Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

The post was put on hold because the OP failed to provide the information the community would need to reproduce the issue. What good is a programming problem if no one else can reproduce it?

Disagree. OP failed to exclude some possibilities by doing multiple randomized trials and so on (or at least stating whether he had done so), but he supplied the source code and a description of the behavior that was perfectly adequate to understand the issue. Nothing personal, but your post above is the epitome of deflecting a question instead of engaging with it.

View on HN

You can't reproduce the issue with the information he gave. He doesn't tell what operating system, terminal, java version, etc he is using.

Most likely his problem is due to his terminal (my guess: cmd.exe/powershell in Windows) and not his program code at all.

FWIW here's my non-reproduction of his problem, on Linux amd64, Sun Java 1.6.0, running in urxvt:

    real	0m3.568s
    user	0m0.616s
    sys	0m1.152s

    real	0m3.393s
    user	0m0.648s
    sys	0m1.060s

In other words, I could not reproduce the issue with the information he provided.

Neither cmd, nor PowerShell are the console host (which would be doing things like outputting text in a character grid), so they're both very far removed from the problem. Heck, when a console program is running it doesn't even need a shell, nor does the parent shell (if there is one) even know when the program outputs text.

It would be very nice if we could share or clone our development environment and let contributors on Stackoverflow play with it, rather than try to reproduce on their computers. Of course it has its dangers, but once solved, it would be an awesome addition to SO.

This is the exact goal of vagrant. The toolset is already in place. I just wish more people use it while filing issues.

I agree it would be cool, and occasionally useful, but I think overall such a tool would be a negative. The goal of boiling down code to the smallest, most portable example which demonstrates the problem isn't just to get more effective help. It's a vital step in isolating the issue, and when duly used, often results in the problem being found without help. Furthermore, it gives answers the quality of being more useful to those who find the question later. That's because while two actual pieces of code that have the same bug will appear almost unrelated, their simplest reductions will bear similarity to each other.

I think adoption of a tool that just lets one share their dev environment would discourage this sort of due diligence, and encourage the useless "here's a dump of my code please fix it"-type questions.

At first, I thought you were being flippant, but then I realized in horror that you were serious.

While I know you were coming from a good place -- I'm all about automating a testable problem (i.e. TDD, write failing tests first), and I think in the right hands, this would be a nice tool -- I could only see SO using this to further enforce strict requirements in what they consider a "valid" question.

"You must set up a lab environment that fully replicates the issue in question."

Maybe they wouldn't let it go that far (I would hope), but I think it would head in that direction.

I see jsfiddle.net being used this way for jQuery, plugins, themes, etc. While I really hate doing HTML + CSS + JS work, the outgrowth of jsfiddle and the like is brilliant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com