42
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 ...
34
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 ...
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
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
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 they ...
22
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 ...
22
Antique languages are on-topic. No reason antique systems shouldn't be.
Not that you will necessarily get much interest.
answered Dec 17 '13 at 2:16
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
34k9 gold badges51 silver badges136 bronze badges
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 ...
22
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
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
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 ...
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
LilyPond seems to have a small following at Musical Practice & Performance
I think you'd be surprised at just how many musicians use utilities like this to reproduce music.
There is also a few at SuperUser.
I think either site is fine. I'd start with Musical Practice & Performance, as it is much more specific to that crowd.
17
You accepted the premise of the question verbatim, but the answers explain why that is entirely incorrect.
Legitimately asking folks to flag or close questions which are <quote> "easily Googleable" is not a thing. It grew from one of our early (unfounded) policy discussions that took on a life of its own… until it devolved to the point of ...
16
I'm surprised that there are so many open legal questions. Legal issues are extremely off topic, however "related" with programming they might be, we are not lawyers and we can not provide any kind of expert legal advice. And in some locales / jurisdictions we'd be prohibited by law in doing so, even if we were lawyers.
This is a tag in serious need of a ...
16
No. Surveys are not permitted.
answered Apr 3 '13 at 17:25
Lightness Races in Orbit
33.9k6 gold badges80 silver badges149 bronze badges
16
People voted you down for a few reasons
They disagree with your position (that users should have to write custom comments)
They likely disagree with the tone in which you expressed that opinion and
You received quite a few downvotes before editing an example into your question -- people downvote when arguments are not cogent or complete.
Your question was a ...
16
Answering beyond the scope is good because:
You are warning the user about a potential bug he will come across. If he do not recognize it then results might be worse. I prefer up voting such answers just because of a such warning.
Do not forget, all questions and answers in here are also future reference for other users. Many other users will have a such ...
16
After getting involved in both the sites; I think I now have enough experience of both, to make a statement.
The DataScience SE is about the problems and doubts which data scientists encounter on a regular basis like "how do you run neural networks on a cluster efficiently?" and "How do I efficiently setup a MachineLearning process on a server", etc do not ...
16
This is rather a long comment... (This was originally written for CV and Data Science: semi-identical twins?, but then I found this question).
Comparison by tags
One way to look at datascience.SE (DS) / CV is to compare the sites by tags.
Top tags of DS on 2019-08-11:
machine-learning: 5881 (vs machine-learning: 12819 on CV)
python: 3219 (vs python: 2529 ...
16
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
