llm/7c7e49f1-870c-4915-9398-3b2e1f116c0c/batch-12-eedf6757-5ba9-4d07-99f6-7a5b8200fd1f-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. Toxic moderation culture
2. LLMs replacing Stack Overflow
3. Duplicate question closures
4. Knowledge repository vs help desk debate
5. Community decline timeline
6. Discord as alternative platform
7. Future of LLM training data
8. Gamification and reputation systems
9. Expert knowledge preservation
10. Reddit as alternative
11. Question quality standards
12. Moderator power dynamics
13. Google search integration decline
14. Stack Exchange expansion problems
15. Human interaction loss
16. Documentation vs community answers
17. Site mission misalignment
18. New user experience
19. GitHub Discussions alternative
20. Corporate ownership changes
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46483644",
"text": "Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.)\n\nEven if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?\n\nIf you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places"
}
,
{
"id": "46484114",
"text": "> Please, start a blog!\n\nThe second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served."
}
,
{
"id": "46483778",
"text": "It's been a long time, but here is the writeup https://blog.chatfield.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-elli..."
}
,
{
"id": "46484381",
"text": "Looks like solid code. My only gripe is the shadowing of x. I would prefer to see `for _ in range`. You do redefine it immediately so it's not the most confusing, but it could trip people up especially as it's x and not i or something."
}
,
{
"id": "46484453",
"text": "Hahaha thanks, I never noticed that. If I ever print it out and frame it I'll be sure to fix it"
}
,
{
"id": "46486927",
"text": "That's pretty nice ;)\n\nI once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;)\n\nThe question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to generate a unique key from any set of positive integers which is valid no matter the order, but which doesn't key to any other set.\n\nMy idea was to take the radius of a circle that intersected the integer pair in cartesian space. That alone doesn't guarantee the circle won't intersect any other integer pairs... so I had to add to it the phase multiple of sine and cosine which is the same at those two points on the arc. That works out to:\n\n(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))\n\nAnd means that it doesn't matter which order you feed x and y in, it will generate a unique float for the pair. It reduces to:\n\nx^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )\n\nTo add another dimension, just add it to the process and key it to one of the first...\n\nx^2+y^2+z^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )+( (x/z) / (x^2+z^2) )"
}
,
{
"id": "46487466",
"text": "It looks like you have typos?\n(x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y)))\nreduces to\nx^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2/y^2 + 1) ) - not the equation given? Tho it's easier to see that this would be symmetrical if you rearrange it to:\nx^2+y^2+( (xy) / (x^2+y^2) )\n\nAlso, if f(x,y) = x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) )\nthen f(2,1) is 5.2 and f(1,2) is 5.1? - this is how I noticed the mistake. (the other reduction gives the same answer, 5.4, for both, by symmetry, as you suggest)\n\nThere's a simpler solution which produces integer ids (though they are large): 2^x & 2^y. Another solution is to multiply the xth and yth primes.\n\nI only looked because I was curious how you proved it unique!"
}
,
{
"id": "46487726",
"text": "Hhhhmm. Ok. So I invented this solution in 2009 at what you might call a \"peak mental moment\", by a pool in Palm Springs, CA, after about 6 hours of writing on napkins. I'm not a mathematician. I don't think I'm even a great programmer, since there are probably much better ways of solving the thing I was trying to solve. And also, I'm not sure how I even came up with the reduction; I probably was wrong or made a typo (missing the +1?), and I'm not even certain how I could come up with it again.\n\n2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?\n\nPrimes take too much time.\n\nThe thing I was trying to solve was: I had written a bitcoin poker site from scratch, and I wanted to determine whether any players were colluding with each other. There were too many combinations of players on tables to analyze all their hands versus each other rapidly, so I needed to write a nightly cron job that collated their betting patterns 1 vs 1, 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3... any time 2 or 3 or 4 players were at the same table, I wanted to have a unique signature for that combination of players, regardless of which order they sat in at the table or which order they played their hands in. All the data for each player's action was in a SQL table of hand histories, indexed by playerID and tableID, with all the other playerIDs in the hand in a separate table. At the time, at least, I needed a faster way to query that data so that I could get a unique id from a set of playerIDs that would pull just the data from this massive table where all the same players were in a hand, without having to check the primary playerID column for each one. That was the motivation behind it.\n\nIt did work. I'm glad you were curious. I think I kept it as the original algorithm, not the reduced version. But I was much smarter 15 years ago... I haven't had an epiphany like that in awhile (mostly have not needed to, unfortunately)."
