« first day (178 days earlier)   

2:50 AM
@Adám Why was this flagged
 
1 hour later…
4:04 AM
Prepare for beta!
4:28 AM
@RydwolfPrograms Dunno. Maybe someone thought it was inappropriate to advertise something that costs money.
 
8 hours later…
12:18 PM
it's beta day babyyyyy
Woooo
 
1 hour later…
1:37 PM
🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Sometime this week
Most likely today
Eh with layoffs I expect they'll be busy and I think 2 or 3 more months
6–8 weeks
 
1 hour later…
2:45 PM
Would asking about github.com/bbrk24/Trilangle/issues/1 be considered on-topic for PLDI? Not in a “anyone want to do this?” way, but in a “how do I approach this?” way
@Bbrk24 If you just want advice on improving the spagetti then code review would be more appropriate
No, not improving spaghetti. My current approach is fundamentally flawed and I don’t know a better way
No amount of untangling spaghetti will fix that
Then yes, if you can make it generic enough
Why "if you can make it generic enough"
2:48 PM
General rule for all SE sites
Questions can't be for a specific situation
Yeah but even a very specific question can be helpful to other people
If you write it in such a way that it's findable and applicable to other people
Like on CR, the questions aren't by any means generic, the answers are. As long as there's some genericism somewhere it's fine
Answers should be more specific than questions
Not as a general rule
Look at CR
Look at any site. There's often general answers applicable to tons of specific scenarios
2:50 PM
Code review is a very odd case since questions are fundamentally extremely specific
Like Harper's copy-paste "YOU HAVE AN OPEN NEUTRAL" on DIY.se
@mousetail except SO :P
Generally a answer being more general than a question means the answer does not actually answer the question
a unfortunatly very common case
This is the issue with SO, way to specific questions becoming canonicals so none of the answers actually relate to the question remotely
An answer doesn't need to address every specificity of the question in extreme detail. Often just being pointed in the right direction is good enough
And there's nothing stopping an answerer from including extra information relevant to different but similar situations
You could avoid the whole issue by just asking good questions
2:53 PM
A good question is one that helps people
If you ask a question that doesn't help yourself based on an assumption it might help someone else, that's a bad question
A good question can be answered by good answers
but it must actually match the answers
?
A question's quality is independent of its answers
Take the famous HTML with regex question
The question is not actualy about parsing HTML with regex
2:54 PM
A good question is one that helps people. A good answer is one that helps people. That's the end of it.
Lol no
All of the other rules and recommendations are just heuristics for making questions and answers more helpful for more people
Have you even visited SO
Questions must be findable
Yes, and the majority of questions and answers are unhelpful to more than maybe one person
@mousetail ...because if they aren't, they're unhelpful to more than one person
Those questions shouldn't be asked
2:55 PM
Why?
Helping one person is better than helping none
Because we're trying to create a databse of knowledge, not answer questions
it's hard for a problem to be so specific that fixing it literally won't help anyone else
I'd rather someone ask a hyper-specific question that helps only them then ask no question at all
Because at least the former helps 1 instead of 0 people
Those types of questions belong on discord or reddit
it's helpful to you and everyone else if you make the question as general as it can reasonably be, but that's that
2:56 PM
SE is purely for collecting knowledge
Yes, and knowledge which helps one person is still knowledge
And you can still glean info from people asking similar questions to you
No that's just noise
Even if SE is optimized as a database for common questions, it still works perfectly fine for the occasional specific question
Look at every single SE site and you'll find that's the case
They usually get closed pretty quickly
Specific questions that nobody else can use just fall to page a zillion with one upvote. They don't hurt anybody.
@mousetail On what grounds?
2:58 PM
Duplicate
And I don't think I've ever seen that being the case
you can't always even expect an asker to know whether or not their question is too specific
@mousetail Duplicate of what? We're not talking about hyper-specific questions that are also dupes
I always close them myself when I see them so I'm a bit biased, but they do get closed quick
I think we're talking about different things here
2:59 PM
Duplicate of the generic version of that question
What makes you assume there's a general version of every question?
Plenty of questions have more than one moving part
Often they can be closed as needing focus too
If there is more than 1 moving part
Sounds like you just want to close for the sake of closing
No, I want to reduce noise
What does this noise harm?
3:00 PM
People looking for answers
How do overly specific questions get in the way for them?
Aren't they hard to find?
Undiscoverable?
No they often show up higher in the search results than legit questions
even if they have no answers or the answers are extremly specific
I'm sure you have plenty of times searched something up but only found way too specific answers only applicable to OP and not you
Actually I haven't
Most of the time it's just stuff unrelated to what I'm looking for
It happenes to me all the time
3:02 PM
Maybe you just have overly generic questions
often the top results actually are overly specific questions but the top answers are general
"Too broad" is a close reason, "too specific" isn't, if that tells you anything
Too specific can be closed as "not reproducable or caused by a typo" on SO
Or duplicate or needs more focus
@mousetail That has nothing to do with specificity
It does
There is a lot of overlap between too specific and too broad
3:03 PM
An irreproducible error would mean that OP's asking the wrong thing, not being too specific
^
which does happen a lot, but is a very different problem
That looks incredibly vague and underspecified, not too specific
that's not overly specific, that's embarrassingly general
^
It's obviously too specific
3:05 PM
it's literally just sheer incompetence presented specifically
Also yea it needs details and clarity as well
I think you're just seeing specificity as a symptom of other issues with questions and assigning the badness to the specificity instead of the cause of it
Many questions have multiple issues
because it definitely correlates with overall lazy and otherwise low quality question-asking
but the main reason they are not worth salvaging is that they are too specific
3:06 PM
but it's never the cause
if it needs more clarity but is specific enough I might comment asking for clarification
My goal on this site, correct me if I'm mistaken, is to help as many people as possible. An overly specific question might have a very slight negative impact by cluttering a few searches, but it also significantly helps at least one person. That's a tradeoff we should be willing to make.
maybe not worth community effort to salvage, but possibly worth asker effort :P
and it's not helping anyone to just nuke it from orbit instead
3:07 PM
Closed questions are still search clutter
@RydwolfPrograms Especially when the site is young we really really need to avoids specific questions. If we have a solid body of generic questions to search it doesn't matter as much
Might as well make them potentially tangentially relevant to searches instead of answerless and definitely useless
@mousetail Why early on? A specific question is still a question and an answer and votes.
And rep and possibly a new active user.
But if you ask it more generically it can help more people
Not necessarily
If a question is too specific ask a new one then close the other one as a duplicate of the new one
To avoid the SO issue where none of the questions match the answers
3:08 PM
Often the problem is that you don't know what the general version of your question is
You don't know what to look for
If I have a specific bug in my parser, I can't really get much help from asking about parser bugs in general
Even if there does happen to be a more general category of parser bugs mine fits into
Exactly, so you'd help then if you rephrased their question then closed as duplicate
if there's a legit dupe target that's a completely different matter :P
You are creating a dupe target specifically for the question
The dupe target is posted later
But IMO you shouldn't prioritize future viewers over the asker
3:15 PM
I just don't want to end up with terrible canonicals
If someone comes here looking for help we shouldn't be criticizing them for looking for help for themselves instead of help for some vague other
@mousetail Nobody's saying specific questions should be canonical, you can always ask a more generic version
And we will have meta to discuss things like that
SO was the first SE site. They didn't have the knowledge of the future to know that what they were doing would end up with dumb results. We do have the context to know how our future will look, and we can avoid a lot of SO's pitfalls.
We should be using that to the benefit of every person here tho, and treat askers as people rather than canonical question factories
I just thought of a meme that I can’t make now
3:44 PM
@RydwolfPrograms Early questions will be canonicals
Not all of them
Most of them
most likely someone will ask a similar question later
 
