerous times. However, upvoting for the lulz.
Mashiro-chan_ ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 19:07:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My biggest pet peeve is when you ask a question and all of the elitist users come rushing like like "jfc didn't you see this post 5 years ago with a slightly related question and a very long and obscure answer that isn't much help in your specific situation?"
[deleted] ยท 10 points ยท Posted at 17:53:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
crowseldon ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:45:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I went to your history see what kind of programming experience you had to understand where you were coming from and... Oh boy....
Maybe you're not the one to call others cancer... With that obsession of going in subs and calling people retarded rednecks and focusing on their sexual kinks and shit.
TrumpWonSorryLibs ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 22:19:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
why do people stalk through others profiles. who cares?
crowseldon ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 22:24:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I honestly didn't do it to look for dirt or anything just out of curiosity due to the programming thing.
But I guess I think it's fair to do it if they're as brazen as they are about other communities.
I'm not gonna tell you: hah! You post in x or y sub, how could you do that?. You do you. But I will expose hypocrisy if it jumps in my eyes.
The guy clearly couldn't back his comments up cause he bailed.
rumforpenguins ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 18:30:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've found Stack Overflow nothing but tremendously helpful, even when asking my own questions. I don't understand the hate it gets.
heeerrresjonny ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 21:27:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I still use it all the time, and I think it is still mostly helpful, but I have seen every one of these bad examples on the site lol. I think a lot of people are just venting. It can be really, really frustrating to get unhelpful responses from people who probably could help if they weren't busy being pricks lol.
TrumpWonSorryLibs ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 22:22:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
because people on there increasingly are pretentious douches
ze413X ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:37:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've honestly stopped asking questions on stackoverflow. Now when I've finally become an expert in the field I find it amazing how the people that lack the knowledge and hate the question has to voice that opinion. If you can't answer the question then you shouldn't answer the damn question. My last 5 questions are perfect questions in all shape and form. But because the answers in each case had unpredictable answers, or rather, answers which aren't immediately obvious. They got downvote and trashed on as if it was Trevor Noah meeting Trump himself.
The most hilarious questions though has to be the topics that tries to revitalize a topic. Like when something is "clear as day outdated" like a Visual studios question which has an answer directed towards Visual Studio 2008 and some poor little beginner coder on the forums tries to find that option in the 2017 edition. Even then people can close the thread with referal to an nonexisting answer and still hate on the poor man.
madwilliamflint ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:12:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Every.
Fucking.
Time.
meechy_dev ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 18:59:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the โduplicate of [insert link that kinda references the same stuff]. Pls look before asking. Idiot.โ
zenyl ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:08:34 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A: How do I do X with Y framework?
B: Why in the name of Stallman would you even consider using Y? Z is far better.
A: I have to use Y, it's what our CTO chose, and we'd have to rewrite everything from scratch to make it work with Z.
B: [Insert generic, passive-aggressive reply here, implying it's still A's fault]
psycholustmord ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 19:17:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I want real examples of this. Links please ๐ข
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:20:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This one inspired me: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49235143/scala-on-intellij-with-git-how-should-the-gitignore-look-like/
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:39:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Of course, now, the question now has an accepted answer, meaning that the original poster (you?) thought it solved their problem.
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 12:39:53 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It did get one, but it came after the first one and got less upvotes...
AldorPeacekeeper ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:09:00 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You should definitely use jquery"
ferrango ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:19:25 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I love the "-1, not enough jQuery" comment on the sole useful comment
RetardedWhiteMan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:01:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Personally, I love the side bar
zanif ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:41:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Takes me back to middle school where I would get so nervous asking a question in fear of looking stupid. Bunch of elitist pricks.
TwinProduction ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 20:52:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Answers question using jQuery even though the user specified vanilla JavaScript
tuseroni ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 09:07:07 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
THE FUCKING WORST!
can anyone on SO use javascript without jquery?
TwinProduction ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 11:04:54 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
$("body").append("<script>alert('Javascript here');</script>");
Exactually ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 21:03:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Nevermind, I figured it out." - bork2121
ThunderBow ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 23:28:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Also why are you not using "insert bleeding edge framework"??
tuseroni ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:51:27 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
i sure wish i could replace bootstrap with css grids...i mean i can and make it exactly as good as the bootstrap grids, but if i want it to be BETTER, it will only work on firefox, chrome, and edge...but not IE. (by better i mean auto-rows, don't wanna have to SPECIFY the row and column this should go into, then i'd need all the ridiculous markup that i have to use with bootstrap, i want simple and clean...now i have simple and clean stuck in my head...dammit..)
