Interviews: Stack Overflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood Answers Your Questions 78
A few weeks ago you had a chance to ask author, entrepreneur, and software developer Jeff Atwood about founding Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, as well as his new endeavor, the Discourse open-source discussion platform. Below you will find his answers to your questions.
Magic wand by Anonymous Coward
If you had a magic wand to make one change in technology right now, what would it be?
Atwood: Users would not have to generate, remember, enter, or ever think about passwords again. Computers would automatically know who the user is through a combination of ambient biometrics plus physical possession of some kind of device. Like, say, a smartphone.
Passwords are the enemy. And the users, because we are the idiots put in charge of making up the passwords. But mostly, it's the *goddamn passwords*.
Why did you choose Microsoft Platform for SE?
by Sadsfae
I don't see many large, high profile sites running an entire Microsoft Windows stack nowadays (IIS/SQL Server, etc) but Stack Exchange is one of them.
What were the reasons behind choosing a full Microsoft stack versus any of the Open Source alternatives which seem much more prevalent, especially in start-ups and smaller businesses for web presence?
Atwood: Mostly, C# is what I knew and what I was skilled in -- and I'm a great fan of its primary architect Anders Hejsberg who also created Turbo Pascal and Delphi. Performance was a goal, too, and since C# is a compiled language it's *extremely* fast. I think you can see for yourself that Stack Overflow is absurdly fast. Having switched to Ruby with the Discourse project, I can also testify that Ruby .. is, uh ... not ... absurdly fast.
The only downside of the .NET environment is, honestly, the SQL Server licensing costs which can be quite extreme at scale. There is movement to make .NET more open source. Plus the long running mono effort.
The main weakness of .NET is that it's not great for open source projects, though that has changed a bit over the last few years. It never really made sense to open source Stack Overflow -- ask yourself, how many Stack Overflow clones have flourished? Why is that? As a closed source project, the performance, great language design, and scaling of C# worked for us.
I made different choices for Discourse which *was* designed to be an open source project, a tool that is widely applicable to many communities, from day zero.
History of StackExchange
by unencode200x
A question on the history of Stack Exchange. What was the original idea that drove you to make StackExchange and how has it evolved or added since?
Atwood: Do you remember a site called Experts-Exchange? No? That means we succeeded at our original goal.
The basic concept was to do a 100% community driven Q&A that had elements of:
- Wikipedia (all the articles are always up to date and not dead tombstones from six years ago).
- Reddit (voting up the good information and voting down the bad information).
- Blogs (ownership, curation, and responsibility for content that has your name on it).
- Videogames (the Xbox 360 Achievements system, points, and ways of encouraging and incentivizing positive community behavior that are fun).
Where everything we build together is creative commons, and belongs to all of us, since you guys and gals are the ones doing all the work in the system!
Reputation mechanisms & scientific quality
by Anonymous Coward
Jeff, have you thought about how to use reputation mechanisms to improve the quality of published scientific results? I'm asking in the context of John P. A. Ioannidis' famous paper.
It seems to me one fix for this (horrible) problem might be an online reputation mechanism where scientists could rate the reproducibility of published results. Thoughts? (thanks for inventing Stack Exchange - you've done the world a big favor).
Atwood: It certainly seems applicable. The Stack engine works best for systems of data, fact, and science -- or at least a "tome of knowledge" -- where you can actually verify an answer (or five answers) as plausibly correct. You can see which topics do best on the Stack engine in the Stack Exchange directory, with a massive, Jupiter sized Stack Overflow right at the top.
There's always more than one way to do it, of course, but when you start getting dozens or hundreds of "answers" you don't have Q&A, you have a discussion with no clear answers, just opinions.
User Reputation, Moderating, and Discourse
by T.E.D.
I think its probably inarguable that the biggest innovation StackOverflow brought to the web was the centrality of reputation and user moderation to its design. Sure, our own /. had done something similar years before, and it was hardly the first either, but no website I know of had before taken it to its logical conclusion in quite the way SO does. This effectively "crowdsourced" a lot of traditional website administrative activities, which turned out to be an incredibly powerful idea. Practically all the functionality of SO is built around the concept.
So when I saw you were tackling online message boards, I expected the same kind of thing. But browsing around a typical Discourse thread, I'm not seeing that at all. Sure, users can "heart" posts, but all that does is bump a small counter next to the heart. There is no way to tell at a glance which posts users found the best and/or worst. Higher rated posts don't sort to the top, or get bigger or anything. As a result, I don't even see that feature used much. Certainly its nothing like SO, where post voting is the central activity. It also seems like moderation on Discourse is designed to be done by administrators, not users. I don't see any facility for users getting moderation privs as they gain reputation. Compared to SO, Discourse seems kind of, well, like a big step backwards in interactivity.
I'm sure I'm missing something here. What is it? Or did you really decide SO's centering of its design around users and their opinion on posts was a mistake, or perhaps just not a good fit for a more generalized discussion board?
Atwood: Sorting a conversation by votes is a pretty effective way to destroy conversation. How can you follow the logical flow of back and forth, chronological dialog when the ground is constantly shifting underneath you as posts get voted up or down? You can't.
