All Questions
190
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Reference: templates for common comments
The purpose of this post is to aggregate several templates for comments useful for the daily moderating of the CS site, e.g., informing the user (usually, new user) when their question is off-topic / ...
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Homework policy
The accepted answer on this question is our homework policy, adopted by a community poll.
The poll rules and outcome are retained below for historical purposes.
Rules
Below, you will find three ...
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Reference answers to frequently asked questions
Why am I here?
If you were sent here, somebody thought that you posted your question too early, that is you don't know facts and/or techniques one would learn in undergraduate courses. This is not ...
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What to do when the answer is already part of the question
We have recently had this question and this one.
Both questions practically contain an answer within the question and ask "is this correct".
Assuming the answer they give is correct (like in the ...
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answers
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The return of the homework question
It has become a ritual: three times a semester (around 2nd week, midterms and finals) there is a flow of simple, homework-like questions (mostly in the field of automata theory; US education system is ...
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What about list questions?
I know we have some very useful ones on cstheory.SE and I have seen some amusing ones on Stackoverflow. On other sites such as scifi.SE they seem to be banned.
What is our stand?
RaphaelMod
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answer
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Questions about correctness of a solution
This question is motivated by the following two examples: one two.
Both questions asked about the correctness of their solution to some problem (in these cases, recurrences). Despite one being ...
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Short reference for LaTeX/MathJax commands
Some users are not familiar with the LaTeX notations, which is perfectly fine, but it would be better if we could have an FAQ/help page that explains the basic commands, in a similar way to the ...
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How to make our cs community very different from the cstheory?
We are now in the third day of private beta with a couple of questions. That is great.
However, most of questions here so far are about CS theory, which already have a full-grown site. The overlap is ...
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answers
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A guide to moderating Computer Science Stack Exchange yourself — editing
Editing posts is a basic feature of Stack Exchange: everybody can edit everything (edits may be audited if you have low reputation). Since our site lives and dies with the amount and ratio of useful, ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
12
votes
2
answers
493
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How to deal with questions about crank-heavy topics?
It was bound to happen and thankfully, it did now rather than later: we received the first question about a claim regarding P?=NP.
Some topics, in particular this, attract lots of public attention ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
6
votes
3
answers
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Should we have a custom close reason for homework assignment dumps?
Since the beginning of the north hemisphere term, we've seen a sharp increase in questions that consist solely of a dump of a homework assignment, where there is no question, only “solve this”.
Our ...
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Computer Science New Site Design
My name is Paweł, I’m a product designer at Stack Exchange. I’m super happy for you, because the process of graduation is about to be concluded! Congratulations to all of you!
New Design
The new ...
- 101
19
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4
answers
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views
Towards a policy for hint-only answers
This question is getting old, but the matter is still unresolved. Please contribute by voting on the answers here, or by voicing your opinion if you have something to add to the existing answers!
Our ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
18
votes
3
answers
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How do I ask a good homework question?
I'm doing some computer science homework and I need help. How should I ask my question here?
The existing discussions about homework tend to center around how to answer them and how to moderate them. ...
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answers
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Homework tag discussion
This discussion started in my other question "Will Homework Questions Be Allowed?".
Should we allow the tag? It seems that some of our sister sites (Programmers, stackoverflow) have not allowed the ...
- 435
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3
answers
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Programming questions
What should we do about programming questions like this one?
Are they on-topic or should they be closed (or migrated to SO)?
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answers
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What is Computer Science?
This meta question is intended to be a place to direct people who ask what is Computer Science and answer misconceptions about it.
What is Computer Science?
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answers
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What makes an answer good, and what makes an answer get feedback?
I have been wondering: does the quality of an answer and its upvotes always correlate? It should, but it obviously does not. Obviously, because not everybody gets all aspects of every answer. ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
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votes
2
answers
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When will CS.SE graduate?
The site has been up for almost more than 2 years.
All statistics seems to be reasonably good.
The flow of good questions and answers seems to be steady.
The need for the site is also clear.
...
- 21.8k
10
votes
3
answers
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Percentage of answered questions
For a long time now, the statistics of the number of answered questions has been standing on 88%, slightly below the golden standard of 90%. That might be due to a lot of early questions which have ...
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7 essential meta questions: FAQ
It's well past the time we had an FAQ! What should our site FAQ contain? Propose ideas and wording here.
Note that we can only customize the first section, between the first sentence “Computer ...
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answers
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Our first list question
We got our first list question. We need a policy how to deal with this and similar questions.
Also, how to tag it? Not everybody likes soft-question.
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
5
votes
2
answers
288
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What should the homework tag mean?
The outcome of the homework tag discussion is not clear so far: there is a slight majority in favor of having a homework tag, but no agreement as to what the tag means. The meanings I've seen proposed ...
2
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2
answers
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What constitues an appropriate check-my-proof question?
I've read this, and also run into the unpleasant situation of having my proof that I wanted to get checked closed as "not constructive."
I realize that a lot of people consider P vs. NP a "crank ...
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15
answers
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Community Promotion Ads - 2016
It's 2016 now, and we've made some changes to the sidebar size. And even though I made a sample ad for you guys with the rest of the sample ads, somehow the thread itself didn't get posted. Weird how ...
