What was intended is one thing. What resulted is that I got the message that effort put out by me, that I thought was appreciated due to upvotes, is not what is actually desired there. So why bother?
It was not the moderation itself. It was the discussion on meta that convinced me that what I was interested was so far from the norms that were going to be enforced that there was no point in being present.
As for trying to "help us figure out how to do that" - there could be nothing farther from my interests. As I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197385 I've never enjoyed being around the kind of people who enjoy debating and enforce rules for what is worthy for their community.
But if you should manage to change the culture, maybe it will show up in a story on Hacker New. Then I might give it another try. But not now.
I'd strike "almost" and "online" from this sentence.
Being part of community always means compromise. Only hermits win all their arguments. But most of us have decided that the benefits of community outweigh the cost.
"if your question generally covers …
a specific programming problem a software algorithm software tools commonly used by programmers practical, answerable problems that are unique to the programming profession … then you’re in the right place to ask your question!
show more What kind of questions should I not ask here?
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face."
This is practical, answerable, an actual problem someone has faced (presumably for a programming interview), to do with a software algorithm, specific, and unique to the programming profession (otherwise why would you specify 2^63-1 as a limit?!).
How on earth is this "definitely without a doubt, not on topic to SO"? Why would "Progamming Language Pragmatics" be cited as a reference if this was not a programming problem?
The comments in the meta thread are also unhelpful - "True, I would close it as not a real question. Because it is the text literally copied from the interview question whitout any effort to change it into a question and without any effort to solve it".
I'm with btilly, these guys should put more time into answers and less into meta-answers, if I were treated like him I'd be looking for the door as well: why would he want to spend his time convincing these people a clearly useful question and answer should be on this site?
sorry but, "faced at an interview" is far from "actual problems that you face".
Interviews contain all kind of junk, abstact and bs questions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin%E2%80%93Karp_algorithm shows serious research into a similar problem. It is depressing that useful questions and answers like this are judged on whether they are homework or interview questions, not on the quality of the response.
The discussion on meta shows no appreciation of the quality of btilly's contributions to the site. I'm not surprised he's leaving, and I agree StackOverflow will be worse without his answers. What do you think?
It's not about the "quality of the contributions", it's about their appropriateness.
If a great chef goes to a Burger King and starts making his own stuff when asked for a burger, he might make very high quality stuff, but that doesn't mean he wont be fired.
Same here, there might be "serious research into a similar problem", but that doesn't mean it's appropriate for Stack Overflow. They want more of the "I face this particular problem in my project" type of stuff.
Practical things, like, e.g "how can I store a blob into Oracle from Python" or "why does this html5 canvas project get a low framerate".
No, the "they" in question seem to be the people who hang out on meta, and who spend a serious fraction of their time agreeing on and enforcing rules against everyone else.
Perhaps if "they" stopped to ask whether they should be acting in a way that is not wanted by users, at least one founder, and which drives away contributers, then they might act differently.
Seriously, when you're applying a FAQ and come to the opposite conclusion from the people who wrote it, something is wrong.