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Comment by cjensen | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. In the Meta the answer is used as an example of something that never gets deleted by the system. I don't see any anger about it -- just a discussion of a defect in the Stack Overflow system where unhelpful answers never get pruned.

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And I’m curious how else SO should handle poor answers like that. Are they just supposed to leave bad answers like that up? Especially when OP admits they don’t actually understand the topic well and isn’t interested in fixing it?

In this case it seems to help about 50% of the people that see it?

Possibly more, since the downvoters are probably just triggered.

Meanwhile on some other programming forum, you ask a question about C, you only get answers about C++. SO is right to put minimal effort into preventing that happening. But they put maximal effort into it instead.

Correct them?

An incorrect answer can be useful, because it often illustrates common confusions and naive mistakes that people are prone to making;

If it's corrected with an explanation as to why it doesn't work, a good wrong answer can be more educational than the answer that actually solves the problem.

There are tons of answers on that question already. Correcting it would just be duplicating one of the others…

I think what people are getting bent out of shape about is the answer isn’t incorrect, but it defies their sense of order because it’s a cpp answer without a cpp tag.

He basically answered that the correct way to find the length of an array in c is to use c++ not c. I don't think there is any way to correct that answer, and responding to a question of how do i do X in C with "use C++ instead", is kind of obnoxious.

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