hehheh

Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers.

I guess this is fundamentally where I disagree with SO's staff and/or moderation team. I occasionally find those questions and their answers very useful, when there are answers, and again more useful than the perhaps ideal, specific, and ignored questions that fill the site. When questions get too specific, the only person that might benefit from the reply is the person that posted the question in the first place. At that point it might as well not be part of a public forum.

My favorite SO pages are those that generate multiple replies with different perspectives, and often different languages or at least libraries. Those questions are admittedly usually vague but I think that given the result (many interesting answers from different people) that is a net positive. You might say that the answers given look like guesses, and that'd be completely fair, but there's still value. Certainly more value than an unanswered question abandoned by both the asker and the one person who expressed a small amount of interest.

I do see the difference you're describing (between Atwoodian and Spolskyians) and I can see the merits in both sides. I'm not satisfied with either, but that's more on me than on SO. In any case, I doubt I'm making any unique or new arguments here. I'm mostly just frustrated with SO and Google in general because I almost never find a solution to my problems.

As a sort of aside:

The key distinction to make here, in my mind, is that all questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them. That is the audience you need to satisfy if you want to have any hope of creating and sustaining a community of peers learning from each other.

That seems to be how you make a site by and for narcissists, or people otherwise interested in hearing themselves talk. It'd be a different story if the answers were paid, I guess, because at least then the motivation would be something more tangible.

To be honest, I probably would have written SO off entirely if I'd seen this comment earlier.

Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers.

If that is truly their goal (and I don't doubt that it's at least a hope) then they should go ahead and remove all the vague questions from their database, or at least flag them so they don't show up in web searches. After all, who's using Google to find unsolved, vague problems?

No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points.

I see. I didn't realize that. They do get the number but I guess it doesn't "persist" throughout the site. Good to know. Though, then I guess I don't understand what their motivation is to respond with useless comments.

Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful.

That's OK, I guess, but it seems to be counter to the idea of building a library. Rather than have a set of answers that may address the question for various versions of C++, you have a question and zero answers (because the person asking for details disappeared). That's the reality, anyway.

In any case, it wouldn't even have to be a private message. Simply having a "needs more detail" checkbox that hides the question (from Google et al) until the detail is added would be enough to improve the SO experience.

You're not the only one here that thinks someone describing something as "hostile" means they feel entitled to have it. I don't agree and I don't understand the connection.

Speaking personally, when I find user-hostile content, I simply leave the page/close the window/throw away the magazine. I don't feel entitled to have the content in any way.

However, I do feel entitled to make an appeal to content producers that they try to come up with a way to make their content less hostile. It's just an appeal, though, and they are absolutely free to ignore it.

There are a lot of folks here on HN and around the web that are upset at Google's AMP cache system, and somewhat rightly so. But at least it is an attempt to make mobile internet less hostile -- at least less in-your-face hostile.

I don't think I ever saw a Documentation page in a search result. Instead, I saw (and see) dozens of copies of the same SO Q&A content spread across multiple sites. I wonder if they would have had better success if they adjusted their SEO strategies and went after the rehosting sites (more?) aggressively.

Their Q&A site was vastly better than what existed at the time, and that's how they won the market. Now, though, it is full of people looking for quick points (as you suggest) -- people that think that the original poster was asking for someone to search Google for 'em -- and I'm convinced that the truly helpful people have moved just given up.

One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)

If media spin can affect people, why couldn't a corporation or foreign government do the same? I don't understand why the facts that that a large number of people want government reform and that corporate and government forces were spending money to influence the election cannot exist side by side.

I think it's worth noting that those BJS stats talk about convictions and that less than half of all violent crime is "cleared". [1] It's hard to know for sure who is getting away with these crimes but it's enough people that, IMO, the figures are highly suspect.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

I kinda get it too, but at the end of the day there's no way for Nextdoor to effectively enforce the rule, and there's no reason for a journalist (not party to any agreement) to ignore what is sent to them. The rule may as well not exist. And if the rule is absolutely necessary, then Nextdoor should not exist.

Nextdoor forums sound like never-ending HOA meetings.

If the cost of disclosure was a dollar a user there's pretty much no way we'd see them voluntarily tell us they were hacked. We'd have to wait until the information got out some other way.

IMO, it's because it's a term that they can use without getting much kickback. Before, they might use "fag" or whatever, but folks would (rightly) take offense to that. Even folks not directly targeted by those slurs would call out their use. Not as many people are going to go out of their way to defend cuckolds and fight back against the new(ish) slur.

We're already talking about reducing the install base by over 95% (in my experience) by having no free option. It's hard to get too picky about who installs your app when you're at that level, IMO.

