can we edit OP's answer here and vote to undelete? Or make CW? oldfred doesn't post answers

oh karel suggested a dupe... that's easier

stackexchange logo on the left has gone a scary shade of red... what's that about? Hallowe'en theme?

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad NS for domain in body, bad NS for domain in title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, +5 more: www.musclestrainrelief.com/advanced-iq/ by Resere1929 on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, link at end of body, pattern-matching product name in body, pattern-matching website in body, +1 more: Herbs To Control Enlargement Menopause by user746188 on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Username similar to website in answer: cherry st1044 not recognized in ubuntu 12.10 by Ludovic Rousseau on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Username similar to website in answer: Smartcard Reader of Dell Latitude E7450 not recognized by Ludovic Rousseau on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer: Canon printer driver in Ubuntu for Canon image runner 2202n by Ekansh Artius on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer: How can I connect Ubuntu 14.04 to my wireless printer canon mp620 by Ekansh Artius on askubuntu.com

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted website in body, link at end of body, pattern-matching website in body: At times, this can be a very time consuming process by fgdfgdfwertwer on askubuntu.com

@Zanna was a bug. i think it has been fixed

lol

I kicked this from the queue O.O

was I wrong?

looks fine, though i voted to close lol

:) hope steeldriver decides to answer it

i never understood why "primarily opinion-based" doesn't show up in the list of types in the CV queue i.sstatic.net/xmeu9.png

I think they are ordered by how many there are with each reason?

I'll go VTC a random bunch of stuff as POB and you can see if it comes up XD

there was something for POB but i still didn't see it listed as one of the types

hmmm

maybe that's a good MSE question

but scary downvotes

hahaha ask on our meta then

We got the new top bar, but the annoyed repeated rep bug is still with us

I got an association bonus, and every time I get +1 back for deleted downvoted post I get 99 or 101 or whatever

I better actually write some awesome answers

haha i also haven't written anything for a while

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, link at end of body, pattern-matching website in body: How Choose On A Safe Male Enhancement by Jelenare on askubuntu.com

what happened to all the text processing questions?

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] URL-only title, bad NS for domain in body, bad NS for domain in title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, +5 more: www.hairlosspropecia.org/advanced-iq/ by Dreak1952 on askubuntu.com

@Zanna What do you mean? Did some of them get detagged or something?

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at end of body: Cannot access any website on Chrome? by Youghis on askubuntu.com

@EliahKagan nah, I mean I don't see them as often as I used to

Just today?

in recent months

Oh.

I don't think I've been paying attention to how many there have been.

Is it too optimistic for me to say that people are finding what they need in already-answered text-processing questions, so they don't need to ask ask many new ones?

well I haven't been counting, probably I've just been inattentive

@EliahKagan that seems reasonable

I was worried people had been put off by off-topic votes

I am worried about that too.

but I think in general people vote to leave open on those

gaahh I voted unclear here and now I am in the dupe party I didn't agree with

that can be easily fixed by the SE devs

Lol.

if only they didn't work on the top bar

and actually spent time on things the community told them about

Have you considered the possibility that, if not for the top bar, those same developers would have use the time and resources to make something else vastly more horrible?

Maybe we are in the best of all possible worlds after all.

you sound like an apologist for the SE devs :p

Similarly, the failed experiment on SO that they called Documentation might have been good. Stack Exchange was trying to expand into new frontiers. It could have been anything. It could have been making shower curtains for the U.S. military.

I got a badge for the documentation thing yesterday... I thought, that's odd, I don't remember contributing to it...

Huh.

So, for those questions, should I just put comments on all the answers that advise to do wrong stuff? Should I post answers on (some of?) them that explain how things can go wrong and which methods avoid the problems?

stackoverflow.com/help/badges/7358/…

@EliahKagan I think it would be good if you posted an answer... maybe we could then vote to close the others as duplicates or merge them

You could ask on MSO.

Well, I don't think they''re really duplicates, though.

looks like loads of people got that badge yesterday though

Well you get it if you got any Documentation badge before.

@EliahKagan you could post a "related" link then. Or you could just answer all of them :) :) :) but that would be the most effort...

Should I edit some of the wrong answers? I am worried that the amount of change is pretty great.

maybe if you mention which one(s) you are thinking of and what you would change about them I can give a very slightly less clueless opinion.

Sorry.

I was going to do that.

Honest.

:)

In this answer, I could change ls -la | grep ".mp4" | wc -l to ls -1q | grep -c '\.mp4$' (see comments), but that doesn't seem right. It would also raise questions like, should I actually make the additional change of writing \ls since it's common to make ls an alias that uses additional options?