Stack is a system of technical Q&A, where opinions are fascinating, and all, but they are completely trumped by facts, data, and science. Stack only tolerates the minimum amount of discussion necessary to get the best questions and the best answers. The goal isn't for people to talk to each other, the goal is for people to *answer the damn question*. Ideally with the aforementioned facts, data, and science, so our peers can objectively decide if the answer is correct and works.
Discourse, on the other hand, is explicitly a system of discussion and opinion. There is no right and wrong. You can't tell me my opinion that Wolverine is the coolest X-Man is wrong. Long after people have forgotten what exactly was said, they will remember how you made them feel. That's what the like (heart) action is about, and why it is featured so prominently: empathy. Discourse is a system of empathy.
We do have user trust levels in Discourse, it's just less obvious, because we're playing a different kind of game. Compare that with Stack, where your reputation number and badge counts appear prominently next to your name every time you post. Trust me, people *do* notice when you like their post. And if they see your post got 20 likes whereas their post only got two, or none, they absolutely notice that too. Discourse is more of a collaborative game, where Stack is an explicitly competitive game, and that's why the score is so prominent. The best way to motivate a programmer is to tell them someone else did it better. Don't try to race sheep, don't try to herd race horses.
There may not be re-ordering by votes in Discourse, as there is in Stack Overflow, but there is a summary mode for topics when they reach 50 or more replies. If you'd like to see this in action, visit a longer topic and press the "Summarize Topic" button at the top near the estimated read time, or as I like to call it, the TL;DR button. Then you'll see only the "best" 10 percent of that long topic. That factors in a lot of data from each post such as likes, incoming and outgoing links to the post, the number of times it has been read, total read time (we track actual on-screen read time for all posts in Discourse), number of times it has been bookmarked, number of replies, and so on. You can also expand context above (in reply to) and below (replies) for each post as needed. Or you can expand the collapsed gaps as needed. Try it, you just need a long topic with over 50 replies to see it in action.
Cargo cult programming and Stack Overflow
by Anonymous Coward
I don't mean to minimize StackOverflow's contribution to the online knowledge base, because it's a great tool when used properly. I'm a systems guy and Server Fault is often more useful than vendor support for looking up strange error messages and possible troubleshooting routes. But, there are a lot of low skill programmers and sysadmins out there who lean on these tools way too much. How do you feel about these properties contributing to the crappy cargo cult programming and sysadmin work we see in our field?
Atwood: Stack is a system of peer education at its core. The key insight is realizing that crappy programmers hurt all of us, and it's our job to learn from each other so that we have less terrible code and terrible coders to deal with in the future. Even if that terrible coder is us!
The best way to learn a topic is to teach it to someone else. That is the skill at the heart of the Stack engine. It works at three levels:
1. Selfish. I need the answer to this question or I may get fired. Give me the answer. This is ideally handled through a good search result. They get what they need.
2. Self Improvement. I want to get reputation and prove to my peers that I know what I am doing. The more I learn, the better I am at my job, the more skilled I am, and the more job satisfaction / money / prestige I can gain.
3. Advancement of our craft. Programming, physics, and math will be here long after we are all dead. It's an honor to help move science forward together as much as we can together in our lifetime, so that future programmers, physicists, and mathematicians can stand on our shoulders and do amazing, incredible things for the future of humanity.
It's fine for people to play the game at level one, because they are also helping others learn and work their way up the skill ladder. If someone is learning, and someone is teaching, we all win.
Rampant closure of questions
by WaffleMonster
From time to time I search stackoverflow for easy answers and I would say about 20% of the time the question has been closed even though it is the reason I went to stackoverflow in the first place. In most of these instances a useful answer was also provided before closure. So my question to you is simply what gives.
The most common reason for closure I run into is that the people closing it don't have any domain clue what is being asked and appear to assume if they don't understand nobody else does either.
Another common reason for closure is the "duplicate" question meme in which nuance is overlooked and questions are marked as duplicates because the people doing the marking failed to understand or appreciate the difference. This is very annoying.
Less common but equally annoying issues are closure due to chatter about domain specific algorithms not being "programming questions" or even more amusing someone posting a question that is more specifically addressed by one of a hundred different stack exchanges even though it is still on topic.
Atwood: Remember that Stack is for questions that can be explicitly answered, *not* discussion. It's not a place for "what's the best way to.." opinion sinkholes. Humans love this kind of stuff because they are social animals, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to have a discussion -- you just need to have that discussion elsewhere, because you can't have it on Stack Overflow.
We're strict about this because we've seen what happens when systems are not explicit about their goals. This way lies madness. This way lies Yahoo Answers. In Stack's case the goal is *learning*. And I do not mean accidental, random, meandering, oh-hey-check-out-this-crazy-thing-I-saw-on-Reddit learning, but highly efficient, directed learning where you are a classroom, not a social club.
Duplicates are a hard problem, for sure. That's the one place I felt we didn't make a ton of progress in my four years there, unfortunately. Human beings have the incredibly annoying habit of asking the same questions using completely and utterly different words. They're really good at it. And it is true that over time there are more and more questions and answers on Stack Overflow, so the minefield of "is this a duplicate of...?" is only getting bigger over time. It is a super hard problem. If you have specific ideas of how to handle duplicates better, don't hesitate to ask or search some of the existing topics there.