Happysin ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 01:12:32 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am a regular at an industry tech forum. A large chunk of my responses are "Don't to A". Frequently followed up by "but we need A" and I have to explain why A will give a ton of technical debt to your project that you really don't want when B gets you 90% there without any of the debt. Then close the gaps, instead of reinventing the wheel.
BandwagonEffect ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 02:16:56 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You guys exist on a much darker side of stackoverflow than me.
edave64 ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 09:11:05 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once asked a question like that. Got told that what I was doing completely wrong.
Turns out: What I was doing was completely wrong. The responding person fixed my code and made it a lot more readable. Accepted their solution, even though my question went unanswered.
๐๏ธ MarkusA380 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:29:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Great! Getting the full fixed code as answer is rather rate, though.
Spocino ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 15:11:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โI solved itโ -A StackOverflow user, on multiple occasions
ArrrGaming ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 17:17:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
FAKE! There's no "has been closed" on it.
Drainedsoul ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:07:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In fairness the XY problem is very real.
TooManyLines ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:08:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
In fairness they asked X. Just assume they have a brain. Either they really want X or will stumble onto Y by themself over time.
Drainedsoul ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 14:14:53 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is not a very good assumption.
FurryPornAccount ยท 6 points ยท Posted at 17:00:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oof owie my computer hurting code
King_Abdul ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:14:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/u/Sporadicsheep
SporadicSheep ยท 3 points ยท Posted at 17:37:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can confirm
othervinny ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:46:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really coaxed me into a snafu
cruel1079 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:50:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Instructor specifically says not to do B and I need to complete assignment A in only a few hours.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:00:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
RetardedWhiteMan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:02:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/nearlylostredditors?
Jas-Ryu ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:02:01 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Accurate
Comentarinformal ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:18:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Date:03-07-2009
topredditbot ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:30:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey /u/MarkusA380,
This is now the top post on reddit. It will be recorded at /r/topofreddit with all the other top posts.
NoMoreNicksLeft ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:38:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I try to assume that they have a real reason for doing A that's just not obvious to me. But some As are really dumb.
I've been on the other side of it too. And you're fucked either way. If you explain yourself and why you need A, you get punished for that (plus lots of heckling... guys, I didn't choose this infrastructure, people paid five times my salary did 10 years before I hired on). If you don't explain then "do B".
ConfusedCoderHere ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:45:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I fucking hate stack overflow
Kazenovagamer ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:32:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Actually me a couple weeks ago. In our programming class we had to do pass in any number of ints and have the array display them so we needed to make the array as big as the number of things we pass in. I could not for the life me of find a way to make its size change as you pass things in because every answer was "lol use a list" but the assignment was for arrays so I can't do that. Finally I found some random blog post from like 2011 that was the the two words I needed to make it work.
lenswipe ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 19:48:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I fucking hate StackOverflow for this (and the reasons listed in this thread). I remember bitching them out in a thread because you can't do shit until you have like 85 rep. Of course, you can't get that 60 rep because attempts to ask/answer questions etc. get closed by some wanker with 99999999999k rep. stroking his StackOverflow e-penis. Then, someone from StackOverflow appears and I just mysteriously receive 65 rep.
https://i.imgur.com/St0jp7i.png
Want to take a guess at what point in time this all happened?
thelostcow ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:59:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What point in time?
lenswipe ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 22:43:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Well if I had to guess I'd say around here where it took a huge jump from 57 to 85 despite me not having logged in or done anything in months. It was literally within the hour of me complaining about basically being unable to do anything (including vote on things). I got an email saying I'd received like 30 rep. It was almost like "here - STFU and stop complaining".
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:52:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Um, what makes you think this is was an employee of stackoverflow? Your username is the same as on stackoverflow, so somebody might have just looked you up, looked at your questions and answers, and said "yup, that's a good question". No conspiracy needed.
On a funny note: Have you met this commenter?
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:05:45 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you give someone large chunks of rep like that? I thought you could just upvote it downvote like reddit
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:14:36 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
On stackoverflow, reputation is gained by upvotes and lost by downvotes!
To go from 65 to 85, you need just 2 upvotes on answers, or 4 on questions.
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:57:27 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
wait so you get 10 rep per upvote?!
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:05:06 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Correct, for every upvote on one of your answers, you get 10 rep. The link I posted contains the full list of how you receive and lose reputation.
