Downvotes are useful for quality control, but there is no real difference between -3 and -4.
This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything.
“How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of stuff.
You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you must have an Internet connection to program.
I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing.
The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a Thank You. out of it.
The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever since.
That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of Oh, you're not violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided you're banned just because.; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous messages by any other means.
So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to avoid the garbage standard to start with.
I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks similarly.
> Re: Stack Overflow, while I agree with you, most of my experience with SO downvoting has purely to do with other members thinking "I feel this is a stupid question so I will downvote you".
This has been my experience too. For someone like me who's a non-professional programming hobbyist, SO has been one of the most toxic and unhelpful communities. My only helpful experiences there are with the people who also happen to have their real names for their user ids.
I've had questions downvoted because I omitted something that "should have been there", downvoted because I included some things that "should not have been there", downvoted because I "asked for a suggestion" (eg: which type of DB is better for this kind of data?), or because I asked for something "that has been asked elsewhere", even though the two questions might have different tech stacks and use cases altogether.
I recommend most beginner programmers to go to reddit instead, where there's a less barrier to entry and visibility for questions. People are happy to answer you in Reddit for some karma, while on SO, the people who answer correctly have to subtly beg the questioner to mark the answer as correct.
You end by saying that downvoting !== hating him or disagreeing with everything he thinks, yet I can't find a worse reason to downvote than the explanation you gave right before: you literally downvoted him because of a personal decision he makes in his life that affects no one else regarding the learning of a programming language, and not at all for any factual inaccuracy in his comment.
He never said anyone else should not learn CoffeeScript nor that CoffeeScript was bad, but that for whatever reason in his own personal life it hasn't become valuable enough to do so. And yet still, the point of his comment had nothing to do with that, and instead simply requests that stories be labeled accurately. Seems completely uncontroversial to me.
It’s all good. You’re welcome. I can see it both ways: its sucks to get downvoted and not know why. But also, here we are talking about something that’s not C++ modules in a thread about C++ modules.
The surest way to get massively downvoted here is to complain about downvoted, though. People seem to relish in it.
I don't really understand these complaints about being downvoted on Stack Overflow. The vast majority of downvoted questions are either off-topic or too vague. SO has clear guidelines on the questions' topics https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic
Even its name implies what types of questions you may ask there, yet apparently some (highly respected - like Rob) people still want it to be a general programming forum.
Personally, I think the most of downvotes on stackoverflow are quite objective and therefore better justified than here where they are generally used to express a personal judgement about a comment.
I didn't downvote the parent, but I think that doing so is justified because the comment doesn't add much to the conversation, whether you agree with it or not. To be a substantive comment, it should explain _why_ typed languages would be a better choice for these particular use cases.
I believe after several decades of observation of communities like this one, that it is a character flaw of some programmers that because they are good at talking to computers—which are in fact totally objective interpreters of code—that the same attribute applies to their person. However at some point we are all emotional and biased creatures, and the distinction between disagreement and illogical argument or even outright factual innacuracy can at times blur significantly.
What I'm saying is that before you form a knee-jerk rationalization about the reason a downvote happened (because of course I do the same thing), stop and consider that there's at least a 50% chance that your argument is not in fact as airtight as your brain's emotional connection to it, and perhaps you are being downvoted for reasons totally unrelated to what you so hastily ascribe to the anonymous voters.
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect the reason you were downvoted was because it was off topic - we are talking about a new dialect of Lisp here, not github and bitbucket.
I'm regularly downvoted and I know exactly why: because I'm mocking Rust's curl | sh or Python's appalling packaging or whatever, no-one is going to "correct" that behaviour and it doesn't matter anyway; it's just HN karma.
I can't speak for everyone, but I downvoted you primarily because of your arrogant and generally uncivil tone and your predictions and assumptions as why people (would) downvote you.
Judging from your other comments, you can be fascinating and insightful, and I have much to learn from you especially in the field of programming. And yet your comment history is peppered with comments in a similar tone and attitude.
I can't tell if you're just tone-deaf or doing this on purpose, but I find it highly unpleasant. Plus, you're not following the guidelines:
> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.
I didn't downvote, but your comment seems a bit off-topic (presenting a random js feature in a thread that is not really about this, and there is nothing really extraordinary in the fact that the OP learned NodeJS last year - good for her!). See also steerpike's comment with which I agree. Your intent may have been sharing this feature that makes you enthousiastic so I can understand that you may find the downvotes frustrating. Don't lose your enthousiasm though, it's a great thing.
You may want to review the HN guidelines, they discourage discussing downvotes.
Interesting, I did not know that one had to be a 'developed' user to be able to down vote. I may have to look more into the history of this and see some examples of implementations. Thanks for the info!
If you or someone can't come and point out that 'obviously wrong something' then don't say that just because a comment got downvoted for some bizarre reason. That same comment now has 11 points. I hope it didn't now become 'obviously right' to you just because of the point count. The fact this (going into 'grey' or 'black' with 0 retort or correction given by anyone) even happened is just stupid to me.
I believe nothing I said is wrong and anyone is welcome to prove me wrong. I also answered the original questions/doubts clearly (Is LuaJIT stuck on 5.1 and no longer in development - no and no and there is nothing wrong with 5.1 itself). The only downside could be how brief I was but I gave plenty of keywords ('ints', 'bit ops', 'function environments') for an astute reader to google or look up in the documentation of Lua (which is a Ctrl + F friendly one pager plain HTML with minimal styling and no JS, I have it as a single .html file with inline PNG and css on my desktop to use offline).
This stealthy downvote drama is why I use HN passively, logging in only to do a fire and forget comment. I've just avoided seeing this entire downvote debacle unfold in real time during my normal browsing (and thus avoided wondering what's going on or if I were providing people wrong information or something else wrong on my part, since it's not like any downvoter told us why they did it) because of that habit.
I didn't downvote him because of his civil comment about misleading comment, but because of his un-hackerish tone about him not planning to learn something that is completely relevant to his career (his description in his page is: I'm a JavaScript and Node nerd). Maybe I shouldn't have done it, but I really have nothing against him. I truly wanted him the best and downvoting his (IMO) wrong comment was an effort to make him understand that what he is doing is wrong.
We are all online friends and friends ought to warn each other when they see their friend is doing something stupid (I really think writing any script longer than 20 lines in JavaScript instead of CoffeeScript is stupid).
This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything.
“How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of stuff.
You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you must have an Internet connection to program.
I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing.
The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a Thank You. out of it.
The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever since.
That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of Oh, you're not violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided you're banned just because.; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous messages by any other means.
So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to avoid the garbage standard to start with.
I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks similarly.
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