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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Meta comment since the SO thread covers the discussion on the actual question:

Does the tone of the asker bother anyone else? The "I don't want you to teach me, I want you to do it for me" attitude feels to me the antithesis of the spirit of this corner of the tech community.

His first and only SO question, he's putting up a bounty, and it just feels like a finance/hedge fund guy saying "Damn, this is tough. Let's see if I can bribe the nerds to do it for me instead."

I know there are places for that - elance, oDesk, etc. Just feels like SO is the wrong forum for that kind of attitude, as interesting as the question might be.

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I disagree.

The OP did not post the bounty, it was an interested reader. The OP (and also the bounty poster) have been engaged in the discussion threads with examples of effort and pursuit of the ideas offered.

SO does get used/abused as you describe sometimes. I'm mostly OK with that. If the poster can find someone interested enough in their problem (or in demonstrating knowledge thereof) then who can complain, really? Everyone is on SO for a reason, after all.

In this case, even if the OP was the typical Homework Solution Seeker, the responses would be valuable to others, sometime and somewhere -- though they would be hard to make discoverable without a few important search keywords.

Where do you have this quotes from ? Your version of the quotes are completely biasing this comment thread.

This is his original: "I'm not looking for a general overview of machine learning, rather I'm looking for actual model in code (python preferred)."

To me this sounds like:

"i am not looking for theoretical background, but practical implementations in code (or pseudocode)" - as in "something more actionable and more straight forward to the solution" - for many people (eg like me) this is easier to learn from than whitepapers.

Sure, and he's not the only one like that on SO. However, if the question is interesting, I see no reason why it shouldn't be answered or upvoted. SO is not about one guy asking the community to do his job, but more like archiving a bunch of programming questions and its solutions. This thread will benefit more people than this guy with a bad attitude.

Very good attitude and perspective. Thank you!

It doesn't bother me. I suspect many people go to SO in order to solve a problem.

Sometimes it's nice to find gigantic answers explaining the theory behind the question itself and giving the answer & examples in the end. It's nice, I search for random coding stuff in my free time and finding such answers entertains me greatly.

Most times, though, it's annoying when you ask a question and the answer/comment simply says "Why are you trying to do X? Please let me understand the problem; maybe you want something else!". I'm one of these people who ask edge case questions concerning obscure pratices/libs/language features, and let me tell you, I hate when someone tries to patronize me about his favorite design pattern on SO.

I don't think he's trying to bribe anyone. Sometimes you're just desperate with no knowledge on X, and a search for X yields just scientific articles on the subject. Sometimes you just want to get stuff done.

That kind of demanding tone, limited requirements and small amount of data always make me suspect someone is looking for a solution to a homework exercise.

The way you inferred that sounds like how my ex-girlfriend infers emotions from texts. And you quoted him saying something he actually didn't even say--another popular move by my ex.

> "I'm not looking for a general overview of machine learning, rather I'm looking for actual model in code"

He wants some code in Python that will help him discern Apple (Inc) from Apple (Fruit). That is as opposed to getting a high-level tutorial on NLP entity and category extraction, semantic reasoning, classification and a link to http://nltk.org/ saying "You can do it with this."

Fair enough, and good point. I may have rushed to judgment on first read. Thank you for the perspective!

This guy tried it with his takehome final, didn't go so well

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/256816/if-n-the-orde...

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