Based on the , it was stated that the goal of SE is not to aid the individual, but create a solid knowledge base of useful problems and solutions for posterity.    This is a valid, and worthy goal. And, this is why redundant answers and poorly worded questions are downvoted, and closed, in order to avoid glut in the knowledge base.   However, based on the above as well as and on certain basic economics principles about the eventual pooling of value, it would seem an unintended side-effect of this would be that (considering the site is now ten years old) that it is effectively closed to new and inexperienced users.   Let me explain  Users gain reputation by answering questions, or posting good questions. In the early days of 2008, there were NO questions whatsoever (obviously) so nearly any question - no matter how basic or simplistic - were good, and received both answers and upvotes (SE recommends also upvoting the question, when a useful answer is found).    Here are some examples of very simple questions from the early days ...        These are all extremely simple questions, which have received high points for the participants based on the usefulness and how long they've been out there.   But, in 2018, nearly all of "the easy" questions have been answered. Any questions even remotely similar to the above would be both immediately closed as redundant, and downvoted to very low stats (affecting the reputation of the asker).   On the flip side; "harder" questions are, of course, still valid and gain a lot of reputation for users. But inexperienced users cannot answer these questions. So, again, no possibility of reputation points.  As a user who deeply values SE, and is somewhat concerned for it's continued success...does this mean SE is effectively now a closed community? And how will this affect its future?
I think everybody with a history of participation can't help but notice the explosive growth of repeated duplicate questions. The work of looking for duplicates and then closing questions has overtaken the work of actually answering questions.  It's become virtually impossible to ask something which hasn't been yet asked. Lately I feel boredom each time I see a new question and start answering it only to realize after the first written sentence that I have answered similar questions five times over or seen them answered some ten times or more. I know where it's going to be going and what answers with what votes it is going to receive before any answer is even written.  It's obviously not the administration's fault, it is simply so. The questions is, what to do about it? Engaging more moderators to close and close duplicates won't work because it's already starting to repel users who get mad at their questions closed and become afraid of asking more or perhaps just go away.  The original idea of Jeff stated the the site is for questions that can be answered. Meaning no open-ended discussions. When I first read this I had a casual thought - well, and what's gonna happen when they all are asked and answered? Will it become a museum, a monument of wisdom and knowledge or what?  I'm not sure what to do about it. Perhaps deprecation/versioning of older questions so that their new versions can sparkle the tiresome evening...  POSTSCRIPTUM.  I recall Star Trek Voyager episode  when another Q asked Captain Janeway for asylum. He was tired of immortality and wanted to die. They opened a hearing and went on to visit the continuum to evaluate the living conditions there which caused the suffering and the wish to escape it in death. A lifeless picture presented itself to the visitors... a house lone in an open space, two people going about their business, nobody talking. When asked why they were silent, the following was said. It's been so long, all has already been said, all stories told, all jokes are made... there is nothing left to do...  Are we there as well?  UPDATE: Just saw this answer in another question:       Also, some of the core questions got asked early on in the life of the site. Great questions still come around from time to time, but many have already been asked.   Doesn't that confirm my point?
Apply for Schengen visa in a third country Can a Kenyan citizen studying in Russia and temporarily visiting family in Kenya apply for a Schengen visa in Nairobi and not in Russia, where he has his residence? Does the universe have an edge/boundary/barrier? If yes, what is at the edge? My question related kind of to asking what the shape of the universe is. Say a hypothetical alien civilization built an faster-than-light spaceship. If they keep flying would they end up where they began? ie space itself is curved...or would they hit some invisible barrier? Could Hermione really free the Hogwarts house-elves with her knitted hats? Why do I get compiler errors with this Java code?  1  public List&lt;? extends Foo&gt; getFoos() 2  { 3    List&lt;? extends Foo&gt; foos = new ArrayList&lt;? extends Foo&gt;(); 4    foos.add(new SubFoo()); 5    return foos; 6  }  Where 'SubFoo' is a concrete class that implements Foo, and Foo is an interface.  Errors I get with this code:   On Line 3: "Cannot instantiate ArrayList&lt;? extends Foo&gt;" On Line 4: "The method add(capture#1-of ? extends Foo) in the type List&lt;capture#1-of ? extends Foo&gt; is not applicable for the arguments (SubFoo)"   Update: Thanks to Jeff C, I can change Line 3 to say "new ArrayList&lt;Foo&gt;();".  But I'm still having the issue with Line 4. What terminal command or program can list an SSD's Power On Hours? I'm looking to script using the unix shell the retrieval of SSD (and HDD) data that disk utility shows in the information window.    I'm immediately interested in the Power On Hours and Power Cycle, but if all the data comes from one data structure or tool, so much the better. The usual tools diskutil info disk0 and ioreg -l are not producing the "of interest" values listed in the screen shot above.  