@Magisch Well, from the e-mail I got, they looked at general site participation, meta participation etc. at the time, and the timezone I was in... For the rest, you'll have to trust me on the not being terrible ;)
@JourneymanGeek Glad I never had to do an election at the time ;)
@Tinkeringbell old (probably urban legend too) teaching from scout years. They said parsley is poisonous to parrots and I never checked if that is true since I had exactly 0 parrots in my whole life.
@HDE226868 I think it depends on the person, too... I've been a candidate in three and I remember spending so much time and effort on writing my nomination, question answers, hanging out in chat... etc...
Canned tuna is... not my thing. I never grew up eating it and even the smell makes me feel ill. One of my former coworkers would bring those tuna and cracker lunch packs for lunch in a small shared room and I had to leave whenever she was eating.
@Shog9 Oh yeah, and a bottle of chardonnay, outside a Spanish/Portuguese bar in the sun. Tuna salad made with those huge toms the size of softballs. . I gotta go raid fridge now:(
Ah. That makes sense. ;) Otherwise getting the correct ratio of tuna salad and tomato might be quite difficult... though, for me a 0:5 ratio would be acceptable. :P
@MartinJames Hmmm? What do you mean? I pulled that off of a site called "stuff Dutch people like"... I only know about it because I have lots of Dutch friends. :D
@MartinJames Now I have a mental image of Martin dunking a giant tomato into a can of tuna, wrapping it all in a couple of slabs of bread, then extending his jaw to some inhuman angle like a horror movie monster and chomping down on resulting mass.
If you're ever in need of some, I still have tons of the sprinkles sitting around... I'm assuming they have an indefinite shelf life. I think I got 3-4 bottles of each type.
@TimPost personal opinion is if you want an RGB board, there are better options out there than the Razer (whose QC went way downhill around 2012), with Ducky being probably your best bet
hm I've got a problem with a collapsing widget in the info sidebar of chats - collapsing the avatars. It doesn't happen in safari or incognito chrome. Disabling tampermonkey doesn't help, it seems to be when I'm logged in. anyone have any ideas what might be causing that?
Hello! The Rate Limiting Guide mentions that there are no limits for comment deletion, but I got a message today saying that I cannot delete my comments from more than under twenty separate posts
(even though it doesn't say explicitly, I'm assuming that it meant: "further deletes are blocked for today" :P)
...so is this a mistake that needs to be corrected?
I mostly curated FAQs back in the anonymous editor days, I still do it from time to time
@GaurangTandon Edited the FAQ. Note that those are community-curated, so if no one bothers to edit them, they will become out-of-date. (This was my main driver to anonymously edit those)
@Magisch i'm deleting my old obsolete comments. Stuff like welcome to chem.se, or here's a mathjax guide, etc.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog thanks for the quick fix!
@rene i feel that the people who made such complex rules should also have published official documentation about those rules, it shouldn't really be needed to be done by the community imo... (though the community is great at it, things do slip by sometimes, like this one)
@GaurangTandon no, SE is an agile shop, the code is the documentation and these rate limiting settings are flexible, they can change at any moment. Documenting them would be a waste of time with little gain. When someone hits a limit it will get documented, as just happened. The process works.
What are the benefits of the ternary number system over the more traditional binary number system? Are there drawbacks to ternary with respect to binary, aside from the obvious of less adoption?
Maybe in a better universe we would have ended up with ternary machines, but given the current reality... it’s quite a stretch to expect them to inevitably become ubiquitous.
Amidst all this "be nice" hullabaloo, let's bring back lmgtfy! Sure, it's savage and embarrassing when you're on the receiving end... but it's a beautiful one-time lesson. Sometimes your ego needs to take a hit for you to grow. Thoughts?
undo's minirant of the day: Suppose Stack Overflow is unwelcoming, and suppose we've decided to fix it. Further suppose that the 7% 'unwelcoming' comments stat holds (seems way too high to me, but maybe). Now, the next question you have to answer is this:
Are our policies wrong, or are we failing to enforce the policies?
If we fail to enforce policies for whatever reason, no amount of CoC writing or blog-posting is going to do anything more than appease Twitter.
@Magisch I know. I've spent years of my life doing this. And every newb on the line tries that placating line. And every time, they go home burned out and the angry guy calls again tomorrow. If you want to actually fix shit, you gotta learn to talk 'em down and get some real info. Otherwise, you're just another slub being paid to get beat on.
Don't get me wrong, you can be sympathetic. Heck, you can be fake sympathetic; it doesn't matter. As long as you can get past the point where they're screaming and to the point where they give you enough info to figure out what problem(s) led them to this state, your time isn't wasted. But all the sympathy in the world doesn't matter if they gotta go back to using broken software tomorrow.
(I get given the difficult customers because I don't eat their shit: I catch it and throw it back gently point out that what they're asking doesn't make sense)
Just two days ago I had someone call and say their connection was faulty and they were tired of kicking the pc to resolve it. Turns out they turned off caching in their browser and the load times were longer then expected. And then the network adapter chipped from being kicked so often so they got even more angry
Problem solving by percussion can be effective. At ******, I was usually first in, and part of my job was to backheel two 19" racks as I passed on my way to the coffee machine. Without that effort, the number of test failures due to old, dirty connectors increased dramatically.
@AdamLear did you see this bug report? Not sure if that is related to your earlier push to prod for the sticky preferences. The timing seems to match ...
