5 ms·

I love how the first comment is from a "guru" with nothing better to say than: > Do you really think it is going to make much difference to the final answer?

by urda 8y ago

I love how the first comment is from a "guru" with nothing better to say than: > Do you really think it is going to make much difference to the final answer? Doesn't matter, it should work.

lukeify 8y ago
Power users on many forums love to adopt this attitude.
warent 8y ago
This really stood out to me as well. That kind of response is, for lack of a better word, cringy. "You probably don't need that anyway so ignore the fact that it's broken!" Sure...
mikehollinger 8y ago
This!!! I've noticed how "forums" (as opposed to reddit-style discussion boards which are moderated) tend to have this sort of "first post!11!!!" behavior. If you look at that user's post history, he or she has contributed, but - also is providing lots, and lots of commentary. And while that commentary is useful, it's not necessarily moving the ball on solving whatever the problem of the day is. I see the same thing in travel forums frequently.
- sbjs 8y ago
  I think about community quality content a lot. I see a lot of abuse of this all over reddit and other forums and stack overflow too. People have figured out how to game the system. I think the internet is ready for some forum software that uses machine learning to decide whether content is high or low quality. It could analyze the replies, the context, the content, the user's history, posting rates, all sorts of data is available to recognize low quality content and low quality users. Especially when you realize that a lot of reddit accounts are bots that farm points and then get sold. ML seems like the only real way to protect communities against this!
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago
    > People have figured out how to game the system. I think the internet is ready for some forum software that uses machine learning to decide whether content is high or low quality. Great idea. Then there'll be absolutely no chance people will find a way to game the system.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      Mission accomplished: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Some guy answering every post with some generic "try these troubleshooting steps" which are all completely unrelated to the question. That guy should be a bot or a sticky post... I'm wondering if there are sites that have people on agreements to answer "200 posts/month" for a fixed pay or something, or get paid per answered question within 48h. In any case: it's not helping.
  - csydas 8y ago
    I get you're being a bit coy, but I have no trouble believing it's just some person who enjoys the small power rush of being "the guy w/ the answers". I've seen this tons of times with employees in Slack/Teams chat, ones who just chime in on virtually any topic with a copy/paste answer and a condescending attitude. It's a power thing, they enjoy being the one who knows everything and lays down the law. From both a technical and managerial standpoint, it can be insanely frustrating, with the only bright-side being that for very basic questions you at least get good coverage.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tzs 8y ago
You think that's bad? I once reported a bug in Apple's calculator in OS X, and it was fixed by the next release. If you started out with a cleared calculator with default settings and computed 14479.14 - 152.36 you got 14326.78. If you started out with a cleared calculator with default settings and computed 1143/78, and then computed 14479.14 - 152.36, you got something like 14326.779999999999. The number of people on forums who completely missed the point and lectured me, often rather condescendingly, on how neither 14479.14 nor 152.36 are exactly representable in finite binary floating point and so that is why the subtraction was not exact was astonishing. The bug is not that the subtraction is inexact. The bug is that the same subtraction result was displayed with different rounding depending on whether it was done immediately after a clear or done after computing 1143/78. How 14479.14 - 152.36 displays should only depend on the calculator settings. That it changed depending on previous calculations suggest that there was probably a scratch variable used during calculations that was supposed to be reset before the next calculation but was not. Speaking of the MacOS calculator, their RPN mode really annoys me (although not as much as Windows 10 calculator which doesn't even have an RPN mode!). Suppose you want to compute (2+3) x 4. The obvious key sequence works: 2 enter 3 + 4 x. How about (2+3) x pi. The obvious key sequence is: 2 enter 3 + pi x. The result of that is an error beep with pi in the display, or, if you had anything on the stack before you started, that thing multiplied by pi. That's because rather than pushing pi onto the stack, the pi key replaces whatever is on the bottom of the stack with pi. In other words, instead of acting as if you had hit the keys 3 . 1 4 1 5 9 ... 7 9 3, it acts as if it pops the stack, invokes the function def pi(x): return 3.141592653589793 on the value it popped, and pushes the result. What you have to do is: 2 enter 3 + enter pi x. Suppose you decide you don't want to have to remember the distinction between the pi key and numerical entry, and decide to just always put in that enter. So: 2 enter 3 + enter 4 x. That gives you 20 like you would expect...but also leaves a 5 on the stack above that. For comparison, that does not happen on an HP-15, or on software calculators that follow HP RPN rules, such as pcalc on iOS. On those, when you press enter it duplicates the item currently on the top of the stack, just like Apple's calculator, but it sets a flag that says if you immediately enter a number, that overwrites the top of stack instead of pushing. This flag was a key thing that made data entry on the HP calculators feel natural. On the HP-48 they made a significant change to this. When you pressed enter it did not immediately dup the stack and set the flag saying numerical entry should overwrite. Instead, pressing enter did not immediately do anything to the stack. Instead, it set a flag saying that if your next action was to enter a number, first dup the top of stack. The RPN mode on pcalc lets you select if you want HP-48 stack behavior or classic RPN behavior (it is in advanced settings when you are in RPN mode). Here's an article on how RPN evolved at HP: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/downloads/S07%20HP%20RPN%20Evolves%20V5b.pdf http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/downloads/S07%20HP%20RPN%20E...