}
,
{
"id": "46488266",
"text": "The typo is most likely the extra /, in (x/y)/(x^2+y^2) instead of (xy)/(x^2+y^2).\n\n`2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?`\n\nYes, & is bitwise and. It's just treating your players as a bit vector. It's not so much provable as a tautology, it is exactly the property that players x and y are present. It's not _useful_ tho because the field size you'd need to hold the bit vector is enormous.\n\nAs for the problem...it sounds bloom-filter adjacent (a bloom filter of players in a hand would give a single id with a low probability of collision for a set of players; you'd use this to accelerate exact checks), but also like an indexed many-to-many table might have done the job, but all depends on what the actual queries you needed to run were, I'm just idly speculating."
}
,
{
"id": "46488611",
"text": "At the time, at least, there was no way to index it for all 8 players involved in a hand. Each action taken would be indexed to the player that took it, and I'd need to sweep up adjacent actions for other players in each hand, but only the players who were consistently in lots of hands with that player . I've heard of bloom filters (now, not in 2012)... makes some sense. But the idea was to find some vector that made any set of players unique when running through a linear table, regardless of the order they presented in.\n\nTo that extent, I submit my solution as possibly being the best one.\n\nI'm still a bit perplexed by why you say 2^x & 2^y is tautologically sound as a unique way to map f(x,y)==f(y,x), where x and y are nonequal integers. Throwing in the bitwise & makes it seem less safe to me. Why is that provably never replicable between any two pairs of integers?"
}
,
{
"id": "46489911",
"text": "I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary representation of the set.\nSuppose we have 8 players, with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010.\n\nBut to lay it out: every positive integer is a sum of powers of 2. (this is obvious, since every number is a sum of 1s, ie 2^0). But also every number is a sum of _distinct_ powers of 2: if there are 2 identical powers 2^a+2^a in the sum, then they are replaced by 2^(a+1), this happens recursively until there are no more duplicated powers of 2.\n\nIt remains to show that each number has a unique binary representation, ie that there are no two numbers x=2^x1+2^x2+... and y=2^y1+2^y2+... that have the same sum, x=y, but from different powers. Suppose we have a smallest such number, and x1 y1 are the largest powers in each set. Then x1 != y1 because then we can subtract it from both numbers and get an _even smaller_ number that has distinct representations, a contradiction. Then either x1 < y1 or y1 < x1. Suppose without loss of generality that it's the first (we can just swap labels). then x<=2^(x1+1)-1 (just summing all powers of 2 from 1..x1) but y>=2^y1>=2^(x1+1)>x, a contradiction.\n\nor, tl;dr just dealing with the case of 2 powers:\nwe want to disprove that there exists a,b,c,d such that\n\n2^a + 2^b = 2^c + 2^d, a>b, c>d, and (a,b) != (c,d).\n\nSuppose a = c, then subtract 2^a from both sides and we have 2^b = 2^d, so b=d, a contradiction.\n\nSuppose a>c; then a >= c+1.\n\n2^c + 2^d < 2^c + 2^c = 2^(c+1).\n\nso\n\n2^c + 2^d <= 2^(c+1) - 1 < 2^(c+1) + 2^b <= 2^a + 2^b\n\na contradiction."