I didn't mean to be sarcastic... I mean, the effort of doing that may not pay off, since my opinion may not be of any help at all

Hmm?

@EliahKagan I've thought about whether that should be done too

Oh. I did not take what you were saying as sarcasm at all!

I took it to mean that I should tell you what i am actually thinking of when I ask you your opinion of it.

Which is correct.

:)

it's kind of annoying that the answer is kind of wrong

Do you mean the accepted answer?

yeah!

no

?

I don't think I know what you mean. I don't know which question "yeah!" was to an which "no" was to.

sorry, I was thinking of the accepted answer to my question, in which I wasn't intending to ask how to count files

then I actually looked at the correct tab, and realised you meant this answer which is indeed quite annoying

There's wrong stuff all over the place in answers and comments to all the questions.

One of the reason I am hoping to figure out a way to mitigate this is that I am responsible for some of it.

Only yesterday did I realize that comment was wrong and replace it with this new one.

oooh TIL

Yeah, that's why dir exists.

$ mkdir 'foo
> bar'
zanna@toaster:~/playground$ ls -l | grep '^d'
drwxrwxr-x 2 zanna zanna    4096 Oct 11 20:12 foo

facepalm

An even easier way to test is just by piping to cat.

ls -l | cat

drwxrwxr-x 2 zanna zanna    4096 Oct 11 20:12 foo
bar

terrible

In contrast, the output of dir is device-independent. That's why -C and -b are implied with dir -- they're the most reasonable options if you don't know where it's going. This is still geared toward being read by humans, though.

Do you mean it's terrible to pipe from ls while assuming that it produces output the same way, or that it's terrible you can't pipe from ls while assuming that it produces output the same way?

I mean it's terrible to pipe from ls assuming it will behave nicely

find does this too, btw, and there are answers that are wrong because of that, too.

Which is also why find ... |& grep -v 'Permission denied', or anything that puts the output of find through a pipe and then displays it, is not so great.

Regarding that error, I feel like I should make a list of wrong things I have said on Ask Ubuntu because I inexplicably failed to actually check if they were correct before saying them, even though I knew they were in areas where especially frequent confusion occurs. Is that something I could use Trello for? :)

@EliahKagan haha you could, if you want to do something about them in an organised way. But, I think that list will be short for you

I don't think any individual criticism of any of the answers really makes a good answer in and of itself, though this is sort of subjective.

So should I post comments on all the wrong answers that don't have comments explaining why they're wrong, before proceeding?

One benefit of doing that is that I would then feel comfortable posting comments on the questions, linking them to one another. I don't want to do that immediately, because I would be sending people to places where they would likely get wrong information, might not realize it is wrong, and might have to undertake considerable effort (if they're not very familiar with the relevant issues) to find out why it is wrong.

seems like a good idea

if we can't correct them or destroy them then we should probably comment on them... hmm I am sleepy

I don't think we should destroy any of them.

The misconceptions that make the wrong are so extremely prevalent, I think it's more valuable for them to exist and have useful comments.

I'm afraid that was more of a thinking-aloud general comment on bad answers. I didn't see any that I wanted to delete so far among these. But it's annoying when bad answers get upvoted/accepted

so

I figured out why I was getting crash reports for my app

:) I am going to sleep, so I look forward to reading about it in UTC morning

I was reloading an important object with a null value if there was a savedInstanceState

Regarding the dir`ls` thing, IMHO Zlatan's useful and technically correct answer deserve upvotes so it appears above the wrong answers (and because "would be inclined to think" is something of a caveat on the wrong historical guess).

@Zanna Good night!

Close please

@AndroidDev sounds dreadful haha but glad you found it. I love it when I finally figure out what I've done wrong (unless it's too late to fix it D:)

@Zanna Closed. Of course, my "primarily opinion based" got swallowed up by the "too broad." It's too bad, too. Rarely do I get a chance to (correctly) vote "primarily opinion-based." :)

@EliahKagan :) thanks :) (come on Z, sleep!)

It's also a duplicate of something (which is itself closed) but I'm not sure I can find it easily.

@EliahKagan my bad. It's unfixable, so the too broad message is misleading

There's certainly an argument to be made that's it's too broad. (EDIT: A correct argument actually, especially given the "and resources" part.) I just don't think that's the main problem with it, in terms of its suitability for AU.

It's also unclear: "I got some from No Starch Press, but are they even good?"

Unclear.

NAA?

Dupe? I thought we had another question about this.

Can this question be edited to make it clear, such that it could be justified to reopen it? I believe the answer is valuable.

I voted to reopen this. It's definitely on-topic.

Why was this deleted?