I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is t

I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task. Additionally, your answer regarding: > On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow. Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...