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This is interesting - my StackOverflow answer (XOR) is now the subject of a blog post that's reached the top of Hacker News. To clarify part of the article, th
by kylec 18y ago
This is interesting - my StackOverflow answer (XOR) is now the subject of a blog post that's reached the top of Hacker News.
To clarify part of the article, the time granularity on the site isn't enough to pinpoint in what order the comments were made on the thread. Daniel Jennings' edit to his post existed before I posted my answer, so it's not his reply to my answer.
Every part of Stack Overflow is run and moderated by the community except one: the selection of the accepted answer. As long as you have one person in charge of selected answers you will always have to deal with their particular biases, which decrease the value of Stack Overflow as an objective reference to programming questions.
It might be a good idea that in addition to the answer selected by the asker that there be a community selected answer. This would be completely orthogonal to the up/down votes for the questions, and would only allow one selected answer per person per question. An approach like this would greatly serve to make Stack Overflow a more equitable and fair system.
In any case, I've had tons of fun learning new information and teaching people some of the tricks I know. I hope to see some of you there!
- tlrobinson 18y agoClever solution. Sometimes XOR seems magical (like with the XOR swap trick). Though in hindsight, it seems like the question was designed for the solution, not vice versa. XOR just happens to do exactly what we need in this case.
- easyfrag 18y agoI know in the podcast Spolsky and Attwood have discussed making a "community answer" a feature. As I recall there were some issues around community answers in general, because of the wiki-like behavior of allowing others to edit answers there needs to be some threshold where an answer belongs to the community rather than the user who originally posted it.