19
There is no clear-cut "do this or that" anwer to your question. It depends on the specific question, your idea to answer it, your degree of uncertainty about the idea, if the idea can be scetched in two sentences in a comment (or not), and how much you care for your score.
Some general recommendations:
if you are unsure about the correctness of something ...
11
While I understand that in the post Wikipedia era it's generally more difficult for professors to come up with homework questions whose answers don't exist on the web, that's a problem for the professors, not us. Adapt or die applies.
My teaching experience is extremely limited, and at a level a tad lower than University, however from that limited experience ...
10
Ultimately, the goal is to get off-topic questions off the front page as quickly as possible, so that they don't provide encouragement for other people to ask their off-topic questions. Migration is not the best mechanism to do this; most off-topic questions asked here will not qualify for migration, and it's not uncommon for it to take hours for a question ...
9
This may or may not have been asked on our meta site before but it was certainly a well discussed issue at Meta StackOverflow.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10811/how-to-ask-and-answer-homework-questions
As far as I know, this discussion here applies equally as well to homework questions about design, algorithms, and software development in ...
6
Before editing the question, I would probably edit the answer, and explain why it answers a slightly different question than the one which was asked (refering to the deleted comment and the edit). It is not unlikely that others, when trying to find information about related topics, find your answer still useful, even if it does not fit to the last version of ...
6
If you read the answers they are not identical:
I find the first method more readable, especially if you have nested blocks.
The second method reminds me of basic, it's like you're trying to not forget that the braces are there.
and:
I find the second method more readable, especially if you have nested blocks.
The first method reminds me of basic, it's ...
5
Yes, you should refrain from providing opinions on any question, not just questions that touch on legal matters.
Programmers is a Q&A site, we expect answers to fully and directly answer the question, not just provide general opinions. Furthermore, preferably answers should be backed up by solid references, especially when they touch on topics that are ...
4
The questions can be merged which will transfer all the answers from the duplicate to the the original.
4
This is a tough one.
One option would be to edit the question after getting the clarification in a comment. You can even use the edit description to note that the clarification edits were derived from a comment. If there's any dispute, mods can see deleted comments on a question and untangle the mess. If the comment/edit were wrong and there are good answers,...
4
The question that you are asking about is this one, which is visible to users with enough reputation. You need 10k reputation (or be the asker) to see deleted questions.
First off, questions that require the expertise of a lawyer are off-topic here and will be closed and/or deleted. As a community of experts in software development, we can't answer most ...
4
There is no ethical question to discuss, we aren't responsible for keeping students honest or ensuring coursework isn't solved in full detail in a readily available web site. We are here to ask and answer questions that fit the FAQ, if acceptable questions are asked that happen to be homework or real work or a hobby it doesn't matter they are all treated ...
3
If you can post the same answer to several questions then those questions are likely to be duplicates.
If you've not already marked the question as a duplicate then do so (either by voting, flagging or commenting).
If this has already been done and the question is closed then the next step is to consider merging the questions. The barrier for this is ...
3
I will try to answer your questions to the best of my ability.
and the moderator was clearly being rude to me.
I don't see where any of the moderators responded to you in anyway. The community users appeared to have downvoted your answer and commented on this, but they are not the moderators in that sense of the word.
We take rudeness very seriously ...
3
You should look better, they are not the same and they are an attempt at humor.
Clearly pointless here because we hate fun.
3
I don't think that pure citational answers are a good idea, because of legal reasons (but IANAL):
All user contributions on Stack Exchange sites are licensed under CC-BY-SA (see the footer of this page). An user can only grant a license to content he created himself. I don't think that simply copying and pasting a few paragraphs of text and applying some ...
2
Stack Exchange is not a traditional forum. We expect that questions contain a question and answers contain answers to that question. If you need to add more information to a question, the post should be edited. If you have a different question, then it shouldn't be asked as an answer, but a new question.
2
It's not incomplete. How does it answer the question?
The question is: "How does one keep argument counts low and still keep third party dependencies separate?" The bulk of your answer is talking about your codebase and how you allow for large numbers of arguments to constructors. An answer of "you don't need to" with sufficient explanation for why it's not ...
2
What happened is that two of the people answering got fairly quick upvotes on their answers. Enough to go over the 10 rep requirements.
At that point, when a new answer comes in, those are excluded.
This is working as designed - may need tweaking though.
1
I think it may have to do with the protection/unprotection by a diamond the first day; see the revision history. This may have blocked the auto protection from kicking in.
1
If the citation provides an actual answer to the question, then why not.
Whenever you use a citation, you should use the normal rules for them:
Make it clear to the reader that you are citing some other source
Provide a reference (or link in case of a resource on the web) where you got the citation from, so the readers can look at the quote in context.
And ...
1
If I'm sure the questions are not duplicates then I have no problem with copy/paste answers, however I try to always link to the source answer at the top of the question so the user can read it and possibly other answers there that might relate to them too.
Usually what ends up happening is I prefix my answer with a summary of the solution, add a link to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
