Hacker News Reader

Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

I see lots of complaining over SO moderation in this thread and other places, but the actual examples shown always turn out to very sensible moderation. For example your question is clearly not appropriate for SO. You are not asking a specific question, you are just asking people to write code for you. That somebody was nice enough to actually write your code for you, does not mean it was a good question!

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.

View on HN

Actual examples always turn out to have very sensible ex post facto rationalizations of moderation decision. Yes, there's always a good argument - this question is too short, that question is too long, this question looks too much like homework assignment, that question looks not enough like homework assignment, etc.

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).

Well there are thousands upon thousands of questions on SO which are not closed, so some people apparently still manage to ask in such a way that the questions are not closed. But of course it could be totally random as you suggest. But can you provide an example of a quality question that was in line with the SO guidelines, but still closed?

The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.

To put it bluntly, it would have been much more educational for you if you had actually tried to code it yourself. If you during this had encountered a concrete problem or question which you couldn't solve on your own, you could have posted it on SO.

But it's perfectly acceptable to ask how to split a string in C#? That's not covered many other places? It's a duplicate, yet highly up voted question.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a...

There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.

It is highly upvoted because many people have found it useful. Contrary to your question, it's a question with many uses.

>That's not covered many other places? (...) >There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.

So what?

Melling's question can't win: closed for being too broad; attacked for being too narrow.

I see this attitude a lot and frankly it is quite annoying. If the guy wanted a lecture he would have asked for a lecture. He wants to learn how to do something without spending 100 hours in it. I know that feeling, lots of us have been there. You are not his mama to lecture him.

I'm just saying SO is not a site designed for this purpose, so he shouldn't get offended when his request for code is downvoted.

http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2

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.

That is not a "plz write code for me" question though, it is just a very simple question. If it is too simple is discussed here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too...

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com