The  tool is frequently cluttered with Not an answer or Low quality flags on questions and answers from 2008 and 2009; I've recently counted 17 and 13 such flagged questions or answers out of the 50 randomly shown. Stack Overflow is not the site it used to be; it doesn't seem productive to me to try to hold ancient posts to standards that did not yet exist. Some old answers should have been comments, but -- I think -- were made before comments were implemented. So I propose adding a polite unicorn when a user flags an old post:  Examples: Very Low Quality:  GEOCHET's answer is definitely lacking in description, but a -1 would probably do better than flagging. Not an Answer:   These answers, and two more, (since deleted by Robert) might have been wrong, but they were at least suggesting libraries. 2D-only, rather than the 3D that the questioner requested. That's why they had negative votes. But they weren't comments. They weren't requests for more information. They were just wrong. Incidentally, the question is a poll. Today we'd close and delete the entire question. But in 2009, it got 11 answers -- and remains open today. Duplicate:  was marked as a duplicate of . I don't think I'd ever recommend marking a question as a duplicate of a code-golf question. (Which we mostly throw over the fence these days.) But the code golf question got 8 answers back in 2009, and it remains open today. Summary Those old questions and answers might not be perfection by today's standards. But they've been picked over quite a bit already and I think we've reached the point of diminishing returns. Our flagging and pruning efforts would probably be better spent on the contents generated in the last week.
After reading of:  I wonder if the  also applies to flagging of old questions.  I have the subjective feeling the longer the time between the question and the flagging is, the longer it takes to become reviewed.   Is flagging of old posts a waste of moderator time? Should I avoid that?
Unicode Regex; Invalid XML characters The list of valid XML characters is well known, as defined by the spec it's:  #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]   My question is whether or not it's possible to make a PCRE regular expression for this (or its inverse) without actually hard-coding the codepoints, by using Unicode general categories. An inverse might be something like [\p{Cc}\p{Cs}\p{Cn}], except that improperly covers linefeeds and tabs and misses some other invalid characters. Can I backup my entire Ubuntu installation to ISO DVD? Favourites Page on iOS App I would like to have a page listing all the questions I marked as favourite, same as the .  Also, I think the desktop version, the star, is much more intuitive and easier to find. Thanks! Let $\sim$ denote the equivalence relation on the $n$-sphere $S^n$ defined via   $$ (x_1,\dots,x_n,x_{n+1})\sim(x_1,\dots,x_n,−x_{n+1})\:\text{ for all }\: (x_1,\dots,x_{n+1})\in S^n. $$      Show that the quotient space $S^n/\sim$ is homeomorphic to the $n$-disc $D^n$.   I know that Ii have to show that there exists a bijective function $f: (S^n/\sim) \to D^n$ that is continuous and that the pre-image $f^{-1}$ is continuous as well, but I can't advance from here, any tips? I`m using the Newton-Raphson method for obtaining MLE for parameters for maximizing my objective function. At each iteration, I want to check that is the Hessian matrix negative definite or not and I see the Hessian matrix is not negative definite at some iterations. So, I want to use the Fisher scoring algorithm ( of derivation) In this situation, the Fisher information matrix is indefinite!! Is it possible? What are the reasons for this? Are the second-order derivatives wrong? Or are values of expectations incorrect? How to get my 4yo daughter's fixation on my belly button under control? I don't know where to begin with this question. It's awkward and to be honest, it makes me feel rather uncomfortable. Simply put, I'm led to believe that my four year old daughter is obsessed with my belly button. It all started one day during the summer when she was three. I decided to take my family to the pool, and I guess I didn't see my daughter follow me into the changing room. Mind you, she's still at the age where it's appropriate to see her parents naked, so I wasn't surprised when, after I finished changing into my bikini, I turned around to see her staring at me.  I followed her gaze and saw her looking directly at my belly button. I asked her what she was looking at and she screamed "mommy, I can see your belly button!" which made me giggle. I picked her up and kissed her forehead, telling her that everyone has a belly button.  I think I might have accidentally given her a green light, because over the next year she constantly asks me if she can stick her finger in my belly button, and if I don't let her, she begins to scream.  For her fourth birthday, she requested that I wear nothing but a sports bra and underwear (in toddler speak. It sounded like "mommy, show your belly button for my birthday!" I could have simply worn a crop top but i didn't want to risk her throwing a temper tantrum)  My husband obviously doesn't mind, because he gets to look at my belly button all the time but it really upsets me that my daughter's finger is constantly in my belly button.  Tomorrow is her fifth birthday and I want to discuss with her that it's not appropriate to always be poking my belly button. Any ideas on how i can talk to her without her throwing a screaming fit? Addressing a former office-holder by that office's title When is it appropriate to use an "expired" honorific to address or refer to a person?   