The Sphinx's Lair

Q: Do we want hats? A *puzzling* situation

4:29 PM

There's a bit of a disagreement occuring. meta.puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/1437/…

3 hours later…

Puzzling Meta

7:13 PM

apologizes for terrible pun in title I recently received an email from a Community Manager from Stack Exchange: Winter Bash 2014 will again be available to all sites that choose to participate. We’re redesigning all the hats and adding some extra features to keep things fresh and exciting. ...

discussion

Puzzling — BOUNTY!

7:46 PM

Q: Crypto-wordsearch-gram: "You Are a Member of the Rebel Alliance, and a Traitor!"

You are a member of the Rebel Alliance. You have been captured by the Empire and imprisoned. In a stroke of sadistic brilliance, your guards have denied you all reading matter except "Uncle Vader's News for Younglings", an Empire propaganda publication which has an intended readership aged 5 to ...

cryptograms word-search steganography

Puzzling Meta

8:12 PM

Q: Spoiler Tags not working in answer that contains Right-To-Left (Hebrew) text

I made an answer here: http://puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/5041/5474 And the spoiler tags do not seem to work on the paragraph that contains the Hebrew text. I have tried changing the formatting and moving the paragraphs but nothing seems to work. Is this a bug in SE? EDIT: I was able to get t...

bug

Yet more from Mr No-Questions-No-Answers-But-Here's-What-You-Should-Be-Doing.
http://meta.puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/1437/can-we-please-edit-very-hard-difficult-and-easy-out-of-titles/1441?noredirect=1#comment3082_1441
Is he just trolling?
Could mods do something about this please?

Q: We're being discussed on meta^2. Users may want to contribute

8:36 PM

@AE I threw you some support

I don't think he's trolling specifically

I think he's just a know it all

that said, I'm not entirely sure I disagree that the descriptions have a good place in the titles. On the one hand, it could be a cheap attention getter and be abused. It's of questionable significance in some cases where it might be used and I doubt that people will bother downvoting if the difficulty is incorrectly described

it also opens the door to edit wars

my guess is it hurts more than it helps

but I haven't been involved enough lately to tell for sure

which is why I didn't post my own thoughts in meta aside from calling him out for being a know it all that doesn't understand how SE sites are allowed to differ

Puzzling Meta

8:53 PM

Discussion taking place here: Beta site degrading in quality, per-site Meta discussion reveals that it's not perceived as a issue; what more can I do? which site users may want to contribute to.

discussion

Thank you @AJ, that's very much appreciated. On descriptions, meh, I don't really care. Could work either way.

the problem really does come down to accurately defining difficulty. There are some problems that are in fact universally hard

but outside of those, difficulty is super ambiguous

the ASVAB for example has a section of spatial reasoning problems. You have 15 minutes for 8 problems, it is expected that you'll get through 4 of them if you are doing well

I finished all 8 in 7 minutes

@AJHenderson it's true. Time-taken-to-solve is one metric but that's not much use at the time of posting.

ASVAB?

armed services vocational aptitude battery

ah!

you should read Cryptonomicon.

(Neil Stephenson)

8:57 PM

I almost joined the coast guard, ended up starting dating an AFROTC cadet instead

and then she got medically disqualified in between her second and third year of school

@AE perhaps someday. The plot line didn't seem all that interesting to me, but it is a book I am familiar with

I am a bit of a security nut though

@AJHenderson the hero is drafted (WWII) and only answers one question in the army vocational test, because he's answered it with such complexity and subtlety that it's taken him the full time (but it's publishable as an academic paper). anyway, if you're keen on security you'd probably find it interesting.

anyway, gtg, thanks again for the support.

yeah, lots of people over on Sec.SE have talked about it

Q: When will puzzling.SE be shut down - The site is a disgrace and is dangerous to our reputation

9:49 PM

do you like my question:

-4

While Puzzling.SE is achieving an unprecedented level of site views and participation, it is under-performing in all other areas, with very low quality questions and answers. How long will it take for the SE moderators to realize this and close down the site? The site doesn't belong within the...

discussion

I thought it would boost my reputation on meta, but thankfully I'm actually glad to see the dominance of downvotes on the post

@Mew it confuses me

I'm not sure what you were trying to accomplish

Was just curious what the response would be to such a directly negative question

either(1) I would get lots of upvotes and achieve a high rep on meta

or (2) Lots of downvotes, which gives the impression to other users people don't want the site to be closed

Welcome Gilles

Gilles

@AE That's not a troll. Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a troll. What do you expect moderators to do anyway?

@Mew Or you could have tried honesty.

Whether I try honestly or not I'm sure I would still get the same downvotes

So I may as well say the opposite of what I want to get across and use those downvotes to advantage.

@Gilles the trollish part was the way he was trying to put words in AEs mouth

in comments

@Mew that doesn't really work, because now it comes off looking bad for the site that a high rep user is either a) saying it should be closed or b) goofing around on meta with fake questions

either way, it doesn't look good

10:05 PM

Good point, I'll delete