What are the actual effects of voting on questions? All the documentation I could find just says that voting "moves things up" and "gives people reputation". I get the second part, and I get how voting "moves things up" for answers, but how exactly does voting move things up for questions? Does it make them appear higher on the main page? On in-site search results? On Google search results?
Possible Duplicates:             Voting on questions played a big role in the site when we didn't have the option to comment on, close, migrate, flag, or edit questions which did not fit the site or required modification to be useful and usable.  As it is, question votes are not much more than a popularity contest, and a lot of bandwidth is taken up on Meta regarding question votes.  Notably:        In most cases a downvote is being given where a good edit should be used instead, or a comment indicating that the question user needs to provide more information.  People are also downvoting in the case of duplicates (or suspected duplicates) when they don't want to do the work of finding the duplicate.  There is no need to downvote to 'alert' other users that a question isn't worth spending time on - if it's bad enough that it can't be fixed, and so bad that you want to be sure others avoid it then it's not worth keeping open.  These are all situations where the person downvoting should be taking a different action.  , and several questions have thrown ideas at how to increase question upvoting artificially, and a  was even implemented to encourage this behavior.  Given all this, I am now convinced that voting on questions is an unnecessary distraction.  Voting no longer provides any useful information about a question, and there are more than adequate means of fixing or removing questions that need work.  Voting makes more sense for sites like Meta where questions aren't really questions, but suggestions and discussions.  For purely Q/A sites such as SO, SF, SU, the voting is superfluous.  The only two possible positive things voting now provides are:   A way for users at lower rep levels to have a voice when they are unable to perform many of the other functions that are needed to fix a question (I contend this is useless, but perhaps they need some sort of outlet) A 'hook' to get new users into the reputation game (which fails frequently because questions aren't getting upvotes, especially questions from new users)   If that is truly the case, then we should consider removing question voting altogether, or removing the effect of question votes on reputation.   Am I wrong? What obvious and explicitly important role does question voting play in our community?
Database design help. many-to-many relationship While writing a proposal at work today I needed to mention a list of things and within that list were multi-part items. It seems like replacing the comma with a semi-colon in this situation would make the sentence easier to understand, but is it correct usage?  With standard punctuation this could get confusing:       Some of my favorite things to do are   camping, playing football and   baseball, watching Laurel and Hardy   Movies, and traveling.   Proposed alternative. Is this acceptable usage?       Some of my favorite things to do are   camping; playing football and   baseball; watching Laurel and Hardy   Movies; and traveling. Here I offer a "proof" of why the power set of the natural numbers is countable by creating a supposed bijection. I know that my proof is wrong, but where? If anyone could point it out, that'd be awesome.  Consider the power set of the natural numbers. We can form a bijection $f:\mathbb{N}\to\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N})$ as follows.  For any $f(x)$ convert $x$ to its binary representation, which is a string of $0$s and $1$s. If the $i$-th digit is $1$, then include $i$ in the output set $S=f(x)$. Otherwise do not include $i$. Note that $i$ is $0$-indexed and starts from the right-most digit.  So in this case $f(5)=\{1,3\}$. Supposedly we can construct any set in $\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N})$ with an appropriate choice of $x$.  Where does this proof blow up? Exit strategies for "chameleon questions" I'm not sure if there's already an existing term for this, so I'm inventing my own. (tl;dr: I call them &quot;chameleon questions&quot; because they change every time you submit or edit an answer.  If you're already intimately familiar with the phenomenon, please skip past the first set of bullet points to where I ask for recommendations.)  I think many of us have experienced this on occasion:  You open up a narrow-looking question, usually dealing with some specific error message.  The question probably contains a snippet of sloppy but not quite awful code; code indicating that the author, typically a new/low-rep user, possibly a , doesn't really know what they're doing.  I'm not trying to be condescending here, they're probably very intelligent and hardworking, but in this specific case, they're clearly in way over their head.  However, as a question, it's not really too bad.  The goal and problem are both clearly stated.  The code is formatted (sort of).  Mort was polite and checked their spelling.  The question looks answerable, although from a rep perspective* it's an obvious dead-end, it's had maybe 3 views in the past 30 minutes.  So you decide, you know what, this person took the time to write up the question properly, they deserve an answer, put on your good citizen hat and throw them a bone.  You slog through the ugly code, find the offending line, direct their attention to it and explain why it's wrong and how it needs to be fixed.  Later, they leave a comment saying that yes, that was indeed the problem and your answer helped them fix it (great!).  Oh, but, now there's another problem (uh-oh...). Something else is broken.  After letting out a long sigh, you read the comment and/or edited question, roll up your sleeves, and write up Take 2, hoping that's the end of it.  And of course it's not the end.  Now maybe the error is gone, but it's not doing what it's supposed to.  If you're anything like me, your patience is now starting to wear thin. It's lousy code and you didn't volunteer to help them rewrite their whole app.  And of course, the question still only has 12 views, and nobody has upvoted either the question or your answer, including the person you're helping, so this is turning out to be a genuinely thankless task in all respects.  Welcome to &quot;Family Tech Support&quot;, Web 2.0 Edition.   * Which is of course just an arbitrary number that none of us care about. Not really, anyway. Not very much, at least.  