Remember, Stack Overflow is governed by programmers just like you, you are a citizen of its community just like me, and you get a say in what happens there. You could even be elected a moderator by participating in the yearly elections. So if you don't like the way things work, it's like any other democracy -- make your voice heard, vote, campaign, or run for office.
Relevance of old answers
by Scottingham
As SO ages, some of the offered solutions are no longer valid. Are there currently plans to automate some way of validating old answers automatically? This problem seems to be a larger problem with forums in general. Do you have any musings regarding aging forums?
Atwood: Anyone, even anonymous users, can suggest an edit to any question or answer on any Stack Exchange site. It is like Wikipedia in that regard. Once two other users with sufficient reputation approve the edit it goes through. Alternately, if you earn enough reputation, you can make direct edits yourself.
If you see information that's out of date, edit it to make it more up to date! Be the change you want to see, and all that.
Signal To Noise: Trolls
by Anonymous Coward
In reading your work for years and seeing your various contributions, it seems like you are fascinated with filtering out the most useful information. In many of your blog posts the insight is not yours but rather a conglomeration of chosen useful quotes and sources. I very much appreciate this. My question for you is how do you handle critical feedback vs trolls when dealing with communities. For example, the down button is often a disagree button rather than a negative point. How do you deal with mixed opinions?
To use a real life personal example, TEF noted how he felt you were suggesting that people shouldn't play around to learn. Yet, the way he said it was clearly inflammatory. How do you separate the legitimate concern and critical feedback from the troll who doesn't want to listen to your response?
Atwood: There is a reason we don't have a "dislike" or "downvote" in Discourse. How can an opinion be wrong? It can be rude, offensive, misinformed, misguided, or just plumb crazy -- but it can't be objectively *wrong*. Often the way you judge posts in Discourse is by their *lack* of likes. If nobody feels strongly enough about your reply to push the heart button on it, and 'co-sign' it with their name in public, that says something.
As for separating legitimate criticism from trolling, I don't know that actual trolls, by the strict definition of the word troll, are that common. I think bad faith makes itself quite clear in the tone and delivery of the criticism. Are you saying this in the hope that we can both learn something from the interaction, or are you saying it because you want to hurt or shame or denigrate or discredit me? Truth alone, as it turns out, isn't the whole truth. How you say something matters.
Bad faith is especially visible to the audience, who has no stake in the argument, and can be surprisingly objective in judging authenticity. One of the most striking things about the early days of Stack Overflow was seeing how people would not upvote cruelty. They wouldn't necessarily downvote it, mind you, but overt cruelty and meanness in an answer was never an effective way to get upvotes and reputation even if the technical information was sound. The best way to win an argument isn't to convince the other person, necessarily -- good luck with that -- but to convince everyone who is watching. And you will never convince an audience watching you be cruel to another person.
In life, being cruel to others may achieve some short term goals, but it is *never* a winning long term strategy. And I think that is exactly how it should be.
How do you have a good debate online?
by AmiMoJo
It seems like the internet is mostly a terrible place to have debates. Many forums quickly become echo chambers for people who want to be as offensive as possible just to prove that they can exercise their free speech rights. Other times debates are derailed by cheap tactics like being deliberately offensive to derail the arguments and bog everyone down in accusations that they are "SJWs". Ad-hominems and obvious logical fallacies seem to be the norm.
How do you plan to avoid this happening? So far no-one seems to have found a way.
Atwood: We have a few tricks up our sleeve at Discourse. We try to teach communities not just how the software works, but how human beings should work, with stuff like our Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse which is prominently featured in every install of Discourse and of course Creative Commons licensed.
I believe in the “Just in Time" theory of human behavior where we try to reach you at the exact moment you start typing your first post with the TL;DR version of those rules. And the most important rule of all for empathy is a simple one: hey, there's another person on the other side of that screen. Not just an abstract name, an avatar, a collection of pixels, but a real live human being, just like you.
I don't know if we can weaponize empathy but I'd sure like to try. Not every space has to be open to everyone, unless you work for Facebook or Twitter. Sometimes the point of having your own community is being able to close the door on people who demonstrate that they can't behave themselves in your house. Live with wolves, and you learn to howl.
Stackoverflow in hindsight
by jez9999
In hindsight, would you have reduced the scope of on-topic questions for Stackoverflow to where it's at today when you started the site knowing what you do now, and do you think it would've made the site less popular?
Atwood: Much of the strictness of Stack Overflow evolved as a side effect of the reputation system. Once you have a reputation score, you want to protect that score, and nothing devalues your own reputation more than seeing some other programmer get 300 reputation points from a humorous answer containing nothing but an XKCD comic. Anyone can post an XKCD comic; that takes no particular competence or knowledge. So the evolution in strictness -- peer reputation should come from expression of *skill*, not funny anecdotes -- was largely driven by the community, not by anyone employed at Stack Overflow.
