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My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting

by Rapzid 7y ago

My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s

benologist 7y ago
I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone. What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.
- setr 7y ago
  For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. And in a Q&A site, the answerers are far more important than the questioners — if the questions will be answered, the questioners will flock there out of need, regardless of want. Answerers are however not so constrained. People complain about SO because, I think, it does the correct thing (unlike most Q&A sites) — it tries to optimize usage and rules for those who answer questions. Most people, however, only ask questions, or search for answers.
  - benologist 7y ago
    If a question is really easy many other people can answer it which in itself is also more inclusive. If a question is really hard few other people can answer it, so no matter what there is a level exclusively for very smart people. Nobody needs to take offense a question was asked or be hurt their question was removed. It's totally superfluous. There are no such problems on /r/nostupidquestions.
  - wruza 7y ago
    >For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precious email in fifteen pages of spam junk. I don’t really have too much time for that. With that in mind, it’s still unclear if my contribution was really unique and helpful, because out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. Statistics-wise it’s not worth it. It is no doubt that SO may be toxic or pushing ego. But being on constructive side is a burden. ‘They’ always outweigh you even with draconian regulation. Relax a little and you’ll drown at the same instant. I suggest every complaining guy to answer a couple of questions a day first, for some time. Not just random two, but find two really worth their time to see real costs. SO is social, and in a society every participant should play nice and take their part on a problem. We help each other, but no one has spare change for hordes. ^ not an upvote junkie, I’m mostly indifferent to community scores
    - indecisive_user 7y ago
      > out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. I regularly come across helpful answers on SO with 0 or 1 upvotes, so I wouldn't judge your contributions' impact solely on that. You've likely helped many people with your answers, even if there's no proof of it.
      - wruza 7y ago
        My answers usually did have some upvotes, and I’m only speaking of up-per-year here (passive accumulation after “hot” period, which kind of must show the real usefulness against initial “hey okay cool +5” phase), i.e. not 0->1->2 transitions. But I see what you mean. Maybe I’m self-biased since I’m usually logged in and do upvote low-voted answers when they obviously help me. Majority may simply not do that for old answers and/or others questions. Still, lack of feedback makes things foggy.
    - 7y ago
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Such a site already exists, it’s called Yahoo Answers. You can judge for yourself the quality of content it attracts.
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    I'm not necessarily agreeing with your "ergo", but I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo answers told you to throw water on a grease fire(as the selected answer).
- jasode 7y ago
  >What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. This is incorrect and a misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the unpaid volunteer answerers who scan the queue of questions to look for interesting things to answer. The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time.[1][2] >Search engines will filter them for us. The volunteer answerers don't interface with the list of new SO questions queue via de-duped Google search results. An analogy with this site (HN) is applicable: Yes Google searches will return some old archived HN threads and filter out some dupes but we (the HN participants) don't look for new & interesting HN threads to add our comments via Google. Instead, we interact directly on this website and rely on moderators (dang/sctb) to mark posts as [dupe] and filter them out. (When I started typing this comment, the sibling comment by setr was grayed out. That downvote was unwarranted because he was correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. I made a previous comment explaining this same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621) [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-reputation-users-answering-fewer-questions https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep...
  - chii 7y ago
    > correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. yep. The answerers are definitly more valuable, because it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place, and there's only the reward of intellectual stimulation for doing so. The questioner are not as valuable, because asking questions is easy. Asking a good question is hard, but the majority of questions aren't hard to ask. By making the site completely biased towards the answerer, stackoverflow gets good answers, at the cost of turning away some questioners. I believe the site maintainers have chosen correctly, because questioners are more desperate to ask their question than answerers are to answer.
    - Chris2048 7y ago
codexon 7y ago
That is certainly one of my pet peeves about that site. It is also a behavior frequently seen on IRC as well. I got a good amount of points by answering the actual questions. Since hitting moderator status based on the number of points many years ago I've stopped using it though. It gets tiring fighting against people like this who often have >50-100k points. Occasionally I'll land on the website again after googling a question, but it seems like Quora is starting to weaken Stack Overflow's google rankings.
- corobo 7y ago
  Ever since someone posted an article on “The XY Problem” nerds on all mediums have been assuming it’s always an XY problem
  - rocqua 7y ago
    It might even be the XY problem, but even if it is. Answer their question, and explain why maybe they should be considering something else after you answered the question. At that point, one is being extra helpful by adding context. Which is in stark contrast to 'that is probably the wrong question, and here is why'. Which is hard to distinguish from being willfully obtuse.
    - corobo 7y ago
      After this came up elsewhere here within 5 days of this comment thread I’m giving it the name “The XYZ Problem” https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/ https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I don’t answer questions on SO, but I occasionally answer questions on r/aws. Half the time after further digging, it is an XYProblem.
    - corobo 7y ago
      That means the other half the time, with the same further digging, it is not. That's the problem.
GordonS 7y ago
Arrghh, this one drives me absolutely nuts sometimes! It's like someone doesn't know the answer to your question, but does know the answer to some alternative (that is unlikely to work for your situation) and just wants SO points.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Sometimes I think it's more that they don't understand trying to understand something. They see someone trying to do something and genuinely want to help. They don't realise that for the one who is asking the question, their goal is not necessarily simply to do something, but to understand something. It's a little like the difference between an idealist and a pragmatist, except not.
kryogen1c 7y ago
When i was taking freshman CS classes, this was a running joke with my classmates. Wed take to google for helping fixing an error, and 90-95% of C++ 101 questions have at least one answer in the form: "why are you trying to do this? Unless you know what you're doing (which by your question you probably dont), you should by using different methods entirely." Friend having a coding problem? Give 'em the SO special: "Have you tried using vectors?"
- Rapzid 7y ago
  My favorite anecdote, and the one I trot out every time this comes up, was the time I was asking for help in golang-nuts and on the IRC figuring out a few things about unsafe/uintptr. I was participating in a code competition with performance as a primary metric and learning Go at the same time. Trying to get somebody to answer very straightforward questions about casting was worse than pulling teeth; everyone wanted to work their way into a back-seat architect role on my "real goal". "Hey, here is this task/problem I'm solving. Is this solution okay or is there a better solution?" is a very different question than "I'm trying to cast this pointer back to this slice of types but I'm seeing this error; what am I missing?". A somewhat related pet-peeve of mine is when software authors bake assumptions about how somebody "should" be doing something into their projects at a low level causing it to become unnecessarily inflexible and often time inconsistent with what you would expect. I've run into this with a lot of Gradle and gradle plugins.. My first big experience was perhaps trying to convince NTFS3G to allow the user to clear or override the dirty bit for certain resize operations. It can take a lot of convincing to get people to expand their concept of a "valid use case" and create escape hatches and flexibility for those atypical situations.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    > ...unnecessarily inflexible... Opinionated frameworks are much, much easier to write. Abstraction and generalization are hard, and a lot to ask of people who are likely creating something for free. The fact that a framework doesn't make the choices you would have made doesn't make it wrong, or unnecessarily inflexible. They're necessarily inflexible to keep the burden on maintainers and new contributors as low as possible. Just because one person has an edge case isn't a good reason to write a bunch of new code. See also, yagni.
rictic 7y ago
As someone who's spent a lot of time answering questions both on stackoverflow and in similar environments, often you really do need to get more context on what the person is actually trying to do in order to give the best answer. I try hard to avoid turning it into an interrogation, but answering the question as asked is often either impossible or a disservice to the person asking.

