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Given the (high) degree to which almost all programming depends upon books (online resources are rarely a complete substitute), what should probably be done is every tag wiki should have a tab (or some other convenient way to access a section) devoted to the book list for that subject.
I should probably add, however, that it would probably be perfectly fine/...
36
Sound SE was imported from Social Sound Design, a Stack Exchange 1.0 site (in fact, it was the last 1.0 site). They were, for all intents and purposes, disconnected from the Stack Exchange network until recently.
They do things a bit .. differently, however we're not very concerned at this point. The plan is to merge the sound portion of our AVP site into ...
34
First, I must note that I do not speak for the management of Stack Exchange / Overflow in this response; these are my opinions and beliefs, put forth in good faith - any resemblance to those of Stack Overflow, Inc. are entirely coincidental.
That out of the way... You kinda answered your own question:
Stack Exchange does not exist as a microcosm ...
33
At the point where SE asks us to not discuss evolution on the biology site, we might as well shut down all of the science sites. We don't need to cater to every irrational thing some nation state might do. There would probably also be a considerable amount of users of those sites that would leave the network entirely in such a case.
It's also not the job ...
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Yes, “making the internet a better place” is still a useful and relevant test for individual questions. It's the vision statement of the entire organization. As such, it's designed to be the guiding principle that we fall back on when more detailed guidelines leave us unsure of what action to take.
I'm not completely convinced that it was ever truly ...
31
Stack Overflow is for Professional programmers and programming enthusiasts. We expect a certain level of skill from people that ask questions, but the bar is not really that high.
If you can:
Make your language of choice print "Hello, World!"
Write a loop so your language of choice does the above several times
Obtain and process user input
... then you ...
28
Is Stackoverflow a central store for tutorials?
Posting tutorials in answers is not forbidden per se - if they are the answer to a proper, specific, on-topic Stack Overflow question. Which "Getting started with OpenCV 2.4 and Visual C++ 2010 Express" and "Getting started with OpenCV 2.4 and MinGW on Windows 7" are very much not. If they were genuine ...
answered Jun 5 '12 at 19:25
Pekka supports GoFundMonica
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There is now a dedicated Mathematica Q&A site. Any questions about Mathematica should be directed there.
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It seems to be a common misconception that Stack Overflow is intended as the be all, end all of Programmer Information Sharing Resources. This is simply not the case. Its purpose is assembling an archive of solutions to concrete and specific coding situations.
Your questions are probably very good questions, and there is no doubt that everyone, expert and ...
26
Why not, virus coding is knowledge like anything else. It can be used for antiviruses, system core programming etc.
Studying viruses is not bad per se. Releasing them is.
Studying security vulnerabilities makes good people fix them, bad people exploit them.
Censoring virus-related topics will not stop virus authors. Those are good enough to go on without ...
24
A quote from the comments on the question
@MikeW this is not off topic. The google-cloud-storage tag is officially supported by Google.
This is a funny thing about tags, especially sponsored tags. They give off a certainly feel for official support, when they are in fact nothing more than owner sponsored advertisements, however the user than made this ...
23
Who cares if someone is "gaming the system," if the game they play leads to valuable content? StackExchange isn't a contest to see who can get the most rep. It's a tool to provide valuable content to the Internet.
If the content is valuable, upvote it. If it is not valuable, comment and/or downvote. It should be that simple.
22
The big problem with book recommendation posts - and similar questions - is that they tend to devolve into polls:
For me, and I think I speak for many others, the only time you really know you’re looking at a poll is when you see those one-line answers. But we can only close questions. Is it always the fault of the questioner that the answers suck? Do ...
22
Antique languages are on-topic. No reason antique systems shouldn't be.
Not that you will necessarily get much interest.
22
We need to be able to engage with you on our own platform when we feel that there's something important to say.
That includes:
Announcements about ways that Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange is changing or growing as a product,
Notices of job openings that are very difficult for us to fill, or we feel would be best filled by someone in our communities with ...
