4 ms·

Ran across this gem the other day: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value-of-n-choose-k https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calcu

Ran across this gem the other day: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value-of-n-choose-k https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value... The question is: how can I calculate "n choose k" (aka, the binomial coefficient)? It's an interesting problem because there are some big factorials to calculate if you just naively program the mathematical definition. So someone asked that good question, and then a mod came along and closed the question as a duplicate of the question "how can I enumerate n choose k?", ridiculous! As though we cannot count things in computer science without counting one thing at a time. As though the only way to know the answer to "2000 choose 1000" is to enumerate all (approximately) 10^600 possible answers.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
> a mod came along and closed the question It wasn't closed by a mod, but by the community: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9d75f00-f169-4a29-8d50-dda62ce96c62 https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9... The way close voting works is that a question will be closed as long as there are five (now three!) random people from the community who feel a question should be closed. This is good since there really are many duplicates that should be marked as such, but some people are not very good in carefully judging questions, and the system doesn't recover from these kind of mistakes well and includes almost no punishments for clearly erroneous close votes. Like I mentioned in my other comment, there are a few comparatively minor fixes that could be done to improve the experience here too, but nothing gets done. Sigh...