by Rapzid 7y ago

benologist 7y ago

I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone. What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.

setr 7y ago
For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. And in a Q&A site, the answerers are far more important than the questioners — if the questions will be answered, the questioners will flock there out of need, regardless of want. Answerers are however not so constrained. People complain about SO because, I think, it does the correct thing (unlike most Q&A sites) — it tries to optimize usage and rules for those who answer questions. Most people, however, only ask questions, or search for answers.
- benologist 7y ago
  If a question is really easy many other people can answer it which in itself is also more inclusive. If a question is really hard few other people can answer it, so no matter what there is a level exclusively for very smart people. Nobody needs to take offense a question was asked or be hurt their question was removed. It's totally superfluous. There are no such problems on /r/nostupidquestions.
- wruza 7y ago
  >For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precious email in fifteen pages of spam junk. I don’t really have too much time for that. With that in mind, it’s still unclear if my contribution was really unique and helpful, because out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. Statistics-wise it’s not worth it. It is no doubt that SO may be toxic or pushing ego. But being on constructive side is a burden. ‘They’ always outweigh you even with draconian regulation. Relax a little and you’ll drown at the same instant. I suggest every complaining guy to answer a couple of questions a day first, for some time. Not just random two, but find two really worth their time to see real costs. SO is social, and in a society every participant should play nice and take their part on a problem. We help each other, but no one has spare change for hordes. ^ not an upvote junkie, I’m mostly indifferent to community scores
  - indecisive_user 7y ago
    > out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. I regularly come across helpful answers on SO with 0 or 1 upvotes, so I wouldn't judge your contributions' impact solely on that. You've likely helped many people with your answers, even if there's no proof of it.
    - wruza 7y ago
      My answers usually did have some upvotes, and I’m only speaking of up-per-year here (passive accumulation after “hot” period, which kind of must show the real usefulness against initial “hey okay cool +5” phase), i.e. not 0->1->2 transitions. But I see what you mean. Maybe I’m self-biased since I’m usually logged in and do upvote low-voted answers when they obviously help me. Majority may simply not do that for old answers and/or others questions. Still, lack of feedback makes things foggy.
  - 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Such a site already exists, it’s called Yahoo Answers. You can judge for yourself the quality of content it attracts.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  I'm not necessarily agreeing with your "ergo", but I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo answers told you to throw water on a grease fire(as the selected answer).
jasode 7y ago
>What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. This is incorrect and a misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the unpaid volunteer answerers who scan the queue of questions to look for interesting things to answer. The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time.[1][2] >Search engines will filter them for us. The volunteer answerers don't interface with the list of new SO questions queue via de-duped Google search results. An analogy with this site (HN) is applicable: Yes Google searches will return some old archived HN threads and filter out some dupes but we (the HN participants) don't look for new & interesting HN threads to add our comments via Google. Instead, we interact directly on this website and rely on moderators (dang/sctb) to mark posts as [dupe] and filter them out. (When I started typing this comment, the sibling comment by setr was grayed out. That downvote was unwarranted because he was correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. I made a previous comment explaining this same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621) [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-reputation-users-answering-fewer-questions https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep...
- chii 7y ago
  > correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. yep. The answerers are definitly more valuable, because it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place, and there's only the reward of intellectual stimulation for doing so. The questioner are not as valuable, because asking questions is easy. Asking a good question is hard, but the majority of questions aren't hard to ask. By making the site completely biased towards the answerer, stackoverflow gets good answers, at the cost of turning away some questioners. I believe the site maintainers have chosen correctly, because questioners are more desperate to ask their question than answerers are to answer.
  - Chris2048 7y ago

