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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#491

Post by akerl_ »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #487
dang wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post flamebait or call names in HN comments. It breaks the site guidelines and evokes worse from others. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That message may have been inflammatory, based on my opinions concerning Stack Overflow, but I don't see where I called names; I called some systems stupid , but I can't name call a system as I would an individual. Anyway, sure, I could've made the message a tad nicer, and I really shouldn't have bothered commenting in the overcrowded discussion anyway, but some of the points in the discussion, from this author I've…

Your comment above makes the sweeping claim that broad chunks of the software engineering field aren’t “real” programmers, by your personal definition of “real” and “programmer”.

I’d suggest that any point whose initial premise defines your opposition out of the room is in bad taste. Having led by essentially saying “people who use StackOverflow in this way are not real programmers”, you’ve constructed an arbitrary high-ground from which to base the remainder of your case.

The fact that the comment is also not nice doesn’t help, but the discussion of what is and isn’t “real” programming by your personal definition is what made it inflammatory to me.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#492

Post by wruza »

indecisive_user wrote: post #399
wruza wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precio…

> out of many pages of answers only few see one upvote a year^. I helped mostly specific people, not the common knowledge. I regularly come across helpful answers on SO with 0 or 1 upvotes, so I wouldn't judge your contributions' impact solely on that. You've likely helped many people with your answers, even if there's no proof of it.

My answers usually did have some upvotes, and I’m only speaking of up-per-year here (passive accumulation after “hot” period, which kind of must show the real usefulness against initial “hey okay cool +5” phase), i.e. not 0->1->2 transitions.

But I see what you mean. Maybe I’m self-biased since I’m usually logged in and do upvote low-voted answers when they obviously help me. Majority may simply not do that for old answers and/or others questions. Still, lack of feedback makes things foggy.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#493

Post by Const-me »

coryfklein wrote: post #488
Const-me wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand. Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account. I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote…

> I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Actually, that's _exactly_ how you change the attitude of the community, by making your voice heard. Sure you as an individual aren't going to override everyone else, but if you don't voice your opinion then your complaint about other folks loses some of its ground.

I answer questions on SO mostly for fun. I find it entertaining to answer hard questions. Sometimes I learn interesting things while I write an answer. Other times people post interesting comments to my answers. Flagging, appealing closes, and other BS politics is not fun at all.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer.

I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#494

Post by Nition »

Const-me wrote: post #464
scardine wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).

I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand. Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account. I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote…

Man, that's a super interesting and very specific question! Wish I had enough rep to apply to reopen it.

I suspect the "too broad" closers wanted it to ask re a specific programming language. But of course in this case the asker didn't care what language they'd have to write it in (although they helpfully tagged the most likely C++ and C#).

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#495

Post by andrewprock »

Const-me wrote: post #465
raverbashing wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such questions often closed as “too broad” Oh my questions were very specific usually (the hardest one I remember was how to put a borderless window inside another window (because it could change) and making it all work. Think some good amount of win32 quirkiness was needed for that to work the way I wanted)

It doesn’t matter to the downvoters. Here’s a deleted question closed as “too broad”: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 Copy-pasting below. What is the best way in C++ to calculate the coordinate of a rectangle (hyper-rectangle) in n-dimension? I have dimensions of the rectangle in a 1d vector like {1d_min , 1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max, ...., nd_min,nd_max}. For example, in 2d the dimensions are {1d_min,1d_max ,…

And to prove your point, the question has now been removed.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#496

Post by Const-me »

Nition wrote: post #494
Const-me wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand. Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account. I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote…

Man, that's a super interesting and very specific question! Wish I had enough rep to apply to reopen it. I suspect the "too broad" closers wanted it to ask re a specific programming language. But of course in this case the asker didn't care what language they'd have to write it in (although they helpfully tagged the most likely C++ and C#).

Indeed, very interesting question. That’s why I spent some time trying to reopen.

