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Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

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Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#51

Post by dan-robertson »

herodoturtle wrote: post #14

I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect it would probably result in more netsplits on freenode, owed to the inevitable influx of programmers who would now seek assistance on IRC like the good old days. I've definitely noticed a downward trend of activity in the assorted programming chat channels I've frequented over the last 25 years or so, which I guess could be a result of the growing popularity of Q&A s…

The key offering of stack overflow these days is less the ability to ask a stupid question and get told that you’re an idiot, and more the existing wealth of answers to questions that may be found by a search engine. I don’t think irc really produces answers which are easy to find.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#52

Post by rovr138 »

rohan1024 wrote: post #16

I wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.

That, not more than a GB part is very wrong

    stackoverflow.com-Badges.7z (View Contents) 07-Dec-2020 17:09 273.8M
    stackoverflow.com-Comments.7z (View Contents) 08-Dec-2020 03:10 4.5G
    stackoverflow.com-PostHistory.7z (View Contents) 08-Dec-2020 22:50 28.0G
    stackoverflow.com-PostLinks.7z (View Contents) 07-Dec-2020 17:11 95.6M
    stackoverflow.com-Posts.7z (View Contents) 08-Dec-2020 18:48 15.9G
    stackoverflow.com-Tags.7z (View Contents) 07-Dec-2020 17:11 843.9K
    stackoverflow.com-Users.7z (View Contents) 07-Dec-2020 17:25 645.2M
    stackoverflow.com-Votes.7z (View Contents) 07-Dec-2020 22:14 1.2G

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#53

Post by livre »

lmm wrote: post #27
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #4

The app Kiwix let’s you keep a static copy of stack overflow on your phone, it’s only a few gigabytes. It also has Wikipedia!

Does it actually work? I tried a couple of times and the downloads never finished.

It worked for me when I tried it but it was so slow that unless you are running from an SSD it's not worth it (I had it on an external disk). Don't download everything, only get what you really need, the phone app was (maybe still is) a bit buggy.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#54

Post by rovr138 »

swalsh wrote: post #17
rohan1024 wrote: post #16

I wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.

There's a lot of metadata not being caputred by MetaData which would be insanely useful for a lot of purposes. It would be kind of neat if a lot more of that was captured... and if SO answers had more programatic access.

The data is on archive.org and also on big query if you need it.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#55

Post by rovr138 »

Decabytes wrote: post #36

I wonder if the reason documentation is so crappy is because stack overflow exists?

Documentations explains internals usually.

StackOverflow benefits from also having answers to things trying to combine libraries and other things.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#56

Post by livre »

layer8 wrote: post #32
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #4

The app Kiwix let’s you keep a static copy of stack overflow on your phone, it’s only a few gigabytes. It also has Wikipedia!

Is there something like Dash/Kiwix for Windows?

Yes, Kiwix is available for Windows: https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/

There's also Zeal: https://zealdocs.org/

And DevDocs: https://devdocs.io/about

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#57

Post by rovr138 »

netsharc wrote: post #11
nonameiguess wrote: post #8

The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirr…

How do you know that info in the first paragraph? On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way. Although I guess when you work for the spooks, they could figure out how to mask your IP that each query would come from a different IP from the world (basically I'…

The second part, regarding mirrors, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#58

Post by syshum »

rovr138 wrote: post #47
PaulHoule wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some StackOverflow answers are so bad they are the worst resource on a topic.

Some are. That’s where you downvote or report it (depending on what’s ‘bad’)

Some of the bad ones are the most up voted one..

Things that technically work, but are not the best way, easiest or more secure way of doing what the person needed.

Often times when I find a solution to Stack Overflow the one I find most helpful is the 3rd or 4th most upvoted solution not the most popular one

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#59

Post by langitbiru »

rovr138 wrote: post #44
ArtWomb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow I feel this is a prudent idea. Not necessarily for a full blown start-up, but a community-funded resource. If you stripped out all the extras. And just cloned the questions and top 2 answers. The text based data set itself is very managable. Several gigabytes in scale. Not to mention its applicability for ML/NLP/codegen research ;)

Maybe you can use their dataset, https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stackoverflow Source is here, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

I think what the poster means is more than just unpacking the dataset. So the project should update itself every 12 hours, and has the capability of searching the information (using local database).

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#60

Post by bryanrasmussen »

I think I use Stack Overflow once a month at the most, generally when I go there with a problem what happens is one of the following:

I have a problem I can't fix, I start writing down the problem, I realize as I am writing it down that it cannot be what I thought was the issue. I try other avenues for a few more hours and solve the problem.

I have a problem that I can't fix. I realize that I cannot reliably cut the problem down in minimal code to get a response on Stack Overflow because it is not a minimal problem. I try some other route to fix the problem.

I have a problem that as I am writing on StackOverflow I realize I have not tried a particular solution, I try it and solve my problem, I do not finish writing my problem.

I have a problem that seems like it is pretty esoteric, I ask a question, it never gets answered, I either manage to solve my problem, finding some github issue or similar suggesting the solution is a bunch of dependency updates or just not solvable. I either solve my issue or find some hacky workaround or do decide the requested functionality should be replaced by something else. No one ever answers my question, 6 months later someone says they have the same problem and did I solve it.

I have a problem that I actually finish writing and asking, someone responds and has misunderstood my question but their answer while wrong for what I'm answering gives me a clue on how to solve my problem.

I have something I want to do but I do not have workable code because I know absolutely no way about proceeding with the idea, so I do not ask StackOverflow because they just aren't helpful for anything that isn't simple.

I have a problem that is something like one of the previous situations, but I realize as I am writing it that it will get deleted or modded or something because it just won't work for StackOverflow guidelines, luckily most of the time when this happens I realize it should really be asked on one of the other Stack exchange communities. If I have progressed far enough to actually go ask a question on some other Stack Exchange community it tends to be answered reasonably quickly.

I have a problem in some area I do not know much about, perhaps because I am just started using the framework or something, my problem is simple but it does not work as I thought, I ask, it is a simple misunderstanding of how I thought it would work, someone responds with a solution really quickly and I fix my problem.

on edit: fixed bad grammatical error

on further edit: if StackOverflow went away pretty much nothing would change for me.

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