21
If you see a bad question, vote to close it. And downvote it. And write the submitter's userid on a brown paper bag and set it on fire, while chanting curses.
I question the premise that you can't find things to earn rep for answer because they are 'hidden' by a deluge of bad questions. Yep, we have some bad questions. But you may be suffering more from our ...
21
The scope of each site is determined by the community. Scope is a fluid, constantly-changing thing, and new meta discussions brought up by users can change bits and pieces of it over time, with the result decided by community consensus. Each community is independent from the others, and as such, they can shape their scope in whatever ways they want.
Physics ...
20
Well, there are some sites where the answers are a little fuzzier than others. As it happens, Christianity is not one of those sites. It could have been and some of the new users expect it to be, but the site has worked hard to not encourage "the meaning of life" questions or answers. To quote from the top answer to "What Christianity.StackExchange is (...
20
The Sound Design site was created outside the Stack Exchange Network by a third party before it was incorporated into the Stack Exchange Network.
If you look at the content as a whole, the information being provided there is actually of pretty high quality. That's what we liked about the site. The community is coherent, professional, and highly engaged&...
20
Oh, it's absolutely like the Roth test. There can be no objective standards here; what matters is what actually offends people, not what folks say should offend.
The guidance - now and forever in the past - is to flag when you see something rude or offensive. If others disagree with you, so be it. The guidance on the flag dialog itself reads simply:
A ...
20
It's fine to not actually be a genius.
But at the end of the day you're expecting people to spend their time solving your problems and a minimal investment in time on your end is nice.
I've also had situations where I was stuck with a problem for an extended of time, googled and found a perfectly clear answer on SE. Someone did the research, and solved my ...
19
Questions that ask for a list are considered not constructive, as every answer is equally valid.
Generally, those questions are infinite, as a new answer could always be added; they also tend to be subjective. As such, those questions should not be asked, basing on what written in the FAQ.
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on ...
19
You should definitely answer beyond the scope, in particular if you see something bad being done that should be fixed.
One common example is with SQL - many questions have users concatenate SQL parameters, which is a bad practice leading to SQL Injection vulnerabilities.
You can answer their question and leave it at that, or add information about SQL ...
19
Stack Exchange has been through similar episodes of turmoil throughout the years, many before my time. To make a long story short, we've been here before - with see SOPA, net neutrality, #LoveOverflow and more. All of those cases saw plenty of discussion about whether or not Stack Exchange is the right venue to promote/talk about/stand up for these. We've ...
18
Writing on the wall
So you didn't expect your opinion to be welcome, observed that your opinion was not welcome, and you've now come here to ask us if your opinion is welcome?
Oh, what the hell. Yes, your opinion is welcome. Because SE sites luuuuurve opinions. There's even a close reason that mentions them, because we want them so badly. The more ...
18
Your question was (10k users only):
Dynamically replacing text with image
I need a method of replacing text with images while keeping the text translatable.
"off topic" was indeed the wrong close reason here; the correct one would have been "not a real question".
On Stack Overflow, we expect questions to be specific, answerable technical issues. ...
answered Oct 22 '12 at 10:40
Pekka supports GoFundMonica
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18
To add to the other answers here: there's no rule on Stack Overflow (or most other sites) that prohibits opinions. Rather, we discourage questions that ask only for opinions. The guidelines for this are in the help center, but I'll quote part of them here for your benefit:
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking ...
17
At its heart, the threads you're asking about are of the form "How do you install X" followed by a tutorial on how to do it.
It is answered by the same person who asked it. That is clearly permitted and encouraged.
The answer is in the form of a clear step-by-step tutorial with illustrations. That is clearly permitted, indeed encouraged.
The question is ...
17
I prefer your third option:
Free-for-all, with each question pulling its own luck depending which voters to open/close are in which camp?
which I think equates with a more impartial wording of:
Allow such questions to be voted on (including vote to close) as they present themselves to each user eligible to vote i.e. a case-by-case basis
I ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
