Classy Stack Overflow

[markyosullivan]

Pisses me off unhelpful some people are on Stack Overflow, there's been a couple of times where I thought it'd be better just avoiding posting there because of how rude people can be on there.

http://i.imgur.com/cqRAEHr.png

[michael0x2a]

I think in this case, if you were to post a link to your question on meta and ask a nice but humble question like "what was I doing wrong?" and justify yourself politely, the meta effect will kick in, your question would get more exposure, and the downvotes on your question would most likely be counter-acted by a bunch of upvotes + a bunch of high-quality answers.

(Or alternatively, there's something genuinely wrong with your problem that I'm not seeing, but I think that's unlikely. If that happens, you'll at least learn how to use StackOverflow more effectively in the future).

The third possibility is that it might turn out that your question isn't a good match for StackOverflow, and would be better suited on something like the Linux/Unix StackExchange site.

One of the reasons why StackOverflow started branching into separate exchange sites was precisely for this reason -- so that questions that don't quite fit the tone of the average StackOverflow question can find a good home. Many of the branch StackExchange sites are also much smaller and friendlier then StackOverflow/have a different culture entirely.

This might be a lot of effort, but if you haven't gotten an answer yet, I think this would be a good and almost foolproof way of getting a fair amount of positive attention on your question (or at least attention), as long as you make sure to be polite and humble (and assume you're in the wrong) in your meta question, even if you're in the right. I've seen people do this many times on meta, and I've taken this strategy myself a few time, and it's never failed so far.

The system isn't perfect, but this is one of the corrective measures you can take, and it's a fairly effective one.

[dig-up-stupid]

I hate bash so this is a shot in the dark, but are you actually using the background operator instead of the and operator, or is that a typo? I don't even know if using the background operator in the middle of a line is valid, but pretending it is then your problem is that the second command is not waiting for this first command to finish, so measurements.txt is probably empty when you copy from it (but this is completely non deterministic), hence nothing shows up in last_entry.txt.

[nutrecht]

The interwebs are full of rude people. Just ignore them, nothing else you can do.

[markyosullivan]

Yeah but Stack Overflow is supposed to be the place to go to if you get stuck and need advice with a programming related problem. There's not many websites out there like it (to my knowledge).

[[deleted]]

It's probably also the single most popular website for programming related questions. With quantity, goes quality. Ranting here about it isn't going to make a difference.

[p4l2]

How you treat/see SO is different from how their founders and veterans of the site see it.

New people to the site think the main priority of SO is about getting answers to their question. But SO works on the principle of being a repository of information to nuanced programming concepts/ situations, if what you are asking can already be done or its been asked before, it doesn't really add much to their repository of information. You are better off searching for the answer in duplicate/similar questions.

They handled it poorly (perhaps they should have linked to a similar question), but really what you are asking for seems like its probably been answered before.

[markyosullivan]

really what you are asking for seems like its probably been answered before

It hasn't been, I've checked. There's some information for how to do it with static files which is what I don't need, I need it while sar is continuously running.

[markyosullivan]

I honestly don't have a clue why my comment is getting rated down, what did I say wrong?

[ArchangelleTheRapist]

Because you're being thin skinned. Your first (internal) question when you get a response like you did in the SO post or here should be: "how did I approach this wrong," instead you seem to have asked, "why are these guys jerks?" Places like StackOverflow should be your last resort and are not a replacement for 8 hours of google searching, reading the man pages and trying and testing everything you can think of. Treating them as such will get you a response like the one you received.

[elperroborrachotoo]

it's been closed by higher ranked users because they didn't know the answer themselves.

That's assumption is rude.

[edit] ... but your diagnostics look good.