Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#61

Post by maxerickson » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 12:53 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59

maxerickson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is arguably more specific. It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them. That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or n…

Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is something you should know when leaving primary school.

Are you saying that you can't find a point of view where it would be a more specific question? Because that's what I meant when I said 'arguably'.

Saying that you can find a point of view where it isn't more specific isn't really that interesting (to me) as a response to that. Hopefully the rest of my comment is enough to see that I was not particularly defending the SE status quo.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#62

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 12:55 PM UTC

SiVal wrote: post #52

I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can provide you with the most useful answer, but by who can be first to find a reason why your question doesn't deserve an answer (and then to block anyone willing to answer from being able to do so). Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners i…

In SO's case, clearly the mod culture is not improving the quality or the reputation of the site.

But I think it's mostly the hacker content that has this issue. The format seems to work better in other contexts.

As someone said about academia - maybe the battles are so ferocious because the stakes are so low.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#63

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 1:02 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #61

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is something you should know when leaving primary school.

Are you saying that you can't find a point of view where it would be a more specific question? Because that's what I meant when I said 'arguably'. Saying that you can find a point of view where it isn't more specific isn't really that interesting (to me) as a response to that. Hopefully the rest of my comment is enough to see that I was not particularly defending the SE status quo.

If I squint hard enough...

Anyway, I was just refering to the first sentence. The rest of your comment is an interesting proposal, though at this moment I don't have any thoughts on it worth sharing.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#64

Post by maaaats » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #57

olavk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it bluntly, it would have been much more educational for you if you had actually tried to code it yourself. If you during this had encountered a concrete problem or question which you couldn't solve on your own, you could have posted it on SO.

But it's perfectly acceptable to ask how to split a string in C#? That's not covered many other places? It's a duplicate, yet highly up voted question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a... There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.

It is highly upvoted because many people have found it useful. Contrary to your question, it's a question with many uses.

>That's not covered many other places? (...) >There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.

So what?

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#65

Post by maaaats » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #43

fapjacks wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echoing other sentiments, this is not a good question at all. You haven't shown code that you've tried, you're not asking a specific question about the problem you're having writing such code, and (worst) you're basically asking someone to write the code for you. This is a code request, NOT a question about coding.

* How do I loop over an Emacs buffer and process each line? * How do I split a string in Elisp? * How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer? All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.

Why didn't you ask that question, then?

A general concept with many uses is useful for many, and would have stayed.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#66

Post by collyw » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #9

melling wrote: post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

> It was a pretty good question No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.

I am sure you could classify a fair number of SO questions as "asking someone to write code for you".

I have been down voted a number of times for "where to start with X (in order to do Y)" type questions - where I am in the same situation and don't have the time to read everything in the docs, to produce what is likely a few lines of code.

The SO response is along the lines that it will generate too many answers or opinions. They are usually closed without receiving any answer whatsoever. I have pointed this out to moderators, but they just post back links to meta pages.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#67

Post by savanaly » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

scrapcode wrote: post #21

stinos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of s…

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

Much the opposite for me. I get help from IRC all the time, but the one or two conferences I went to no one seemed very talkative or helpful at all.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#68

Post by collyw » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #31

ayrx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are clearly not a frequent user of Stack Exchange because you do not know about the meta sites which are available to discuss moderation decisions. And if you are not a frequent user who are you to say that "the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation"?

That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.

That sounds exactly like my experience. Challenge anything on moderators, and you will be down voted to hell. Its like normal site down voting on steroids. "Do not question the mods"

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#69

Post by EduardoBautista » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 3:38 PM UTC

bjwbell wrote: post #26

scrapcode wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.

The rust community is very helpful overall.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#70

Post by chippy » Sun, Mar 01, 2015, 3:40 PM UTC

The mod explanation for the Neural Net question is revealing:

"This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet"