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Comment by 4ad | Hacker News Reader

No thanks from me. The no discussions rule means the only questions on the site are the trivial questions that could be answered by reading some documentation. If questions are broad or open ended, the value lies in the discussion, not in any particular answer. I also found that many accepted answers are blatantly wrong, or encourage very poor practice. Sure, the StackExchange network is better than experts-exchange or quora, in the sense that's a much better implementation of a concept, but I believe there's just very little value in that concept.

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Likewise. I usually only end up searching the web-in-general for answers when the product documentation doesn't help. When that's led me to stackexchange, more often than not the threads asking my exact question have been closed as "too general" or similar.

The most recent example, in my case, was:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166086/good-examples-of...

"Can anybody recommend some [PHP] programs for me to look at, that promote best practises, but are simple enough for me to understand?"

"closed as not a real question; It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. [no it's not] This question is ambiguous [nope], vague [no], incomplete [er, no], overly broad [no], or rhetorical [still no] and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form [no again]. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it [mmm, passive-agression]."

... er, WTF guys? Given the minefield that is trying to write good PHP, it's a very good question. A couple of good answers had, I note, already been given, which puts the lie to the mods' reasoning -- but they killed it off anyway, even though it was showing promise? Really?

Reeks of power-tripping or jobsworthy moderation to me.

In my opinion, that IS an ambiguous question. Not in the sense that it's hard to understand approximately what you're looking for, but that it's not obvious how to choose the right answers. I agree that this kind of moderation can be a bit heavy-handed, but I think one of the goals of SO is to have provably correct solutions to questions, not an "answer wiki" like Quora. You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I wouldn't say "ambiguous". I'll grant you "subjective".

Does stackexchange forbid questions where there's an element of opinion, because the system's set up only for questions with "one right answer"? That seems awfully restrictive in the name of a system limitation.

Especially as, as 4ad observed, the asker chooses an incorrect answer annoyingly often -- so the "best answer" isn't always actually the best. As such, it's advisable to at least flick through the other answers anyway, despite this rule.

No, opinion is welcome (on Stack Exchange, not necessarily on Stack Overflow) but it needs to be backed up by research or fact.

That's not the problem on the sample question.

> You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I see that as the issue - that there has to be one answer. It's a site that promotes the same issue that plagues reddit, the hunger for karma.

The post has two other questions:

what are the best practices when it comes to PHP?

And are there recommended ways of tackling certain task?

And these are, I believe, ambiguous, vague and overly broad (not to mention subjective).

Also the third question, the one you quote, is actually a yes/no question that would be pointless to answer. So, assuming that's not the real question... what is? I believe it IS difficult to tell what is being asked here.

StackExchange is just not meant for discussion, I think. At last not as it is right now.

The one I quoted is a yes/no question only if you ignore the norm of answering "Can anybody recommend [thing]?" as if it were "What examples of [thing] do you know of?". That's obviously the intention behind the question -- if you asked your waiter "Can you recommend a wine?", and s/he replied only "yes", that'd make hir both pedantic and deliberately unhelpful.

And the existence of the other questions is beside the point -- the title of the question is "Good examples of PHP code for an intermediate PHPer?", the body is merely exposition. I only quoted the equivalent question from the body because it had better grammar than the title.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The mods are power crazed and addicted to closing questions. If people are answering, and upvoting those answers, or the question, then the question is worthy and shouldn't be closed. End of story.

SO is still awesome, but flawed. And their mod system suffers from the same problem that has plagued every mod'ed site: mod convergence, essentially turning the site into their own echo chamber, and stagnating it.

It also seems like they have a lot of help vampires as I see many questions where the correct answer doesn't have even a single upvote.

Discussion is only tolerated insofar as it allows refinement (and editing for improvement) of the question and the answers. Discussion in and of itself is not the goal; getting a verifiably great answer to your question -- even if you didn't ask it -- is!

At Stack Exchange, we do science in the small. Bite-size, fun-size units of science that shouldn't feel like work, but collectively build something amazing for a community of people who love a particular topic.

Science in the small is an oxymoron, I guess. Any scientific issue start with a good question that has no straightforward answer.

SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion.

Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and other people will be annoyed at you. Different solutions for different needs.

It's not the software it's the community. Here's the exact same software with a community that tolerates a list: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/4994/fundamental-examples

That said the community+software is good at what it does. I can be sad it's intolerant of lists without needing to disparage it further.

It's really the software. It isn't made to host lists. Votes on lists are historically on the item (OMG YES JQUERY!!!!!), not on the answer (You should use jQuery because a. b. c. d.), and that isn't how the rest of the site works.

Besides in a Q&A network, a "list question" has "list answers" where every "answer" is a "list", rather than an item of that list. Even that doesn't really work because that's not historically the way the site is actually used.

See also the following for the rationale:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-an...

The problem is that the quality of participants/knowledge on the discussion sites simply isn't as good as SE.

No knock on SE. Quite the opposite.

But I frequently have questions that aren't SE style questions, and I wish I knew where to take them for such intelligent and informed responses.

The theory (a very sound one, based on internal observation) is that the strict "answers, not discussion" format is what attracts and retains high quality participants.

I really strongly believe that it's an either/or proposition, you either get discussion or you get quality answers to questions. Discussion "sucks the air out", so to speak.

And since there are already so many places for discussion on the internet, it's better for us to focus on Q&A.

I do not think "no discussion" rule is enforced to mean no any discussion at all. I have routinely seen and participated in discussing merits of certain answers, and nobody minded. The premise is however that there is a right answer to the question and it is knowable and findable, not just a matter of opinion that can be debated endlessly. Yes, some questions do not fit - but many questions that are complicated enough for me that I could not find it by myself without wasting a lot of time - do fit. Documentation is very different format - it usually shows you what tools you have, but not how to use them. Compare "here's a hammer, it is used to drive in nails" to "how do I hammer in a nail that is slightly crooked into a concrete wall?" or "Can I put a nail into a porcelain tile without breaking it?". The docs probably won't answer such questions.

When you go to the public pool, you don't complain about not being able to play golf, do you?

StackExchange is a Q&A community website. Although sometimes discussion would be appreciated, it is not what it was meant for. And by all means, if you find an accepted answer to be wrong, downvote and comment it! The whole point of StackExchange websites is to rate questions and answers!

I think the person is simply frustrated because he realizes that StackExchange could be so much better. I quit a few years ago when they changed all question upvotes to be only worth 5 points, but rejoined about a year and a half ago because it's still the best existing option.

When asking questions, I try to make them good enough so that other people will find them useful in the future, and it's great when I get a like-minded answer. Some examples:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9708945/how-to-embed-a-ne...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10252440/changing-the-det...

Still, I think StackOverflow could be taken up a notch to allow more collaboration and organization. Also, wouldn't it be great to be able to provide runnable source code in some sort of git archive? For some languages like Javascript the code in the questions/answers could be in something like http://jsfiddle.net

Ideally, a group of people could pick any topic and essentially write several books (beginner and advanced) by asking lots of questions. At least that was my initial belief. Say, for example, you wanted to learn elisp, and you typed: "Hello world in emacs", well I've got that answered:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-wor...

I didn't quite get a book with Elisp, but I did throw down quite a few breadcrumbs:

CGI: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532311/cgi-programming-i...

AWK Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2260294/awk-print-2-1-in-...

Extract URLs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642184/extracting-urls-f...

Parse CSV/Gen HTML: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1541682/lisp-script-to-pa...

Wrap Selection like Textmate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1558178/wrap-selection-in...

MySql (Unanswered): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532365/mysql-queries-fro...

Generate a Quiz: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz...

Open Browser: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532365/mysql-queries-fro...

Generate a Quiz (Common Lisp): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2115341/sorting-buffer-li...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2358604/convert-decimal-h...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170120/operating-on-mult...

Once you are asking questions beyond a certain level at SO it is impossible to get a correct answer; instead you will get conjectures from people who don't know what they are doing.

I saw authors, maintainers of some projects answer questions related to their projects on SO.

stackexchange is to solve problems not answer questions.

Can a dog have the Bhudda nature - is a good question but it's not really a problem.

How do I connect to a wifi network without an SSID in Ubuntu is a problem - even if it is a less good question

Nope, we're here to answer questions. Can a dog have the Buddha nature is argumentative, and as far as I know would be off-topic since there is no Buddha site. However, "Can a dog be saved and go to heaven" would be closer to being on-topic, since there is a christianity.se. Make sense?

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