The Whiteboard

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user20683

12:33 AM

@YannisRizos you either spell programs with one m or two mms and an e. Never just two mms. This makes that question all the more heinous.

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer Yeah, and this was his first question after getting a private message about his low quality contributions, that explained in detail what questions we welcome, how he should formulate them, etc. Waste of time, it seems, there's little hope educating this one. One more crap question and I'm suspending.

user20683

@YannisRizos not a Gomaniac?

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer No. btw Goma smartened up, he's now using Tor.

user20683

@YannisRizos some people just take trolling to the next level

user20683

it's a pity they don't actually go and learn useful stuff

Yannis Rizos

12:46 AM

68 sock puppets merged so far... And who knows how many more accounts he has, especially now that he found out about Tor.

It's actually a network wide record ;P

user20683

@YannisRizos wow

Yannis Rizos

There's a troll on Wordpress Answers (if I'm not horribly mistaken), that's catching up, ~55 socks.

user20683

I'm constantly amazed by the utter lack of knowledge about how the underlying systems inherent to programming exhibited by people out there. It makes me feel very good about being able to find a job when I get out

Yannis Rizos

Q: How is time calculation performed by a computer?

I need to add a certain feature to a module in a given project regarding time calculation. For this specific case I'm using Java and reading through the documentation of the Date class I found out the time is calculated in milliseconds starting from January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT. I think it's saf...

...for example.

The only interesting thing there is the link in Robert's comment on his answer.

user20683

@YannisRizos yeah

user20683

12:59 AM

I mean I'm no programming diety by any means but I do wonder

user20683

I quietly laugh to myself when people blame themselves for buggy software

user20683

it's a bloody shame

Yannis Rizos

1:14 AM

History of Science

Proposed Q&A site for researchers and students of History of Science, Sociology of Science, STS and so forth. A place to get the context of scientific discoveries: The way they were achieved, the influence they had on the society and the way the were impacted by it.

Currently in definition.

Sounds interesting...

user20683

@YannisRizos we have a history.SE, it's somewhat underutilized

user20683

and some of the questions are quite similar to this type of thing

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer History.SE is a bit undisciplined. Overly broad questions, unreferenced answers, etc...

user20683

@YannisRizos true

David Wallace

1:42 AM

@YannisRizos What's interesting about this question is that the three posted answers to it each answer something completely different from one another.

Yannis Rizos

@DavidWallace That's what usually happens with poorly defined questions.

David Wallace

I suppose you're right, as you so frequently are. I just find it interesting. Call me enigmatic.

Yannis Rizos

@DavidWallace I didn't say it's not interesting ;)

Interesting or not, poorly defined questions suck the life of our most valuable resource: answerers. It didn't happen in this question, but it's very common for the asker of a poorly defined question to come back and actually complain to people who bothered to write good answers that they didn't answer his/her question. Or a ton of other people coming and downvoting answers, because they don't feel it answers their interpretation of the question...

Questions should be as well defined as possible, if only out of respect for the answerers who volunteer their time...

(imho)

David Wallace

Sure, I don't disagree. I wish people would use comments for what they are designed for, that is, asking for clarification on what a question means. But it's too easy for a prospective answerer to assume that their interpretation of the question is what the OP intended, and even to be unaware of the existence of alternative interpretations.

Yannis Rizos

1:58 AM

well, I'd at least hope people would only answer when they feel certain their interpretation of the question is correct, even if later on it's proven that it was completely wrong. Unfortunately there's a (minor) trend of people that post answers saying more or less "I'm not really sure what you're asking but here's an answer anyway"...

David Wallace

@YannisRizos Hope springs eternal.

Yannis Rizos

My deep dark secret is that I love all these NC questions with a passion. But they don't work. Sometimes, through vigilant moderation they do work, fewer times it's just dumb luck (first couple of answers are excellent, and people don't bother posting crap), but in general they turn into crapfests quickly...

but we are getting better over time... very slowly, but, at least to me, it seems that we've raised the quality of answers noticeably during the last six months.

David Wallace

Hmm, I'll believe you. I have been far from a high-volume user over the last six months. Certainly several months ago, there were so many poor questions that it was hard to know what level of quality one could expect from the answers. I only answer a question when I feel I have something useful to add; which lately has been very seldom.

user20683

@YannisRizos I like the NRQs because they are a challenge

Yannis Rizos

Lots of good things happened the past six months. First, I was elected ;P Then, we had the contest, and it went ok, a month later we got the blog, and it's now running smoothly, after a rocky start.

David Wallace

2:07 AM

Hmm, I suppose I should go and take a look at the blog. I'm sure it is replete with gems.

Yannis Rizos

And our traffic since January has been steadily rising, after being completely flat for almost a year...

David Wallace

2:42 AM

Right, yes, lots of good stuff on that blog. I especially enjoyed the "20 controversial opinions" or whatever it was called.

Yannis Rizos

@DavidWallace We're always looking for writers if you're interested...

Lots of very interesting (but deleted) SO/ProgSE questions you could salvage...

David Wallace

Hmm, I'll think about it. I've got rather a lot of other stuff going on in my life at the moment (which is why I'm here in this chat room :-) but there may be something I can contribute at some point in the future.

Yannis Rizos

Only thing you'll need to do is ping anyone in the blog chat room, so they can set you up with access to WP and Trello. Any time you feel like it.

David Wallace

I shall keep it in the back of my mind, with all the other rubbish that's currently there.

7 hours later…