@Shog9 Well, apparently, "Stack Overflow is unwelcoming" may mean "survey participants were unsure WTF 7% of comments were about when shown them without context." Apparently, though, your colleagues have already decided this is "not good enough for us".
@Shog9 With the results from the survey, and nothing more? I'm not sure you can do much with them at all, which is my point. With the criticisms of the survey? You can ask all the staff about how they interpreted the three levels, and you can figure out whether the interpretations were consistent, and then either build a better survey with less ambiguous questions or argue the case that we actually did get some meaningful data.
Look... we should've been doing this 4 years ago. Straight-up. We knew it, we actually started this same sort of analysis... And then we saw whatever the 2014 equivalent to "7%" was and decided, "meh. not a problem"
I mean... You look back at the posts I was writing about the state of moderation tooling back then, and they're all full of embarrassing admissions that comments were fast becoming the single biggest problem. And we didn't know what to do about it.
So, there's a thing that I haven't seen mentioned at all since Jay's first welcoming blog post, that in my personal, totally non-rigorous observation of the site has always seemed like the single biggest problem with how askers get treated by commenters
Like, you come along as a new user and you ask a question and somebody'll say "What have you tried? You need to show us your code!" and they vote to close for no MCVE. And so you paste your code into the question and then I come along and say "You're mixing a how-to question with a debugging question here, and the result is too broad to be usefully answerable because there's basically two separate questions now" and I vote to close as Too Broad.
And the experience as a new user is terrible, because you've got different people trying to impose their contradictory visions of how questions should be, and the only concrete mechanism the site gives them to do so is to fuck you over by blocking anybody from answering your question
This is where I kinda think Stack Overflow is too large - has been too large - to really have this notion of one set of specific rules that apply the same to everything.
Yeah. They didn't start out as rules. The problem is, when you need 5 people to all vote to close a question as "unclear" you start to need some way to get them to agree.
But let's be honest: 5 random people are not all equally-equipped to decide which questions are answerable.
I mean... Who's equipped to decide which WinAPI questions are answerable? You? Me? Or Raymond Chen who has been answering WinAPI questions for the past couple decades?
But I get a binding vote, and he's gotta wait for 4 other people.
Of course. And sadly, the bigger this gets, the more it tends to fall on blind heuristics: folks voting because a question doesn't contain code, or because the title asks something vague that's then specified in detail in the body.
it's a reason to edit. I mean, come on - it's trivial to edit those. Not as trivial as voting to close, but easily more trivial than 5 people voting to close.
and actually get "Here's 200 lines of code I wrote to do something tangentially related to [broad, generically applicable task], why am I getting an EccentricHighlySpecificException on line 66?"
I end up wanting to throttle the asker for their title choice
I kinda suspect that as the major tags get more and more "filled in"... The reason for folks to participate at all is becoming more and more the niche stuff: specific libraries with lousy docs (because only two people are working on it and they're both fixing bugs); new platforms; legacy stuff that never got properly documented to begin with.
@Shog9 I agree, and I edit them when I see them. They upset me most when careless gold badge holders use them as dupe targets for everything to do with [broad, generically applicable task], which happens way too often
But... If we keep fixating on the folks asking their Java debugging questions or whatever, we're not gonna serve the folks for whom Stack Overflow can actually be useful.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love to have a resource to help folks become better debuggers. But... Pointing out the line where they forgot to initialize a variable 8000 times a day ain't doing that.
of course, going back to the point about contradictory standards, while I will close a question for having much more code than is needed to illustrate the problem... other people will do the opposite
there's an irritating interpretation of "practical problem related to software development", or whatever the Help Center wording is, that implies that if you're using an artificially constructed example of a problem rather than a copy-paste from your real project, then your question is off-topic
people will look at the sort of minimal toy example that I want to see and ask "But what are you really trying to do? Why do you need this?" and close as Unclear
and it has seemed to me for a long time that, no matter what standards we settled on, if we could somehow as a community all agree to enforce the same standards we'd be a whole lot less oppressive to new users
rather than the current status quo where Mother berates you for speaking out of turn and Father berates you for not being assertive enough
but nothing your colleagues are doing will capture this point. It's not about tone; it's not about the fine nuances of word choice in comments. It's about the actual content that's being expressed.
@canon My biggest problem with comments complaining that something is Googleable is that they're frequently wrong. I personally have no issue with This is trivially Googleable. The first result for "frobnicate widget in fooscript" is www.example.com/relevant/docs which tells you to call the .swizzle() method. The trouble is with commenters who stop at the end of the first sentence, and leave the same comment even when there are no relevant results for any obvious search.
@MarkAmery I used to comment 'Copying your exact title into a popular search engine gives 'About 32,000,000 results', with several links to SO answers on the first page that explain your problem'. I no longer bother, given it's either rude or pointless or both. Down/close vote only, every time now.
Well, take Shog's joke last night... I asked how you get an editor's address and he responded "&editors"... which made no sense for me but I would have no way to know the terminology to get any sort of background to understand that joke.
I see the same thing all the time on ELL... language learners sometimes don't know how to find what they need because getting the correct definition of "run" or "do"... words that have so many different definitions... it's impossible unless you specifically know the right part of speech you're looking at.
What are the benefits of the ternary number system over the more traditional binary number system? Are there drawbacks to ternary with respect to binary, aside from the obvious of less adoption?
