Hi,  It is kind of an annoying feature that I have to wait to accept an answer after I upvote it.  Why is it done like that?
I keep on seeing a fair number of questions (such as ) which get marked as answered within 5-10 minutes of being posted. Sometimes the questions like this are insanely popular and actually see some proper discussion, however often I see questions have few views and only 1 answer. The trouble with these questions is that very few people have scrutinised the answer for correctness, or possibly a better solution. I always make a point of not accepting my answers until a day or so has passed — would it not be a good idea to put a short (1 hour or so) time limit on accepting answers on new questions with few views or votes, or perhaps just an additional confirmation dialog, something along the lines of:  Your question is new and not many people have had a chance to look at it yet.  Are you sure you don't want to wait to see if anyone else has a better suggestion?
Is the genderless pronoun "they" appropriate and grammatical for a non-binary gender? I recently had somebody tell me that a mutual friend of ours who is  prefers that people refer to him/her using the gender-indefinite pronoun they.   In some cases, this almost seems okay:   Kris left their umbrella at our house.  On the other hand, if Kris is sitting right next to you, it feels very odd to say       They (meaning just Kris) would like more cake.   Or even odder,      Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they/them?"   Are these usages grammatically correct? Are they in the process of becoming grammatically correct? Are there more correct alternatives? Too much space between links in post menu This week we rolled out a series of changes to  of the question close workflow.  You can read more about the details of these changes .    For context, the overall effort to improve the question close experience will be optimized for Stack Overflow. Given Stack Overflow’s scale, many of the pain points we hear about with question closing and reopening are unique to Stack Overflow and won’t make sense for other network sites. However some  changes are general improvements that should improve usability and guidance overall. Wherever possible, we plan to roll these changes out network wide as well. Any time we roll out a change network wide, we’ll make sure to cross-post here. This first phase is being rolled out to the network and is why I’m posting today.  Let us know if you run into any issues or have questions regarding the network here. Vote to close a deleted question - bug? I just successfully added my Close vote to a question on Stack Overflow that had already been deleted by the author.  The question can be found .        The only purpose I see for such functionality is perhaps to stop someone from escaping the initial surge of wrath from critics, then subsequently undeleting their question.  And that would be a pretty strange thing to guard against.  It seems far more likely that this is an oddity that was overlooked.  So I'm just curious - is voting to close a deleted question a bug, or is it ?  If by design, what is the rationale behind it? Physical meaning of quantum operators Let's say we have a wavefunction $\psi$ and a measurement operator $\hat A$.  I understand how eigenvalues and eigenvectors of $\hat A$ describe the possible outcomes of the measurement.  I also understand that the average measurement can be computed as $\langle \psi|\hat A|\psi\rangle$.  It's still not clear to me what the direct meaning of $\hat A |\psi\rangle$ is. It is a wavefunction; how does its corresponding quantum state relate (in physical terms) to the original state $\psi$ and the measurement $\hat A$? The client can do several actions per frame, for instance, requesting a movement, shooting etc. Should i send a packet to the server for each action the client performed during the frame, or should i stack them in an unique packet and send it at the end of the frame?  EDIT: i'm using Jmonkeyengine and the provided network API SpiderMonkey. Java Equivalent to Python Dictionaries How to add a confirm dialog to a command button? $\mathbb{F}_p[X]/(X^2+X+1)$ is a field iff $p \equiv 2 \bmod 3$ Conjectures that have been disproved with extremely large counterexamples? I just came back from my Number Theory course, and during the lecture there was mention of the Collatz Conjecture.  I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with it; it describes an operation on a natural number – $n/2$ if it is even, $3n+1$ if it is odd.  The conjecture states that if this operation is repeated, all numbers will eventually wind up at $1$ (or rather, in an infinite loop of $1-4-2-1-4-2-1$).  I fired up Python and ran a quick test on this for all numbers up to $5.76 \times 10^{18}$ (using the powers of cloud computing and dynamic programming magic).  Which is millions of millions of millions. And all of them eventually ended up at $1$.  Surely I am close to testing every natural number? How many natural numbers could there be?  Surely not much more than millions of millions of millions. (I kid.)  I explained this to my friend, who told me, "Why would numbers suddenly get different at a certain point?  Wouldn't they all be expected to behave the same?"  To which I said, "No, you are wrong!  In fact, I am sure there are many conjectures which have been disproved by counterexamples that are extremely large!"  And he said, "It is my conjecture that there are none! (and if any, they are rare)".  Please help me, smart math people.  Can you provide a counterexample to his conjecture?  Perhaps, more convincingly, several?  