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Lifehacker is a cool website -- you can find how-to articles on just about anything from kitchen to computing. I've used it a bunch of times to help me figure out how to do several things with my computer, for example.

However, even though our site has a similar name, our scope is NOT the same as that of Lifehacker.

Our site (for the moment) only takes questions about physical problems, for example. Therefore, questions about booting Ubuntu are off-topic, even though you might find the answer at Lifehacker.*

This is not to say that I think that questions involving tech are off-topic; a question about cleaning a dirty computer screen, for example, is on-topic.

I don't either mean to say that anything found on Lifehacker is off-topic; like I said, they also have solutions to "real-life, physical problems," such as one or two alternate methods for sharpening knives.

* We have other sites that serve this purpose: Web Apps, Super User, Android, Ask Different, Ask Ubuntu, Unix & Linux, and a few others.

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I agree with this very much. However, I don't think that something is off-topic just because it is on-topic on another SE site, inclusive of computer issues.

For example, if I'm looking for a hack to keep a child from deleting my files, it could be on-topic at either of the following:

  • Super User
  • Parenting

not to mention the platform-specific sites:

  • Android
  • Ask Different
  • Ask Ubuntu
  • Unix & Linux
  • Web Apps (If the files are in Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.)

A valid "hack" for this answer may be to cover the keyboard and mouse, whilst other sites would take a software-based approach.

This comes back to questions being on-topic based on their end-points. This means a lot of NAA's and vaguely closed questions.

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    Oh, I agree with this entirely. Do you think that this was unclear in my question?
    – Shokhet
    Feb 12, 2015 at 17:59
  • @Shokhet "We have other sites that serve this purpose"
    – Mooseman
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:00
  • ....I meant that footnote as just a "Hey, if you're disappointed that your question couldn't be handled here, you can ask it over here
    – Shokhet
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:00
  • @Shokhet +1 But the issue of endpoint-based closure still exists.
    – Mooseman
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:01
  • I was planning on raising that on Meta at some point; perhaps I will. You can do that yourself if you think it's a big problem.
    – Shokhet
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:04
  • @Shokhet Writing it up now.
    – Mooseman
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:06
  • Awesome! Waiting to upvote. ...please use the term ipso facto in the title; I'd love to link to the post using that term :)
    – Shokhet
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:10
  • @Shokhet meta.lifehacks.stackexchange.com/q/2405/15
    – Mooseman
    Feb 12, 2015 at 18:52

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