I think the discussion of whether that is justification for closing is more important than the discussion of whether there should be a specific close reason allocated to it.
" I code no matter what position I have held because "programmers" are mostly lazy under-performers and I have to step in to get the job done. In my 35+ years in the business, I have literally met under five programmers worth their weight in salt. The rest, ineffective."
It's a bit big for a single screenshot, but here's a taste from the comment section:
> wow. hostile audience. Apparently, IDEs are favored for creating "page"-oriented network traffic. Too bad I offered some insights into coding GREAT APPLICATIONS and you think it constitutes "noise". Wow. Someone using an IDE is like a "chick" wanting an "automatic shift" car instead of a "stick shift" car. If you're not coding straight out of notepad, you're a rookie. My opinion. Now, can anyone answer my question?
@Mego I do think that discussion is an important one. I know it's been mentioned before informally but I can't remember a meta discussion (or find one with a quick search)
If there is something that you find annoying / counterproductive / unfair / detrimental / no longer funny in challenges (question posts), describe it in an answer here, and propose a recommended response. Voting will indicate whether that response has the backing of the community.
For example, y...
> Does anyone know the answer to this VB.NET/C# compatibility internals question or am I too advanced for this discussion group? Of course I can just "try it", but trying to save time and so many of you seem to be experts. Please advise. Thanks.
@NathanMerrill It's fine. Although I was aware of that one, funnily enough ;) I think that might be a good place for this, although I wonder if a separate discussion first would allow more input (people tend to just vote on an answer, so a new question might get more conversation going).
Anonymous
@NathanMerrill Though it may be mentioned in that post, that's just a list of things that one should avoid. There's no policy there, and so there's no teeth. I'm saying we should explicitly make those types of challenges off-topic, thus having a policy to cite when closing them.
I think that a winning criterion should be fair, not just objective. The two seem to go together. So the score should be identical regardless of who posted the answer.
(I know we've had several challenges based on username or avatar that did well, but I still think it would be better to ban this, so a challenge based on a name/avatar has to be the same for everyone)
I still haven't got used to seeing Downgoat's halloween avatar. It's like catching sight of your reflection after a significant haircut, when you're not quite sure if it's yourself
Another week of confusion and then we can start the long process of getting used to things being back to normal
@trichoplax and you put yourself through this because...
Anonymous
Gah... Just got a call from my recruiter. The meeting to decide whether or not I will have a job at Google is happening in an hour and a half. I don't know if it's better or worse now that I know the time.
@NathanMerrill Last year there was no confusion as Downgoat's avatar hadn't been invented. I didn't realise how confusing it was going to get this year...
Consider the following two challenges:
This Sandboxed challenge gives an unfair advantage to users who have been around longer and contributed more towards collaborative golfing efforts.
The original version of this challenge gave an unfair advantage to users with short usernames (and changing ...
Permutation-Tolerant Hello World
Inspired by Fault-Tolerant Hello World (a.k.a. the Interview).
Task
Write a program that prints Hello World. Sounds easy, right? Ok, lets challenge up a bit : your (real) task is to maximum the number of permutations of the characters of your code that produce ...
Huhu @trichoplax (for the reccord, I feel like the dollar signs are an important part of perl's charm - and unreadability maybe-, and you won't have them with a lot of languages!)
I little while back I awarded Dennis a 500 rep bounty for his excellent answer to one of my indefinite bounties. Thinking that Dennis would want his well deserved rep as soon as possible, I awarded the bounty within minutes of the end of the 24 hour holding period, only to discover that this was...
Halloween is almost here, the holiday after which most people need to wean themselves off a hollow diet of sugar.
Write a program that takes in a positive integer. If the integer is less than 31 (1 through 30), output this ASCII-art jack-o'-lantern, looking to the right as if looking forward to ...
@NathanMerrill The location does do multiple things. That's the team I will be working on. All I'm waiting for now is the finalization of the job offer by the SVPs. That meeting is happening now.