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:27:00 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
!!!
my whole life is a lie
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:58:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I guess StackOverflow doesn't appreciate meta-humour..
thelostcow ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:42:10 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Thanks for replying. Yeah, that's pretty bullshit. I don't speak on StackOverflow anymore because of my experiences there.
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:58:25 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, I mean basically you have like a small selection of people (who don't necessarily work for S.O) with like
Number.MAX_VALUErep who basically consider themselves god and sit there stroking their stack-overflow e-penis that they acquired about 10 years ago when you could get thousands of rep by answering basic "How-to" questions. Occasionally, they pause this activity as someone pointed out to close various questions and mark things as duplicate. When this happens there is no opportunity for discussion or appeal. It's just done. You're on your own buddy now. GL;HF, fuckface.I hate that community so much. I like that it exists sort of and it has some useful information, but I don't think anyone could write me a cheque large enough that would incentivise me to invest my time and energy in it.
thelostcow ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:20:21 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
One interview I had when I was switching to software engineering after years of another engineering discipline without a software engineering related degree they asked what my SO rep was. I'm really glad I didn't get that job knowing what I know now.
lenswipe ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 15:24:18 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yeah, that's a red flag right there.
Conor3000 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:13:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Love this. Especially when I'm told to do A by a teacher. And not taught B or B doesn't work, so I throw together some janky shit from answers about A. Wouldn't have passed HNC Computing without janky shit.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:24:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
yOu dO ๐ ฑ๏ธ
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 23:46:14 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stack overflow is great when I'm trying to find something. But I would never post there. Just seems like if you don't write a doctoral dissertation complete with full scientific method on how you tried to solve your problem, people will harass you saying "I'm not going to do your homework for you."
BowsersaurusRex ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:53:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow has become worthless. The only questions that get answers are ones that can be answered by the docs in a few seconds. Everything else is marked off topic, or duplicate when the other answer isn't a duplicate or is for an obsolete version.
Dithanial ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 01:47:12 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I am so glad to find out I'm not alone. I'm pretty thorough in my research through docs and my Google - Fu is strong, but there have been times where I've had nowhere else to turn other than StackOverflow. At first, it really turned me off from learning to program, but I've gotten past that. I have had several good questions answered even though they were down voted. I've also submitted some accepted answers while getting lectured that my answer wasn't right, even though it satisfied the OPs question.
hyliandanny ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:17:31 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really closed my duplicate question.
JayInslee2020 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 03:58:09 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's like asking for help on a forum:
Does anybody know of a way I can do X without doing Y? These are the circumstances why Y doesn't work in this instance even though I already know that way and read the article about it.
Response 1: Why don't you just do Y?
Response 2: Well, doing Y is better for me. This is how you do Y.
Response 3: I don't know, but I talk about this unrelated thing.
Response 4: I did Y; worked for me.
Response 5: Here's a link to the article to do Y. Hope it helps!
weinde ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 06:32:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This picture perfecrly sums up the SO... all that is missing on this picture is a comment from a guy that whrites "read a manual on how to post on SO hurr durr duurr"... SO is the f*cking cancer of comunity
Flyberius ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 10:00:59 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That's been my experience with a lot of tech support forums.
Lay out a concise explanation of your problem and what you'd like to achieve. Pages of logs to make sure anyone willing to help has what they need.
First response:
"I don't see why you would want to do that."
fantasifull ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:22:47 on March 14, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ha! I'm facing this exact problem now. I'm specifically required to use XmlHttpRequest for an assignment at university. When I needed help with it, people just tell me to use fetch instead.
iOSGuy ยท 7 points ยท Posted at 18:06:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is never a problem with iOS, this is ALWAYS the problem with Android answers. Yeah, looking at you Mr. HolierThanThou CommonWares.
[deleted] ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 18:44:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I suspect CommonWares was once very helpful and has just grown bitter over the years, to the point that he or she just shits on every question.
QuantumQuantonium ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 17:15:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Question unclear, please repost to /r/stackcirclejerk.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:15:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm so over B. I'm all about C now. C is lit.
ElTortugo ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 17:57:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But what about the D, do you like the D?
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:15:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Only after I take a little E.
[deleted] ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 18:36:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
repsolcola ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Cutting away the rot is ok, but too often they chunk off fresh meat.
WatchDogx ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:51:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
ITT people salty thier crappy questions get downvoted and no one brave enough to actually link an example to a question they asked.
