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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

Although SO does give one the option to answer an own question it is clear here that this guy posted his question in order to answer it, perhaps to farm points, perhaps because he thought his answer is genuinely useful. The answer is time stamped the same as the question.

Not sure why we should care one way or the other but to me it does seem a bit against the spirit of how SO should be used.

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"If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site."

http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/its-ok-to-ask-and-answ...

> To be crystal clear, it is not merely OK to ask and answer your own question, it is explicitly encouraged.

In this case, however, it's not so much an answer, as an opinion that he vents dressed up as an answer. The real answer is that there's nothing wrong with `git pull`, but for some unusual ways of working with git, it may not be the tool you need. And that's no problem; git has other tools.

On the contrary, the stated purpose of SO is to be the repository of programming related questions and answers - to the point that moderators routinely go in and edit questions so that they are more clear. So, the goal isn't so much to help the one person who has the question at that moment in time, but the masses of people who will have that question in the future.

With that goal in mind, then answering your own question is clearly in the spirit of the site.

Posting good answers to get rep is not exploitation of the reputation system; it is the reputation system "exploiting" users

My issue isn't that he answered his own question. My issue is that this question might have been closed if he hadn't, since it's likely to solicit opinion.

Apparently we're supposed to care because there are still some sour-grapes, git-hating Mercurial users who can't understand why anyone would use git. They keep pointing and going "see? this is why git sucks!", but most everyone else has learned how their VCS of choice works and moved on.

Meanwhile, Mercurial has picked up history rewriting, which reminds me in so many ways of Apple fanboys who loudly decry Android, then blithely ignore when features from Android get cherry picked for iOS.

Use what you like; if you don't have a choice, either change projects (quit) or learn how the tool works. Nobody cares that you think the git UI is "godawful". Nobody cares that you think history should be inviolate. If you want that, enforce it on your project. These "complaints" have been answered multiple times, and if you can't be bothered to look into the reasons behind git does what it does, then don't be surprised when people ignore your self-serving rants.

It is only point farming if it turns out to be useful, which is the whole point of SO.

AFAIK you don't get reputation for answers to your own questions.

You do get rep. I occasionally get reputation for my own answer to my own question ( http://stackoverflow.com/q/12077126/923847 ).

If you got some nice info, why should one not be able to share it? If you get rep, it means that it was useful for someone.

I think you only don't get the 15 rep for selecting your own answer as the correct one. Upvotes still give you rep.

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