What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

Post by oauea » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

yulaow wrote: post #32

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why. This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle"…

The entire fact that a moderator can decide what you really wanted to ask even if you are clear that's not the question you want to ask, is, honestly, ridiculous.

Post by olooney » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #26

indigochill wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid – which means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other Q&A setting. Although I'm sure that happens, the site is explicitly designed to be a pseudo-wiki (Jeff counted Wikipedia as one of its inspirations), so if you ask a question that's too specific to your use case (i.e. that other users will not be able to put into practice) o…

> You might instead ask, "What are the key differences between MySQL and SQLite" which can then provide the insight to answer your original question as well as help other users. I'm pretty sure if you ask that exact question, an even if nobody has asked it before so it isn't a duplicate, someone will find some reason to shoot it down.

Post by infuriating » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #11

rlguarino wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you accidentally post this to the new twitter thread[1] first? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466641

???

  Q.
  Hello, I wanted to open up
  a DLL file in a HEX editor
  and directly edit some of 
  the bytes of the file, just
  to see what happens. Which 
  HEX editor is the best one 
  for diffing and translating
  some of the string literals
  embedded in a binary?

  A.
  Why would you ever do that?

  A.
  You should never do that.

  A.
  Do not edit binary files.

  A.
  Why don't you have the 
  source? Can't you recompile?

  A.
  That's really dangerous. You
  could go to jail for that.

  A.
  ARE YOU TRYING TO BRICK YOUR SYSTEM?????????????????????

  A.
  You should not try to reverse 
  engineer your software. Check
  the EULA that shipped boxed
  with your set of compact discs.
  It's usually forbidden and 
  will void the warranty on
  your installed partition.

Post by fortran77 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

pkteison wrote: post #34

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why. This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle"…

In case you're still curious, I think the reason it isn't included is because auto-increment is a hard problem to do right, ends up being a leaky abstraction for technical reasons, causes bugs, and is philosophically sub-optimal for basically any use case you can dream up. Want to order? Dates are probably always a better thing to order by, or else some natural property of the data like name or title. Want to link tw…

Post by olooney » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #13

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why. This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle"…

I've soldiered on through several experiences like that, and sort of assumed it was the usual (being non American, I guess I just assumed it was cultural differences with Americans or my English being annoying). I changed my mind after asking some questions on the math stack exchange, and seeing how answers there were night and day compared to what's usual in stackoverflow. People with phds in areas I couldn't even s…