1 hour later…
4:46 PM
BETA BETA!
I'M IN
@Ginger @lyxal @mousetail @Bbrk24 IT'S HAPPENING
AAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I'm user #8
I'm holding back my #1 question, compiling vs. interpreting, for public beta
4:48 PM
alright alright
we did it baby
alright, let's ask our first question
Let me answer it
hmm, I don't actually know what to write
I've got no precedent!
@Ginger How many example questions did you post?
Luckily we have 80 questions prepared
^
May 12 at 17:41, by Mast
@WormholeX If you write them down and put some thought into the question already, you can help the site make a good start.
4:52 PM
Hey, I posted a question, but it doesn't show on the site.
Days, weeks of preparation.
I see it
@Mast We did talk about it briefly...
I do have a question prepared but it will take a few more hours to format properly
4:53 PM
OK, it was just slow.
@Mast Yay! And I didn't even prepare it in advance.
Should we have a tag?
alright, question posted
I feel like that wouldn't really be very helpful for searching, since it could be talking about them in tons of different contexts
@RydwolfPrograms Surely tokenisation will be common. avoids UK/US issue.
@RydwolfPrograms In beta, lots of tags can be created that later are removed.
4:54 PM
Ginger has made a change to the feeds posted into this room
@Adám I feel like that should be or (we can always do a synonym for US spelling)
Good point.
@Mast emails were sent out, right?
I didn't get one.
nice, question 3
4:56 PM
@Ginger Takes a while.
Is it possible to move a room to a different site?
oooh
Keep in mind that suggested edits need approval from people with 500 rep and over. So, currently, the only way to get them approved in any decent amount of time is for the OP to approve the edit. If you post a question or an answer, keep this in mind. Your activity may be required.
did we get a main room?
I don't think chat's registered the new site yet
4:57 PM
aaa I’m at work for another four hours
it has not registered the site
@mousetail Do you want it to be moved?
oh right, we were gonna do a meta discussion for the name
lemme do that real quick
the “join the community” button doesn’t work
or should I wait until we're out of private beta?
4:58 PM
@Mast Would be great yea
If I search for programing language design in chat I get this:
Doesn't the site have a main chat room?
We can create a new room, I think. And continue everything there. The issue is this current room is on the Area51 server. Let me check on that...
okay I figured it out
u n d e f i n e d
Mast has frozen this room.
This room is now obsolete. All further discussion will happen at the new Programming Language Design and Implementation room.
room topic changed to Programming Language Design and Implementation: MOVED TO chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/146046/…! Room for discussion of area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/127456/… [discussion] [site-definition]

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