It was made evident on the Stack Overflow question  and many others that people with famous names in their fields answer questions and (granted are usually correct) get an insane number of upvotes for their answer that other people with lower reputation points also post. I can't help that feel that a well known name basically means extra reputation points earned for every answer. Part of me wants to say that there should be some form of bottleneck on reputation: as you gain more you gain less. Then you can have people on 5k answering questions and getting good reputation from it while big names with 50-100k can answer a question, still get reputation point, but the mental number of upvotes for simply being a big name won't tip the scales too much. Edit: So for all the people that decided to downvote my discussion on this point here is  talking about it:  Jakob, I actually do think you have a point. There is a slight bias towards high-reputation users (I wouldn't really call them &quot;famous&quot;). In my experience, however, the most important factors are speed and correctness, sometimes with far too much emphasis on speed. See  for a discussion of this phenomenon, which I consider far more serious than the slight bias towards high-reputation users. – Sven Marnach 2 hours ago
I have noticed a couple of kinds of behavior that seem to crop up in the SO community, and it really seems to artificially boost reputation. There may not be a solution (or it may not be a problem!) but here are some thoughts.  The first is the fact that "celebrity" users, or users with lots of reputation, are treated significantly better than others. Take Joel Spolsky's most recent question:    It was closed, opened, closed, and re-opened. And the question has earned Joel - what - 1030 reputation 103 votes, and lots of reputation! Wow! I'm not saying that Joel's question is a bad one. But lets compare to other questions that one might consider to be in the same equivalence class - easily answerable, specific questions, short questions:   (5 votes)   (5 votes)  If you look at the , I can hardly find any which are specific technical questions. So that Joel's question was so upvoted could only mean that:   It was upvoted based on his celebrity People have been interpreting the questions as a sort of zen-like wakeup call, designed to get people talking and thinking about they way they vote.   I do not mean any disrespect toward Joel, and again, I think his question was a good one. This post isn't about Joel! But the boost in reputation did not (imho) mean "Joel is really good at programming, and he has earned my trust as someone knowledgeable about computers." It may be true that Joel is a proficient computer expert, but not based on the merit of that one question.  Which leads me to an example about myself. I recently gave  (130 reputation) to a question about PHP's image-creating libraries. I am very appreciative of the community's support for my answer - an answer which I believe was well-thought and that I put effort into.  At the same time I can't look someone and tell them, with a straight face, that my reputation is a great reflection of my computer-related knowledge. Billions of people on the net have created tutorials for PHP's GD image library - I just happened to be the person to post a few of them. Heck if I know why it got 13 votes! (oh, but please don't downvote it!!)  SO is built by the community - so the community absolutely gets to decide what questions are important, and how they choose to dispense reputation. But in practice, I feel like peoples' reputation would be much lower if the community were more discriminating about the way they voted.  So: am I totally off base here? Is this even something that can be corrected with a different reputation algorithm? Or am I the only one who sees this as a detriment to the SO community?  (And, to be completely clear, I do not intend for this to be an ad hominem, and I am not jealous about not having a higher reputation. But I do take reputation with a grain of salt, in part for these reasons, and I thought I'd bring it up! It is meta, after all!)
