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Apologies for the slight hijacking of the thread.
I endorse your decision to resign. I am no longer going to contribute to any Stack Exchange site. Moderators and major contributors (of which I do not include myself) have been underappreciated by Stack Exchange for a long time, but in the past couple of years it has transitioned to outright mistreatment. I ...
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Thank you for all of your enormous contributions to the site over the years, Gilles! I admire your acts of service and your spirit of giving to the world anonymously, and I will miss having you on the moderation team.
Best wishes in all your future endeavours.
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Gilles was specifically involved in creating Computer Science and shaping its community and policies from the early days on. His prior experience as SE moderator was unique among the pro-tem mods and very helpful.
Thank you, always.
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I agree with David Richerby. Math.se is the anomalous site. It is inundated with boring homework questions that keep repeating in an annual cycle. I personally ran away from the site with disgust, and I wouldn't want the same thing to happen here.
I don't mind giving help, or sometimes complete solutions, for interesting and non-routine exercises. For me ...
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Thank you for the kind words, Yuval! You are an inspiration -- and it's a pleasure to be a part of this community.
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I think the site might need you exactly because of your attitude and your views. But still, I respect your decision and, moreover, share your views. I find the actions of SE against Monica intentional, perhaps personal, and highly inappropriate. If there is any alternative, non-StackExchange computer science forum you participate in, please feel free to tell ...
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Rooted trees are pretty ubiquitous in all kinds of computer science, both theoretical and applied.
You can find plenty of applications of rooted trees e.g. in the context of algorithms and data structures, automata theory, computational complexity theory, computational geometry, programming language theory, formal methods, artificial intelligence, computer ...
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But CS seems completely different to me
It isn't. Our policy on homework questions is broadly the same as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics and Stack Overflow. Rather, it's Mathematics that's unusual in accepting homework questions with essentially no restriction.
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Left-aligned, breaking before the sidebar
Even with left-alignment, we may not want titled to flow over the sidebar:
Reproduce by combinging text-align : left; with padding : 8px 320px 11px 20px; on div#question-header.
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The only technical limit is that you must wait 20 minutes between questions (this only applies to low-reputation users). A few of the biggest site in the Stack Exchange network have additional limits: a maximum of 6 questions per day and 50 per rolling month, but these limits do not apply here. (Source: The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide)
There isn't a number ...
answered Mar 23 '14 at 17:25
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Generally speaking, personal style should be left alone as long as it doesn't hurt the legibility of posts. If you prefer to use British spelling, we won't edit your post to remove the “u” from your posts on the four-colour problem. On the other hand, if your religion forbids the use of the Shift key, we will edit your posts to capitalize the first letter of ...
answered Apr 9 '15 at 23:05
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Here is my proposal:
We do not want hint-only answers.
If a question does not deserve a full answer (now), don't answer (now). Use the comment feature for providing hints. Down- and/or close-vote the question if and as appropriate, i.e. in accordance with current policy.
If you happen upon a hint-only answer, kindly refer the author to this ...
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D.W. explains what to ask. Here are some pointer towards how.
Wait, first the when:
First, talk to people, namely fellow students, TAs and teachers (in that order). Many problems go away after you talk to somebody who is thinking about the same problem, or has done so before.
If that is no option (really?) or does not work out: Google your problem. ...
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TL,DR: me too.
Posting a scan of the text in a textbook or worksheet is a low in laziness. (I'd say a new low but I've seen that before on SE.) That right there can justify a downvote.
A scan of a figure can be ok, as long as it has accompanying text that explains the problem. For example, this is an appropriate question:
the text in book reference says ...
answered Nov 9 '13 at 8:02
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Yes, please change the threshold on close/reopen votes.
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Sure, programming language design is one of the things computer scientists do. You'll find programming language design questions under tags such as programming-languages, typing, type-checking, type-inference, compilers, interpreters, etc. as well as under tags for specific programming paradigms such as constraint-programming, functional-programming, meta-...
answered Jul 4 '15 at 8:58
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Analysis of the questions on the proposal
I went and analyzed the 40 questions with score 10 and above that define the proposal, checking their suitability for Computer Science.
When creating a programming language, should I choose an LL or LR grammar?
Too broad as is. Squarely on-topic once edited to add information about the language.
What are the ...
answered Sep 30 '14 at 0:50
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Some thoughts.
Forms
I like the background. It's abstract yet aesthetic (I guess 70's wallpapers are back?). I for one can believe to see remnants of a (very complicated) Venn diagram, which I appreciate.
The logo I like for all the reasons stated over at Jukka's proposal. It's clean, it's iconic, it's CS, and it symbolizes many qualities of CS. The gaps ...
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Left-aligned
The network standard (the distance from the left border may have to be tweaked):
Reproduce with changing div#question-header to text-align : left;.
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I suggest to disregard the fact that they are interview questions, and evaluate them on their other merits.
Some interview questions are open-ended, and meant to trigger discussion.
The interviewer asks such questions to see how the candidate tackles the problem. Often, there is no clearly defined or even intended answer. As such, they fall into the "too ...
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Titles
Titles are important: they represent the question on the main site, in search results and in RSS feeds. We want users to visit questions (and to answer them) and a good title may make just the difference.
Also, titles fuel the search for related questions in the "Ask Question" form. A question titled "How to analyse this piece of code?" will never ...
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Many, even most, of the questions on this site are homework questions. Despite the homework policy, in practice the site is used mainly to help students with their homework, and indeed traffic varies predictably with the academic year. If you discourage such questions, traffic would decrease dramatically.
While the homework policy suggests that we do ...
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The tooltip on a downvote button reads
This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful
If your opinion of a question is “this guy should do his own homework instead of dumping it on us”, that's a prime case of “does not show any research effort”, and a downvote is perfectly consistent with the guidelines.
As per our homework ...
answered Oct 19 '13 at 23:20
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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When it's ready.
To be clear: this site is doing very well so far. Not just by the numbers, but in how the folks here conduct themselves and handle increasing amounts of traffic (as we've seen over the past couple of months with the start of the school year). I've written a bit more about this here.
So what are we waiting for?
So from this point forward, ...
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The proposed standard requires five people to verify that the standard techniques all fail or, at least, are difficult to apply. That's a fairly large fraction of the amount of work needed for those five people to answer the question itself.
The burden is on the asker to demonstrate that the question is suitable and, really, it doesn't matter if they do ...
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Stack Overflow
Pro
Programming questions are the largest group of offtopic questions.
Most of us can tell what a programming question is.
Con
We'd probably migrate bad questions as well (which we should not do).
To note
Most such questions need heavy retagging on SO, which ideally one of us would do.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible