this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Meh, just put your question and wrong answer in a meme and post it anywhere, within an hour everyone will correct it with the right answer πŸ˜‚

[–] [email protected] 74 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Or post your question with a picture of Kurisu Makise saying "you should be able to solve this"

That's how they got a 4chan user to post the solution to an unsolved math problem

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

Holy shit that's actually amazing

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm clearly not understanding the problem, because I think the only answer is 14!. What am I getting wrong?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The question is about "superpermutations". The permutations of 1 and 2 are "12" and "21". A "superpermutation" would be "1221". It contains the numbers 1 and 2 as well as all permutations of 1 and 2. However "121" is also a superpermutation of 1 and 2. It also contains "12" and "21" and it's shorter than "1221".

The problem is finding the shortest superpermutation. Stand-up Maths has a video where he interviews a mathematician that published Anonymous' solution. So yes, there is a math paper where the main author is "Anonymous 4chan Poster".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What’s funny is that watching The Endless Eight already feels like you’re watching 93,884,313,611 episodes of Haruhi

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I seriously could not believe what I was watching when I got to that part. I would start the next one thinking "there is no way... Yep, again". How did the director even convince people to do it?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Quite often it gets corrected with another wrong answer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Correct. Always provide wrong answer. No one can withstand someone being wrong on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Obviously thats so wrong. The correct answer is to pray for the answer and keep taking naps until you get your answers.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hacker news isnt an appropriate forum for most questions tho, that one is valid

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Yeah, this list of sites is making me think of asking for a book by loudly asking a library, a series of coffeeshops, a chud microbrewery, and an 11-year-old bully. Try quietly reading in the library first, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Especially useful when the specific thread is now the first result on Google.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah this is one of the main reasons why Stackoverflow's question closing policies are bullshit. We're going to close the question so nobody can answer it... but they can still upvote it and it will still be ranked highly on Google!

Bunch of idiots.

You know the SO Devs actually tried to improve this a while ago - I think you would be able to reopen your question once or something. Of course the power-hungry mods hated that idea and the abandoned it.

At this point it's unfixable. They depend on their unpaid mods and they've already attracted the sort of people you absolutely don't want to moderate a site.

The only hack I've found is that if your question gets downvoted/closed you are allowed to delete it, wait half an hour and ask it again. Much better odds of success than editing the question.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Simultaneously the worst and funniest feeling, is searching for a solution and most of the responses/results are to go search for it. If your answer is that searching for an answer is an easy and quick solution, you contribute to disproving yourself.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

most people don't know how to properly formulate questions and it shows. 90% of new questions on SO are just bottom barrel which is why the rules are so strict about quality.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely true, but it's also more difficult to ask a good question when you don't know anything about what you're asking.

People who know a lot about a topic can ask very good questions about that topic.

The problem I see with most questions people post online is that they make too many assumptions that their audience will will magically understand the context of their question.

Good questions require relevant context.

Determining relevancy requires expertise.

Expertise comes from experience.

No matter how many questions you ask and answers you get you'll never "understand" something until you do it.

Instead of asking questions like "How do I do X?" people should be asking "I'm trying to accomplish X, I've tried Y, but I'm encountering Z. How could I resolve this?"

I guess my rule is that you should never ask someone a question without first trying to answer it yourself.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Try chatgpt and the like, it's gonna give you same barely correct answers, at least it isn't gonna send you out, well... Most of the time

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ChatGPT is give you general answer not the right ones from my experience
Sometimes you get the right answer if you fine tune your question...but sometimes don't

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Same with stack overflow, in my experience at least) i just googled questions btw, not started them, so in my personal experience chatgpt is google++

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's enough to start the own research.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Stack Overflow isn't a tutor site. It's a wiki. Its usefulness would plummet if duplicate questions are allowed, since that would scatter all the answers.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Then it should allow to connect duplicates as sub questions to main question which they keep as original, Wikipedia allow additions to articles after all, i mean if you comment your question under main question, who gonna look at that?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

It's also weird to me that people seem to primarily use it to ask questions (and get butthurt about getting duplicates). It's really rare that I ever don't find an answer there (which often is buried in responses, but still). Like I've virtually never been motivated to post there.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

I love it when the top Google result for a problem is a thread saying to Google it. Exactly what I needed, thanks asshole.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

If it's a question I know how to answer but believe it really it would take 30 seconds of searching for a regular person to find...

I'd give the answer but be a bit snarky about it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Does the snark really make you feel better?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, yeah sometimes. It's my emotional reflex to frustration that was programmed into me by my parents and I haven't done enough cognitive behavioral therapy to undo it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As someone who discovered my Type 1 ASD at 40, the gods know that I have a lot more work to do on my self-awareness and abrasiveness.

Not saying you should adopt this, but sometimes I read aloud what I type and imagine myself replying to a student in real life in the way of and with the tone that people sometimes have on StackOverflow.

My gut reaction at that point, usually, is to rewrite a response or post completely with a more generous dose of humility and compassion.

I don't always get it right, but when I remember to do that and read replies, I like myself a little bit more.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I realized that I talk to other people the way I talk to myself. This probably wouldn't be a problem if I weren't so critical of myself.

I think I need to not only put in the effort to reread the things I write when communicating with others, but also to just be kinder to myself in my internal monologue.

I spend too much time being frustrated inside my own head, and that makes it easy to use that same tone when I'm interacting with other people.

Thanks for sharing your advice. I think verbalizing my thoughts the way you suggested will be really helpful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

This probably wouldn't be a problem if I weren't so critical of myself.

Same.

I spend too much time being frustrated inside my own head, and that makes it easy to use that same tone when I'm interacting with other people.

Same.

My Dad's neighbors always say:

Hurt people hurt people.

And as a counterpoint to that, from Slavoj Zizek:

Never presume that your suffering is, in itself, a proof of your authenticity.

Just because we wrestle with ourselves internally, it doesn't justify our perniciousness to others.

Uncle Iroh nailed it:

Sometimes the best way to solve your own problems is to help someone else.

I just don't wanna sound like an asshole when I attempt to do that!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It’s not about feeling better. It’s about getting the other person to understand that Google exists and that they can use it, too. Too many people refuse to put in any effort of their own and go ask someone instead.

IMHO in that situation answering isn’t even the right thing to do, since it encourages that behaviour and prevents the asker from learning to find out stuff for themselves. Something about fishing for hungry people or so…

When someone is genuinely stuck, doing research themselves allows the answerer not to go down the same dead ends, which saves time for both.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

If it's on Stack Exchange, you can help us keep the community decent by assuming good faith and being patient with newcomers. Yes, it's frustrating. And yeah, sometimes, it's basically impossible to avoid sarcasm and scorn, just like how HN sometimes needs to be sneered at, but we can still strive for a maximum of civility.

If all else fails, just remember: you're not on Philosophy SE or any of the religious communities, it's just a computer question, and it can be answered without devolving into an opinion war. Pat yourself on the back for being a "schmott guy!" and write a polite answer that hopefully the newbies will grok. Be respectful of plural perspectives; it's a feature that a question may have multiple well-liked answers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

As someone who works in IT, and specifically networking and security, the "trade subs" are honestly what I miss.most from reddit. Places like sysadmin, Cisco, Fortinet, talesfromtechsupport, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Or, anywhere: "But why do you want that?"

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