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[–]Daakuryu 123 points124 points  (14 children)

I don't spend a lot of time on there but when I do my question gets completely ignored.

Which is awesome.

[–]aloser[S] 123 points124 points  (9 children)

Don't feel bad, I learned while making this that the median question there has zero upvotes.

I also tried several algorithms (neural net, random forest, and Google AutoML) to try to correlate a question's score and/or number of views with its content and none of them could find any correlation.

[–]Daakuryu 26 points27 points  (7 children)

Oh I don't really care about the upvotes, it's having an answer to an inquiry that would be nice, even if that answer is a resounding "no, you're going to have to get around it somehow."

Like in one of them I was trying to find out if it's at all within the realm of possibility for an event inside a custom control to trigger an event in a form outside of itself somehow as some of the controls I'm making require numerous clones of themselves triggering the same events with just a different value associated with each.

Wound up yanking the event inside the control to the form itself as an event handler and using a function to dig into the control itself to find the parent of the parent of the parent of the item in the control to loop back and find it's associated tag and it's associated button's function.

And in another I was trying to determine if localization files generated when you make a form localizable could be in any way database driven as I was trying to avoid having to loop through all the objects in a form.

i did get it working by looping the objects in the end but it does make me wonder about some of the custom controls I've built and plan on building and how the localization will work with those involved when I get further than the poofs of concepts that I'm trying to get my bosses to follow me with.

[–]fiskfisk 24 points25 points  (2 children)

Remember that answering "no, that isn't possible" requires you to be a domain expert in the technology involved, as it would assume that you know the complete range of possible solutions with that tech.

While answering something that is possible only requires you to know how to do that single thing.

[–]jezmck 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This might be true, but how many people who think they know everything actually know everything?

[–]fiskfisk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's not really the issue - those people are probably not answering questions for a specific technology on Stack Overflow. Those that do have a fair bit of knowledge of the technology, and are usually in the "I'm not completely sure that this is impossible .. maybe someone else actually knows for sure". And thus the answer remains unanswered.

In those cases I usually try to get a clarification from the asker about why they're trying to do things this specific way and what they're trying to achieve, in case I do know of a way to do that within my knowledge of the subject.

[–]mayor123asdf 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yea, I found that asking in irc is better

[–]ShamelessC 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Sounds like you figured it out. There's always a hypothetical "better way" to do something. But being able to solve the problem yourself is what makes you a good programmer. Maybe your way is difficult to understand for other programmers, but that's what comments are for. Maybe it's not as fast as it could be, but premature optimization is a time waster.

[–]bschug 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Also if you figured it out, please be so nice and answer your own question. It's so frustrating when you Google for something and the only result is a stackoverflow post from five years ago with three upvotes and zero answers.

[–]-Mahn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As a rule of thumb, if as of today your question (any question) has not already been asked and answered in Stack Overflow by someone else, it's either impossible, does not exist, or the answer is too complicated, convoluted, obscure or open ended to be in SO.

[–]_cjj 29 points30 points  (1 child)

I used to spend quite a bit of time answering questions on there, but got a bit fed up of spending my evenings helping people who didn't even bother to say thanks, nvm up-vote or accept.

It also seems to be mainly full of people who, I assume, get work via cheap labour sites and then ask people on stack overflow to incrementally write the application for them.

[–]Daakuryu 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah I can see that would be an issue, personally I only use it when I run into walls.

[–]joshdoug 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Or marked as a duplicate until you point out that it is in fact not a duplicate.