84
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  • MathOverflow, Tor, Sound Design, Vi and Vim
  • Puzzling, Emacs, Mythology & Folklore, Esperanto Language
Rand al'Thor
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    how many questions on Stack Exchange? too many. – micsthepick Aug 30 '18 at 01:01
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    @micsthepick Once it's solved, I'm gonna remind you of this comment :-D – Rand al'Thor Aug 30 '18 at 01:02
  • Bold would probably be better. Can't really see it as it stands. Unless the idea is for it to be hard to find, but that doesn't seem like much of a puzzle at all, just something that will artificially make it take longer to solve. – NotThatGuy Aug 31 '18 at 11:42
  • @NotThatGuy Yes, the idea is to make it just slightly more challenging. I didn't want the letters to immediately stand out in a very obvious way, but OTOH I know the users of this site are experienced enough to look for such things. – Rand al'Thor Aug 31 '18 at 12:35
  • The experienced users are probably experienced enough. The people who like to just occasionally pop in to take a minute or so to try to figure out some of the easier puzzles ... not so much. This should perhaps be part of a broader discussion of how accessible we should try to make the site to new users / puzzlers (?) (which is not to say "make the puzzles easier", but rather "don't complicate puzzles by adding things not part of the 'core' puzzle which experienced users will find trivial and inexperienced users may find very difficult"). – NotThatGuy Aug 31 '18 at 12:43

2 Answers2

114

The answer is:

LOTS

this is why:

The italicised letters are i, g, d, and r. The only word that makes sense that you can make from these letters is grid. This suggests we are looking for a grid

Where can we find such a grid?, at https://stackexchange.com/sites. If we start drawing lines from each sites icon, the letters, L, O, T and S are spelled out LOTS

micsthepick
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55

When you single click on a stack exchange site (i.e. Stack overflow) it gives you the number of questions on that site. enter image description here

I just did this with every site and added them all up. The answer is there are 21,716,700 (approximately) questions on stack exchange

William Pennanti
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    Ummm, I'm not sure what to do with this answer. You've certainly responded to the literal question in the title, but you haven't solved the puzzle. Remember this is [Puzzling.se] SE, not [Meta.se] :-) Ah well, have a +1 anyway. – Rand al'Thor Aug 30 '18 at 10:09
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    Oh. Sorry. I thought you were just curious and didn't know which site to put it on. – William Pennanti Aug 30 '18 at 10:10
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    If you can make this answer update dynamically, then... Cool. – Carl Aug 30 '18 at 11:48
  • It would be a lot of effort and I don't know if I could do it. It took me about two hours to count out the first one and I'd have to do it every day. If someone is willing to count for me then I will update it reguarly – William Pennanti Aug 30 '18 at 11:51
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    While that might be a noble endeavor, it'd also be a misplaced one here. (And there are certainly easier ways to get this information with less manual effort anyway, but this entire conversation is off-topic so I'll leave it at that hehe) – Rubio Aug 30 '18 at 12:20
  • Your figure is wrong. I just checked and it was some hundreds more. But by the time someone reads this any number I post is also going to be wrong. – Mindwin Remember Monica Aug 30 '18 at 14:03
  • Yes sorry. It was just meant to be a rough figure – William Pennanti Aug 30 '18 at 14:05
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    When I read the puzzle I immediately became curious about the literal answer so +1 – Dan Anderson Aug 30 '18 at 14:47
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    @WilliamPennanti, seriously? He has 66.9k reputation, very unlikely to ask such question on wrong place. BTW, this made me laughing, xD. – rus9384 Aug 30 '18 at 22:44
  • If stack exchange has an API to retrieve this data, then getting this information on request wouldn't be too hard. However, writing some kind of web scraper would not be fun or easy. – peaceoutside Aug 31 '18 at 15:45
  • @peaceoutside https://data.stackexchange.com/, https://api.stackexchange.com/ – Maya Sep 02 '18 at 16:14