Timeline for Dealing with "Find out who's going to buy the croissants"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
37 events
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| Jun 3, 2020 at 13:30 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Aug 7, 2013 at 15:34 | history | edited | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 2, 2013 at 5:10 | comment | added | gnat | @AdamRackis I guess I should have answered something, and I had something to say in my mind. But your note wrt Programmers "It's not a site I really care about" made me feel it won't make sense | |
| Aug 1, 2013 at 22:26 | comment | added | Adam Rackis | @gnat - I know programmers has had all manner of problems in the past, and possibly present for all I know. It's not a site I really care about. But I really hope a stupid drawn-out meta thread doesn't have to be created every time a marginal question gets more rep than it "deserves" because of a silly title. If we all just let these questions have their 15 minutes and then die gracefully we'd all be better off. | |
| Jul 30, 2013 at 15:53 | comment | added | gnat | sort of ironic to see objections against too much attention to the meta question which is, in turn, related to questions receiving too much attention from collider | |
| Jul 30, 2013 at 15:48 | comment | added | gnat | @AdamRackis at SO, you probably can afford a luxury of a fake fame question once in a while. At Programmers, we used to get this sort of crap every week or two and it's not as much fun. Think of any not-stellar-but-overall-reasonably-ok question getting hit by hotness lemmings just because it got title that looks attractive at collider | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 19:22 | comment | added | Adam Rackis | To be fair, this stupid meta thread attracted a lot more whining, flailing, and dire warnings of Stack Overflow's imminent demise under a deluge of "bike shed" questions than the "croissant question" ever did. If people had just let this silly question have its 15 minutes of fame, most of us probably would never have ever seen it, let alone cared. | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:46 | comment | added | user102937 | @Shog9: Anyway, if someone had put an Eric Lippert quality answer on the question, we probably wouldn't be having this pleasant conversation. | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:43 | history | rollback | user102937 |
Rollback to Revision 3
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| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:43 | comment | added | Shog9 | Well, let's see... You wrote a pretty popular answer in the meta discussion regarding the question's future ;-) | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:41 | history | rollback | user102937 |
Rollback to Revision 4
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| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:41 | comment | added | user102937 | @Shog9: You haven't seen me take any action against the question other than my original fifth close vote, have you? It's this kind of bikeshedding that created the close rules in their current form in the first place, so it's not like I'm saying anything particularly earth-shattering. | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:33 | comment | added | Shog9 | Little bit saddened by your edit, Robert. All else being equal, it's not really our business to be telling folks which questions are most worthy of their time. Years ago, you were one of the folks who chided me - and rightfully so - for being unnecessarily harsh in regard to a certain popular, borderline question - and we're pretty far removed from that particular sort of bikeshed nonsense these days. | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:14 | history | edited | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:12 | comment | added | BoltClock's a Unicorn | @Robert Harvey: OK, can't disagree with that ;) | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:06 | history | edited | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 25, 2013 at 4:03 | comment | added | user102937 | @BoltClock'saUnicorn: It's really a shame that the question wasn't asked on Programmers, where it is a much better fit. People ask these questions on SO because P.SE is still perceived as the "also-ran" programming site. The problem with this question is not so much the question itself, but the inordinate amount of attention it has received. How to choose who buys croissants? Count me in. Help me with a controller algorithm for a power station? No, thanks. | |
| Jul 25, 2013 at 3:42 | comment | added | BoltClock's a Unicorn | I dare say I'm with @Gilles on this one. For all I know, more than half of my contributions to the site (in terms of questions and answers) should have been closed instead simply because the questions aren't looking to solve a problem with existing code. I always refer to this question on the types of questions I find myself asking and answering most often. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 20:28 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | Ugh. This attitude limits Stack Overflow to a debugging service. That's hundreds of thousands of people's effort to build a useful resource on programming problems down the drain. Why bother with a questions and answers site? A forum would be better suited for a debugging service. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 20:16 | comment | added | user102937 | @RexKerr: Fair enough. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 20:11 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @RobertHarvey - If you exclude the social engineering solutions, that is also true here. There are really only two classes of solution here (as far as I know): biased lotteries and random streams with filters. Within each of these solutions, there are very few that aren't absurdly over-complicated given the tools that programmers commonly have in hand. There are lots of solutions that don't work, but not so many that meet the three stated criteria. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 19:58 | comment | added | user102937 | @RexKerr: That's a straw-man. While there might be many possible sorting algorithms, it is likely that there are only one or two that satisfy an OP's particular requirements. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 19:54 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @RobertHarvey - Does that mean that sorting questions are off-topic because there are exponentially many possible O(n log n) sorting algorithms in the length of the list? I don't think it matters if theoretically there are a large number of possible algorithms; Kolmogorov complexity is going to sink almost all of those as unworkable. A much more telling criticism is that this problem can be equally well solved by a "business method"--Stack Overflow is not for social solutions to technical problems. (Those should go on e.g. Workplace.) | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 19:49 | comment | added | user102937 | @RexKerr: Nevertheless, the question is structured in such a way that the number of possibly correct algorithms is unbounded. To answer your question, we don't generally evaluate the answers to determine a question's veracity for closing purposes. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 19:46 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | Minimal understanding was definitely on the short end. Too many possible answers was not really true, since most of the answers, including the top rated ones, didn't actually meet the OP's criteria. What is the policy with regard to questions that receive highly-voted answers which don't fully/properly answer the question? | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 19:03 | comment | added | Shog9 | So far as I can tell, this particular question has not received a significant amount of traffic from Reddit. Meta is the largest referrer apart from Stack Overflow itself. @dystroy | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 18:52 | comment | added | jscs | @dystroy: A banner was applied to the socks question at one point: «Welcome, Redditors! We're looking for answers that provide serious, practical solutions to the problem stated. If you'd prefer to post a joke or launch a tangential discussion, please do so on the corresponding Reddit thread.», although it was mostly addressed at answerers (there are many deleted answers at that question). | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:31 | comment | added | Adam Rackis | @Asad - that's a fair criticism. If this question somehow doesn't get closed, I wish the system had a way to de-list edge case questions like this from the "top lists" for the reason you state. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:23 | comment | added | user200500 | @AdamRackis You're entitled to use your votes however you see fit, but that doesn't mean voting choices can't be criticised. The goal is to index stuff by its value with regards to the site scope, not to index stuff by how entertaining one personally found it (although again, you're entirely free to vote as you see fit). | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:21 | comment | added | Old Checkmark | it's baked alright. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:19 | comment | added | Adam Rackis | @Robert, probably true by most sensible criteria. But so long as SE let's users vote on questions as they choose, then interesting ones like this will always get more votes than they "deserve." People need to stop complaining about vote inflation in cases like this: it's baked right into the system | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:18 | comment | added | user102937 | @AdamRackis: There's no way that question is worth that many upvotes. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:16 | comment | added | Adam Rackis | -1 for who don't know how to use their votes properly. I'm fairly certain I know how to use my votes, thank you. That I chose to use a few on a question that will likely end up being closed is my business. That question added a bit of interesting reading to what's normally a dreary morning spent waiting for the coffee to get my brain up to speed, and that's good enough for me, and 107 other users. | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:11 | history | edited | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 24, 2013 at 16:05 | comment | added | Denys Séguret | "These kind of questions attract a lot of attention from the Reddit and Quora crowd". Did that happen here? Couldn't this specific point be handled in a general way (for example a warning message to users coming from those sites when they try to vote) ? | |
| Jul 24, 2013 at 15:54 | history | edited | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jul 24, 2013 at 15:45 | history | answered | user102937 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |