/dev/chat

6:38 AM

@sebasth simply means messaging restrictions :)

11:03 AM

I've got this crazy idea to write up a Meta post with tips for writing a good question. I'm realizing, though, that new users aren't going to look on Meta before asking a question -- many of them don't even complete the tour! Would it be useful to have around, perhaps as a link from the tour, or the help pages??

sebasth

11:47 AM

@JeffSchaller meta readers might find it more useful to have tips how to edit a (not so great) question to be a better question

such as some do/donts

Jeff Schaller

12:28 PM

@sebasth good feedback; thank you!

I've approached this poorly, so I'll have to re-think it. The current idea is all from the perspective of the question's author

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Sounds like a good idea. But for it to be useful, people would have to be aware of its existence. And of course, it should be at least somewhat U&L specific.

At any rate, it would be more useful that linking against that infamous Kali question.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha thank you! I currently have links to U&L help pages & such, but not too much is U&L specific (I was thinking it wouldn't be too hard to adapt to other sites), but it would have more value here if it had U&L examples and guidance. Good feedback, thanks!

@FaheemMitha well, depending which way this goes, I'm not intending it to be a dupe-target

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller I certainly hope not.

I'd suggest a point system. That way you could refer to the question and say something like - your question falls down on point 1 because such-and-such.

With the such-and-such optional, I suppose.

Jeff Schaller

I mean, there's not any actual harm in a Meta post with guidance on writing a good question; I'm just realizing that it won't hit the target audience.

Faheem Mitha

A few things that come to mind - make your question completely reproducible to start with. The term MWE (Minimum Working Example) is sometimes used.

@JeffSchaller It will get to the target audience if people link to it when necessary.

Even if only a small number of people do so initially, it might catch on. And it certainly won't make the question quality here any worse.

Jeff Schaller

12:37 PM

@FaheemMitha excellent idea; almost no one does it, but it's nice when the question says "mkdir this" and "cd that" and "run this find command", since it makes it easier to step into the problem to solve it

Faheem Mitha

Another one, don't paste code examples as images.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha doesn't terdon have a Meta post for that already? I could link to it

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller TeX SE is quite good at that, but that's a smaller and more disciplined community with a higher bar.

@JeffSchaller Possibly, but I wouldn't worry about it.

Jeff Schaller

(I'm jotting down your ideas as you go, don't let me stop you)

Faheem Mitha

Another thing - try and write sensible subjects. People are terrible at doing that.

And some discussion of tags would not be a bad idea. I get the feeling that most people don't have a clue about that. With special reference to not using the ubuntu tag for a general linux question (for example).

Oh, and a related thing would be, try to couch questions in as general a style as possible, though I suspect most people won't do that even if it is pointed out to them.

Jeff Schaller

12:41 PM

@FaheemMitha can you elaborate just a little bit? I'm not sure what you're driving at, or away from with "a general style"

Faheem Mitha

Also, some discussion of whether to chose AU vs U&L might be reasonable. <Shrug.>

Even now I'm not sure how questions are supposed to divide up between those two sites - we still get an awful lot of dupes.

sebasth

@JeffSchaller this imo can be applied to edits too; after OP finds the answer it is usually easy to strip the question from irrelevant details

Jeff Schaller

I think the closest I've gotten to that, mentally, is to use the "Linux" tag if it's generic, or a distribution tag, if the question is specific to one (using "yum/rpm" or "apt", etc)

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Abstract out the particular things about the question that are incidental, while keeping the question the same. No examples come to mind off the top of my head, but it should not be hard to come up with some.

Jeff Schaller

@sebasth I thought I understood this, but now I'm not sure -- you say strip away details in response to "make sure it has the detailed commands"; could you say just a little bit more please?

@FaheemMitha I think some of the trouble with this idea is that people may not know what's incidental or pertinent

Faheem Mitha

12:43 PM

People come up with very specific questions which might generalize, but people might not see it, because of the way it is written. Another way to think of this is - you want your question to be as useful to as many people as possible, so help a search engine find it if people submit a related query.

@JeffSchaller Agreed.

Jeff Schaller

I'm just hoping that people can write an Answerable question, that's on-topic and not opinion-based and such.

Faheem Mitha

But there is no harm in thinking about it. Many people don't think about the fact that the real, main reason of SE is to be a repository of questions that are of use to other people.

@JeffSchaller Sure, that would be great, if they were to do nothing else.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha sure; there's a whole range of questions, from really good general questions down to the zero-votes but solves one person's problem

sebasth

@JeffSchaller some questions OP includes a lot of details (which is nicer than no details) but in the end the details might turn out to be irrelevant, like server configuration when the actual issue is clearly in permissions

Or sometimes the problem itself is broader than the original question, so by minor edits the question can be made to address broader scope of issues

Jeff Schaller

@sebasth ok; that would be some ... careful ... editing suggestion, then. Once you know the actual problem, remove distractors. Gotcha; thank you!

sebasth

12:46 PM

@JeffSchaller yup, usually also requires the op to confirm the issue was addressed

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth Yes. And it would probably help to drive the point home by including some actual examples from the site.