Evaluation of OptionValue[] Overload a C++ function according to the return value What is this story about 20 y.o. inexperienced "kids" fighting against a stronger foe in space? Is “all women who are mothers of daughters” right? Is the expression      All women who are mothers of daughters are here.   correct? I mean every woman who has at least one daughter is here. How can I accept the Microsoft EULA agreement for ttf-mscorefonts-installer? Debugging a custom-bib bst file that crashes on book items I created my own bibliography file with custom-bib (makebst), but when I run it with a reference to a book I get:  $ bibtex PhD [...normal output] Database file #1: PhD.bib You can't pop an empty literal stack for entry oecd2001brc while executing---line 1504 of file wdsphd.bst   The only thing on that line is a high-level ITERATE call.   The style was created with these options:  %% merlin.mbs  (with options: `head,exlang,annote,seq-no,nm-rvvc,dt-beg,yr-par,xmth,tit-qq,qx,bt-qq,vol-bf,volp-sp,num-xser,pub-date,isbn,issn,doi,english,pp,ord,url,url-nl,nfss,,{}') %% english.mbs  (with options: `exlang,annote,seq-no,nm-rvvc,dt-beg,yr-par,xmth,tit-qq,qx,bt-qq,vol-bf,volp-sp,num-xser,pub-date,isbn,issn,doi,english,pp,ord,url,url-nl,nfss,,{}') %% merlin.mbs  (with options: `tail,exlang,annote,seq-no,nm-rvvc,dt-beg,yr-par,xmth,tit-qq,qx,bt-qq,vol-bf,volp-sp,num-xser,pub-date,isbn,issn,doi,english,pp,ord,url,url-nl,nfss,,{}')   The code for book items looks like:  FUNCTION {book} { output.bibitem   author empty$     { format.editors "author and editor" output.check     }     { format.authors output.nonnull       crossref missing$         { "author and editor" editor either.or.check }         'skip$       if$     }   if$   format.btitle "title" output.check   crossref missing$     { format.bvolume output       new.block       format.number.series output       new.sentence       format.publisher.address output     }     {       new.block       format.book.crossref output.nonnull     }   if$   format.edition output   format.isbn output   format.doi output   new.block   format.note output   fin.entry   write.url }   And this is the entry:  @book{oecd2001brc,  author = {OECD},  doi = {10.1787/9789264193550-en},  isbn = {9789264186903},  publisher = {OECD Publishing},  title = {{Biological Resource Centres: Underpinning the future of life sciences and biotechnology}},  url = {http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-technology/biological-resource-centres\_9789264193550-en},  year = {2001} }   Is there a way to get a better stacktrace from bibtex? 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If the captain of the fielding side doesn't ask for a new ball, will he be forced to have it mandatorily after a certain point by the match umpires? Find the sum of two elements in a matrix Given $[a_{ij}]_{10\times10}=\left[ \begin{array}{ccc}   1&amp;2&amp;4&amp;7&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...\\   3&amp;5&amp;8&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...\\   6&amp;9&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...\\   10&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;\\   ...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...\\   ...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;98\\   ...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;...&amp;99&amp;100\\ \end{array} \right]$, what's $a_{7,3}+a_{7,7}$?  Is there a better way than write down all the elements? It's not easy to find the formula of $a_{i,j}$ Let $M$ be an A-module and $f \in \text{End}(M)$ an idempotent endomorphism. Show that $M = \ker(f) \oplus \ker (f-\text{id}_M)$. I don't know how to approach this exercise, using only properties of modules and direct sums, without projections. Can you help me? Thanks in advance. What's the meaning of the transpose? The sequence of triangular numbers is well known. Consider now the triangular numbers modulo some positive natural number $k$. That is, let $T_{n,k}$ be the remainder of dividing $T_n$ by $k$. For the regular sequence of triangular numbers, we can take as convention $T_n = T_{n, \infty}$.  Question: For all values of $k, i &lt; k$, does there exists some $n$ such that $T_{n, k} = i$ Change the Python3 default version in Ubuntu I am using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS . I have python3 installed. There are  two versions installed, python 3.4.3 and python 3.6 . Whenever I use python3 command, it takes python 3.4.3 by default. I want to use python 3.6 with python3. python3 --version shows version 3.4.3 I am installing ansible which supports version &gt; 3.5 . 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Upload them into WordPress, uses native image reducing components and J query go from there. 2. Go through each and every photo, reduce file size, and proportion and bring it to Yahoo's PNG processing script.  However, maybe I'm missing a choice or alternative workflow that would allow for processing all of these photos in a clear manner without losing quality or perspectives. Any workflow suggestions? I'd like to "add to" an existing command by writing something like  \renewcommand{\somecommand}{\begin{something}\somecommand\end{something}}   but (not surprisingly) I get errors about being "too deeply nested".  Is there a way to take an existing command, add to it (by appending or prepending additional commands or text), and then have that "augmented" command replace the existing command?