I do not think we should accept questions as valid and on-topic when the OP have not even bothered to type an equation or data and only show a screenshot or a picture of a notebook. Particularly I'm surprised that this question got two answers. 5 out of the 25 latest question have this problem.

@rhermans I notice this when going through the review queue and I see questions of bad quality with close votes that already have several answers. The fault is ours. Everyone would have to resist the urge to answer a question when the quality is not acceptable. IMO this is not going to happen. Someone will write an answer if he knows a solution.

Heh... when playing with SatisfiabilityInstances, recasting a problem from one form to another can provide 10^30 fold speedups quite easily.

Does anyone have any idea what happened here? This exchange has left me thoroughly confused...

@kirma do you have an example? I'd be interested to see how this is done.

@halirutan These are other similar questions : 178752 178730 178698

Probably the people that answer them may want to share their thoughts? @BobHanlon, @CarlWoll @Mr.Wizard @HenrikSchumacher

The two already mentioned. 178741 177047

@rhermans That last one is particularly confusing. It has -4 but no close vote.

(and I did not downvote)

@HenrikSchumacher pushing for a Reversal badge? :P

@halirutan There is your first close vote for 177047 ;)

Actually, that post sounded quite interesting in the beginning and the drawing was actually very helpful...

But after some time I found that the question did not make sense.

@HenrikSchumacher The comments are still very confusing. He thanked @b3m2a1 for not giving him information. I too believe that the -4 does not reflect the quality of the question. Sure, it doesn't contain code, but otherwise, it is as you said interesting. I wished he had included that paper in the question though

We have so many people atm that come here and don't even understand their problem.

Like this one guy that calculated the eigensystem and was not happy that the solution is so large.

lol I recall that one...

But I have to admit that I lost my patience quite early that day...

I don't care too much for the time it takes to type the equation ir data. Probably it takes longer to explain why the question is rubbish. what irritates me is the lazy disregard for the people trying to help. It's a matter of reciprocity.

@halirutan I wonder if there's some academic reason for this... Like undergrads doing summer research for the first time? Not entirely sure.

Ah. Could be.

Or too much sun?

I feel undervalued by the people behind those questions. It's insulting.

@HenrikSchumacher I do get dumber in the summer

@rhermans I understand your point and I also feel often insulted.

@rhermans I think it's a matter of relative anonymity. It's easy to forget that the weird combination of letters and numbers that's responding to your post is actually a living, breathing human.

I'm certain that face-to-face people would make a better effort modulo language barriers

Well then, Tit for tat. No answer until they comply.

I think that's reasonable, but obviously people in a generous mood will be willing to do a bit of work to figure out what that OP is actually asking and provide an answer

And that is entirely their prerogative, even if I would not do so myself.

I know. Probably I have done ut myself at some time. I thought venting this now was relevant given the volume of examples.

Good night to you all. It's past midnight in ghe UK.

@rhermans I feel that. It can be very dispiriting answering questions here, sometimes.

Yes. Good night!

I often answer such poor questions when I believe to know what the point is and when I have only 5 - 10 minutes of time. Hence no time for all this chitty-chat about code and examples. But I start to realize that this no good.

Here's a nice example of a case where I had a totally useless OP whose question I sunk a large amount of work into understanding and answering for but who remained useless. To make things better, I they didn't realize they were asking an ill-posed question, even after I proved (I think) that mathematically.

But sometimes you're in a generous mood...

By the way, I don't like the tag "code-request": It suggests that one may dump in just anything into this site and expect to get out useful code.

@HenrikSchumacher mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/489/… :)