About the question about "this" in JavaScript. And how to "get rid of it". I always give it another name! Like car = this. Then I'll write car.engine instead of this.engine. It makes life much easier as I do not have to worry about "car" changing in sub-functions. And it's much easier to search and replace if I want to change the variable name.
My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
221–230 of 239 posts
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#222First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…
We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.
You can make it so that if a closed question gets an answer, the question will only be visible for the one making the question and the one answering the question.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#223SO is one of the best things that has happened on Internet, but lately it became really annoying due to all these closed questions by over-zealous moderators. More often than not, my questions are closed just because they are not mainstream (for example, embedded related) or slightly reassembles existing questions, that ask totally different things. One solution, that comes to my mind could be not to allow all moderators close all questions, but only these, that are in moderator's area of expertise. For example, if you want to close a question tagged "Java", you must have >5000 or so reputation in Java field.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you ask that instead of browsing through the most recent 50 questions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service ?
I don't know much about how SO works but your query got truncated to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang It didn't seem particularly useful for such a question. I could see why the poster might be tempted to ask. Perhaps there is a particular way that SO should be searched? The recursive irony is both amusing and annoying: doing a google search, coming to an SO answer where a commenter rants "why don't yo…
It was truncated because monksy and I used placeholders. If you use real values for lang and service you get good results, here's an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java+oauth
Do you notice that all the questions in the result are tagged both java and oauth?
monksy didn't say which particular languages and services he's interested in (the male pronoun seems safe in his case) but I venture to guess that if suitable libraries do exist, then there'll be SO questions about them already and they're easy to find.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.
An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag. I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a mont…
Sometimes I find a two year old post on HN that I want to comment on, but it's "closed" - the reply button is gone. HN should implement that when N hits from Google occur, it bumps it back to the front page and makes it able to be discussed again.
More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Better to have a bad question closed quickly than have it accumulate bad answers and rude comments and downvotes." Unless it's offensive in some way, this seems like a terribly short-sighted way of handling bad questions. Ask questions back or offer suggestions for improving the question. Closing or deleting it doesn't teach the person anything, and it doesn't help the community.
Furthermore, it assumes excellent judgement on the part of the closers, who by definition don't have the full context. They are confident in imagining that a particular question will accumulate bad answers etc, but do they have any data to demonstrate that their imagination is any good? It may be, but then again, it may not be. It's not like no one has ever had bad judgement before. So it might be useful to bias the…
Totally. I do come across duplicates and bad questions which necessarily must be closed, but I always do my best to help solve the problem that the human on the other end of the question is experiencing via the comments. There are rules, mostly good, mostly in need of enforcement to keep quality up, and I think they work in the individual human context.
There's a balance of rights / responsibilities, and if you have the right to closevote questions and earn magical rep points, you have the responsibility to explain why and try to help.
Herd-mentality and behaviour (demonstrated as closevote requests) seem like the opposite of this.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should post a question and then answer it yourself, so that people in the future will see it.
That's a good point, and an idea I hadn't thought of.
For the future :)
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#228First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…
I've stumbled upon "too localized" a few times and it's BS. Just because I'm daring to build a desktop app on OpenBSD doesn't mean it's not a real question.
Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem doesn't stem from people just being wankers in a chat room, it's a deeper problem than that. It's hard to know exactly why people voted to close the 'niche' question you're talking about, but I had to rant recently to someone else who was complaining about how their 'recommend me a library' question was closed unjustly. What is Stack Overflow's goal ----------------------------- To be a large repository o…
> I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. I think this is mostly a problem in so far as answers aren't updated. I'd say that for most "well formed" question belonging on SO that was answered correctly years ago -- most of those answers might no longer be entirely correct and/or the questions themselves might "block" newer (up to date) formulations of the same…
I have experienced this. Asking questions about a new version of something, and having it closed with a pointed to a prior version of things that explicitly does not work any more.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#230SO jumped the shark for me when its scope shifted hard from the original goals. I remember the original seedling goals that Spolsky posted; for example, a question is likely inappropriate for SO if its answer couldn't involve code. That got lost awful fast. Oh, and remember how it was going to be all Wikipedia of programming, where really good answers would be zipped together so that SO became the defacto good-idea r…
SO has definitely out-stripped what came before. They were generation 1 and had gen-1 problems.
SO is generation 2, better than generation 1. But it's having gen-2 problems. I think a lot of it is because they are so proud of having fixed the gen-1 problems that they refuse to see their gen-2 problems.
Eventually we will see generation 3.