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user259867

12:05 AM

Since we've beed talking about Math, today's timehop question is Why does factoring eliminate a hole in the limit? by Emi Matro on math.stackexchange.com

user259867

Asked two years ago. A very naive question, but an actual question... not "I can't do this homework halp plz"...

user259867

Hence, +78.

apnorton

Right. The problem I have with Math.SE right now is that a large number of the questions asked every day are the equivalent of "Gimme teh codez" or "I pressed 'run' and it threw this up on my console. WHY?"

On SO, those questions are regarded with near hatred. On Math, those questions are considered "valuable teaching experiences" (not teaching site etiquette, either).

user259867

A bit worse, I would say. A programming question "how to do X in Y" can be a useful time-saving device for others who want to do X without sweating too much.

user259867

But "how to find the derivative of sin(tan(x))" was asked only to make that person sweat through this.

user259867

12:09 AM

There is no practical value in the answer whatsoever.

apnorton

Very true. Especially when there's a dozen copies of the question already floating around that no one seems to care about.

Braiam

meanwhile, I'm learning chef

which has the plus that I learn ruby

apnorton

Is there already a data query for unanswered percentage by month?

I can't find one via search, but Data.SE's search is pretty bad.

Braiam

grouped by asked time or accumulative?

apnorton

Asked time.

Er...

user259867

12:24 AM

@apnorton data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/50887/…

user259867

site:data.stackexchange.com unanswered month works better than built-in search.

apnorton

Ah.

Thanks.

I should have used Google instead of SE search.

user259867

This reminds me... as a Chrome user who spends most of time on SE, I find it hard to tell the difference between Chrome features and SE features.

user259867

Like Ctrl-Enter in the search box creating a new tab.

user259867

Upon inspection, this appears to be a Chrome feature that is also an SE feature (they coded it in for other browsers).

user259867

12:27 AM

Anyway... I wish they'd have a key combination for "search this with Google".

apnorton

That would be helpful.

I should probably switch to Chrome from Firefox, but...

user259867

For now, Alt-Enter works well for me.

apnorton

Right now, I'm enamoured with the Atom text editor. I used to use vim on Linux and Notepad++ on Windows, but I think I'm going to use Atom on both (it has optional vim keybindings).

user259867

12:42 AM

Looks nice. Is there a Stack Exchange site for it?

user259867

@SmokeDetector fp-

user259867

Aha, now that I have 10K on Meta, I can get a sample of deleted spam from there to refine the regex...

apnorton

@NormalHuman I don't think so. It's a fairly new editor, which seems to be somehow connected to github.

Congrats on Meta 10k; I suppose spammers don't typically target Math.SE.

user259867

Correct; there is so little spam on Math (relative to volume of questions) that Smokey only rarely fetches posts from there, saving the API requests.

user259867

What is the built-in GitHub editor, by the way? Looks like Ace, but I'm not sure... ace.c9.io

bjb568

12:50 AM

@apnorton yay, I use Atom too

user259867

Spam webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/39059/…

user259867

Yes, GH uses Ace. I understand that Atom sort of grew out of that.

user259867

Is this spam or what? superuser.com/questions/952676/…

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