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Comment by Supermighty | Hacker News Reader

I can't count the number of times I've found the perfect StackEschange answer to my question and it was marked as "closed as not constructive" or closed for off topic.

The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they should change over time based on the changing environment.

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Then answer the old question. Or suggest an edit to one of the old answers if it's out of date. Anyone can do those things, even with only 1 reputation point. The system was designed specifically so answers can change over time.

This has happened to me, I was looking for an answer, and found a blatantly wrong old answer (as some breaking changes in the toolkit had been made).

What I didn't have was an answer to provide, and so I moved on.

I'm not sure the tools given are effective enough for this problem.

Could you give examples of some of these questions that are marked "closed as not constructive"? Otherwise, we have no idea what questions in particular you are talking about. I've had completely positive experiences with StackOverflow, so I can't personally imagine questions that might be useful to someone and not worthwhile to keep open. Except duplicate questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397229/reaching-up-to-hit...

That's not a programming question, it's a question about using vim. It's nice to know the answer, but really not the kind of question we want more of. Closing is a compromise between leaving it open (and inviting more questions like it) and deleting it.

I can't recall ever seeing something like this. Can you link an example?

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