@Doorknob冰 Ah yes, a tag relevant on a single day once per year.
@SuperJedi224 5 hours
@trichoplax Take Stack Apps as an extreme example. They award +10 rep for question upvotes. That said, it's exceptionally difficult to obtain said votes on that site because that requires actually building an application that interfaces with the site. We're in a similar (albeit less extreme) situation where it's difficult to rep farm with questions because it takes effort to write a decent challenge.
How to print 2016 using only the number 2?
You can use any operator or native language library but no other digits other than 2 can occur in your code and no characters or strings.
The objective is to
output an integer 2016 without the use of other digits other than 2.
no characters / string...
Obviously we get crap challenges that get massive upvotes but I think they're relatively few. I think one thing we should try to emphasize to the community is to not be afraid to downvote.
It's necessary for maintaining the site's overall quality and health.
@AlexA. I took a look and it’s obviously a perfectly fine challenge, I don’t get why it would even get closed. Looks like overly trigger-happy mods to me.
@Timwi Challenges should get put on hold before they're straightened out, so they won't wind up with a ton of answers that get invalidated by the edits.
Task
Constantly having to check on television, or the time on your computer to see if its 2016 is a tedious task. Being programmers, we should be able to automate this task. Write a program that will output 2016 when the system time hits Friday, January 01, 2016 00:00:00. or rather 1451624400000...
How to print 2016 using only the number 2?
Print 2016 using only the digit 2 operators and native language built-in functions.
The objective is to
Output the integer 2016 without using any digits except 2.
no characters / strings are allowed, i.e. no tricks like ord('b')
The code that uses t...
I love the quipu challenge. I had a solution that worked in some cases and not in others. I think I could have fixed it into a working solution that was reasonably golfy but I accidentally overwrote the file.
@Sherlock9 I'm undecided on whether I'm going to rewrite it. When I overwrote the file was just about a day after you first posted the challenge, so it's been a while. :P
If you shut down your computer, that means all of your tabs will be closed. So when you have turn your computer off, you open 200 tabs in the course of a single day?!
@flawr I always close out of everything and clear my browser cache, cookies, history, etc. every time I close my browser. If I want something the next time I'm at my computer then I'll just navigate to it again. If it's something I'll access multiple times then I'll bookmark it.
A schizophrenic number (also known as mock rational number) is an irrational number that displays certain characteristics of rational numbers.
== Definition ==
The definition of schizophrenic numbers is given in The Universal Book of Mathematics as:
An informal name for an irrational number that displays such persistent patterns in its decimal expansion, that it has the appearance of a rational number. A schizophrenic number can be obtained as follows. For any positive integer n let f(n) denote the integer given by the recurrence f(n) = 10 f(n − 1) + n with the initial value f(0) = 0. Thus, f(1...
Anomalous Cancellation (from Wofram Alpha):
Anomalous cancellation is a "canceling" of digits of a and b in the numerator and denominator of a fraction a/b which results in a fraction equal to the original. Note that if there are multiple but differering counts of one or more digits in the nu...
@Dennis The site does far more than just stop people from posting answers. It prominently plasters the posting with a huge notice that yells in the author’s face “this sucks, you suck, fuck off”. It’s extremely discouraging and destructive. On top of that, in this specific case, the question was also unilaterally closed by an over-eager mod, which leaves no recourse even for the community who want to salvage the posting, much less for the author who is long gone and pissed off at the site.
The mods who have closed the question were not "over-eager." They were acting as per their responsibility to put the question on hold while issues were being sorted out.
Note that the OP reposted the challenge in the sandbox so I don't think they're long gone or pissed off.
4. The scoring mechanism of this challenge is horribly broken and would result in a 100-way tie. 5. Not putting a challenge on hold makes it unfixable. Changing the rules after 20 answers have already been posted will do nothing but get evryone mad at the poster.