}
,
{
"id": "46498159",
"text": "Thanks for the great response. Honestly, TIL that 2^0 = 1. That was a new one for me and I'm not sure I understand it. I failed pre-Calculus, twice.\n\nVisually I think I can understand the bitwise version now, from reading this. But it wouldn't work for 3 integers, would it?"
}
,
{
"id": "46498526",
"text": "it works for any number of integers. The first proof above (before tl;dr) is showing that every positive integer has a unique representation as a sum of distinct powers of 2, ie binary, and that no two integers have the same representation. You can watch a lecture about the representation of sets in binary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw21xgyN9To (google representing sets with bits for way more like this)\n\nBut again it's not useful in practice for very sparse sets: if you have say a million players, with at most 10 at the same poker table, setting 10 bits of a million-bit binary number is super wasteful. Even representing the players as fixed size 20-bit numbers (1 million in binary is 20 bits long), and appending the 10 sorted numbers, means you don't need more than 200 bits to represent this set.\n\nAnd you can go much smaller if all you want is to label a _bucket_ that includes this particular set; just hash the 10 numbers to get a short id. Then to query faster for a specific combination of players you construct the hash of that group, query to get everything in that bucket (which may include false positives), then filter this much smaller set of answers."
}
,
{
"id": "46488482",
"text": "BTW, yet another way to do it (more compact than the bitwise and prime options) is the Cantor pairing function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function\n\n... z = (x+y+1)(x+y)/2 + y - but you have to sort x,y first to get the order independence you wanted. This function is famously used in the argument that the set of integers and the set of rationals have the same cardinality."
}
,
{
"id": "46488631",
"text": "mm. I did see this when I was figuring it out. The sorting first was the specific thing I wanted to avoid, because it would've been by far the most expensive part of the operation when looking at a million poker hands and trying to target several players for potential collusion."
}
,
{
"id": "46489643",
"text": "you're only sorting players within a single hand. so a list of under 10 items? thats trivial"
}
,
{
"id": "46498101",
"text": "So the goal was to generate signatures for 2, 3 or more players and then be able to reference anything in the history table that had that combination of players without doing a full scan and cross-joining the same table multiple times. Specifically to avoid having ten index columns in the history table for each seat's player. This was also prior to JSON querying in mysql. I needed a way to either bake in the combinations at write time, or to generate a unique id at read time in a way that wouldn't require me to query whether playerIDs were [1201,1803,2903] or [1803,1201,2903] etc. Just a one-shot unique signature for that combination of players that could always evaluate the same regardless of the order. If that makes sense. There were other considerations and this was not exactly how it worked, since only certain players were flagged and I was looking for patterns when those particular players were on the same table. It wasn't like every combination of players had a unique id, just a few combinations where I needed to be able to search over a large space to find when they were in the same room together, but disregarding the order they were listed in."
}
,
{
"id": "46483603",
"text": "You should write it up and submit it to some journal officially. Doesn't matter if it mostly duplicates your own (technically unpublished) work."
}
,
{
"id": "46486322",
"text": "SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed."
}
,
{
"id": "46486670",
"text": "My experience as well:\n\nStack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others.\n\nAt some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46486300",
"text": "I have a similar story about an interesting little advance in computing that I haven't formally published anywhere, but it's at https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292\n\nThe question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary. Surprisingly, linear time is possible."
}
,
{
"id": "46486139",
"text": "On the other hand, I once implemented something to be told later it was novel and probably the optimal solution in the space.\n\nAn AI might be more likely to find it..."
}
,
{
"id": "46487250",
"text": "Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three times in different projects during my academic \"career\" :-)"
}
,
{
"id": "46485153",
"text": "> Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem.\n\nIn the same blog you published it originally, then mentioning it on whatever social media site you use? So same?"
}
,
{
"id": "46485887",
"text": "Reddit is my current go-to for human-sourced info. Search for \"reddit your question here\". Where on reddit? Not sure. I don't post, tbh, but I do search.\n\nHas the added benefit of NOT returning stackoverflow answers, since StackOverflow seems to have rotted out these days, and been taken over by the \"rejection police\"."
