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Trolling people looking for easy answers is pointless. Folks like this won't use a single source to send in their work. The problem with this approach is you of

Trolling people looking for easy answers is pointless. Folks like this won't use a single source to send in their work. The problem with this approach is you often penalize people who are truly curious and not trolls. If you were to allow the masses to determine whether a question is a troll question or not, using an OR, allowing anyone to flip the bit, then almost every question would be considered a troll question. You get a lot of false positives. Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect is on the line. Providing a trolly answer, and treating the question asker as insincere will inevitably treat a sincere person like shit, and turn them off entirely from entire genres and disciplines. Treat resources as sincere, and those who wish to abuse them for temporary short term gain will, and I am very confident about this, end up fucking themselves over. *If you downvote this, please let me know what you disagree with, I'm open to debate.

yeukhon 13y ago
I didn't downvote you. Two thoughts: 1. I read the whole thing three times and I still don't really understand what your objective is.... and do you actually know the purpose of the trolling thread or not. The purpose is to have fun and pretend one as a student who is under some stress and is trying to figure out some funny yet creative ways to brain fuck with the TA or professor. Even if it receives F, whatever. > Treat resources as sincere, and those who wish to abuse them for temporary short term gain will, and I am very confident about this, end up fucking themselves over. Well, most of the questions we ask on the Internet are really for short-term gain anyway. We hope someone could tell us why the fuck the X.so file is not linked and we move on afterward. Most of the answers are actually not some quick jerky answers. people actually took time to write them. And in the process of writing an answer, the author learns. Ever heard of "one teaches, two learns?" 2. Why so serious? The Internet is full of shit half of the time. Wasting 100MB in the database for 100 trolling answers isn't going to kill some hungry child in Africa.
- codezero 13y ago
  I'm probably so serious because it seems like so many other people are so dismissive :)
nilkn 13y ago
In terms of responding seriously to someone actually asking for code to sort a list, I completely agree with you. My impression, though, since this is on the Code Golf section of Stack Exchange, is that this is purely hypothetical. It's a challenge to come up with the most evil answer to the question, not as a serious answer to someone asking it but as a puzzle.
pandaman 13y ago
>Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect is on the line. This what would happen in an ideal world. In reality though it's orders of magnitude easier to check credentials than intellect (provided it's even possible to do the later). In many situations, if you go against somebody with credentials without credentials of your own you won't even have a chance to have a battle of wits (like applying for a job that requires a degree). And cheating will get you credentials most of the time, it's not like universities check every graduate's intellect before issuing them a diploma. Otherwise cheating would not be such a big deal in the academia. So yes, helping stupid people with their homework will advance their career. Might not to the level of Google's CTO but to the level of the guy who codes healthcare.gov or the DV's "random number generator" or Toyota's ECU or any other example of crappy code that has a good chance to interfere with people's lives. Please don't do that. If you don't want to troll them - just don't reply.
DanBC 13y ago
Everything you say is true. Luckily, none of it applies because no one goes to CodeGolf for homework questions. CodeGolf will look at other SE sites, find homework questions, then take those questions back to codegolf. Thus, CodeGolf gets an interesting new flavour of challenge (provide the worst solution to a problem) and the person who originally asked the question doesn't have to deal with the codegolfing. They do, however, have to deal with the rest of SE. I guess downvotes are because you appear to think that codegolfers are answering in the threads where the questions are originally asked.
- codezero 13y ago
  Yep, this context helps a lot, I don't know enough about codegolf, thanks!
lmm 13y ago
I downvoted because I disagree with asking for explanations of downvotes. I think the practice is bad for HN.
- codezero 13y ago
  Makes sense. But for folks who are downvoted it can be helpful to know some context, I've noticed that when you ask for feedback you get it and when you don't you end up confused and a bit pissed which is toxic over time. I was -1 when I edited the comment to include it and +22 now and a lot less confused.

yeukhon 13y ago

I didn't downvote you. Two thoughts: 1. I read the whole thing three times and I still don't really understand what your objective is.... and do you actually know the purpose of the trolling thread or not. The purpose is to have fun and pretend one as a student who is under some stress and is trying to figure out some funny yet creative ways to brain fuck with the TA or professor. Even if it receives F, whatever. > Treat resources as sincere, and those who wish to abuse them for temporary short term gain will, and I am very confident about this, end up fucking themselves over. Well, most of the questions we ask on the Internet are really for short-term gain anyway. We hope someone could tell us why the fuck the X.so file is not linked and we move on afterward. Most of the answers are actually not some quick jerky answers. people actually took time to write them. And in the process of writing an answer, the author learns. Ever heard of "one teaches, two learns?" 2. Why so serious? The Internet is full of shit half of the time. Wasting 100MB in the database for 100 trolling answers isn't going to kill some hungry child in Africa.

codezero 13y ago
I'm probably so serious because it seems like so many other people are so dismissive :)

nilkn 13y ago

In terms of responding seriously to someone actually asking for code to sort a list, I completely agree with you. My impression, though, since this is on the Code Golf section of Stack Exchange, is that this is purely hypothetical. It's a challenge to come up with the most evil answer to the question, not as a serious answer to someone asking it but as a puzzle.

pandaman 13y ago

>Providing a thorough, quality answer to a troll question won't help advance that troll's career, they will pay the price later, for sure, when their intellect is on the line. This what would happen in an ideal world. In reality though it's orders of magnitude easier to check credentials than intellect (provided it's even possible to do the later). In many situations, if you go against somebody with credentials without credentials of your own you won't even have a chance to have a battle of wits (like applying for a job that requires a degree). And cheating will get you credentials most of the time, it's not like universities check every graduate's intellect before issuing them a diploma. Otherwise cheating would not be such a big deal in the academia. So yes, helping stupid people with their homework will advance their career. Might not to the level of Google's CTO but to the level of the guy who codes healthcare.gov or the DV's "random number generator" or Toyota's ECU or any other example of crappy code that has a good chance to interfere with people's lives. Please don't do that. If you don't want to troll them - just don't reply.

DanBC 13y ago

Everything you say is true. Luckily, none of it applies because no one goes to CodeGolf for homework questions. CodeGolf will look at other SE sites, find homework questions, then take those questions back to codegolf. Thus, CodeGolf gets an interesting new flavour of challenge (provide the worst solution to a problem) and the person who originally asked the question doesn't have to deal with the codegolfing. They do, however, have to deal with the rest of SE. I guess downvotes are because you appear to think that codegolfers are answering in the threads where the questions are originally asked.

codezero 13y ago
Yep, this context helps a lot, I don't know enough about codegolf, thanks!

lmm 13y ago

I downvoted because I disagree with asking for explanations of downvotes. I think the practice is bad for HN.

codezero 13y ago
Makes sense. But for folks who are downvoted it can be helpful to know some context, I've noticed that when you ask for feedback you get it and when you don't you end up confused and a bit pissed which is toxic over time. I was -1 when I edited the comment to include it and +22 now and a lot less confused.