> It's not that I know the correct answer, that's why I'm reading, but I do know what does not work, and all too often that's all I see, just pages of things th

> It's not that I know the correct answer, that's why I'm reading, but I do know what does not work, and all too often that's all I see, just pages of things that are obviously not right. A similar situation is when you have a working answer, you know that it is not particularly good (inefficient, poor handling of edge cases, etc.), yet all of the answers are along the lines of your existing solution. Programming problems are quite often a case of how something can be better solved. Consider the textbook example of sorting. The problem itself was always quite easy to solve, yet considerable amount of research were put into finding efficient algorithms since naive approaches are quite inefficient. We are lucky today since languages or libraries typically provide both the data structures and algorithms, but I cringe at the thought of how inept my code would be if I was relying on SO quality answers while learning how to program in the late '80s and early '90s (since there were many cases when you had to roll your own).