SO might not be perfect, but most of the time your question fails, its your fault.
How many times a day do you google a question and get a high quality SO answer first result?
SO's curation is a large part of ehat makes that possible.
benabus ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 20:57:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
0 to 1... 90% of the SO questions that google pulls up for my queries have no answers.
WatchDogx ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 21:15:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If you end up solving the problem, you could improve the odds for the next person.
tuseroni ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 09:09:04 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
i've not figure out SO's commenting restrictions...either you can't comment til you have posted some number of questions...or you can't ask questions til you have posted some number of comments, or you can't post unless someone lets you...whatever it is any time i've tried posting i couldn't and i didn't care enough to figure it out.
WatchDogx ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:41:11 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
New users can both ask and answer questions.
Yeah you can't comment against an existing question or answer, but that is to prevent the common mistake new users make of asking or answering questions via comments.
Cr3X1eUZ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:32:25 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Wow! What kinds of projects are you working on?
MisturDust319 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:42:11 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Heck.
Roadsoda350 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:03:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You can do this with jQuery"
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:15:05 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey, u/MarkusA380 . I was your first upvote on this post. Congrats man.
Filibut ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:16:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
so true
doodszzz ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:18:44 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
heck overflow logo looks like an overflowing pancake
farmerfreeman ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:19:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
skybluegill ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:21:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really crowdsourced my answers
CodeGrunt ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:24:04 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This was supposed to be funny but it just made me sad...
decentDango ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:30:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How to do X? Answer without external code: 2 votes Answer that is just a link to a plugin: 100 votes and selected answer.
Jabulon ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Its scary to ask, but it does attract some quality answers
NPVT ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:32:57 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You do B do B do
ebrahimessam ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:34:33 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
-4 points and moved to off-topic
RaisonDetriment ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:34:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This isn't even just a programming joke, this is life.
fj333 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:39:07 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Very true, as I just wrote in another comment: like life, you get out of StackOverflow what you put into it. And I've found the site to be a great resource.
It's only a joke if you're on the wrong side of things.
Brio_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:34:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Space before the question mark. This needs to be edited!
Pepe_Gui ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:35:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu ?
Kiefyking ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:36:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's not the code forum we need, it's the code forum we deserve...
ifiwereabravo ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:38:36 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I know and everyoneโs madd all the time in replies
JasonDarkX2 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:39:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Lol
noisyturtle ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:39:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
It's queries all the way down.
bluefish009 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:40:16 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I don't like your question, your post will be deleted.
DanThMann ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:41:30 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
theonlydidymus ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:45:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I used to see more people defending SO by saying โthey need to be douches to keep the site from being crap,โ
I am really glad after 20 minutes of scrolling that I didnโt see that comment.
StackOverflow has only been useful to me for surface level stuff lately. I look for solutions elsewhere on โhardโ questions. Iโll read some dudeโs blog before using SO.
corqezi ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Oh god that's so true it hurts
Odatas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Internet in a Nusthell:
"I wanna do A"
"But Why? B is better"
PutridFang ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:54:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
aww heckin'
Bjeaurn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:55:12 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I own kekoverflow.com, had the idea of turning it into a joke collection site. Never got around to it. Anyone want to buy it from me for โฌ10.000?
pls_pressy4pie ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:05:08 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I want it. Email me konnorrigby@gmail.com
Seltiix ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:04:37 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do i do A?
Use std::vector
EliteWhiteMan ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:05:24 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
Handtuch1 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:06:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Too real
nilespsych ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:07:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Now please accept my answer as correct.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:10:31 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Congrats on r/all
FollowSteph ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:13:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Closed as duplicate because although it appears generally the same to another itโs not but that would mean paying closer attention.
blbrd30 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:23:54 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I once used stack overflow as an unknowing undergrad
I was severely reprimanded for my earnestness
CovertCoding ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:32:23 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
During my first internship I was working solo on a small project and I had to do something which seemed difficult with the tech I had, so I remembered stack overflow, made an account and asked.
Q: How do I get X using Z.?
A: Do A,B,C
Me: thanks a bunch that worked
Commenter: good, please upvote my answers as its standard courtesy if I helped you with your problem...
I couldnโt upvote him cause my account was too new and when I told him that he downvoted me :(
Never went on stackoverflow again regardless of my college professors bowing down and praising it over the years
mattkenefick ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:33:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is my biggest pet peeve.
"You should try doing this instead."
