http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp...
It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit.
As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.
Now there might actually be an audience for a "write my code" website, where users could post programming tasks or homework exercises, and other developers then might try to solve them for the fun and challenge of it. But SO clearly does not want to be that kind of website.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a...
There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.
>That's not covered many other places? (...) >There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.
So what?
Look who asked this question. "Not designed for this purpose," indeed. Joel and Jeff weren't sitting around trying to think of reasons for people NOT to use their site.
The point is, when you look at even few examples taken together, you realize that those "sensible moderation decision" cover pretty much the entire space of possible questions. There is no good question on SO. Moderation seems to be applied unevenly and sometimes totally at random.
This is why I don't even ask questions on SO - I have no idea how to write one to be sure I won't end up at -100 (or +100, but Closed As Not Constructive, which is SO's way of highlighting actually interesting questions).
Bountify, if you're prepared to pay for the code. Codegolf on SE if you want to explore the range of answers that meet the spec but which can't be turned in as homework.
No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.
Thank god for these arbitrary community standards, shielding people from getting useful answers to questions that are deemed as formatted incorrectly.
If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better question?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-some...
It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them.
That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or not.
Saying that you can find a point of view where it isn't more specific isn't really that interesting (to me) as a response to that. Hopefully the rest of my comment is enough to see that I was not particularly defending the SE status quo.
Anyway, I was just refering to the first sentence. The rest of your comment is an interesting proposal, though at this moment I don't have any thoughts on it worth sharing.
(the fact that you can't be in any way contributing to the site until you asked enough questions to bump up your karma is another blocker)
I sometimes vote to close questions, but it is always due to pretty obvious laziness like not actually asking a specific question ("Here is my code... please help me") or overly broad questions ("I'm trying to write an e-commerce web site. Can anybody point me in the right direction?")
I have been down voted a number of times for "where to start with X (in order to do Y)" type questions - where I am in the same situation and don't have the time to read everything in the docs, to produce what is likely a few lines of code.
The SO response is along the lines that it will generate too many answers or opinions. They are usually closed without receiving any answer whatsoever. I have pointed this out to moderators, but they just post back links to meta pages.
* How do I split a string in Elisp?
* How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer?
All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.
A general concept with many uses is useful for many, and would have stayed.
Whoever did this on SO should have their moderator privileges removed pronto, that's a very bad piece of advertising for SO and hurts its image much more than the rest of this discussion and the original article combined.
If your "question" starts out, "I'd like to create...", and finishes with the expectation that else somebody will write the code for you, it's a pretty good bet you're going to get down voted.
Second: is this really the kind of question SO doesn't want? Their privilege, if so, but in addition to being well-defined it's clearly content that more than a handful of people were interested in (at least 15 upvotes on the most popular answer, multiply it by the ratio of non-user visitors to user visitors). It's a programming question, it has a programming answer, and it certainly has instructional value as an elisp recipe beyond whatever intent the author had.
And as for whether it's lazy -- that's basically the charge here, right? -- I'm not sure I see a functional difference between someone asking a question like this and someone who has written a larger pile of code and is missing a narrow piece of knowledge to complete it. There's possibly arguably a contextual/rhetorical difference where in the latter situation we see the context which led to the question being asked and in the former we don't... but honestly, nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.
To underscore the point, let's just compare it to some other questions:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-con... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-t... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight...
It's pretty easy to see what most of these much more popular questions have in common with the one we're talking about here -- as part of whatever these askers are doing, they know there's a capability embedded in a tool that's part of the environment. They just don't know how to bring it out. You could, of course, just tell them to go RTFM for awk, until they get something simple like deleting a line from a file when it matches a string you know, but then again, you could also tell people to go more carefully read the relevant documentation for most programming problems, and if you accept the question and the answer you've got relevant content people are looking for on the site and a recipe people can start learning more from.
I have answered a lot of questions on StackOverflow. One of the worst type of questions is the "please, write this code for me" question. There are frequently lazy or incompetent programmers who just ask for code to do their job, along with students who are asking people to help them cheat on their homework. So many people on SO are very quick to downvote and close any such questions.
Now, there's a grey area. Asking how to do one specific task which is a small component of a larger program is different enough than asking someone to deliver a completed program to you that it's tolerated. Asking something like "how do I use this one facility in a language" is different than asking "please write this tool for me."
There's also just the fickleness of the crowd. Any site which is based on voting, like StackOverflow, Reddit, HN, and so on, can have some questions upvoted and some downvoted due to sheer bad luck, different sets of people looking at different sets of questions, and so on. Trying to expect that a large group will act in a coherent manner, when only a small subset of that group ever even sees any given question (and with strong bias, as different people follow different tags), is just going to set you up for disappointment.
> nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.
Actually, take a look at melling's later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126537
> Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming.
Yep, sounds like he was just asking someone else to do a job for him, he wasn't interested in learning elisp.
I don't know anyone who gets paid to write elisp.
I'd just used AWK or Perl if it were for my job. It's a 1 liner.
perl -ane '...'
Not taking into account specifics of a particular domain - along with questions being judged by people who have no idea what is being asked, but feel the need to judge - was the very thing which made me leave SO.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...