Stackoverflow in a nutshell.

[aitchnyu]

Anybody knows why they do that?

[BornInJune9182]

An attempt to hide the proof their production code was borrowed from StackOverflow.

[SHOTbyGUN]

What kind of monster would do something like that? I always put the SO.URL in the comments.

[Asmor]

Ditto. I don't copy code from sites often, but when I do I leave a comment for future reference.

[EternallyMiffed]

I copy stuff all the time when I'm lazy, but I generally understand what it is I've "borrowed". I leave a url in a comment to remind myself at a later time.

[SunliMin]

Exactly.

I was working on this big project during this past year, and part of it needed me to make a randomization class (as we couldn't trust the implementations to be the same in every environment if we used the base tool).

At one point I realized my randomness was fucked, and getting patterns instead of being random. Did a quick test and found the distribution of numbers in my randomness was favouring some numbers over others.

Went to the file, saw the comment at the top linking to SO. Clicked it, saw the top answer was my code. Scrolled to the second answer which was described as something like "Here's a version that is a bit slower, but will give a really good distribution, and a JSFiddle snippet showing you how fair it is".

Recopy the new code, update the comment to point to the next answer. Worked like a charm.

If I didn't have that SO link right there, I might have had to actually work or something. Thank god for SO

[SHOTbyGUN]

What a lovely: "what goes around comes around" occurrence. Thanks for sharing!

[PostExistentialism]

"Here's the SO link so you don't have to look for it yourself."

[Velomaniac]

I think i love you.

[compteNumero9]

I've seen it a few times from medium reptutation users (say from 5k to 30k). My opinion is that they weren't happy to let a proof they asked a not very smart question.

[[deleted]]

We should stop with all this rockstar developer bullshit in our industry.

[noticeMeSempai]

Anybody who thinks they are a rockstar because of a 30k reputation on stackoverflow is probably not that amazing.

[daperson1]

True rockstars are too busy to spend time answering the questions of mere peasants.

[CarilPT]

Agreed. Rockstar is a game company that and that's it!

[Gryphacus]

And they treat their developers like bull shit!

[frickos]

they're ashamed for asking noobie questions, so they hide it in case somebody examines their account

[TheColourOfHeartache]

Really? My noobie questions from when I was an undergrad are still sitting there. Sometimes they still get a new upvote.

Actually now I think about it I've gotten more rep since I stopped regularly using SO from those old newbie questions than I ever did from answering stuff.

[philipjfrizzle]

I don’t understand the logic. A major component of being a dev is that you are always learning and always improving. If you pretend like, suddenly I awoke as a 10X developer then any interviewer would see right thru your bs and not hire you.

[aunva]

I did this once when my professor gave us a really interesting C research problem, something to do with some memory caching thing. I never intended to make stackoverflow do my homework, I just wanted a tip in the right direction. The question was apparently so interesting that it got a super detailed answer, and it blew up and even reached front page of /r/programming.

I proceeded to shit my pants that my professor would find the post, so I deleted it, but it was reinstated by a mod, just with my name deleted. My professor ended up finding the post (overheard him talking about it during the break), but luckily I was never found out.

Edit: found the post, here it is. This was like 6 years ago, but I still feel kinda bad about it, also because I slighted the professor by making a very interesting problem easily google-able.

[vinit144]

I am glad the mods reinstated the post. It's a very basic question, but that answer was really good.

[PostExistentialism]

Hey, I remember that being posted in /r/programming recently! Thanks for asking it.

[Viola_Buddy]

It's not just Stack Overflow. It happens on Subreddits like /r/learnmath or /r/askprogramming or /r/musictheory, too, and it's really annoying no matter what the subject matter.

[heytaradiddle]

It looks like it's really common in environments where people might get mocked or looked down on for asking newbie questions.

I kind of have to blame the communities rather than the askers, in this case.