That's not what I fucking asked man. I wasn't looking for alternatives.
amalgamatecs ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:33:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This reminds me of when my company chose to write an ODBC driver in .net. if you're wondering why.... managed code fixes allot of flaws that ODBC drivers typically have regarding memory/handle leaks. Googling was like "not possible, don't bother" or "why not just use c/c++" we wrote it and the thing is a tank.
coomzee ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:36:06 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You can do this with jQuery and a 3GB image download.
OxfordGeansai ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:41:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is even worse on any Apple Mac forums
pgoetz ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:47:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That pretty much describes StackExchange these days.
qui-sean ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:50:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I'm the dude mannnnn
NoxiousDogCloud ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:50:55 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Q: from an end user perspective without admin rights, what would be a good work around to this problem?
A: get admin rights
Wow thx
CroptyCrypto ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:53:15 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
FlackOverflow.
service- ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:53:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Where is the logic
boringdude00 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 19:56:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Is there something about the Stack format that attracts certain types of people? I don't use StackOverflow but StackExchange is just as bad, both for legit professional questions and casual stuff.
sharkn8do ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:00:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I got a 6 month ban for asking 10 questions in a row that didn't get upvoted. Sorry I have obscure questions
phihag ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 00:06:29 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You did not get banned for questions that didn't get upvoted. You got banned for questions that got downvoted - specifically these two.
sharkn8do ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:10:42 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Still though, -3, -4? I got banned because go daddy is a POS and people didn't like my formula? Seems a little shitty to me
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:26:28 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
No, you didn't get downvoted because of the topic of your questions. You got downvoted because this question lacks a complete and verifiable example, especially as it was asked originally, and this question is a 642-word essay about how to send mail with GoDaddy without having read the first google result for send mail godaddy.
However, there is something you can do: Improve the questions! Fix typos, clean them up (text like I understand this might be straight impossible. is not necessary). I apologize for being so direct, but as far as I can see you didn't do that either.
blgke ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:00:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
SheolCodeMonkey ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:04:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
And my favourite
4as ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:06:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do I change a tire on a bike?
Just buy a car.
nnexx_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:07:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hecking bamboozoled
Ollymid2 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:11:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ooh I spy the word heck
OP must be a good boye posting from a Christian intranet
Sagittar0n ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:16:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Closed as not a real question"
DTF_20170515 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:20:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Does anyone have the SO mock image of "help I'm trapped in a car trunk and the only way I can communicate is via stack overflow"? I can't find it anymore.
nsomnac ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:23:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
What gets me is Iโll ask a question, have someone start a clarifying question then the โfuck me Iโm a moderatorโ who just closes your SO question because they think itโs off topic, and because SE is so fragmented they have no way of moving a question to the right place - as if there is a right place.
So I end up wasting most of a morning cross posting followup questions the various SO family of sites because the mods are assholes.
Korzag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:25:38 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Don't forget questions that follow the template:
icorrectotherpeople ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:27:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Fucking same
bdvx ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 20:30:28 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Heres B in coffeescript
Bunnymancer ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:24:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Everyone always hates on SO..
So.. is there a better option?
If the site is unusable for most people, where do they go to ask questions?
tuseroni ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:05:49 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
i doubt one exists, if one was made it would be occupied by the same people. it's not a problem with the site...it's the people. you pretty much always find elitism where nerds congregate, and the programming community has lots of religious wars over tools and standards (i mean personally i hate bootstrap and jquery, and don't hate windows as much as i DID...but mostly because absence makes the heart grow fonder...and every time i get over my hatred of ie, i get some fucking ie related problem with some website i'm making, just. fucking. die. already!)
the programming community tends to be less jolly cooperation and more "the thing you like sucks" "nuh uh, the thing YOU like sucks, my thing is awesome"
Eliaznizzle ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:27:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/coaxedintoasnafu
Jarmahent ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 21:41:43 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I really don't like that site. Bunch of dick heads.
Corn_11 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:03:53 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I hate the fact that in computer programming there is this quota of how to do things.
โYes A is more simplistic has better readability, but B is more useful in this one very specific situationโ
โBut I know that I wonโt be in this specific situationโ
โShut up and follow standardsโ
Zexks ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:04:52 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I've successfully used SO about 5 or 6 times to find an actual answer (as in the answer was directly on an SO question). I've asked 6 questions. 1 was answered satisfactory (I was able to implement their suggestion and it fixed my issue), 1 answer said I can't do what I was asking to do, 2 of them had answers there were either unrelated to my question or didn't work, and 2 never got an answer at all.