Even knowing what I already knew, which is that putting a number next to someone's name will cause them to do whatever it takes to make that number go up -- I didn't anticipate how strong this effect would be. But ultimately I agree with it, and I think systems should trend to slightly increasing strictness over time as they grow bigger. Big cities have different problems than small cities, and they need more structure.
Sorting posts (Score:2)
Atwood: Sorting a conversation by votes is a pretty effective way to destroy conversation. How can you follow the logical flow of back and forth, chronological dialog when the ground is constantly shifting underneath you as posts get voted up or down? You can't.
I have done it here for years.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
Slashdot doesn't sort by score, rather it can filter by score. Threading, date/time, etc. all keep their precedence
Re:Sorting posts (Score:3)
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
That still doesn't break threading
Which is yet another advantage of threaded discussions. Unfortunately Atwood hates them [codinghorror.com], so <strike>rubyBB</strike>Discourse doesn't support it.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
Re: Sorting posts (Score:0)
Actually -1 posts do get pushed to the bottom after some time even if they first posts and close to that.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2, Insightful)
The ability of Slashdot (and Reddit, etc.) to sort conversations is very much predicated on the existence of threaded discussion. Without threaded discussion, the direct replies to a topic get lost and scattered, and may even end up before the post they were replying to, with all the temporal paradoxes that involves.
In my experience, there is nothing more controversial in the realm of online discussion boards as the for/against on threaded conversation. There are people (mostly older folks who remember Usenet) who adore threaded discussion. There are others who absolutely *loathe* threaded discussion, and wish it would die in a fire.
Jeff's very much in the anti-threading camp [codinghorror.com], (2 [discourse.org]) though mostly on a practical, rather than ideological basis: "I have yet find any threaded discussion format I like". So Discourse only has a very limited threading model - basically just a "WTF is this person replying to?" button.
Without the ability to directly look at the context of a post, sorting posts removes all sorts of context about the discussion. Conversation is all about context, so removing it destroys the ability of the conversation to function. Flat posting forums solve this issue in one of three ways - either by forcing all readers into the same - usually chronological - context; by inducing users to heavily quote context in each post (quoting being something that also generates a large amount of acrimony); or by discarding the concept of "discussion" entirely, meaning posts devolve into disconnected soliloquies, related to each other only tenuously.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
The ability of Slashdot (and Reddit, etc.) to sort conversations is very much predicated on the existence of threaded discussion. ... Jeff's very much in the anti-threading camp
From the person whose question he was answering (who is temporarily sans mod points), this is a very insightful post. Jeff's answer makes perfect sense, if you *assume* the software doesn't strongly support threading. Which Discourse doesn't (mostly).
Now from *my* perspective, as a person who had a choice and has *chosen* to read email/news/forums in threaded mode since the first threaded newsreaders came out in the 80's, it doesn't answer the question at all. There are theoretically loads of other ways to get discussion context independent of how you decide to "promote" upvoted posts. I'd list some, but apparently that was the trap I fell into with Jeff. The point should be that a clever developer ought to be able to come up with some way of doing it, aside from bumping a tiny number next to the post just like its next to every single other discussion post, no matter how great or boring or offensive.
I'm not saying I hate it. It's just "meh". Lots of other online discussion software is already doing that. I expected more.
But again, as I said in the question, perhaps I'm missing something. I was late to the SE bandwagon too, so its not like it would be the first time.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
I will not use a system (for conversation, this sort of site - as an example) that does not allow me to sort (oldest first), thread (oldest first - still), show all (-1, here), and allow me to have a metric ton (preferably all) comments loaded at once. I read. I read a lot - an unhealthy amount, really. Since the days of yore, I've read comments at various sites. This system works for me.
Sometimes the longer and more involved topics can make threading difficult but Slashdot deals with this nicely with a link to the parent post. I don't want to click next page, that breaks threading. I like clear breaks to show me where the threaded comments start and end (the lines on the left are nice). I do tend to like AJAXy stuff that inserts new comments as they're added - there's that. Highlighting new messages is another feature along that bent that I like.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
Well you showed them! You don't have an answer to your question, and you can't get your job done, but by God you stuck to your guns and showed that SO who is boss!
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
SO is not for conversation. ;-)
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
But Discourse is, and that's what we are talking about here.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
And I don't use them - I do use AU which is part of SO/SE.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:0)
The cost of being anonymous with no reputation is obscurity.
I can sign up for a real account under a pseudonym but then I can be tracked.
Meh, this is good enough for me.
Re:Sorting posts (Score:2)
Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2, Interesting)
It works at three levels: 1. Selfish ... It's fine for people to play the game at level one, because they are also helping others learn and work their way up the skill ladder
Wow - that is a really cool observation. Atwood just went way up in my estimation for expressing this.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
This fights against the "Go read the 2000 page manual, you idiot!"-itis found on specialist sites.
A reference manual is a terrible learning tool. It is only useful if you know what you are looking for. For that matter, it is difficult to use if you don't know the correct words to search for, as he mentions elsewhere when discussing duplicate questions.
Programmers who get off on saying RTFM are useless and should not be allowed anywhere near such discussions. If you were sitting next to the guy, you would answer the answer, not say this. Help someone find the answer to an actual question quickly.