Is this information available from any of the built in OS X terminal tools or do I need to locate an open-source package that makes the same API calls to get this level of detail about a Mac drive? Watched screen recording but it's not saved to the desktop I recently recorded a session with my dad. I stopped the recording after the session ended (with the setting set to save to Desktop), clicked the icon that appeared on the lower right corner to open the file, and played back a few minutes to make sure it worked. I then clicked Share to send it via AirDrop to my computer, which did not work; the status remained &quot;cancelled&quot; despite my efforts. I assumed I'd be able to access it through my phone by sending it through a third app, so I pressed cancel on the AirDrop pop-up window. The entire screen recording closed and (apparently) vanished forever after the action. I'm extremely frustrated because I can't seem to locate this video. Create line heatmap with QGIS I have loaded my bike tours as .gpx files into QGIS.    It already looks quite nice but I was wondering if it might be possible to create something similar to the strava heatmap with tools of QGIS.     I have tried to generate points along the lines and use kernel density but it just does not look nice as a raster layer.  Any suggestions? "1 out of 100 chickens is" or "1 out of 100 chickens are"? How to setup two completely separate partitions on one SSD I have a MacBook with 1TB SSD. I want to have two separate partitions with two independent macOS installations. I want to make sure that none of the partitions have any kind of possibility to interact with the other, I want them to be as separated as if they were physically separate. Is this achievable with, for example, FileVault for each of them? Edit: My question is neither &quot;how can I install two different macOS versions on two different partitions on one SDD&quot;, neither &quot;how do I use FileVault&quot;, etc. I know how to do all of that. I want to make sure that there is no interaction between the partitions possible. Can this be made sure with the above approach? Is it sufficient? I'm studying abstract algebra for the first time.  let $F$ be a field. I learned that polynomials over field $F$ means polynomials with coefficients in $F$ (denoted by $F[x]$). But when I keep studying, I get to confused the word, 'polynomial functions from $F$ to $F$'.  Firstly, I consider this as induced functions from $F[x]$, so I guess all coefficients of these functions are in $F$. But let $F_{4}$ be a finite field consisting of four elements $\{0, 1, a, b\}$. and let $f: \{0,1\} \rightarrow \{0,1\}$ be a function defined by $$ f(x)=ax^2-ax$$ Since $\{0,1\}$ is a subfield of $F_{4}$ and $f(0)=0, f(1)=0$, I think $f$ is a example polynomial functions from $F$ to $F$ of which coefficients are not in $F$. Am I wrong? if so, please help me.  I encounter this problem while solving 'the set of all polynomial functions from $\Bbb{Z_{3}}$ to $\Bbb{Z_{3}}$ cannot possibly be isomorphic to $\Bbb{Z_{3}}[x]$'. "1 in 10 are" or "1 in 10 is"? Take the examples:   "One in ten children are dyslexic."  "One in ten children is dyslexic." "One in ten children has dyslexia." "One in ten children have dyslexia."   The "one" is singular so 2 and 3 should be correct. But the "one in ten" is a fraction" so 1 and 4 should be correct. And yet I think I usually say 1 and 3. Which is/are correct?! I am looking for the name of a sci-fi cartoon. Key plot points  There were Space ships flown by some American voiced crew. They were some kind of rescue squad or maybe space police. In one episode they went to an orange tree farm in a canyon which used mirrors on the canyon walls to direct sunlight to the oranges. They had a force field that protected the canyon but some bad guys came and shot the mirrors. The heroes came back and saved the day. Another episode was set in an underground ancient tomb of some kind that was covered by a sandstorm once they escaped.  Chronology and other relevant information It had kind of 80s or 90s animation. I don't think I ever saw it on TV. I only ever watched the same 3 episodes on VHS. Dynamic select list in the form (dependent dropdown) Why singularity in a black hole, and not just "very dense"? Why does there have to be a singularity in a black hole, and not just a very dense lump of matter of finite size? If there's any such thing as granularity of space, couldn't the "singularity" be just the smallest possible size? Method defined as testMethod do not support web service callouts, test skipped I have been struggling with this error for a few days now. I get this error every time I try to run a test for a method that has an httpCallout. I followed the architecture from  , but to no avail. I thought it could be something I was messing up in my code, so I copied all three of the classes from the documentation, and I am still getting the error when I try to run the test. All of the classes are on Salesforce API 29. Has anyone run into this before? Let $x, y$ and $z$ be real numbers such that $x^2+ y^2+ z^2= 1$. Find the   maximum and minimum values of $2x + 3y + z$ .       How can I able to solve the problem? Thanks for your help. I'm trying to make a command block that spawns an item in front of you if you are holding an item with a specific name. I've got these two working scripts;  /testfor @p[r=10] {Inventory:[{tag:{display:{Name:"Item Name"}}}]}  /testfor @p[r=10] {SelectedItemSlot:0,Inventory:[{Slot:0b,­id:"minecraft:diamond_sword"}]­}   but I can't get them together. The block should only look for an item in the active slot. How to add a browser tab icon (favicon) for a website? Is there an optimal loss function for dealing with imbalanced classes? I'm aware that there are many ways of dealing with datasets where there is a strong class imbalance in the target variable: downsampling the more prevalent and less important class, over-weighting the valuable minority class, etc. Are there any loss functions that are ideally suited for these types of problems? I've heard of AUC, but AUC sounds like a means of evaluating a model once its training is complete (correct me if I'm wrong). Log loss and squared loss penalize a model's over confidence, but overconfidence and class imbalance seem unrelated. Is that true? possible to access custom labels dynamically?