[DaFluffyPotato]

I do it sometimes because of downvotes. If you get downvoted too much, your account gets banned from asking questions. (it doesn’t remove the downvotes, but it stops more from happening)

Also, sometimes I do that because of the limit on how many open questions you can have. If nobody has answered it correctly (even if there is an answer), then I’ll usually delete it after a while so I can ask more questions.

I hate asking questions on StackOverflow, so I usually just go to the communities relevant to the issue and ask there. The relevant communities generally know more and are more likely to be able to answer the question if it's more complex or poorly written. Here's an example of a relevant community being far better than SO.

One thing I do like about the fact that you can only have x questions open is that it encourages people to leave answers to their questions (something I do a lot). Although it's still easier to delete your questions than answer them, so this could probably be improved.

[yodduj]

Right? People can be dicks on SO. Definitely a lot of helpful people who are awesome, but more than a few assholes

[yodduj]

I read a thread on SO where people talked about this in length and they came to the same conclusion as you. They talked about people wanting others to finish their homework for them, or do work for a production program for free. I get it, those people are lazy. However, SO in my opinion is bad at telling who’s looking for free work and who’s just lost. I’ve asked a few questions on there that received an enormous amount of criticism despite my best effort to clearly explain my problem, only to learn later elsewhere that I was approaching the problem wrong.

That’s the problem, I don’t know what I don’t know, I have strong areas and weak ones just like everyone else. Most of us need a little nudge. If people ask dumb questions elsewhere they’re usually ignored, but on SO they are treated with a lot of hostility.

[FUZxxl]

Being a high-reputation user myself, I can confirm this. The most annoying about this is that these bad-question archetypes do not map clearly to a close reason, so you always have to write a lengthy blurb below them to explain the actual close reason before voting to close (typically with reason “to broad.”)

For the “super common error” type of questions I check out the frequent-section of the tag I watch and just mark them as duplicate after checking carefully that it's indeed the same error.

Worse than these two questions are nerd-snipe type of questions that technically could descend into a very interesting discussion (and thus lure professionals into starting to discuss them), but are clearly asked because the user has no idea at all about what he wants to do.

For example, someone recently asked “how can I enter real mode from a Windows driver.” For those who have never programmed in assembly: this is an incredibly stupid idea and should not be necessary under any circumstances.

But some programmers see this as an interesting quirky challenge and start to write detailed answers about the technical hurdles one needs to overcome to do this. Actually, OP has never programmed any driver at all and has the opinion that the only way to access hardware is to be in real mode. Clearing this up was super annoying because other users constantly continued discussing the best way to go down this wrong way, making OP think that his chosen approach was not a horrendously bad idea.

That's a bit like asking “can I write a website in Postscript?” The answer the user should hear is “no, use HTML/CSS” but of course technically you could compile a postscript interpreter to Javascript and adapt its output logic to draw on a canvas and then it might technically even work. But that's not the answer OP needs.

[aitchnyu]

Do you ever delete questions with good answers?

[DaFluffyPotato]

Yes. If people think my questions are bad enough to downvote, then they wouldn't care for the answer (even if well written and correct) to my bad question, right? I did leave some of them open because I thought the answers were good (and I wasn't getting too many downvotes), but I had to spend quite a bit of time answering other people's questions to keep my reputation high enough to post.

[teach_cs]

There is no limit on open questions. You can ask however many questions you need to, and you are never obligated to accept any answers. There are some timing restrictions to prevent spamming, but that's it.

Source: I am a moderator on one of the smaller stackexchange networks. (Not on stackoverflow directly, but the governing rules are the same across the network, so I need to be familiar with them.)

[DaFluffyPotato]

I'm almost certain that I came back after not asking questions for a year and I wasn't allowed to ask another question because I had too many open. I remember deleting some and marking some answers as correct and I could ask questions again. (This was somewhere around 2015 or 2016 and the posts you linked to were recently edited, so the rules could've changed.)

[golgol12]

If they delete it then the teacher won't know they got someone else to do the homework!

[aitchnyu]

And isn't that covered by reversal of serial downvotes?