- 101
14
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2
answers
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Will homework questions be allowed?
Since the current FAQs say this site is for students as well as professionals, what will the policy on homework be?
What are the guidelines that a homework question should follow if it is to be asked?...
- 435
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4
answers
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Renaming tag `graphs` to `graph-theory` [duplicate]
I suggest that we rename the tag graphs to graph-theory for the following reasons:
The word graphs is ambiguous.
graph-theory looks more professional.
The tag ...
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2
answers
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A guide to moderating Computer Science Stack Exchange yourself — close voting
We've had complaints in the past that too many questions were closed by moderators. And as the site grows, we have more questions in need of closing. We have a growing number of users who can cast ...
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3
answers
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Scope limits on proof assistants (e.g. Coq)
To what extent are questions about proof assistants on-topic?
I see four main classes of questions:
Modeling a problem in a formal setting; going from the object of study to the definitions and ...
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3
answers
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Are programming questions in scope on CS.SE?
There has been several discussions in several meta-posts on this. I think we should settle the issue once and for all.
Do you think programming questions should be on-topic or not?
What kind of ...
- 21.8k
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answer
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Are questions about software to solve computer science problems on-topic?
Are questions about software that is specifically designed to solve computer science problems on-topic?
The answer may well be “it depends”, so where do we draw the line?
For example, is a question ...
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4
answers
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Computer Science - Stack Exchange: FAQ
Well, we are almost at the 90 days threshold. Let's have another try to write our FAQ.
To avoid the pitfalls of the previous attempt, please post entries for FAQ as answers. We can later select and ...
- 21.8k
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3
answers
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Close votes that don't apply to the question
This question has, at the time of writing, three close votes. None of them seems appropriate.
Off-topic: does not appear to be about computer science... It's a question about decidability of ...
- 80.8k
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vote
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answer
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Just-a-hint tag
This relates to the following discussion:
Homework tag discussion
After talking to Gilles in chat about possible solutions to the homework tag problem. The tag just-a-hint was suggested. The purpose ...
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Advertising Computer Science Stack Exchange on other SE sites
Graduated Stack Exchange sites display ads chosen by the community in the right-side bar. “Graduated” means sites that have been around for long enough to no longer be in beta, other than the original ...
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Should we do anything about questions that are just a scan of a problem in their textbook?
I have seen an increasing number of questions where the author takes a scan/screenshot of part of their textbook and includes this image in their question. Typically, the image contains some exercise ...
D.W.Mod
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6
answers
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Inspirations towards a logo for cs.SE
As you know, we are graduating. The last missing puzzle piece is our own design which will be create by Stack Exchange employees at some uncertain point in the future.
They are known for listening to ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
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votes
1
answer
265
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What is the history of the Computer Science site?
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
A paraphrase of a quote by "George Santayana"
I am new to the Computer Science site and new to SO and have asked a few questions, ...
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2015 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
In connection with the moderator elections, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic ...
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Self-deleted questions
Once in a while I discover that a question that I had answered got deleted and is nowhere to be found. Presumably the answer wasn't up-voted, so the user could self-delete the question. So far such ...
- 273k
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Let's eliminate [tag:check-my-proof]
The tag check-my-proof has the following description in its tag wiki:
Questions which also contain a proof or a solution that needs to be checked for correctness and completeness.
There are ...
D.W.Mod
- 149k
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answer
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Why are there tags for programming languages?
One of the defining factors about this SE is that it's NOT about programming. I recently edited a question which, I was surprised to see, the user had tagged as "C++", and had asked for an ...
- 29.4k
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Towards a homework policy
The purpose of this thread is to determine what our homework policy should be, if any.
In previous discussions, we saw:
Will homework questions be allowed? → Homework questions are allowed, but we ...
5
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3
answers
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Policy on stocking the beta with "easy" questions
This is my first time to be involved in a site beta, and I would like to gauge the community's opinion on this subject.
Certainly, there are many kinds of questions which we could expect to (...
- 12.7k
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3
answers
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Should "hints" be posted as "answers"? [duplicate]
I'm referring to the answer here: The operator $A(L)={w|ww\in L}$.
In my opinion, it is completely not accetable as an answer, simply because answer should give a solution. The rules for me are ...
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Proposals for tag synonyms [closed]
I can suggest tag synonyms now (and others are soon to follow). Every suggestion will need to be upvoted by at least five users with answer score at least 5 for this tag.
This will (as I understand ...
RaphaelMod
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Should questions about other sciences for computer scientists be on topic?
Consider the question Introductory books on nature sciences behind bioinformatics. Beside the fact that it is a book question and those are arguably always problematic, it seems to be more about ...
RaphaelMod
- 71.5k
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2
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Using ACM or arXiv based tags
Should we use tags based one of these subject classifications? IF yes, which one?
The 1998 ACM Computing Classification System (here)
arXiv (here)
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Congratulations! Computer Science is graduating!
It's a big day. You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Computer Science has already met our threshold for graduation-worthy sites, and today joins in the new design-...
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