I spent well over 2 hours crafting the ones that got any kind of replies. Pulling out my code, removing identifying or security risk info. Formatting all that I had tried, and justifications for what I had tried, why I can't do what the easy google searches tell you, and why the other 'similar' answers on SO are not answers. Without this, I'm sure even those that got replies would have been shut down or trailed off into unrelated threads.
stilloriginal ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:04:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"closed for being off topic" - literally the #1 hit on google for the issue I am searching
skittersburnerphone ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:04:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You can't do A with B. Because A can't be done with B. B is not a tool that can be used to correctly do A. As I have answered in A-and-B questions here so many times before, the use of B will not allow you to do A. B is a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by A. A is not B-solvable problem and hence cannot be solved by B. B is not equipped to break down A into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me.
DrFortnight ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:05:41 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I use language dedicated discord servers, has been wrking well enough so far
jbob133 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:07:58 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My whole experience learning python in 1 picture.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:09:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"Follow the guide here: broken link."
Usus-Kiki ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:13:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I tried using stack overflow at the start of college and quickly realized how dogshit it is. Itโs just a pissing contest of programming elitism, not helpful at all for asking questions when youโre a computer science student.
Tadaboody ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:17:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This really j'd my query
Zimboboys ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:26:26 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Does anybody here have an actual guide for using StackOverflow? I have questions, but they're always downvoted or removed. :(
phihag ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:56:59 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Stackoverflow has a pretty good help. There's also the Internet classic How to ask smart questions (not specific to stackoverflow, long predating it, assumed to have been read by everyone). If you tell me your username (or link to the questions that were downvoted), I'd be happy to explain why I think they were downvote, and help you improve them, either in private chat or right here.
squirrelthetire ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:31:21 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
But really, even though no one does A in OP's use case, this is the post that will be atop DuckDuckGo/Google/etc. for anyone who has a real need to either do A, or understand why not to do A.
This is the biggest problem I have with stackoverflow. People care more about solving problems than answering questions, and that leaves us with rotten search results.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:32:20 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
can we get an AMA with a guy from StackOverflow who tells people off for a living? we could ask him questions like how do you live with yourself and other such mysteries.
cheesepizza180 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:41:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
thought i was in r/coaxedintoasnafu
DaddyDom48 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:50:09 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I hate this too. I'm an experienced coder so I usually ask very specific questions and there is always the inevitable "tell me what you're trying to accomplish".
I'M TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH GETTING A STRAIGHT EFFING ANSWER TO MY QUESTION.
cipher__ten ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 22:50:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Am I the only one who doesn't have this problem? SO is almost always a solid source. The only time it doesn't answer my questions is when my question turned out to have a flawed premise, so when I see "Nobody does A" I reassess. Not always, but usually there was a good reason why they told me that.
Pariahdog119 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:01:32 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/CoaxedIntoASnafu is leaking
henry8362 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:11:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is literally why I stopped asking questions on stack overflow! Like i'm there asking because I don't know what isn't working, even when I think i'm being super like helpful by formatting stuff explaining every variable even linking the repo people still roast you.
CarthOSassy ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:31:03 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
If someone links to the "XY Problem" blog unironically, it is legal to murder them under international law.
repsolcola ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:35:27 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Welcome to SO. Please understand SO is not a free coding service. You have to make some attempt to solve the problem yourself. If you can't get it working, post what you tried and we'll help you fix it. Also, see the How to Ask page.
borktheuruk ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:38:45 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hey, another Bork.
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:40:17 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Idk. Some people just go there without even read the question and apply the solution given. And u know what? It works like a charm
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:50:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
I was recently trying to figure out why the Android emulator (AVD) kept crashing for me when using the hardware accelerated mode on Linux. So many people just telling people to switch to software mode. But the performance of the emulator without the hardware acceleration isn't that great... Still haven't fixed it.
tuseroni ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 08:47:38 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
it sounds like it would be a graphics card driver problem. nvidia?
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:52:44 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
That is what I think. I have the open source Nvidia drivers installed because that is the only way I could get xrandr working for dual monitors because I had notable performance issues with xinerama. I haven't actually tested this theory out though.
tuseroni ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 09:25:30 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
that sounds about right, it's been some time since i've use the open source nvidia drivers but when i did they did not support hardware acceleration. have you tried the official drivers from nvidia (i don't know if i ever DID get opengl working though)
0x1F595 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:57:33 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
For using the emulator no.
jasontroyhimself ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:54:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Funny name.
teiman ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 23:55:35 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Knowledge is asking how to do A. Experience is telling why doing A is a bad idea. Wisdom is ignoring the question altogether.
