For those don't know, Khanacademy is an education site that also has lessons on simple computer programming and allows you to publish your own games that are made on the website.
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Most games build on other games' successes and many are downright clones. Where is the limit of imitation before legal issues come into play? Is it down to literary or graphic work like characters and storyline that cause legal problems, or can someone actually claim to own gameplay mechanics?  There are so many similar clone games out there that the rules are probably very slack or nonexistent, but I'd like to hear the views of more experienced developers / designers.
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Why is insulting other users and giving sarcastic comments such a huge part of the culture on SO? It's the complete opposite of projects like Wikipedia where everybody is exceedingly friendly and helpful.  For example: This response comes from a user with 13k reputation to a question about an interview problem:     There are a fair number of undergraduate CS students who can see this solution       immediately, and it seems they were looking for those students.      If you have any ambition as a C++ programmer, and aren't already intimately       familiar with the data structures and algorithms provided by the STL, you       should learn them now. It seems your competition already has.   This was in response to a genuinely extremely difficult interview problem that did not even ask for a solution using the STL. This seems to me like an unnecessarily unfriendly thing to say. This is just one example of what I think is a major trend.
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I'm teaching web development to beginners, and it would be useful to show them the basics in design, meaning using a graphic design package to come up with a layout, before turning it into code.   To be clear, I want something for creating the "look and feel" of a page, not the layout. I don't mean prototyping tools. There was some confusion about this, and the meaning of my original question was changed, I just changed it back, half a day later.  The html and css itself will be hand-written.  I need something which is freely available, or really cheap. It can be a program designed for beginners, or a broader program with a "beginners mode", or a less intimidating interface for new users.  Is there software which fits this description?
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The purpose of my question is to strengthen my knowledge base with Python and get a better picture of it, which includes knowing its faults and surprises.  To keep things specific, I'm only interested in the CPython interpreter.  I'm looking for something similar to what learned from my  question where some of the answers were well known to me but a couple were borderline horrifying.  Update:    Apparently one maybe two people are upset that I asked a question that's already partially answered outside of Stack Overflow.  As some sort of compromise here's the URL   Note that one or two answers here already are original from what was written on the site referenced above.
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There are too many options for "Solution/Answer" environments which we can use and I am adopting  for my "big" project that I am doing.  At the moment, it looks like the easiest one for me to implement, but there is just one function to be explored. How can I show/hide the solution environment, so that I can have a teachers' version and a students' version?  When the solutions are hidden, preferably that the space I used for these content are "reserved."  Thanks.
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Stack Overflow is great resource to learn. For both someone asking a question and answering a question. Posing a question let you reflect on your problem. A lot of the questions started are never submitted because the act of posing a question helps solving it. Answering a question helps to stretch your knowledge bit by bit. You may answer questions directly but sometimes you know only 75% of the answer. Now you have to stretch your knowledge a bit to be able to answer it and you'll learn something on the way.  This is the positive side of Stack Overflow; on the other hand Stack Overflow is not good enough for systematic learning: I want to learn more about X!. You'll find something about everything, but it's not efficient. The knowledge that is in Stack Overflow is not refined in a way to allow this.  This is unavoidable for a site that wants to help users with immediate answers to their problems. The knowledge amassed is only a by-product of this process. Nonetheless it can be put to another use with some extra effort.  This is the basic idea:  Select and revise Stack Overflow questions and answers to allow efficient learning.  Stack Overflow question and answers cannot replace text books, articles or blogs, but can provide exercises for a given topic. We learn by application of the ideas presented in these other formats. If you dust off your  there are always exercises after all the theory. The exercise part is where the learning starts by reflections. Before that it's just following a beaten path: "Oh yes it's this and that and O(n)".  Given some effort it is possible extract high quality exercises from Stack Overflow:   Select good questions (probably &lt; 20% for this purpose) Select the best answers  Assign some grade of difficulty (to create some order) Add additional tags (when the tags are missing or to not fit into the structure of the anthology) Optional - Revise the question and answer Optional - Add missing questions and answers   The biggest advantage is that the posed questions are real world problems. This is a big factor to motivate learning.  There could be some feedback into Stack Overflow in later steps. Stack Overflow is really complicated enough but some form of quality improvements may be desirable. Wikipedia added some quality improvement measures later in the project after it gained a critical mass. It may be nice to see high quality content highlighted in Stack Overflow, but it is not essential to the anthology idea.  The best way to start and see if this idea works is to take a tag with few questions (less than 1000) and categorise all of these questions. The target would be to extract ~100 questions. Some software is needed to support this. Development could start with a limited set of edit tools to select questions, answers and add tags. For learners a page to browse the anthology with direct links to Stack Overflow is enough to get started.  Is this a bad idea or would you like to work on this project?