by urda 8y ago

I love how the first comment is from a "guru" with nothing better to say than: > Do you really think it is going to make much difference to the final answer? Doesn't matter, it should work.

lukeify 8y ago

Power users on many forums love to adopt this attitude.

warent 8y ago

This really stood out to me as well. That kind of response is, for lack of a better word, cringy. "You probably don't need that anyway so ignore the fact that it's broken!" Sure...

mikehollinger 8y ago

This!!! I've noticed how "forums" (as opposed to reddit-style discussion boards which are moderated) tend to have this sort of "first post!11!!!" behavior. If you look at that user's post history, he or she has contributed, but - also is providing lots, and lots of commentary. And while that commentary is useful, it's not necessarily moving the ball on solving whatever the problem of the day is. I see the same thing in travel forums frequently.

sbjs 8y ago
I think about community quality content a lot. I see a lot of abuse of this all over reddit and other forums and stack overflow too. People have figured out how to game the system. I think the internet is ready for some forum software that uses machine learning to decide whether content is high or low quality. It could analyze the replies, the context, the content, the user's history, posting rates, all sorts of data is available to recognize low quality content and low quality users. Especially when you realize that a lot of reddit accounts are bots that farm points and then get sold. ML seems like the only real way to protect communities against this!
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  > People have figured out how to game the system. I think the internet is ready for some forum software that uses machine learning to decide whether content is high or low quality. Great idea. Then there'll be absolutely no chance people will find a way to game the system.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Mission accomplished: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
alkonaut 8y ago
Some guy answering every post with some generic "try these troubleshooting steps" which are all completely unrelated to the question. That guy should be a bot or a sticky post... I'm wondering if there are sites that have people on agreements to answer "200 posts/month" for a fixed pay or something, or get paid per answered question within 48h. In any case: it's not helping.
- csydas 8y ago
  I get you're being a bit coy, but I have no trouble believing it's just some person who enjoys the small power rush of being "the guy w/ the answers". I've seen this tons of times with employees in Slack/Teams chat, ones who just chime in on virtually any topic with a copy/paste answer and a condescending attitude. It's a power thing, they enjoy being the one who knows everything and lays down the law. From both a technical and managerial standpoint, it can be insanely frustrating, with the only bright-side being that for very basic questions you at least get good coverage.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tzs 8y ago

You think that's bad? I once reported a bug in Apple's calculator in OS X, and it was fixed by the next release. If you started out with a cleared calculator with default settings and computed 14479.14 - 152.36 you got 14326.78. If you started out with a cleared calculator with default settings and computed 1143/78, and then computed 14479.14 - 152.36, you got something like 14326.779999999999. The number of people on forums who completely missed the point and lectured me, often rather condescendingly, on how neither 14479.14 nor 152.36 are exactly representable in finite binary floating point and so that is why the subtraction was not exact was astonishing. The bug is not that the subtraction is inexact. The bug is that the same subtraction result was displayed with different rounding depending on whether it was done immediately after a clear or done after computing 1143/78. How 14479.14 - 152.36 displays should only depend on the calculator settings. That it changed depending on previous calculations suggest that there was probably a scratch variable used during calculations that was supposed to be reset before the next calculation but was not. Speaking of the MacOS calculator, their RPN mode really annoys me (although not as much as Windows 10 calculator which doesn't even have an RPN mode!). Suppose you want to compute (2+3) x 4. The obvious key sequence works: 2 enter 3 + 4 x. How about (2+3) x pi. The obvious key sequence is: 2 enter 3 + pi x. The result of that is an error beep with pi in the display, or, if you had anything on the stack before you started, that thing multiplied by pi. That's because rather than pushing pi onto the stack, the pi key replaces whatever is on the bottom of the stack with pi. In other words, instead of acting as if you had hit the keys 3 . 1 4 1 5 9 ... 7 9 3, it acts as if it pops the stack, invokes the function def pi(x): return 3.141592653589793 on the value it popped, and pushes the result. What you have to do is: 2 enter 3 + enter pi x. Suppose you decide you don't want to have to remember the distinction between the pi key and numerical entry, and decide to just always put in that enter. So: 2 enter 3 + enter 4 x. That gives you 20 like you would expect...but also leaves a 5 on the stack above that. For comparison, that does not happen on an HP-15, or on software calculators that follow HP RPN rules, such as pcalc on iOS. On those, when you press enter it duplicates the item currently on the top of the stack, just like Apple's calculator, but it sets a flag that says if you immediately enter a number, that overwrites the top of stack instead of pushing. This flag was a key thing that made data entry on the HP calculators feel natural. On the HP-48 they made a significant change to this. When you pressed enter it did not immediately dup the stack and set the flag saying numerical entry should overwrite. Instead, pressing enter did not immediately do anything to the stack. Instead, it set a flag saying that if your next action was to enter a number, first dup the top of stack. The RPN mode on pcalc lets you select if you want HP-48 stack behavior or classic RPN behavior (it is in advanced settings when you are in RPN mode). Here's an article on how RPN evolved at HP: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/downloads/S07%20HP%20RPN%20Evolves%20V5b.pdf http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/downloads/S07%20HP%20RPN%20E...