L1QU1DF1R3 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:03:52 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The worst is ending up on stack overflow from a google search and the only response is some snarky fuck saying "have you even googled the answer?"
PM_ME_NSFW_STUFFS_ ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:17:23 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or downvotes without comments
blazingKazama ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:38:13 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The given solution is not very effective, Here is a link to article on C which has references to A.
c3534l ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:50:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Closed as Duplicate Question even though no one has asked it before.
retardedearthling ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:52:51 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"You can easily google the answer to this question, im locking the thread."
aboardthegravyboat ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 00:54:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This was me today...
Like, yeah, I would love to rewrite that stored proc as a table-valued function, but I'm a subcontracted cog in a corporate machine and don't have nearly that sort of access and if I had it my way I would have never ended up on this SQL server thing in the first place.
IceEye ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:00:10 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Or:
"How do I do A"
+999999 Incredibly overcomplex answer that may do A, but it would take you about an hour to find out
-9 Answer that is significantly less complicated that worked instantly when tested
Comment saying not to use this technique without specifying why
Shin-Dan-Kuruto ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:09:44 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This is pretty much my experience anytime I need to look up a tech issue.
Supertrinko ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:10:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do this in Excel?"
"Don't use Excel."
"But I'm only allowed Excel!"
goldleader71 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:37:35 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
This guy codes.
twtwtwtwtwtwtw ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:42:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You forgot the obligatory reply: "I don't understand your stupid question you mouth breather"
lambdaq ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:00:55 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Ctrl+F "Closed for off topic" upboat.
grenadier42 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 02:39:40 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"How do I do X in HTML/CSS?"
"You should use Boost"
tuseroni ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:42:17 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
or anything to do with javascript, i feel like SO doesn't know how to write javascript that isn't jquery.
HomerNarr ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:23:56 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
thats mac overflow
THEGOLDENMUSHROOM ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 04:30:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Rush a cykar
EmeraldDS ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 07:55:04 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
/r/coaxedintoasnafu
Hemeligur ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:06:16 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
The real problem is that SO is not a Q&A platform anymore (if it ever was). It is a solve-the-problem-for-the-OP-while-underestimating-the-OP-ability-to-think-and-fucking-use-Google-in-the-almost-2020s kind of platform.
There's a billion questions asking about A, with answers pointing to B. There are two possibilities: 1- The OP really wants to know about A and B is not the answer; 2- The OP actual problem is in fact in B. The answerer's problem though is the question and he/she should not attempt to solve the OP's problem instead of answering the question. If it does or not solve the OP's ultimate problem is out of the scope of the question. If A does not solve, the OP should investigate and possibly ask another question. SO shouldn't be a substitute for the user's own problem solving abilities.
Obs: Just realised I used "OP" a lot. Was referencing the imaginary SO's OP, not this post's OP.
Kalthramis ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:28:58 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Can you link us to the thread you screenshotted this from?
jfq722 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 09:58:26 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Its definitely a helpful place but when people roll their eyes at software developers its alot of the personality types there that are responsible for that stereotype.
gtfovinny ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 10:34:02 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โThis question has been marked as duplicatedโ
toiletduck123 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 13:44:21 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Heck Overflow needs to become a sub reddit
kyz ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 14:26:55 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A = Parse HTML with regular expressions
LordTyrius ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:18:08 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There is a js framework that does b c and d. You are welcome. - 2k18
Damascus-Steel ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 06:38:29 on April 11, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
โWhy would you do A?โ
โBecause my fuck-head programming professor is 70 years old and a fuck-head.โ
MissionCow ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 01:06:26 on April 18, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
r/HeckOverflow
islegolas ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:31:38 on June 30, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
i thought that stackoverflow was stuckowerflow
passcork ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:54:14 on July 26, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
My experience.
How do I do A?
"Go read a book"
C4RB0N ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:24:18 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
A? I'm all the way down to R.
ThecerealGamer ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 17:28:47 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
He should be at -3 tho
keyonte0 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:29:50 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Seeing this as the answer to every problem I Googled is why I gave up on Linux back in like 2010.
aiij ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:42:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 18:06:13 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
heeerrresjonny ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 21:20:19 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
"spectrum worthy" is pretty offensive when used that way...