On a personal note for SE, "This is a duplicate question." needs a link to the duplicate question. Again terminology for search issues. And if they provide it, note to their UI people, I can't easily see it. It just seems like a snotty response + "Denied!"
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:0)
The "duplicate question" close always includes a link to the question it's a duplicate of. That you apparently can't see it, right there in the text, suggests you have pretty serious trouble reading and probably should look for a career and interests that don't rely on that so much.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
Or, you know, maybe he should RTFM... That's not even *hard* to find.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm sure to master systemd from reading its manpages.
Good documentation is hard to come by. Most of documentation out there seems to be more of a logbook where developers log their achievements and describe what they made in terms only they can understand. It's way too often unreadable for the outsiders.
A good documentation needs a document that describes the structure of the whole thing, how its elements influence each other and how the user can affect them. Provide usage patterns, examples with explanation of what and how is being done, caveats, processes.
Most of documentation, instead, lists available functions in alphabetic order, with perfunctory descriptions of their parameters and vestigal mentions of their purpose. Mapping intended action -> sequence of functions is about impossible for anyone not already trained in the system. Instead of "How to do [task X]" you get "which [mysterious parameter] does knob Y tweak?"
Imagine trying to learn flying an airplane given only a list of names, locations and briefest descriptions of every switch, dial and knob in that airplane.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
No no no... The SO/SE help files to see that the dupes are linked to the questions which they duplicate. I've never seen one marked as a duplicate in error but I suspect there are some due to humans making errors but if it's closed as a duplicate then there's a link to the original or best suited question. Sometimes questions aren't marked as duplicates as nobody notices so you end up with some duplicated content which means you may find that the newer question has better answers.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
You can also usually set a bounty on a question with existing answers if they are not to your satisfaction. It's costly in terms of karma, but it can un-bury an ancient question and attract new, better answers.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
Yeah, I gotta get that badge on AU. I've got the reputation for it (I don't do it for points - I do it to learn and spend most of my time there asking questions in the comments trying to tease out the problem and don't care enough to write out solutions often - someone comes along and does it for me) so that's not a problem. I can also earn more points with editing and whatnot. Meh... I should still get the badge. They're Pokebadges. Gotta catch 'em all.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
Well, I could do without my couple "Tumbleweed"s.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:0)
Actually, You misunderstand the RTFM.
You should read it. Not when You have a problem -- read it, optimally before You use it. How else would You know the capabilities and limitations of the tool that You are using? It works for real world tools as well -- You should read the manual before plugging the tool in.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:1)
Recalling a hint from xkcd about sudoers(5) [www.sudo.ws]: the description of the sudoers file format starts with a "Quick guide to EBNF" and the whole manual is roughly 13,000 words long. When you want to change the password prompt timeout today, RTwholeFM before opening visudo is not an option.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
Perhaps what #51029267 meant is that you ought to have read through sudo(8) and sudoers(5) not just before you visudo but even before you sudo in the first place.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
This is especially important if the question is (or appears to be) someone's homework assignment.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:2)
In the (not so rare) cases where a question was closed as a duplicate even though it was not, the right course of action is to act the question for a third time. This time - underlying differences and focus; linking the existing "duplicates" and telling how they don't answer what you need. It works.
Also, don't treat every single closure as a "punishment".
"Duplicate" closures mean people still get the correct answer (at the original question) but they still provide alternative paths to find it.
"Migration" closures mean there are people better qualified to answer that elsewhere, so you're better off going there.
"Too broad" closures - you really won't obtain a comprehensive answer because it's impossible; it would require a library, not an answer entry. In these cases Either split your question into smaller, bite-sized chunks or explicitly ask for a shallow, broad summary of the topic.
Also, before you ask a question that has numerous possible answers, think how are you going to pick that single "correct" one. If you know some quality that would let you choose, include it. If you don't - you should really rethink your question.
Also, in case "is there any...?" type of questions, don't hesitate to state "this is a yes/no question, I'm not asking to list all, just drop me any single example or 'none' if there is none." Some mods are allergic to list questions and unless you narrow it down sufficiently, it will be closed. Same about short, closed lists - if the list goes on and on with no way to find its tail, the question is too broad. But if the list is like "which out of these five?" then its answer will not exceed five items and it should be perfectly acceptable. And sometimes people forget "none" is a valid answer, it's good to remind that in the question.
Last but not least, each site has its chat. If you have trouble formulating a neat question, you can drop in and ask for help there. Not for answer as such, but help in phrasing your question right.
Re:Three cheers for selfishness! (Score:1)
Three cheers for huge egos huge e-penises. (Score:1)
His response to the severe problem of way too many excellent and useful questions at SO getting unjustifiably closed is abysmal.
It totally misses the fact that online moderation, whether at SO or elsewhere, is often done by people who have no influence at all in the offline world. Being so powerless, they strive to obtain power online. This is often achievable through moderating sites with user-contributed content. By subjecting others to censorship, these moderators stroke their egos and try to lengthen their e-penises. It makes them feel bigger than they really are, even if it ruins the experiences of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other users.