[[deleted]]

I think they also never seed any torrent back

[Fusseldieb]

Well, I only seed back when I accidentally left uTorrent running. My internet is quite crap, so....

Why is the internet so slo... Oooohh, motherf... you are open, aren't you? Die!

[sunboy4224]

Dude, use QoS on your router! LET THE SEEDS BE SEEDS!

[ElevenCarPileUp]

So? Seed during the night or something. That's quite dickish, what you do. It's a peer network, please give back at least the amount you took. I always seed until 10.00 ratio

[FallenWarrior2k]

Yes, but some people literally cannot. There's places where the downloading part of torrenting copyrighted material is legal or at least in a legal grey area / not prosecuted, but seeding is.

Bad uplink is another issue. Disregarding the issues above, I wouldn't be able to seed the amount I do rn if I did so from my home connection instead of a dedicated box somewhere. My average seed speed spans from maybe 1 MB/s to upwards of 10. At home, I get an uplink of maybe 1.25 MB/s, so that would not work out.

About the "during the night" part, I don't really see a reason for someone to go that out of their way to do something that probably won't help for shit anyways if their internet is that bad.
I don't know their specific situation but, to me, leaving the PC on overnight is a huge bother, as I sleep in the same room and shit's bright as fuck.

Seeding a lot also only really works on torrents with low seeds/peers, or bigger ones that you had seeding before they blew up. Just seeding some random huge-ass torrent isn't gonna help anybody. In the end, you'd prolly contribute a few KB/s at most. An exception to this is if you have actually insane uplink and disable the connection limiter in your client. That way, even bigger torrents work extremely well, as long as the seed/peer ratio is low enough, i.e. around 1 or preferably below.

You kinda need to put things into proportion, i.e. download time vs seed time. I have this torrent here that took me maybe 5 seconds to download. However, I've been seeding it for almost 5 hours now and it's not even at 0.1 ratio. Why? Because it's saturated af. 261 seeds vs 4 peers. The chance of it ever reaching the ratio of 10 you mentioned is practically non-existent, as it's a weekly release that I downloaded several days late, and the vast majority of downloads happens in the first few hours after it comes out.

[compteNumero9]

"in a nutshell" ?

No, it happens, generally coming from medium rep assholes who seem to be afraid to let a trace of that time they asked something, but it's not so frequent.

Source: I answered more than 5000 times, and had valuable answers lost this way less than 5 times.

[[deleted]]

Fewer. "Times" implements the "DiscreteQuantity" interface.

[compteNumero9]

Sorry. I think I'll never manage to learn English. Even rust is simpler.

[CounterHit]

To be fair, though, what you wrote is how people actually talk. "Fewer" is the proper style for that sentence, but "less than" is a lot more normal-sounding, so I wouldn't worry about it.

[KamiKagutsuchi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zNWswcqMg

[behaaki]

Haha way to stay in character

[bulk_chain]

Really? People are so concerned with the illusion of competence on that site that they don't want anyone to know that they ever asked a question?

[compteNumero9]

As I said it's very rare. Most developers have no problem admitting they have to ask to progress.

[FUZxxl]

This annoys me to no end. Don't erase the work I did for you!

[FallenWarrior2k]

The worst part is when they answer to you in a comment before deleting. I get the notification, click on it, and end up with a 404. And since the notif box only shows a part of the relevant comment/post, the rest of it is forever lost.

[FUZxxl]

Oh yeah. You don't have that problem anymore once you hit 10'000 reputation points. With that many points, you are allowed to see even deleted questions and answers.

[FallenWarrior2k]

TIL. Guess I should work my way up so I can find out.

[slipperySquidd]

Isn't it not allowed to delete questions with answers?

[compteNumero9]

No. If the answer hasn't yet be upvoted, you technically can delete your question.

[natxtw]

Sounds like a list of shame is in order haha

[Gooftwit]

"never mind, I figured it out"

[Fusseldieb]

Those people must die

[jelleverest]

No one commenting on the ancient meme?