[deleted] ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 16:21:28 on March 23, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[deleted]
heeerrresjonny ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 18:46:45 on March 23, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
You meant to offend/insult people with ASD?
VodkerAndToast ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:16:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Me: (Copies code posted in question) Why is A not working?
[deleted] ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 17:41:29 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
StackOverflow is one of the reasons I fell out of love with programming
LosEagle ยท 0 points ยท Posted at 07:57:19 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Answers to question about complex undocumented specific problem that only few people run into:
We won't do your job for you stupid noob.
Answers to question about something simple and documented but devs run into it frequently:
Just do it like this...
carnyvoyeur ยท -9 points ยท Posted at 18:33:51 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
[EDIT: serious comment in a humor sub... sorry in advance.]
The ultimate purpose of SO is not to answer your question. It is to curate the best answers to quality questions.
This doesn't mean that it is useless to beginners; in my experience, most beginners who get less-than-ideal results from SO suffer from poor question-asking skills. Many newbs take criticism of their question wrong; they aren't being shit on, they are being encouraged to improve their question's clarity & completeness, so that people can help them properly. If that sounds like too much effort, consider that you are asking people to help you for free. Think of the requests to improve your question first as the price of getting your answer.
Finally: if you are new & inexperienced, be ready to accept that your entire approach might be fundamentally flawed. In those cases, the "you do B" answers are better answers than the flawed "how do I A" questions could have ever hoped to have gotten.
crowseldon ยท -11 points ยท Posted at 18:36:02 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
So much entitled whining about stack overflow... When I've had questions I've asked them "the smart way" and usually don't need to ask anything in the first place because research covered it but if I do, people will recognize the uniqueness of the query and answer.
Maybe people should realize that no one owes them anything or set the example of what they wanted to see themselves.
fj333 ยท 5 points ยท Posted at 19:36:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
+1e6
You get out of StackOverflow what you put into it. Much like life. And also like life, entitlement leads to nothing but sour grapes. As a total newbie some years ago, I had no issues getting answers to good questions. And as an experienced SWE today, I have no issues answering good questions. And while I rarely actual post questions anymore, I use the site daily for its massive repo of knowledge, to save me from asking repetitive questions, i.e. the way it was intended to be used.
fj333 ยท 2 points ยท Posted at 07:26:50 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Hilarious that you got downvoted while I got upvoted for agreeing with you.
xaled1011 ยท -8 points ยท Posted at 17:42:56 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes doing A is not a bright idea..
Jarhyn ยท 4 points ยท Posted at 22:55:40 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Sometimes, you have to do A.
Like for instance, continuing program execution after an illegal instruction was encountered. Usually this is on the list of things that are widely agreed on to be bad. But very rarely, you need to. Why would you ever want to not crash after an illegal instruction? Well, sometimes your binaries were compiled for a slightly different platform, you have no source, and you just have to make the incompatible binary work on the platform you have.
Or you get an obfuscated Java application dropped in your lap and told you need to figure out how to make it puke out baked in values so you can access the keys in the self-signed signing certificates it generates, and sign software in the same way it does because the actual signing tool is a huge pain to use, and the only way to do that and compile against the packages in the original is to change symbol names in the project because some happen to be renamed to keywords by the obfuscation utility. For the record, there's a Java class explorer utility out in the world that is capable of doing this, but according to stacko it just couldn't be done.
xaled1011 ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 08:58:11 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Yes you are right, sometimes you have to get dirty and hack yourself into a solution. And sometimes, the "right solution" is too long for a small application.
Nevertheless, sometimes programmers implement stupid solutions. As a security analyst, i've seen many hacks and workarounds for fictive problems that are simply stupid.
So context matters when asking a question in stackoverflow, if you find someone who can help you.
Jarhyn ยท 1 points ยท Posted at 12:32:51 on March 13, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
Honestly, I still don't know what I would need to do to implement the fix for the illegal instruction problem in x86, because of the variable-length instruction set, and nobody anywhere was willing to tell me a heuristic for figuring it out or even a library that had that heuristic. It's apparently deep in the world of the black hat to be have a library capable of machine code analysis. The actual problem itself was between on Power/PPC arch, which has a fixed instruction width; I just had to figure out how to tell the OS not to crash me when I returned from an exception handler I wrote to read the failed instruction and do an equivalent task (copy 64 bits? Or maybe array copy? It's been a year or two since then)
HolaSoyDiego1403 ยท -1 points ยท Posted at 17:32:22 on March 12, 2018 ยท (Permalink)
How do i a?