I actually did laugh out loud while reading this. SO is not governed by programmers just like me. It's governed by programmers who have time to waste with stupid online politics and censorship. I, and real, working programmers like me, don't have time for that bullshit. We need answers to our questions, and we need them now. We don't need some micropenised neckbeard wrongly telling us that our questions and answers, which thousands of people find useful, don't exactly match the letter of some obscure and subjective policy somewhere. We surely don't need this sort of monster disrupting our online experience!
Re:Three cheers for huge egos huge e-penises. (Score:2)
Real programmers get everything done by 10:30 AM, and spend the rest of the day posting on Slashdot, levelling up on SO and working on personal github projects.
Re: Three cheers for huge egos huge e-penises. (Score:2)
Actually, if a "real" programmer is going to have their work done by 10:30, they'll ask for more work at 9:00. It's only the bad programmers who are allowed to slack off for 3/4ths of the day since their time is considered less valuable.
Cool post, interesting (Score:-1)
Thanks for posting. I'll have to take a look!
Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
Or are they just perfecting COPY / PASTE?
1) Google "How do I do X in Y?"
2) Click result in position #1
3) COPY
4) PASTE
5) GOTO 1
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:0)
All the interesting problems nobody ever had before. If you're faced with one of the problems somebody already had, it's crazy to feel you're a better person for inventing your own new solution rather than using the existing one. Go solve one of the problems we DIDN'T already solve, fool.
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
I've been a professional software developer for almost 30 years, and I can say that this isn't new.
There has always been cookbook programming and programmers who can only do it.
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:0)
YPICS staff & students can use Atomic Learning (http://www.atomiclearning.com ) to view tutorials about various software packages, as well as work on digital learning projects. To get the username and password for Atomic Learning, click on the links below:
BCCS staff & students
https://docs.google.com/a/coronacharter.org/document/d/1cArcV4rQMpZkBPxxhIJIBBD6_PqNUDnMc41n6tUiLlw/edit
MORCS staff & students
https://docs.google.com/a/romerocharter.org/document/d/15eLnKvjLT3BrcSCfv-_yKqOG0yrkViD2b54VzJS9iGs/edit
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:1)
Or are they just perfecting COPY / PASTE?
1) Google "How do I do X in Y?"
2) Click result in position #1
3) COPY
4) PASTE
5) GOTO 1
Fifteen years ago I worked projects where I had the luxury of really diving into one language or technology and mastering it. Now every project has a huge set of completely new platforms, languages, libraries, buzzwords, etc, and I'm expected to hit the ground running on day one.
So, yeah, I'll google "jquery change combobox options", open the first hit (usually Stack Exchange), copy-paste-test-commit. Bam. Next search, "less css inherit", copy-paste-test-commit. "iBatis map jodatime", copy-paste-test-commit. "Spring mockito tomcat autowire", copy-paste-test-commit. Over and over and over.
Often I don't even know how it works. It just has to get done by morning scrum.
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
When reading the official documentation you have an authoritative source for information, and while there may be some errors, in general the answers you see will be correct. When searching the Internet it is a whole different ballgame. The internet is chock full of posts promoting worst practices as best practices, or just generally giving advice that doesn't work or is just really, really bad for one reason or another.
So no, searching the internet for your answer is not just a faster version of RTFM.
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
Re:Do people actually learn to code anymore? (Score:2)
Objectively wrong. (Score:1)
"How can an opinion be wrong? ........... it can't be objectively *wrong*. "
You're an idiot, of course an opinion can be objectively wrong.
Re:Objectively wrong. (Score:0)
Jawohl mein Herr! Long line political correctness and groupthink!
Re:Objectively wrong. (Score:2)
Now read your own post in a non-sarcastic way; treat the text of your post as a personal opinion. Then judge whether that opinion is not objectively wrong.
Re:Objectively wrong. (Score:1)
> You're an idiot, of course an opinion can be objectively wrong.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
"Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:1)
So-called "civilized discourse" is some of the blandest, boring, mind-numbing conversation there is. It's completely devoid of original thought. This is because original thought might just hurt somebody's feelings, which is considered totally unacceptable for some reason. Negativity, especially negativity that's the most legitimate and correct, is also not tolerated, again because somebody's feelings might get hurt. Discussion forums where that's the policy quickly become politically correct mutual masturbation sessions, where the mindlessness is repeated again and again. It's funny, though, that the moderators at such communities are often the biggest tyrants around. The louder they scream about how critical it is to be tolerant of others, the faster and harder they'll crack down on anyone who dares to show any sort of originality!
Re:"Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:3)
Yet you stated such in a civil way... IOW, I disagree. You can have decent, thought-provoking, insightful, and original thought in a civil manner. It takes effort and the parties should all be civil but, it's certainly feasible. For that matter, I've had lots of it - with people I didn't agree with. But, yes, you must put the effort into it and the other participant(s) be receptive of such.
Re:"Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:2)
"Civil discourse" does not mean that you are afraid to say things that some random reader might take offense from. You are thinking of "political correctness".
"Civil discourse" implies not gratuitously and unneccessarily insulting the addressee. That need not be boring, but it requires some thought in order to be engaging. There is some real wisdom in a movie called "Blast From the Past (1999)". My favorite quote is:
Troy - 'I know, I mean I thought a "gentleman" was somebody that owned horses. But it turns out, his short and simple definition of a lady or a gentleman is, someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible.'