codexon 7y ago

That is certainly one of my pet peeves about that site. It is also a behavior frequently seen on IRC as well. I got a good amount of points by answering the actual questions. Since hitting moderator status based on the number of points many years ago I've stopped using it though. It gets tiring fighting against people like this who often have >50-100k points. Occasionally I'll land on the website again after googling a question, but it seems like Quora is starting to weaken Stack Overflow's google rankings.

corobo 7y ago
Ever since someone posted an article on “The XY Problem” nerds on all mediums have been assuming it’s always an XY problem
- rocqua 7y ago
  It might even be the XY problem, but even if it is. Answer their question, and explain why maybe they should be considering something else after you answered the question. At that point, one is being extra helpful by adding context. Which is in stark contrast to 'that is probably the wrong question, and here is why'. Which is hard to distinguish from being willfully obtuse.
  - corobo 7y ago
    After this came up elsewhere here within 5 days of this comment thread I’m giving it the name “The XYZ Problem” https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/ https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/
- scarface74 7y ago
  I don’t answer questions on SO, but I occasionally answer questions on r/aws. Half the time after further digging, it is an XYProblem.
  - corobo 7y ago
    That means the other half the time, with the same further digging, it is not. That's the problem.

GordonS 7y ago

Arrghh, this one drives me absolutely nuts sometimes! It's like someone doesn't know the answer to your question, but does know the answer to some alternative (that is unlikely to work for your situation) and just wants SO points.

squiggleblaz 7y ago
Sometimes I think it's more that they don't understand trying to understand something. They see someone trying to do something and genuinely want to help. They don't realise that for the one who is asking the question, their goal is not necessarily simply to do something, but to understand something. It's a little like the difference between an idealist and a pragmatist, except not.

kryogen1c 7y ago

When i was taking freshman CS classes, this was a running joke with my classmates. Wed take to google for helping fixing an error, and 90-95% of C++ 101 questions have at least one answer in the form: "why are you trying to do this? Unless you know what you're doing (which by your question you probably dont), you should by using different methods entirely." Friend having a coding problem? Give 'em the SO special: "Have you tried using vectors?"

Rapzid 7y ago
My favorite anecdote, and the one I trot out every time this comes up, was the time I was asking for help in golang-nuts and on the IRC figuring out a few things about unsafe/uintptr. I was participating in a code competition with performance as a primary metric and learning Go at the same time. Trying to get somebody to answer very straightforward questions about casting was worse than pulling teeth; everyone wanted to work their way into a back-seat architect role on my "real goal". "Hey, here is this task/problem I'm solving. Is this solution okay or is there a better solution?" is a very different question than "I'm trying to cast this pointer back to this slice of types but I'm seeing this error; what am I missing?". A somewhat related pet-peeve of mine is when software authors bake assumptions about how somebody "should" be doing something into their projects at a low level causing it to become unnecessarily inflexible and often time inconsistent with what you would expect. I've run into this with a lot of Gradle and gradle plugins.. My first big experience was perhaps trying to convince NTFS3G to allow the user to clear or override the dirty bit for certain resize operations. It can take a lot of convincing to get people to expand their concept of a "valid use case" and create escape hatches and flexibility for those atypical situations.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  > ...unnecessarily inflexible... Opinionated frameworks are much, much easier to write. Abstraction and generalization are hard, and a lot to ask of people who are likely creating something for free. The fact that a framework doesn't make the choices you would have made doesn't make it wrong, or unnecessarily inflexible. They're necessarily inflexible to keep the burden on maintainers and new contributors as low as possible. Just because one person has an edge case isn't a good reason to write a bunch of new code. See also, yagni.

rictic 7y ago

As someone who's spent a lot of time answering questions both on stackoverflow and in similar environments, often you really do need to get more context on what the person is actually trying to do in order to give the best answer. I try hard to avoid turning it into an interrogation, but answering the question as asked is often either impossible or a disservice to the person asking.