The problem with that software title is caused by a hostile licensing system it uses. It relies on an offline form of online activation where the activation key is tied to your installation ID, which in turn depends on OS/hardware identifier of your computer. This is an overkill IMO.
I cannot imagine people working with ceramic tiles cracking a static licensing system. Yes, they can overshare license keys but realistically this does not happen too often, and there are non-invasive ways to circumvent this.
I've worked on parts of a training platform for a specific professional group... There's literally been widespread hacks to bypass the need to watch mandated training material. You'd be surprised the efforts people will go through to get to/through something they need.
I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.
The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be.
They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.
That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:
> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.
> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.
> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)
... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.
Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.
Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you
I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.
> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.
completely agree
> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.
And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)
> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.
Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
> Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...
It’s not asking for documentation, it’s quite literally asking how to do something. There are links to documentation to prove that I read all the documentation I could (to preemptively ward off the question getting closed).
Yes, I deleted it because I solved the question myself, no need for it to exist as a closed question. How can I “Edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations. You can edit the question or post a new one.”? The answer is quite literally facts (the message format) and citations which is what I was hoping to get from someone else answering.
I undeleted it so I could give this example.
> So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.
What would looking at it again do? I had no idea it was being voted to close in the first place; I have no way to request a review; and the instructions for what to do to “fix” the questions make absolutely no sense so there’s nothing to change before it gets “looked at again”.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Signs of over-moderation and increasing toxicity on Stack Overflow became particularly evident around 2016, as reflected by the visible plateau in activity.
Many legitimate questions were closed as duplicates or marked off-topic despite being neither. Numerous high-quality answers were heavily edited to sound more "neutral", often diluting their practical value and original intent.
Some high-profile users (with reputation scores > 10,000) were reportedly incentivized by commercial employers to systematically target and downvote or flag answers that favored competing products. As a result, answers from genuine users that recommended commercial solutions based on personal experience were frequently removed altogether.
Additionally, the platform suffers from a lack of centralized authentication: each Stack Exchange subdomain still operates with its own isolated login system, which creates unnecessary friction and discourages broader user participation.
To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.
Pleasantly surprised? I would think that these feeds would consist of product and company announcements and this would be the expected/appropriate content. Did you find something less sterile?
To convince you I would really need to rebuild this thing and show it side by side with blogs and news outlets.
To give one example, at the time I gathered f500 feeds my other feed sets (tens of thousands) suffered horribly from echo chamber effect. I had endless headlines announcing that David Bowie died. Something like half of it. I don't find that a particularly interesting topic. I have my own memories of his work and have little need for more. Perhaps you would like to read 20 of those? Surely not thousands? It isn't that it isn't a noteworthy event but it drowns out everything else.
Meanwhile Walmart is talking about donating returned Lego to charities.
Exon is talking about a giant ammonia deal to make carbon neutral hydrogen
and GM talks about their next generation software platform to help bring long term continuous innovation to customers through over-the-air updates.
They apparently have tons of diagnostic data and are looking to make it more practical complete with remote tuning for old clunkers.
This to me is quite a lot more interesting than say cbnc talking about war with iran, if bitcoin will survive and that Tesla stock is down???? I really needed more articles about those topics? I thought I already got a million of those. No way in hell I will open those links.
Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.
Fair enough, I've added your site to my reader just in case you change your mind ;). The mechanics of your process actually sound more interesting than the results.
Probably a part of it, but I did not submit my site there directly at least. I think they used different sources to seed the list. There was a very active thread on HN about two or three years ago where very many folks shared their personal websites and from that several OPML lists where compiled. I noticed quite an uptick in feed subscribers around that time.
Also by the way, Henry Desroches, the author of the article we are discussing in this thread, also maintains a web directory personalsit.es, where I had submitted my site as well, so that might have also been a source for the kagi small web index.
This comment is an excellent example of low quality content. It's all wrong and hallucinated to point out a conflict between things that do not exist. An AI can generate this crap, but only if you ask it the wrong way.
Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off.
It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.
If a file system implements lock/unlock functions precisely to the spec, it should be fully consistent for the file/directory that is being locked. Does not matter if the file system is local or remote.
In other words, it's not the author's problem. It's the problem of a particular storage that may decide to throw the spec out of the window. But even in an eventually consistent file system, the manufacturer is better off ensuring that the locking semantics is fully consistent as per the spec.
I cannot imagine people working with ceramic tiles cracking a static licensing system. Yes, they can overshare license keys but realistically this does not happen too often, and there are non-invasive ways to circumvent this.
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