So, here's where I get to my question.  At this point, do you:  Leave a comment, stating as politely as possible that you've done your best to help them answer the original question they asked, and if they have a new problem then they should start a new question?  (I did this once, and actually ended up with an accept, but I felt kind of guilty afterwards, I don't think anybody answered their 2nd question).  Bite the bullet and edit your answer a 3rd, 4th, 5th time, however many times it takes to resolve their issue, knowing full well that they may not even remember to accept the answer once you're done? (I may work for free on SO, but that doesn't mean my time is worthless.)  Just abandon the question, hoping that it will force Mort to start thinking for himself?  Something else?   I've tried all three of the above and none of them ever quite feel right. I do want to help, but at the same time there are a lot more &quot;lucrative&quot; questions I could be answering. And I don't mind spending a lot of time on an answer either, if the question is interesting or important to me, but debugging is dull work. I'd prefer not to reference specific questions here; I'm pretty sure that this is a shared experience, and my objective isn't to point fingers at &quot;misbehaving&quot; members.  I'm more looking for some practical advice on how to dig myself out of these pits of despair. Anybody have any other ideas? Headless linux install How do you do a headless install of linux? No monitor, no keyboard. Machine has floopy and cd drive. Can I configure a live cd to run sshd with a preconfigured pass or something similar and manage it via that?  Instructions for fedora 8+ would be ace but anything else also welcomed.  Cheers. If A is invertible, prove that $\lambda \neq 0$, and $\vec{v}$ is also an eigenvector for $A^{-1}$, what is the corresponding eigenvalue? If A is invertible, prove that $\lambda \neq 0$, and $\vec{v}$ is also an eigenvector for $A^{-1}$, what is the corresponding eigenvalue?  I don't really know where to start with this one. I know that $p(0)=det(0*I_{n}-A)=det(-A)=(-1)^{n}*det(A)$, thus if both $p(0)$ and $det(0) = 0$ then $0$ is an eigenvalue of A and A is not invertible. If neither are $0$, then $0$ is not an eigenvalue of A and thus A is invertible. I'm unsure of how to use this information to prove $\vec{v}$ is also an eigenvector for $A^{-1}$ and how to find a corresponding eigenvalue. Invariance of a maximally entangled state under unitary operation $U \otimes U^\dagger$ What's the difference between &lt;b&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;, &lt;i&gt; and &lt;em&gt; in HTML/XHTML? When should you use each? Does an electrolytic capacitor degrade each time it receives reverse voltage? Quote from :     The only portable way of using templates at the moment is to implement them in header files by using inline functions.   Why is this?  (Clarification: header files are not the only portable solution. But they are the most convenient portable solution.) How to install latest Code::Blocks from tar.xz? How do I "decompile" Java class files? What program can I use to decompile a class file? Will I actually get Java code, or is it just JVM assembly code?  On Java performance questions on this site I often see responses from people who have "decompiled" the Java class file to see how the compiler optimizes certain things. How to update kernel to the latest mainline version without any Distro-upgrade? Using a question mark mid-sentence Questions like:   ♦ ♦-should-discriminate-more-when-bumping-unanswered-questions ≠-users-who-want-to-write-good-posts   well, you can see there.  The diamond (and other problematic Unicode characters) in the title breaks the automatic prettification of internal question links.  This becomes a bit more of an issue when one wants to link to an answer.  For example ♦-break-the-automatic-hyperlink-parser/242572#242572 should link to Martijn's answer, but, it doesn't (tangent, but a different issue is that  which is the share link doesn't auto-prettify unless the userid part is removed - one keeps having to manually remove things to get the auto prettify to engage).  If one looks at the html generated for  for the title and the url linked in the &lt;h1&gt; of the page, we get:  &lt;title&gt;Users who can&amp;#39;t write good posts ≠ users who want to write good posts - Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/title&gt;     &lt;h1 itemprop="name"&gt; &lt;a href="/questions/238644/users-who-cant-write-good-posts-%e2%89%a0-users-who-want-to-write-good-posts" class="question-hyperlink"&gt;Users who can&amp;#39;t write good posts ≠ users who want to write good posts&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/h1&gt;   And while that's a long link title, I will point out that the quote as part of the word "can't" was removed from the slug.  The bug is that this should be done for other characters too. How to sort this JSON The movie "Die Hard" or The "Die Hard" Movie? Sometime like this case I don't know if I can put the name before or after the label (movie in this sentence)...  The movie &quot;Die Hard&quot; or The &quot;Die Hard&quot; Movie? The variable &quot;X&quot; or The &quot;X&quot; variable?  Are they both correct? What is their difference? What is the application of each? My question is not about &quot;the&quot; (), but the order of the &quot;movie&quot; and &quot;Die Hard&quot; Is an Unarmed Strike considered a Weapon attack? For the purposes of the fighter Battle Master archetype, whenever a maneuver calls for a "weapon attack" does that include an unarmed strike? How does the Ranger's Extra Attack feature work with Two-Weapon Fighting? I think I know the answer to this one but I'm double checking.  At the 5th level the Ranger gets Extra Attack, which lets them attack a second time during the Attack action. If they are fighting with 2 weapons, the second weapon normally uses their bonus action.  Does this mean when using the Extra Attack and using two weapons, a ranger can attack twice during the Attack action, and still make 1 extra attack as a bonus action, for a total of 3 attacks? I recently moved into an in-law unit of a large old house.  In the kitchen, there are two pipes coming out of the wall (one protruding out a little more than the other).  I had assumed they were gas lines to connect my stove.  But since the stove only connects to one pipe, I'm now wondering if they're actually water lines. Can anyone explain how I can tell the difference? On the other side of the wall is a large closet with the air conditioning system, water heater, and what I think is the gas shutoff valve.