@Timwi 1. There was nothing unilateral about this. Three mods were present at the time of the closure, and all agreed with it. 2. There's nothing final about a mod's closure. It still takes only 5 votes to reopen a challenge. In this case, the challenge was actually reopened before it was fixed. 3. The author did not react like this. He reposted the challenge in the sandbox.
@Timwi Although I agree that the people who close a question (mods or not) cannot know for certain how the author feels as a result, I wouldn't expect you to either, unless you were the author. If you wanted to get a feel for it, you could start a meta discussion "How did you feel the first time you had a question put on hold" to see if we can find out.
How to print 2016 using only the number 2?
Print 2016 using only the digit 2 operators and native language built-in functions.
The objective is to
Output the integer 2016 without using any digits except 2.
no characters / strings literals are allowed, i.e. no tricks like ord('b')
The code th...
@trichoplax Putting things on hold is just something that happens in the Stack Exchange network. I think a lot of users try to phrase things in nice (or at least neutral) terms so as not to discourage the poster, but that's not something we could change because we can't control how people behave.
@AlexA. I'm not suggesting we change it - and I think putting things on hold is more important here than anywhere. I'm just suggesting that the only way to find out how people feel about it the first time when they don't understand it, is to ask them.
@trichoplax “you could start a meta discussion” No, you can’t. By definition, you can only get responses from people who have decided to stay and not from the people who were pissed off enough to leave.
@Timwi The only measure I have so far is seeing comments from the author after voting to close. I've seen the occasional rant but far more authors were engaging and inquiring (even if upset) than leaving silently.
@Timwi If you are worried about users of other sites in the SE network, you could post on Meta Stack Exchange. Even on meta.PPCG I'm fairly sure we have some users who stormed off first time but still came back later
TBH it seems like closing is being made into more of a big deal than it is. We're a Stack Exchange site. Things get closed here just as they would on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or any other site. We can try to be as friendly as possible but in the end closing is just part of what we do.
Some people are going to take offense regardless of how you approach things. Some people will leave in response to a friendly comment. All we can do is be as open and helpful as possible, and be here for the people who stay.
@Timwi There are only two options, and I know which one I prefer: 1. Immediately put an unclear/broken challenge on hold, and reopen it as soon as the problems get fixed. 2. Leaving the challenge open while it gets fixed. The fix invalidates most of the answers. Posters of invalidated answers get upset, posting possibly comments and downvoting the question.
I’m questioning the way that posters are told that their posting sucks. It should instead say something more positive, e.g.: “This question will start to accept answers once the following issues with it are addressed: [clear list]”
@Timwi Why shouldn't they be shown to the poster? It's shown for the express purpose of letting them know what the general issue is with specifics typically given in the comments.
@Doorknob冰 I’m talking about how it sounds or how it feels. It’s the same with downvotes. Nobody says “you suck”, but a downvote really feels the same way as a “you suck”
@Timwi That isn't a no - there's a large audience on Meta.SE and your concern isn't only shared by PPCG users - all the sites would benefit from a discussion on how to make this clearer/more positive.
I can't remember exactly how I felt as a new user (and I came here from other SE sites so I was never new to SE here) but now I see a downvote as a negative and a close vote as a positive. I downvote things I don't like, and I close vote things I like enough to make sure they get the chance to be ready.
I often both upvote and close vote the same question.
Apologies if this has been covered. It's extremely difficult to search for questions on downvotes on meta.
I very recently had an exchange with a user where I was told I was "known to be a downvoter" (like that's a bad thing).
The situation was, he posted an incorrect answer, I downvoted and l...
Here, a downvote on an answer can show the answer is incorrect, but a downvote on a question I'm not so clear about.
I'm much more likely to close vote a question than downvote it. I can only imagine downvoting a question if I got the impression the author was posting a wilfully bad question.
The hover text for downvotes is "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful." The latter two points are more relevant here than the former.
I'm not strict on having a reference implementation first (perhaps I should be...) but there needs to have been some thought about whether it will work.