Sometimes insult is warranted. Wisdom is knowing when that sometimes is. I wish I were wiser.
Re:"Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:2)
So-called "civilized discourse" is some of the blandest, boring, mind-numbing conversation there is.
This message brought to you by Trump 2016!
Re: "Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:0)
Hey, nothing wrong with mutual masterbation! It's fun!
Re:"Civilized discourse" is fucking boring! (Score:0)
Yes, being an overbearing, insensitive asshole to make a point is always such an original approach...
"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey there. I'm a developer working on some pretty niche stuff. Usually, the questions I have aren't entirely code-related, but they don't fall on any other Stack Exchange site's purview. So I post a question and, instead of getting answers from people who are also coders and have also worked with the same stuff, I get a bunch of people going all "Hey, this question doesn't belong in SO/networking/whatever". This got old fast so I stopped contributing my own answers to the sites. Can you work on making the community a bit friendlier, a bit more flexible on this? Because right now it's a bunch of rule lawyers. Thanks.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:0)
Duplicate. See "Rampant closure of questions", by WaffleMonster, above.
There's probably a bit of irony in here. This reaction is so typical; there's a lot of blame on StackOverflow moderation for being strict, when the actual issue is just laziness from the initial poster.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:2)
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:0)
This is the answers session. You missed the questions [slashdot.org].
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:3)
If it's not code-related, don't post it to Stack Overflow. The site owners have been very clear about what type of content they want on their site, and questions like that are not it. The response to "we don't want that type of content on our site" is not "I'll post it anyway then complain when it gets removed". That's what spammers do. Don't post stuff where it's not wanted just because it benefits you. It's selfish and spammy. You don't have the right to abuse other people's websites for your own gain. If you want a website where you can post non-code-related questions, there are plenty of them out there. Stack Overflow is not one of them. You're posting the equivalent of -1, Flamebait there.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:0)
If it's not code-related, don't post it to Stack Overflow. The site owners have been very clear about what type of content they want on their site, and questions like that are not it. The response to "we don't want that type of content on our site" is not "I'll post it anyway then complain when it gets removed". That's what spammers do. Don't post stuff where it's not wanted just because it benefits you. It's selfish and spammy. You don't have the right to abuse other people's websites for your own gain. If you want a website where you can post non-code-related questions, there are plenty of them out there. Stack Overflow is not one of them. You're posting the equivalent of -1, Flamebait there.
It looks like you're the problem the OP is talking about. His questions are, by his description, code-related. They're not entirely code related, and I'm not sure what that means (perhaps it's standards, but who knows?), but it clearly does not mean unrelated to code.
Please explain then, Bogtha, why a code-related question is unwanted. Please do not call the person selfish and accuse them of spam based solely on a misinterpretation of his description.
Finally, he did not respond to being told "we don't want that type of content on our site" by posting. He left. If anyone looks like they're being abusive, it's you.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:0)
He says they're "not entirely code-related" which is what these non-contributors say when they think the rules shouldn't apply to them, Here are some typical "not entirely code-related" questions
"Like a lot of programmers I really like Star Trek. But I'm not sure which Star Trek actress is hottest, what do you think?"
"I write PHP software for a small company in California. Should I ask my employer to support the State Ping Pong Championship?"
"I just watched a Youtube video about the Amstrad CPC range of computers. The Z80 microprocessor lacks a floating point unit, which seems like it could make some Java software run more slowly, but my question is, does God really exist?"
Maybe some function would be served by indulging these idiots, but that function would be unrelated to Stack Overflow's purpose, so I'm glad SO doesn't make it their mission to "help" them.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:2)
Hint: If you consistently get a bunch of people telling you that your questions don't belong on Stack Overflow, then they don't belong on Stack Overflow. There's tremendous amounts of people who have no problem posting questions that are on-topic. If you keep getting told that yours are off-topic, then the problem is with you.
Read his comment again. He was talking about what usually happens to him. Meaning this is a common pattern of behaviour.
The bottom line is you've got a community-driven website continually telling you that they don't want certain types of content. The people who keep trying to force it onto the website are behaving like spammers. Yes, that's abusive.
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:1)
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:2)
It's not. This is the equivalent of somebody going to a soup stand and asking for ice-cream, then complaining when the soup stand won't serve ice-cream. That's not what the soup stand is for and just because you really want ice-cream, it doesn't mean it's their responsibility to serve it to you, and it doesn't make them nazis for refusing. Where does this misguided notion that Stack Overflow shouldn't be allowed to define boundaries come from?
If you have a question that Stack Overflow is designed to answer, then post it. If you have a question that Stack Overflow doesn't want, then don't post it. This is simple stuff and has nothing to do with how thin your skin is. Does successful moderation of off-topic things on Slashdot down to -1 make you afraid to post comments here?
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:2)
Nicely ask in the question that if it doesn't belong here, could you (please) be redirected to the right site? :)
"Programmers.SE" is also a good site for questions that can't be answered with a snippet of code. You may get a better track record asking there - especially that it's not so ridden with competition between vicious addicts of the karma that swarm every new question and fill it with loathing if they find they can't gain any karma to be earned from it.
