64 questions linked to/from List of Generalizations of Common Questions
848 views

### Was I right to answer this question this thoroughly?

I'm looking at this question. I gave the answer that was accepted. Please bear in mind that, when I answered this question, it was a different edit. In particular, there were more parts to the ...
361 views

### Handling users asking lots of similar questions with little work

I realize that one of the major goals of this site is to help others learn and understand mathematics, and in fact it is one of my favorite parts of math.SE. As such, I don't mind a bit when I see a ...
717 views

### What to do about “What is 48/2(9+3)?”-type questions?

Recently there have been a rash of questions of the form "What is 48/2(9+3)?", the most recent of which being here (and other examples are linked to in mixedmath's answer). I think most of us can ...
489 views

### Should community growth be encouraged?

I'm having a doubt about how should we users encourage the participation of new members. So far I have only presented MSE to three of my fellow colleagues in grad school. In an overall way I feel like ...
778 views

### Can we make IEEE 754 off topic?

For those who may be unfamiliar with IEEE 754, it is the standard that the vast majority of computers use to store floating-point numbers. There are about 100 questions on this site about converting ...
1k views

### Why do high rep, long time users answer duplicate or too similar questions on book recommendations?

Way too many duplicates to Selecting the Real Analysis Textbooks, Recommend a statistics fundamentals book, What is the best book to learn probability?! I feel that too many book recommendations ...
2k views

### There are only 40 calculus problems

There is a saying in mathematics that there are really only 40 calculus problems, and all the other problems are just permutations of these using different numbers or stories attached to them. This is ...
719 views

### How do you search for duplicates?

Sometimes I am really surprised how fast are the duplicates of new question found, given that we have vast amount of questions here. I hope posting this question here can be useful and can lead to ...
615 views

### Closure of extremely basic questions

I'm somewhat disturbed by the closure of this question: What is $9-5+2$? It appears to be a mathematical question that is specific, answerable, and genuine - a "real" question. I can recall wondering ...
482 views

### What do we do with so many similar combinatorics questions?

I don't know if this is a problem, I just wanted to listen to more points of view, we seem to get a lot of combinatorics problems that are really similar, problems like this one Seat 5 men and 4 women ...
2k views

### How do you search for specific questions?

I have noticed that a lot of times people ask a question and a duplicate is instantly found. It's not necessarily true that the person hasn't tried to look up the question, but it is just hard to ...
1k views

### Do we need a FAQ question for “Guess what I am thinking” type of questions?

This question here: Interview riddle seems to have gotten a lot of views (perhaps by someone posting to reddit or something), with a lot of me too answers, leading to a protection. Such questions have ...
815 views

### The birthday tag

Recently the birthday tag has emerged and it quickly has around 100 questions tagged (mainly by one user I suppose). This is indeed not the first time we have this tag. The last time it was deleted ...