Aaronut

@DavidRicherby: You're covering subjects that have been extensively discussed on this site. Toxins can't be killed because they aren't alive. They can be denatured, but for many toxins the denaturation temperature is so high that your food would be charcoal if you reached it. Thus we simply consider sufficient bacterial contamination to be an unrecoverable situation and tell people "when in doubt, throw it out".

@Ben: Bacteria are killed by cooking, but the cooking temperatures provided by food safety agencies are specifically designed for typical levels of contamination found at the supermarket and so on - not for petri dishes containing billions of times more bacteria than normal. It's true that toxins are the more serious issue because they can't be killed, but even with the bacteria, it's not a "yes" or "no" question, it's a "how many" question; even if there were no toxins, you might have to considerably raise the cooking time and temperature to kill the additional bacteria.

Obvious troll is obvious. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invariant_%28computer_science%29

@Victor: "I could show you many studies that show the opposite" - how about showing us one, for starters. Accusing other people of "bias" and "questioning the data" is essentially doublespeak for "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about and don't have any evidence but I'm still sure that I'm right and I'm going to filibuster until everyone else listens." On any other site I would assume you were trolling.

@Victor: I haven't written an "opinion" about trading, I've written a fact: Statistically, the more frequently you trade, the lower your return is. Read just about any of the research papers from Barber & Odean, and if you think you can find a study refuting them, please do. Once again, your advice is not merely an "opposing viewpoint", it's dangerously irresponsible.

@Victor: I got overconfident, like you are right now. I don't care to elaborate, and I'm not interested in arguing with you. It's incredibly irresponsible of you to be even suggesting to people that they can sustain 50% profit per year using short-term trading as long as they use "position sizing" and "risk management". I know your type, it's very easy to recognize because you use the phrase "buy and hold" a lot, usually capitalized and always as a pejorative term. I'm used to seeing that kind of stuff on trading forums, but I really wish you wouldn't take it to a Personal Finance Q&A.

@Victor: The plural of anecdote is not data. "Back-testing" means literally nothing; the trouble is actually being able to time your trades correctly. It's literally like gambling; you can be on a hot streak for a while and maybe even think you have a system, but it's random. I've been in your shoes, somehow convinced I could do better than the best fund managers, suffered some terrifying losses, and eventually managed to make most of them back. Now I'm a lot more careful. I truly hope for your sake that your great returns continue; statistically, it's very unlikely.

You'll no doubt see other advice, but research has shown that, on average, the less frequently people monitor and make changes to their portfolios, the greater their returns are. In other words, people who only trade every 5 years do better than people who trade every 1 year, who do a lot better than people who trade every day (again, on average). When you get too involved with daily swings, you stop seeing the big picture. Pretend for a moment that you can't get a quote at all; do you think it's a good stock to own or not?

No harm done. Just didn't want you to think that moderators on other sites were retarded. ;)

@slhck Thanks for the warning, although I actually did not vote to migrate, I just voted "off topic". Unfortunately the other 4 previous votes took precedence.

Anyway, work tomorrow, which means I'm off. Talk to you later.

@SAJ14SAJ It's not what I expected, but you had me expecting something much worse.

Oh, well, Jeff Atwood's most recent blog post is all about this thing that you just mentioned, apparently. Discourse.

Of course, it's better if the long-term ones actually pay dividends in the short-term, but profit does not come without risk.

This is a good thing - you want to have some short-term investments and some long-term.

But SE as a company does have a viable short-term business model. It's just that not every SE site is part of it.

Actually, I thought chat.se was that.

I did not.

@SAJ14SAJ The key phrase being "short term".

Not every business model requires short-term profits. I'm not necessarily saying this one will make them billionaires, but you never know.

@SAJ14SAJ Well, there's (a) publicity, (b) loyalty, (c) branding, (d) the potential for future advertising, and (e) the potential for future careers spin-offs.

Careers.

Yeah, I used to be in utilities, so I know the feeling well.

@SAJ14SAJ I actually had a UX proposal on Meta SO, but either I can't find it or it got deleted. I thought it was a pretty good design that would have accommodated polls. But SE is a company and I guess they want to occupy a specific niche. Same stuff goes on at my company, sometimes good ideas just won't ever get implemented.

@SAJ14SAJ we beat you to it.

@SAJ14SAJ If you're actually curious there's always Google image search.

I like Quora because it's a perfect model of everything we're trying not to do; opinion-based questions that immediately turn into popularity contests.

@SAJ14SAJ Quora is another obvious sort-of competitor.

You'd be surprised at how many people don't know that they can vote. That's why we're constantly deleting "thanks" answers.

@SAJ14SAJ They clicked on the big check, they might not have understood what the arrows are for. Especially not if they have experience on discussion forums and/or Yahoo/Answers/etc. but not newer Q&A engines.

@SAJ14SAJ Who says they know?

If you don't participate on the social web then you don't realize just how clueless people are.

Reddit isn't really the same thing as Digg was. But when we see traffic spikes it's usually Reddit; Digg has become fairly irrelevant by now, I think.

@SAJ14SAJ Yes, but that is merely a side-effect of the traffic spike, since most people are clueless.

It's nothing to do with what happens on their site, just what happens when they link to one of ours.

The cap is more about rate-limiting (Reddit effect) than fairness.

@SAJ14SAJ That shouldn't be a surprise; in order to get a lot of rep, you would have to answer a lot of questions. And if you answer a lot of questions, you'll get a lot of vote trickle from search traffic.

It's exhausting answering questions that are only being asked out of sheer laziness; that's one of the reasons I want to keep those away from SA.

@SAJ14SAJ Yes, well... big city problems. I thought it was funny you mentioned my share of the rep on SO, and so shortly after mentioning your "passive" rep here... I haven't really answered anything on SO in at least a year, maybe two.

@SAJ14SAJ See but not search.

And yes, we'll probably never get homework questions because they can't copy and paste a technique.

Hah... it wasn't intended as advertising, just answering the implied question.

@SAJ14SAJ You can't... only moderators can.

In fact, it's been too long since the last purge..

@SAJ14SAJ Oh, that's partly because we delete a lot of other closed questions.

Do we want an infinite supply of help-vampire questions or a smaller, more focused set of generally-applicable questions? Perhaps neither extreme is appropriate here.

@SAJ14SAJ We can't have the long tail and have all interesting questions. The long tail on Stack Overflow is the long tail because it's so dull.

@SAJ14SAJ Indeed.... proof that the quality is indeed going up, not down.

@SAJ14SAJ And you don't think amateur cooks can come up with an equally impressive number of ways to screw up recipes?

@SAJ14SAJ That's a problem on every site! But again, you need the perspective of experience; to you, perhaps, a lot of new questions are lame. To me, there are a lot more interesting new questions now than there were a year ago.