I happen to have experience DLL injecting into dwm.exe’s swap chains. AFAIK it’s the only way to get frames in VRAM for hardware encoding of desktop video on Win7. Desktop duplication which provides same data through officially supported API was only introduced in Win8, while desktop compositor runs on GPU since Vista (usually, i.e. when Aero is enabled). I didn’t need to process frames, just copy to another texture in VRAM shared with my capture process, which encodes them with media foundation. But the same DLL injection approach can be used to process frames in real time like OP wanted, by rendering extra pass[es] before each IDXGISwapChain::Present().

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#497

Post by Izkata »

jodrellblank wrote: post #63
milch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a small number of answers, and the most successful / least criticized ones were always on niche languages or topics. C/C++/Java? No chance. I corrected a wrong answer on a question in C++ once, which was immediately reverted with “nope, your answer is too different from the original, make a new answer”. Great, so now there’s an answer that is fundamentally wrong with 26 upvotes that apparently can’t be correct…

That's apparently the intended design; SO bills itself as "questions and correct answers", but they've made it clear in the Meta site or in blog posts, I don't remember where, that the accepted answer and upvotes are not "this is correct" but "people found this helpful", and people can find "wrong" answers helpful, so they stay. The intended outcome here is that you post your own answer, and leave a comment on the mo…

So on your last point, I found something sneaky you can do to people:

The answers have a sort order, controllable by tabs below and to the right of the question. These go to the same page with a GET arg to change the order. The trick is that these are sticky - browsing to one saves it as your preference. So if you post a comment to a question and include that arg, it'll switch the whole site for whoever clicks it, without telling them.

One of the options is "newest first".

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#498

Post by Izkata »

ufmace wrote: post #236
NateEag wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect to burn a few karma points on this, and be ignored, but all evidence I have says that this is human nature at work, and that at scale it cannot be prevented. I've seen moderators of small communities hold off the effect by setting a good example, using a deft touch, and not letting the community get too big. My suspicion is that once the number of commenters gets much past Dunbar's number [1], the universal…

I think there's something to this. Not sure if it's Dunbar's Number specifically, but something. It seems like there's a pattern where a community is nice and small, with people joining at a trickle. Things change when a jerk joins and starts doing jerk stuff. This tends to drive away the nice and helpful people, attract more jerks, and pushes people still there to be more jerk-ish themselves. Sometimes deft manageme…

You're describing the broken windows theory [0], it's not related to Dunbar's number.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/broken-windows-theory

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#499

Post by Izkata »

Veedrac wrote: post #174
prepend wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I’ve been a reader for 10 years or however long, but their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer. This didn’t work for me because SO wasn’t something I typically visited every day. So I just couldn’t get into the habit of being enough of a user to browse and vote so it was a vicious cycle of ap…

You don't even have to have an account to post an answer, nor any points to post a question. You need only 15 points to upvote (2 upvotes on an answer, or three on a question).

Or no upvotes and 1 "accept" on an answer.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#500

Post by shagie »

eitland wrote: post #424
shagie wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of those three, only the last one is one that I can view. Consider the original question: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/57323981/1 which... really is "design an entire system for me" type question. The refinement, while better is still getting into discussions in the comments. While its from a different site on the SE network, consider: Green fields, blue skies, and the white board - what is too broad? -- https…

> That should be ok, there are many other places where such questions can be asked. Won't say "citation needed", but I will say that outside of reddit I do not frequently visit any such places. And reddit has its own problems and also hardly counts as "many".

Consider then having people ask the questions that are 'interesting' here, on HN. There's Metafilter. There is IRC, slack and discord channels, twitter, GitHub issues, mailing lists. People have fairly consistently tried to do spin offs of Stack Overflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876 is one such example - it didn't work, it is rather challenging to get enough people active to keep it active - see https://www.askquestions.tech as another). There are even people still posting on usenet ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.javascript )

There are lots of them out there. They're not as big as Stack Overflow, but that's part of what allows them to have a less focused mission... and many of the other formats support the interesting questions better than Stack Overflow can.

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