Also, if the situation was regular, it would be a good idea to bring it up in meta.stackoverflow.com, asking for advice.
And if the answer is "there is no site in the SE network that would be a good match for your questions currently", the right course of action might be a visit to area51.stackexchange.com ...
Re:"Not in THIS Stack Exchange site!" (Score:1)
didn't answer my question :( (Score:1)
Re:didn't answer my question :( (Score:-1)
Because you're a disgraceful excuse for a human being.
Re:didn't answer my question :( (Score:0)
I felt his question was quite inciseful. I find your hostility offensive.
Re:didn't answer my question :( (Score:0)
I would like to know this as well.
He did jot adress the dubplicates issue (Score:2)
Seems he did not graps it. ...
It is a pain the ass to have high ranked google hits of questions that are closed as duplicates when they are clearly not duplicates.
Just had that problem a few weeks ago when I had to edit the sendmail.cf file manually, because the toolchain to go via sendmal.mf did nit exist on that machine.
A good deal of the usefull questions where closed as duplicates
Even worse is the amount of questions that are closed as 'non constructive'.
As far as I can tell, people with the reutation to close questions, are abusing that power. Probably they are just bored and click on stuff they only have a vague grasp about ... no idea.
Re:He did jot adress the dubplicates issue (Score:1)
Note to self: must remember not to post sloppily in haste, and to always preview and proofread. Else there is too much danger I will appear either drunk or slovenly to the reader.
Re:He did jot adress the dubplicates issue (Score:2)
Seems he did not graps it...questions that are closed as duplicates when they are clearly not duplicates.
But, he did:
Human beings have the incredibly annoying habit of asking the same questions using completely and utterly different words. They're really good at it.
I think the main problem is that questions can be closed as duplicate without explanation. My observation has been that a lot of people do not yet know how to simplify their problems, and are thus less effective at asking questions. They may not realize that their question is actually a duplicate, because the people closing it did the simplifying for them and realized it was a duplicate.
As an example, this morning I saw a question with a subject like "Conditional += operator" -- their question was asking why something like (a + b ? c += 1 : c += 2) was resulting in an unexpected number. Any moderately experienced coder will have boiled it down to "how does the ternary operator work?", and maybe closed it as a dupe of another such question. They'd have been technically correct that it was a duplicate, and yet not helpful at all to the person asking the question.
I think the solution may be to allow a sort of "closing answer" -- something that closes as a duplicate, with a minimal explanation showing why their problem was a duplicate.
Interestingly enough, this appears to be a problem unique to the professionalish "no nonsense" standards of SO. In the days when IRC was the primary point of help, if you asked a question poorly you'd usually get a lot of equally poor mocking responses until you learned to boil it down. Condescending trolls or not, it sort of forced you to think about your problem a bit more and after a few weeks of that, you're a lot better off.
Re:He did jot adress the dubplicates issue (Score:2)
No, he did not grasp it.
The duplicates in question: are not duplicates!
He tried to answer it, and luckily you grasp the problem as the rest of your post shows.
Condescending trolls or not, it sort of forced you to think about your problem a bit more and after a few weeks of that, you're a lot better off.
That is usually not the case when I ask a question.
Closing valid questions is just a little bit less annoying than the stupid: 'why do you want to do that' answers.
Re:He did jot adress the dubplicates issue (Score:2)
The solution is:
- ask the question one more time.
- link previous "duplicates"
- tell exactly how they don't answer it
- tell what you expect from the answer, that the accepted answer doesn't have.
Example [stackoverflow.com]. The original question asked "how to deal with the problem". My question was "Why the problem exists; what are its potential consequences?" - I had to state I'm not looking for solution but for a rationale, not "do it because standard says so" but "what rationale lies behind this entry in the standard?" - it was three close-votes down before I got the point across.
Another one [stackexchange.com], not on SO but on Arquade, one of SE sites. A Minecraft question, which was at first deemed a duplicate... except the original was about the Creative mode, and mine was about Survival, making the (trivial) answers for the original useless in my context. Again, underlying the difference... made all the difference.
So: Just re-ask the non-duplicate, just make sure to show clearly why and how it's non-duplicate.
Excuse me... contradiction here: (Score:0)
Yeah, see, because I am a human being, and to me, those two quotes really seem to contradict each other. Am I just Doing It Wrong?
Ignorant sycophants (Score:2)
This "question": Jeff, have you thought about how to use reputation mechanisms to improve the quality of published scientific results? I'm asking in the context of John P. A. Ioannidis' famous paper. It seems to me one fix for this (horrible) problem might be an online reputation mechanism where scientists could rate the reproducibility of published results. Thoughts? (thanks for inventing Stack Exchange - you've done the world a big favor).
When I say it in the original thread, I was sure it would be picked. But apart from the grovelling, it's a foolish idea.
> Atwood: It certainly seems applicable.
Where's the supporting argument? There isn't. It's just "we're so cool, we could do better than science". Ugh.
I remember expertsexchange.com (Score:2)