That's pretty much the only argument I ever see, other than the standard one for cannabis (it's just a plant).

I'd be ok with investing in 200mph rail if we went ahead and bought enough ROW to add faster adjacent rail when the funds/will is there.

Neat. Any chance of adding JSON processing where you can pick a key (ala `jq`[0]) and then combine it with RSS or other JSON or what have you?

[0] https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

He or she's talking about backpage.com. They're infamous for hosting prostitution ads.

And (1) is in part because they deliberately put in extraordinary effort to customize and break Android, increasing the costs of merging from upstream.

There's plenty of money in it. Imagine if you could price the house correctly out of the gate, reducing the amount of time the home stays on the market. It is indeed a hard problem to solve using ML.

You'd need a few other things:

8. Floor count

9. Size and location of the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen

10. In-unit laundry (mostly for condos)

11. Proximity to neighbors

12. Existing tree coverage and other landscaping

13. Proximity to trails, transit, and other mostly-fixed landmarks

... I'm sure I'm missing many more.

I feel exactly the same way about systemd as you seem to feel about docker.

Complaining about downvotes is one of the worst things you'll see on reddit, there's no need to bring it here. Pedantry is also not very useful but I guess it's not worth "downvoting" over.

In addition to contract enforcement and standardization, I'd add reducing and/or internalizing externalities. This is fundamentally a power differential issue but I think it's important enough to highlight independently.

As for the assertion that "regulations are not bad, it's needless regulations that are bad" -- the argument sort of falls flat without specifics. The argument can be boiled down to "good things are good, bad things are bad."

I think they could make threads work with some simple changes:

* Optionally show thread replies in-line with chat, as they come in, just like regular chat but with some special annotation to indicate they're part of a thread.

* Allow the user to collapse a thread so they no longer see it in-line.

* Auto-close threads after they're idle for more than 1 hour (or some site-policy-configurable timespan).

* Allow the user to navigate between threads using only their keyboard.

As they are now, I think threads are bad for business. They hide useful information away and slow conversation (responses dragged out because they're no longer in your face).

It doesn't seem like that to me. It seems like Garadget is willing to let Amazon handle the refund, which Amazon would do, anyway.

I wonder why Garadget would want to let Amazon process the refund, anyway. It seems like that's got to count against them in some analytics somewhere.

I'm also surprised at the amount of overly sensitive people defending Garadget here. Their basis -- that this customer was likely brought up wrong -- is a bit amusing. It suggests that the defenders were brought up to judge others based a single interaction, without any thought of context, or anything but the barest of social awareness.

'course, here I am doing the judging now.

Whoa sorry about my super late reply here.

The APIs are not great. Some of it is down to poor naming, for example:

The callback you'd use on a CheckBox is called `OnCheckedChangeListener.onCheckedChanged(view, boolean)` (or something) but it is called whether or not the check state actually changed (e.g. if you call `setChecked(true)` and it's already checked you'll get the callback anyway). This is an issue that plagues the APIs in other places like `OnLayoutChangeListener` and `TextWatcher.OnTextChanged`

The fragment lifecycle is incredibly complex to the point that many people advocate against using it -- I'm one of them. It's like someone decided to try to solve every problem ever without asking the real users (devs) what they thought was wrong.

But the worst thing about it, bar none, is just how long it takes to build and run an app. We're talking 1.5-2 minutes. Everyone has their pet idea for reducing the build/test cycle but they provide marginal benefits at best and don't offer up concrete examples with concrete data (e.g. "I am running this gradle command for this github project on this computer and am measuring it this way, and here are my results"). I've spent weeks of time, scattered over the years, trying to figure out a way to reduce this to something more reasonable like 5 seconds, but to no avail.

My best guess is that other people are working on tiny toy apps or are just building the default project and then proclaiming that I must be mistaken, I must be doing something wrong for my build (of a reasonable sized app) to be as slow as it is.

And the final result was that the two languages had roughly the same performance, which may surprise folks that believe Java is still a slow language.

Ok. What laws do we need to pass and enforce to allow us to collect and share that evidence? Would any such legislation pass?

I'm late 30something and I do not want to be writing code any more. I'm burnt out, thanks to being an Android developer. (Don't do it!)

I'm not sure what I'll do instead. I've been reading a bunch of stuff folks have written about the subject, but most people are focused on going in to management or QA or whatever. I think I'd just like "out". My brain ain't what it used to be and I'd rather quit than be fired, if you get my meaning.

I don't have an answer yet. I half-joke about becoming an Amazon Flex driver.

I look at these previews as an example of things to come 3 years from now.

I keep hoping that Google will figure out a solution to that (restrict access to Play Services, say). Until then, I guess I'll continue targeting API 16.