Really, the quality of questions here is so abysmally low in general that it would not be that hard to give it a measurable push.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha I could see value here in adding in "key" phrases that lead people down the right path. Did you get "permission denied"? Or "No such file or directory"? etc

@FaheemMitha that was my original goal, and I might still throw something out there, but I also want it to be useful

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Exactly. Including the error message verbatim is a good start. Search engines are good at picking up on that.

But often people don't even do that. They say something like - it gave an error - but they don't say what the error was, which is annoying on multiple levels.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha good one, yep

so many of these guidelines are things that only the OP can do, and so I realized that a Meta post is not going to be useful when someone goes to click "Ask a Question", which is when I started going down the path of linking it in from a help page.

I think we're up to two good ideas, now -- a "how do I write a good U&L question" and "how should I edit a question into shape"

similar ideas, but there are pieces to the first one that only the OP can do

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller The way this could work is that a reader of a hypothetical Awful Question could add a comment link to your Meta post about how to write Good Questions.

Jeff Schaller

12:53 PM

@FaheemMitha riiiiight, but if it's a bad-enough question, it should be closed (or updated by the OP to be not-bad)

Faheem Mitha

Though to be really useful, the comment would have to have more than that. Preferably say what "category" it fell down on. Otherwise it's not very useful, though still more useful than an anonymous downvote.

@JeffSchaller Regardless whether it is closed, it can still be edited by the poster.

That's the idea of the close, in fact.

Though often people just go away, I think.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha fair enough; at least we can have a link instead of having to write up the same guidance over and over. Although each question would have its own failings

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Quite. But some broad categories do recur quite a lot. There are definitely patterns.

Some of them are U&L specific, others not.

Jeff Schaller

alright; I'll keep working on it, and now I have another TODO :)

sebasth

@FaheemMitha a couple of my edits unix.stackexchange.com/posts/464954/revisions and unix.stackexchange.com/posts/469380/revisions ; both quite heavy editing to remove some noise and get a clear question

Faheem Mitha

12:57 PM

@JeffSchaller You could post a link to work-in-progress here. People might have comments.

sebasth

In my opinion the parts I removed were not helpful in making the question clearer

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth Yes, I see. Heavy editing, indeed.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha hmmm, what about a community-wiki Meta post? Certainly it has some of my ideas, but I'd want others to chime in with more ideas

Faheem Mitha

One normally expects the poster to do this, though. It's his/her responsibility.

sebasth

but importantly the question must still address the OP's issue, and the existing answers must be just as relevant to the edited question

Faheem Mitha

12:59 PM

@JeffSchaller On meta you don't get rep, though. So does community still make sense?

@sebasth Right.

sebasth

@FaheemMitha I haven't seen it happening much. If I end up writing an answer it is not that much more effort to clean up the question

Prabhjot Singh

In my view some questions should be clubbed together.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha I suppose it's the difference between "here's what Jeff thinks (and how the community voted on it)" versus "Here's what the community has come together on"

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth No, they usually don't. But I don't know if you can expect other people to clean it up.

@JeffSchaller Sure, if you think that is better.

Jeff Schaller

My first idea is almost always horrible, so I'm working on it :)

Faheem Mitha

1:01 PM

Another generic suggestion - suggest that posters check for basic spelling/punctuation. That's a frequent annoyance.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha indeed; already included (spell-check) and a reference to ELL.stackexchange.com, if needed

sebasth

@FaheemMitha I think it is pretty much up to either the OP or a person who participated by answering/commenting

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Good. But browsers don't have a spell-check, do they?

@sebasth Yes, I suppose so.

Though I rarely do so myself. It's more work.

Plus, it's possible the poster won't like it. Though of course that's not a reason not to do it.

sebasth

I think if I already spent time writing an answer I can just as well improve the question so it would be useful for more people

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth That's certainly very public-spirited.

Jeff Schaller

1:04 PM

@FaheemMitha Chrome appears to have something; I don't know if I want to maintain browser howto's ("click here then there to turn on spell checking")

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller One way to think about generalizing a question is by analogy with a math theorem. Math results are designed to be as general as possible. The more specific they are, the less useful they are.

@JeffSchaller It puts a red line under things, but does not offer alternative word suggestions afaik. But regardless, people don't have to write their question in the browser.

sebasth

@FaheemMitha the results deducted from the broader theorems can still be interesting and useful

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth Of course.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha true; I could add a hint that says "look at all the red-underlined words" to double-check them. Won't the question eventually end up in a browser, though?

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Yes, but it could be spell-checked outside one. :-)

Jeff Schaller

1:07 PM

@FaheemMitha certainly!