I've only managed to find one! (Polya's conjecture). One, out of the many thousands (I presume) of conjectures. It's also one that is hard to explain the finer points to the layman. Are there any more famous or accessible examples? The company I work for has asked me to attend a training class on the other side of the country.  However my situation is my drivers license expired a few days ago. I do however have a separate printed email stating that the license has been renewed.  This drivers license is my only ID that shows both my name &amp; photo.  Is it possible to be able to board a flight with the expired drivers license and the printed email showing that it was renewed? RAR password cracker Does the  file format use a serious encryption (such as )?  Will it take unfeasibly long to brute force a password?  If not, what tools do you suggest that do so automatically? What are the differences between Linux and Windows .txt files (Unicode encoding) I am only using the 128 character set defined in the original ANSI standard.  But as a whole how are the files implmeneted differently.    I am not concerned with the display, i.e. if a tab is displayed with 6 or 8 characters but the actual internal representation in memory  One difference I've heard is the use of \r\n (Windows) vs. \n for line termination (Linux). Lets say I have something like:   \[ Let x = number of cats \]   (This is a contrived example, but pretend we are actually inside a long align environment block...) "Let" and "number of cats" need to be written like normal text, while x= needs to be math type text.  I've seen this:  \[ \mbox{Let } x = \mbox{ number of cats} \]   and this:  \[ \textrm{Let } x = \textrm{ number of cats} \]   They seem to produce equivalent output, but I'm not sure which is the "correct" one. Also, they are not ideal in that the extra space needs to be placed inside the text mode block, otherwise it is ignored as math mode and butts the text right up against the math.  Ideally there would be some command which allowed embedding text into an equation, which correctly inserted leading and trailing space around the block as required without adding space inside the text block.  How does one do that "correctly"? Why am I getting shopping trolley notifications about local store savings? I am getting "Shopping Trolley" notifications appearing regularly. The notification looks like this:   The notification is about "Store savings" at a local supermarket and that is it!   Is this notification from Google Maps or another application like Google Assistant? I'm struggling to find the specific setting to disable the notification.  I am also interested to know if this notification could in any way be targeted advertising generated by the store. My marketing preferences with the store are opt-out and this strikes me as very dumb advertising. Surely Google isn't doing this? Is there a means that a store can generate notifications like this? Could it be targeted if they have my email address?  These are pain and I want to understand why they are spamming me and disable them without disabling everything else.  I can see various options under Google Maps, settings, notifications. Which setting would apply? Could it be "New on maps, Get occasional updates about new features in your area"? I can't see what setting to suppress!  Thanks for all help. What is the difference between "What are you?" and "Who are you?"? I am often asked "Who are you?" and "What are you?", but I don't know the difference between these two questions.  Please explain it to me. Find the expansion for $\det(I+\epsilon A)$ where $\epsilon$ is small without using eigenvalue. How to use JACK and Pulseaudio/ALSA at the same time on the same audio device? Whenever I launch hydrogen it breaks my audio in all other applications which use Pulse, for example, I can no longer play videos in Chrome after having launched Hydrogen once, until I restart my PC or do sudo alsa force-reload. I have found people with similar issues, but no actual guide to fix this, often there are links to  (which has moved to  ) I am using Ubuntu Studio 14.04 64bit.  ALTERNATIVELY if this is truly impossible to achieve, can someone tell me how to use Jack on one soundcard and Pulse on another? This way I could plug in a USB sound card only when I need JACK.  Please don't make me use windows. I have been stuck in a problem, that has thrown my brain out of the coding. This problem is at very high priority and I need the solution as early as possible. Problem is as :  There are exactly N advertising boards on the highway. Now a company want to advertise on some of these advertising boards(each advertising board costs some money) .  Company strategy is that, they want at least 'K' advertisement should be there among M consecutive advertising boards. But at the same time Company want to pay minimum for its advertisement .  Now, what is the total number of ways, different ways Company can advertise meeting its minimum cost strategy.  As for Example: N= 3, M = 2, K=1 ==> there is only one way for minimum cost, ie. 0C0 , where '0' denotes No company advertisement, and 'C' denotes company advertisement board.  Similarly, for N =4, M =2, K =1 ==> there is 3 possible ways, ie. C0C0, 0C0C, 0CC0.  Hope to get a reply from someone soon. Thanks. Using awk to sum the values of a column, based on the values of another column I am trying to sum certain numbers in a column using awk. I would like to sum just column 3 of the "smiths" to get a total of 212. I can sum the whole column using awk but not just the "smiths". I have:  awk 'BEGIN {FS = "|"} ; {sum+=$3} END {print sum}' filename.txt   Also I am using putty. Thank you for any help.  smiths|Login|2 olivert|Login|10 denniss|Payroll|100 smiths|Time|200 smiths|Logout|10