devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

I really fucking loathe StackExchange. Some poor soul had the nerve (THE NERVE!) to ask a question about something they didn't understand (HOW DARE THEY!):

"What is the difference between a ping and a get request? The goal is to see if the site is up."

And par for the course over at smarmy-fucking-smug-pedant-land, in less than three hours, the question was closed: "[C]losed as not a real question... It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

Allow me to indulge in some pedantic, "well actually" fuckery of my own...

Well actually, that actually is a 'real' question, because it's, you know, a fucking question. There's a question mark in there and everything! The person is asking what the difference is between two different things, and we can tell it's actually two different things because the person uses two different fucking nouns. And not only is this person asking to know what the difference is between these two different things, they even give us a use-case for why they're asking the question: they're pretty sure that they think they might know there's at least two different ways to check that their website is up, they just want to know what the difference is between those two methods -- hence the two different fucking nouns. It's almost like they're trying to give us some contextual information about why they're asking so that even if there is some vagueness to their question -- which is bound to happen IF YOU KNOW YOU DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT THE SUBJECT, WHICH IS PROBABLY WHY YOU'RE FUCKING ASKING -- then a reasonable, decent, helpful person who is making a good-faith effort to be helpful can infer from that context enough information that clarifies the question enough to remove any vagueness or ambiguity and thus provide a helpful answer. AND THAT'S WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED!

And what just fucking galls me to no end... the question was answered (SUCCINTLY, INFORMATIVELY, SIMPLY, AND CORRECTLY!) and even marked as accepted in less than fifteen minutes after being asked.

And that didn't stop some smug fuck from being an asshole and closing the question because "fucking scrub noobfags need to git gud."

https://serverfault.com/questions/...

If MySpace was a place for friends,
then StackExchange is the place for insufferably elitist smug cunts.