Re: Search StackOverflow and paste code snippets without leaving the edited file

[Marcin Borkowski]

And two more afterthoughts (SCNR).

Dnia 2014-01-06, o godz. 03:06:47
Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> napisał(a):

> Second, that those sites are "mutually exclusive". This
> is delirious. There is "ask Ubuntu" - but what is
> Ubuntu? Ubuntu is Debian, and Debian is Linux, and
> Linux is Unix, and Unix is software, and software is
> achieved by programming... it is all interconnected,
> and at several levels at that.

Disagreed.  Then, why do we teach algebra, combinatorics, analysis and
set theory as different subjects at the university?  Answer: this is
technically easier, and some people just like algebra/analysis/whatnot
more.

And, there are i.e. some Ubuntu-specific questions, completely
unrelated to, say, Gentoo or programming in general.

> And this "artificial perfection" makes for frustration
> because reality is never perfect, and when this
> happens, which is all the time, if you can't decode it
> for what it is (reality), you'll just be
> frustrated. And this is why (you might have noticed)
> that people are very fast at upvoting when some guy is
> mastering some other guy, telling him his question
> doesn't make sense, he posted in the "incorrect" site,
> and so on.
> 
> That's why I like Usenet much more because here, when
> you act like a moron, you are simply a moron, because
> you are human, and you don't need to "recode" it in any
> other way, claiming some other guy didn't stick to the
> rules, bubbling about the nature of the site, etc.

None of these ("artificial perfection", "one and only one correct
answer" etc.) are commonly observed on TeX.SE.  Maybe it's just a
smaller community, and the site is not very formal.  For instance, some
time ago there was a discussion on TeX.SE about a particular style by
one particular person.  A newcomer (from SO) started to correct her
posts (which are typed exclusively in lowercase).  His corrections were
promptly reverted, since it is a well-known person, and her usage of
lower- and uppercase is a well-known habit, conveying concrete
information (she uses uppercase iff she writes on behalf of the
institution she works for).  Yes, there is a rule that posts should be
correct from grammatical point of view, but here the community decided
to screw that rule for some clear reason, and everybody is fine.
(Well, everybody was fine, apart from one guy from SO, who claimed that
this particular rule was more important than what the community did.
He found no supporters.)

Another example: on the TeX.SE blog there are (from time to time)
interviews with the most famous users.  The interviews are conducted on
the chat, and *every* user may ask a question.  There's nothing like
that at SO, AFAIK (podcasts are, I guess, a bit different thing - I've
never listened to them, so this is a guess only).

Why am I writing all this OT stuff here?  One of the reasons is that I
have to write that the Emacs community seems to me one of rather few
internet communities with similar features as the TeX community: small,
maybe even niche, but very friendly.

Thank you all!

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University