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Role playing is an excellent hobby to train your problem solving skills. You learn to look at situations from different view points (i.e. the characters) and you have various skills and resources at your hands (from dangerous to trivial, from magical to mundane...) which you will often sort through, combine and apply to solve the problem at hand. In our group of RPG veterans this fact leads to a strong prevalence of what I will call MacGyver-ism. Let me explain using an example:  One of the recurring items is the molotov cocktail, or some genre-specific variant. It is highly efficient, trivial to create (pour liquid into bottle) and the ingredients are wide spread and cheap (gazoline/lamp oil, a bottle, some cloth). The process seems to be so simple that even untrained characters of low intelligence should easily be able to do it.  Just as MacGyver will do in his shows, the players will often combine mundane items and/or trivial skills in unforseeable ways to get an advantage, be it combat or plot wise. This can lead to solutions which are:  very unrealistic given the setting (i.e. some medieval character would probably not know how to manufacture a molotov cocktail) overpowered (tips balance of certain encounters/problems, especially low-tech close-combat settings) are hard to forsee/prevent, as the needed ingredients are wide-spred and freely available (I can hardly keep my players from buying lamp oil or bottles)  So far I have not yet found a very compelling reason why my players should not be creating molotov cocktails (or similar improvised devices) all the time, and in settings where such solutions seems to be very unfitting (say, high fantasy). How can I limit or control the prevalence of over-improvisation or MacGyver-ism in players actions? As the first answers and comments heavily focused on the molotov: I am just as well concerned about players being true to their characters knowledge and possibilites as I am about the problem of power balance.  A medievalish soldier just should not possess the knowledge to build improvised firearms, bombs or complicated mechanical contraptions.  I have absolutely no problems with PCs being smart, creative and inventive while solving problems. I have a problem though, when the players are smart/inventive in ways which don't fit the setting or their supposed PC knowledge. As it was suggested that his question is not entirely system agnostic (I somewhat agree), here some systems where I have struggled with this issue: MERP (low magic high fantasy), Call of Cthulhu (Investigative/Horror), DSA (high magic high fantasay)
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If a user asks a question that is rudimentary and shows that perhaps they are new to programming, is it better to give a complete, working solution or point them in the right direction so they can teach themselves?  More specifically, I mean in a situation where the user seems to want 'codehereplz' instead of at least giving something a try after being given 'hints' or a partial non-code solution.  I know that I learn best by doing something myself after being pointed in the right direction, but is that the best thing to do?
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Consider the question   Asymptotic notation questions have been pretty standard for Stack Overflow.  This fairly interesting beginner question is up, but has already accumulated a couple of 'close' votes.  One of them is for 'off topic' but, possibly because I'm a theory guy, it seems very much on topic for programming and related topics.  You could argue for "computer science" potentially, but it would seem this, like questions on, oh, NP-complete problems and such, are things serious professional programmers should know and are interested in.  You could also make a case for mathematics and event the theory stack, although it's probably a little light for theory.  But with all of these separate categories, there seems to me to be a real risk that interesting questions will be modded/closed/moved until the OP loses interest.  Perhaps we've gotten a little too compartmentalized?
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Here is an idea: As human kind we discovered many laws, formulas, events, etc. in our surrounding environment.here is a way to discover the unknowns :   Now if we simulate a virtual world with our knowledge in computers we expect it to work, because we guess that we know all of it. If a bug occurs in the simulation or something acts differently from the expected in the real world, that may tell us that there is something new; a thing (law, formula, ...) that we didn't know, which causes that bug or that anomaly.  For examples imagine that we created a virtual simulation for motion dynamics and we didn't add the friction to our simulation. Everything in the simulation will work fine but in a different manner. So if we hadn't discovered friction yet, would it help us to think about if there is something we didn't add? Or if there is something we don't know?       But can we simulate the whole universe, everything we know, in one simulation? I know it will require a deadly high computational power. Something like what they did for DNA; two years of computation to analyse their pattern. can we simulate everything we know to create a virtual universe to compare it to our real universe?
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I am looking for a paper detailing the very basics of deep learning. Ideally like the Andrew Ng course for deep learning. Do you know where I can find this ?
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A user walks into Stack&nbsp;Overflow and . The answer for his question is in the first result of a Google search. Well, it is the fourth result, to be precise, but the first link in the discussion under the first link leads there anyway.  Long story short: the question is very simple and the answer is two clicks away in Google. What should I do? Should I give user the link to answer or should I point him to the Google Search results? What is Stack&nbsp;Overflow, a place to learn something (even if it is googling) or a black box "insert question, receive answer" machine?  (Meta&nbsp;Stack&nbsp;Overflow's policies prevent me from posting a link to Google? WTF.)
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I have a little game written in C#. It uses a database as back-end. It's  a , and I wanted to implement the function of the cards as a script.  What I mean is that I essentially have an interface, ICard, which a card class implements (public class Card056: ICard) and which contains a function that is called by the game.  Now, to make the thing maintainable/moddable, I would like to have the class for each card as source code in the database and essentially compile it on first use. So when I have to add/change a card, I'll just add it to the database and tell my application to refresh, without needing any assembly deployment (especially since we would be talking about 1 assembly per card which means hundreds of assemblies).  Is that possible? Register a class from a source file and then instantiate it, etc.  ICard Cards[current] = new MyGame.CardLibrary.Card056(); Cards[current].OnEnterPlay(ref currentGameState);   The language is C# but extra bonus if it's possible to write the script in any .NET language.
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I am giving a LaTeX course and have the idea to let the students find and solve problems within a few documents. Basically they shall learn how to create minimal examples and read error messages.  However, currently I have no document with 'typical' errors around.  If someone has such examples from him- or herself or within this forum I would like to have the code or link. It does not matter if its short or long. It should just be enough to let the students play with it for some minutes.
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There really does need to be some descriptions here. The two sites seem so similar that I'm unsure which is the proper one to use for certain math issues. In what situations would you use  over ?
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I think it would be a very useful and quality-improving feature.  As for me, when I speak on something, I often have a visual representation of how it works, or something. It's obvious there are many things (in algorithms, or, say, UI) which are much easier understood with pictures and diagrams, than from scarce text.  So I'd really like here to be a special answer form, where you can attach some visual things to better explain your ideas.  I imagine this form as just a canvas with few painting tools and some basic blocks and patterns.
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I know someone who is thinking about getting into game design, and I wondered, what does the job game designer entail? what tools do you have to learn how to use? what unique skills do you need? what exactly is it you'd do from day to day. I may be wording this a bit wrong because I'm not sure if the college program is become a game designer or learn game design. but I think the same questions apply either way.