In the U.S., former state governors are occasionally referred to as "Governor So-and-so", although they have not held that office for several years. I see this happening most often when the former governor is actively campaigning for a new office (usually U.S. President), and my impression is that it's done only by someone with an interest in the campaign (for or against) rather than a (relatively) neutral party like a newspaper.  Certainly this could be used as a jab: in a political campaign for high office, addressing one's opponent by a former title — lower than one's own — could imply that the opponent is not qualified for the new job. It could also be used the other way around, to remind listeners that a candidate one supports used to hold an important title.  I'm curious whether there are formal rules for this in the U.S., or at least style or journalist guidelines, for various offices. Are ambassadors, for example, entitled to some sort of emeritus honorific? Remove "Category:", "Tag:", "Author:" from the_archive_title I have the following code in my theme's archive.php:  &lt;?php the_archive_title( '&lt;h1 class="page-title"&gt;', '&lt;/h1&gt;' ); ?&gt;   This gives me titles like "Category: Russia", "Tag: America", "Author: John".  I would like to remove the "Category:", "Tag:" and "Author:" part and just display the category, tag and author names.  Does anyone know how to accomplish this?  Thank you. Changing background color to transparent in GeoServer? How to set the background color to transparent. I want use style which describe in *.sld file for all my photo with tif format. How to do that? Continuity $\Rightarrow$ Intermediate Value Property. Why is the opposite not true? Continuity $\Rightarrow$ Intermediate Value Property. Why is the opposite not true?    It seems to me like they are equal definitions in a way.    Can you give me a counter-example?    Thanks If two functionals have the same kernel, then one is a multiple of the other I would like some help with this exercise.  Suppose that $f_1,\ f_2 \in V^*$ and that $\text{Ker} f_1 = \text{Ker} f_2$. Show that $f_1 = k f_2$ for some scalar $k$.  I expect your suggestions.  Thanks! I have a bash script which must call another bash script which varies per-user in order to get some configuration information, like so:  somescript:  #!/bin/bash ${HOME}/.ssconfig echo "Hello, ${VARIABLE}!"   ~/.ssconfig  #!/bin/bash VARIABLE=world   Which, instead of giving me Hello, world! as expected, gives me Hello, ! How can I pass variables up from a script to the one that called it? How do I prompt for Yes/No/Cancel input in a Linux shell script? One of the most common security best practices these days seems to be . I've never really found a good explanation for that, but I'm assuming it's to minimize the risk of a  malicious or infected script within the webroot from reading the database password.  But, you still have to let WordPress access it, so you need to expand open_basedir to include the directory above the document root. Doesn't that just defeat the entire purpose, and also potentially expose server logs, backups, etc to attackers?  Or is the technique only trying to prevent a situation where wp-config.php would be shown as plain-text to anyone requesting http://example.com/wp-config.php, instead of being parsed by the PHP engine? That seems like a very rare occurance, and it wouldn't outweigh the downsides of exposing logs/backups/etc to HTTP requests.  Maybe it's possible to move it outside the document root in some hosting setups without exposing other files, but not in other setups?    Conclusion:  After a lot of back-and-forth on this issue, two answers have emerged that I think should be considered the authoritative ones. Aaron Adams makes a good case in  wp-config, and chrisguitarguymakes a good . Those are the two answers you should read if you're new to the thread and don't want to read the entire thing. The other answers are either redundant or inaccurate. Add a link to the timeline of a post For the past year I have been quite active on SO and a bit on meta, but I had never heard of the timeline of a post until today in a comment on meta.  There was an  two years ago of this feature as "experimental". ( for that question).  This feature was , answer: this exists, but the link has to be built manually.  I think this could be quite interesting sometimes and I would like to use this, but I will not do so if I have to build the link each time by myself.  This feature has existed for two years and is still "experimental"? Who is using it? Who knows about it?  My feature request: Implement a link in the posts to their timeline. I am sure this nice feature will be used. I want to save a backup of my data on a remote server, but never want the backup server to see the data unencrypted. Editing a single file and backing up should not result in everything being encrypted and sent again. The remote server should preferably not even know the directory structure (and especially not the directory names).  Is there such a solution? Which is the correct tense to use with 'by'? I gave him the money by 6 PM.   I had given him the money by 6 PM.   I can't spot the difference between them and both seem right, but I was told the first one is wrong. Can anyone say, why?  Here is a another set of sentences with the same issue:     By 5 PM I gave him the book.   By 5 PM I had given him the book.   In both the sentences the book was given before 5 PM and no later than 5 PM. But I can't understand then what the difference between them is.   Is it right to use simple past with 'by' at all? If yes, then why and if not, then why is it incorrect to use simple past with 'by'? Problem in notation: $(\vec{v}\cdot\vec{\nabla})\vec{v}$ versus $L_v(\vec{v})$ Primitive Pythagorean triple divisible by 3 What is the derivative of this? I have a function of the following form:  $J = \|W^TW-I\|_F^2$   Where, $W$ is a matrix and $F$ is the Frobenius Norm.  How can I find the derivative of $\frac{\partial J}{\partial W}$ ?