Faheem Mitha

In Emacs, for example.

Which has quite a good spell-checker.

sebasth

@FaheemMitha if they are not native english speakers, they probably don't have english spell check enabled by default

Faheem Mitha

@sebasth Probably not.

I wonder if one can tie spell checkers to locales.

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha Chrome, which I just looked up, has a list of dictionaries, yes

Faheem Mitha

@JeffSchaller Oh? Can you get it to do word suggestions?

Jeff Schaller

1:18 PM

(Weird, yet another question that was flagged as off-topic not reproducible; the question has no evidence of that -- it is close-worthy, and apparently some reviewers have now voted off-topic as well)

unix.stackexchange.com/review/close/261596

sebasth

not so sure how common it is that web servers/sites contain information on what language the content is

Jeff Schaller

@FaheemMitha right-click on the red-underlined word, yes

for Chrome: Settings - Advanced Settings - Languages - Spell check

mine has "English (US)" and "English"; not sure if or how you can add those if you don't have them

sebasth

I think firefox provides more spell checking languages as addons

Jeff Schaller

1:39 PM

@sebasth I have a fairly stock/default firefox install; looks like there's a right-click context menu to enable spell-checking, then it will underline words

Max

2:37 PM

Hi There. Hope you guys don't mind answering me a short question here, which i consider is not really worth of posting a new question

it's about this question:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/194232/source-shell-script-automatically-in-terminal
how can i find out which is the correct directory to put my bash scripts if there is no ".bashrc" in my system?

user141350

I'm trying to understand if in programming, a higher-order function always totally equivalent to a "callback".

For example, The very opener of the Wikipedia article "Higher-order function" notes that an higher-order function has two characteristics:

1. It takes one or more functions as parameters.
2. It returns a function as a result.

But AFAIK, in programming, a callback won't 100% of the time take a function as parameter (it might be other type of data as parameter) and won't 100% of the time return a function as data (it might be other data returned).

Stephen Kitt

@Max what are you trying to do?

@JohnDoea a callback isn’t a higher-order function, you use callbacks with higher-order functions

you have some function which expects another function as a parameter

the latter is the callback, not the former

and the callback doesn’t take a function as a parameter

Max

@StephenKitt exactly the same what the guy in the question that I linked wanted to do. To be a little bit more specific: I'm learning to work with ROS and in every single terminal that I use, I have to source 2 setup.bash files and I would like that to be done automatically.

Stephen Kitt

@Max right, so why can’t you do what terdon says in his answer?

Max

@StephenKitt because there is no .bashrc on my system

Stephen Kitt

2:49 PM

@Max can’t you create one?

user141350

@StephenKitt but I understand that a callback wouldn't always necessarily be used with in higher-order function, from this answer:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/378964/216836

Max

@StephenKitt I don't know. Can I? Can I just use Kate to create a new file, name it ".bashrc", safe it in my ~/ and put the two source commands in there? you gotta know, I'm completely new to linux and bash

Stephen Kitt

@Max that’s it, you can create the file and add your two commands there

Max

@StephenKitt Alright thanks! I would've just tried doing so, but I didn't want to "destroy" something ;)

Stephen Kitt

@JohnDoea I’m not sure why you understand that from the answer

you’re misreading the Wikipedia article

@Max you’re welcome!

Max

2:54 PM

as I have kind of no idea what I'm doing :D

Stephen Kitt

Higher-order function

In mathematics and computer science, a higher-order function (also functional, functional form or functor) is a function that does at least one of the following: takes one or more functions as arguments (i.e. procedural parameters), returns a function as its result.All other functions are first-order functions. In mathematics higher-order functions are also termed operators or functionals. The differential operator in calculus is a common example, since it maps a function to its derivative, also a function. Higher-order functions should not be confused with other uses of the word "functo...

that does at least one of the following

not “has two characteristics”

a function which takes a callback (whether as a function or as a piece of code, e.g. a lambda) is a higher-order function, by definition, because it takes a function as a parameter

user141350

Indeed I misread. But even so (that does at least one of the following), the data type shouldn't necessarily defined as a "function", at least in programming (not sure about mathematics), isn't it?

user141350

@StephenKitt

Stephen Kitt

@JohnDoea it’s always equivalent to a function (the distinctions in the SE answer relate to syntactic sugar, not intrinsic characteristics)

Nick Alexeev

4:38 PM

Folks, would this be on-topic for Unix.SE ?
Or, is this more of a StackOverflow question?

-1

Q: SPI - spidev kernel module only reads right on the first time it is run

I'm using the Linux spidev SPI driver to communicate with another device. The first time I go to read a register, the data comes back well. However, in the next attempts the data doesn't come as expected, although it is consistent (for example, in the second attempt I receive 0x30, 4th, 0x21 and ...

Stephen Kitt

@NickAlexeev I suspect it would be OK on both but you’re more likely to get an answer on SO

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