}
,
{
"id": "46486480",
"text": "Naive question maybe but how haven’t the models been trained on your answer if it’s on SO?"
}
,
{
"id": "46486598",
"text": "Models are NOT search engines.\n\nEven if LLMs were trained on the answer, that doesn't mean they'll ever recommend it. Regardless of how accurate it may be. LLMs are black box next token predictors and that's part of the issue."
}
,
{
"id": "46485388",
"text": "Sounds like this should live in Wikipedia somewhere on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse...or maybe a related but more CS focused related page."
}
,
{
"id": "46483739",
"text": "I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too."
}
,
{
"id": "46483888",
"text": "I have had this experience -- twice with the same answer. There is nothing so amusing in quite this way."
}
,
{
"id": "46492998",
"text": "I often forget just how much smaller and less siloed the internet was just ~13 years ago."
}
,
{
"id": "46483999",
"text": "This is a really method for solving that problem! I wouldn’t have thought to use the tangents but that makes perfect sense"
}
,
{
"id": "46486652",
"text": "If you ask me your blog post is basically a paper, I’d publish to arxiv."
}
,
{
"id": "46484670",
"text": "That algorithm reminds me of raymarching signed distance functions."
}
,
{
"id": "46485225",
"text": "Amazing work!"
}
,
{
"id": "46485923",
"text": "Really great write-up, thanks for sharing it again!"
}
,
{
"id": "46484751",
"text": "Very cool!"
}
,
{
"id": "46484280",
"text": "Why did SO decide to do that to us? to not invest in ai and then, iirc, claim our contributions their ownership. i sometimes go back to answers i gave, even when answered my own questions."
}
,
{
"id": "46484866",
"text": "Decide to do what?\n\nSO didn't claim contributions. They're still CC-BY-SA\n\nhttps://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing\n\nAFAICT all they did is stop providing dumps. That doesn't change the license.\n\nI was very active, In fact I'm actually upset at myself for spending so much time there. That said, I always thought I was getting fair value. They provided free hosting, I got answers and got to contribute answers for others."
}
,
{
"id": "46482678",
"text": "Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.\n\nSo \"I'm not happy he's dead, but I'm happy he's gone\" [x]"
}
,
{
"id": "46483160",
"text": "I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks.\n\nBut it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.\n\nI said to myself, let it die."
}
,
{
"id": "46483978",
"text": "I was an early adopter. Have over 30k reputation because stack overflow and my internship started at the same time. I left because of the toxic culture, and that it's less useful the more advanced you get"
}
,
{
"id": "46485984",
"text": "> many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.\n\nPlease feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate).\n\nBut more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason."
}
,
{
"id": "46488830",
"text": "If I had kept a list of such questions I would have posted it (which would be a very long one). But no, I don't have that list.\n\n> use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly.\n\nRespectfully, no. It is meaningless. If you just look at comments in this thread (and 20 other previous HN posts on this topic) you should know how dysfunctional stackoverflow management and moderation is. This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time. Nobody should waste their time and expect anything to be different."
}
,
{
"id": "46489826",
"text": "> This (question being incorrectly closed) is a common complaint, and the situation has not changed for a very long time.\n\nThe problem is that people come and say \"this question is incorrectly closed\", but the question is correctly closed.\n\nYes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, \"why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?\" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or \"how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?\" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)"
}
,
{
"id": "46482856",
"text": "It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as \"answerer\" wasn't fun for me."
}
,
{
"id": "46483477",
"text": "Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers.\n\nI remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.”\n\nTo their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community."
}
,
{
"id": "46488306",
"text": "> I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script.\n\nYou can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits.\n\nAfter you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't \"suggested\" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them."
}
,
{
"id": "46483407",
"text": "I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it."
}
,
{
"id": "46485982",
"text": "> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.\n\nI think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50