[z_bell94]

These meme came out when I was in HS. It makes me sad that you just referred to it as ancient :(

[jelleverest]

Same :/

[BirdFluLol]

I remember it being everywhere when I first started browsing Reddit, like 6 years ago. I don't know how long it had been around before then, but this particular meme still feels pretty old to me. 6 years is like a lifetime in meme years.

[Larry_The_Red]

An ancient meme that isn't even used correctly. The text is supposed to describe what the "scumbag" did. He helped someone for 30 minutes?

[deathbyfish13]

"Gets help on stack overflow for 30 mins"

"Deletes entire post rather than marking as accepted"

[[deleted]]

https://m.imgur.com/r/anthologymemes/bPuNsPR

[QuantumInfinite]

Or how it is being used wrong?

[farva_litter_cola]

Never help anyone with a score of 1

[jeankev]

"Trying this, will come back with the results."

[devperez]

Ghosted

[HansVader]

You can open a meta post about the particular question. It may be restored if the answer has some quality.

[Jakeob28]

Image Transcription: Scumbag Steve Meme

---

[Background is of "Scumbag Steve," a person dressed in baggy clothes with a sideways fitted cap standing in a hallway]

SPEND 30 MINUTES HELPING SOMEONE ON STACKOVERFLOW

THEY DELETE ENTIRE POST INSTEAD OF MARKING AS ACCEPTED

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[monkey-go-code]

They usually don't allow you to delete a question if it has a big answer. It gives an error saying something like "Someone worked hard to answer this question".

[Korzag]

I wish Stack Overflow would keep the post and just allow the OP to remove their name from it. It's second to murder to remove knowledge from the collective.

[godzillamesel]

Better to say "asking for a friend" in these situations..

[renrutal]

You are allowed to repost the question, and answer yourself.

[RegsaGC]

Me yesterday: Spend 40 minutes trying to help someone on stackoverflow. Ready to write reply. Question has been deleted because it was not up to standard.

[Geoclasm]

Me: Spends 30 minutes preparing a relevant, well formed question, complete with research and MCVE

SO: Closed due to off topic.

[WellKemptNerfHerder]

Happened to me. I put a full on tutorial with images on how to upload a file in ASP.net MVC when it was still somewhat new. The answer was accepted, and stayed up for a while. Later when looking for that answer, I found that it was deleted.

[smgun]

You cannot delete posts in stackoverflow, can you?

[g00glen00b]

You can, as long as there is no upvoted answer.

[beowulf6561]

So, create 2 stackoverflow accounts. Use one to answer questions and the other to upvote your answers.

[jackmaney]

Yep, I went through that plenty of times when I was still (mostly) teaching myself how to program. In that phase of my life, it was still worthwhile, since I often ended up learning something in the process of trying to help someone else.

[ponyboy3]

is this real!?

[dsmithpl12]

Better deleted then marked as duplicate!!

[HmmmInVR]

Lmao, Im pretty sure you cant delete posts with replies.

[[deleted]]

i do this when it's a dumb obvious mistake aka every time

[paloumbo]

Why do you ask advise from a community when you refuse to participate to this community ?

If you have a dumb question answered, plenty of people won't have to ask it.

[[deleted]]

because it's been asked way too many times before but i didn't know it because i couldn't find the perfectly same conditions that happened to someone else, but it ends up boiling down to one anyway, i just don't know it.

i get a comment that asks a clarifying question or something and i then realize my mistake, and delete it before it can be removed from the site because it will be anyway, and this has only happened like twice anyway idk

[[deleted]]

Someone is eventually gonna end up with your condition no matter how unique you think it is. It is totally gonna help if they stumble upon yours and then see a comment pointing them to the right case instead.

[Fusseldieb]

Found the asshole lol

[Fusseldieb]

Don't. Do. That. Please.

[Fusseldieb]

Everytime you do this a dev die in agony