9:33 PM
@Mysticial no-no-no, I am talking about "looks", you are talking about "is". Your reasoning makes sense to me, it only has one limitation: it works only on "mature" questions, when there's enough votes and views for formula to build a popularity guess from these...
...but at early stage, there's too little votes and too little views to build a sensible guess on these
...when question is "young" all we have is number of answers and question score
that's exactly where current formula "plays well" per my observations. It's like, you know, "many answers make it look (note look, not really be) like answerable"
other than that I agree, one (or small amount of) well upvoted answer is a better indicator of a question being answerable, that's the whole idea behind the cut-off. I only have to take into account that answer(s) have first to get these upvotes and...
...while there's not enough to make a better guess, plain Qanswers serves as a rough approximation
not in any way meaning definitively answerable, only a guess that it has better chance to get answered. One thing to take into account here...
...is that at early stage, when question is "cold" (as opposed to "hot"), it is mostly viewed and answered by community regulars, which makes it a whole different game...
...and I think there's a reason to trust "early answers" more than those brought by collider-invaders,
> You know, everyone would want to answer a question, but for community regulars, this natural desire is balanced by established norms. Regulars understand what kind answers are good and likely to bring upvotes and they avoid posting garbage that usually gets downvoted: this sort of sets the quality norm.
> ...For questions that are not too hot (likely 2-3 clicks away from top of the list) it's natural to see things working exactly as intended. Answers and comments quality is mostly maintained by site / tag regulars (business as usual), collider brings moderate amount of interested newcomers from other sites with their views, votes and fresh perspective, everything is nice and fair.
@Mysticial I think dropping Qanswers is going to have a detrimental effect on the early stages, and here is why. You correctly noted it needs "enough votes" to get to collider, but the clever trick (clever at early stages only) is that amount of answers multiplies on question score. And that makes the "early stage game" really interesting...
Formula bases its guess on the votes given to question there, and that's a good trick (again, only at early stages)
Which of the following techniques is the best option for dividing an integer by 2 and why?
Technique 1:
x = x >> 1;
Technique 2:
x = x / 2;
Here x is an integer.
Why does this bit of code,
const float x[16] = { 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8,
1.9, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6};
const float z[16] = {1.123, 1.234, 1.345, 156.467, 1.578, 1.689, 1.790, 1.812,
1.923, 2.0...
