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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#501

Post by proverbialbunny »

falcor84 wrote: post #406
proverbialbunny wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed the pre-internet times when it came to programming far more than I do today. This is because of flow states. I have a hard time getting into a flow state when I'm looking something up, but when I know the language inside and out it's easy for me to get into a flow state. So much so, when I learn a language I try to know it well enough to never have to google for help. Of course, I still google around at tim…

That's a lofty goal, which I don't think is achievable anymore, at least not in modern web development. The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with makes offline development entirely infeasible. I too try to avoid googling for language features, but for the rest of my questions, SO is invaluable.

It is a lofty goal. I've been told by coworkers, "No one can remember the entire language." and then went and did it anyways.

Yes, I still have to look up libraries for, eg pip, and I haven't gotten to the level of knowing every compiler error yet.

But it is very much a doable goal. Especially given that knowledge transfers between languages and libraries. Once you learn the thought process of the dev who wrote it, you can guess how they did or are going to do everything after that, creating a short cut where you can guess and usually always guess the right answer. It's much quicker than using SO.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#502

Post by setr »

Chris2048 wrote: post #462
chii wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. yep. The answerers are definitly more valuable, because it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place, and there's only the reward of intellectual stimulation for doing so. The questioner are not as valuable, because asking questions is easy. Asking a good question is hard, but the majority of questions aren't h…

> it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place Only if it's a hard question, and answered correctly. There is negative value in, say, closing a question as a dupe, that is not a dupe.

Sure, but it should be measured against the impact of greater redundant questions. The filter is not perfect, and no perfect filter is known — reducing false negatives increases false positives, and vice versa.

Reducing false positives (closed for dupe, but not actually a dupe) favors the answerers; reducing false negatives (open, but in fact a dupe) favors the questioners.

The filter should likely favor the former — an emotionally injured questioner must go where the answerers are, and will come back. An emotionally injured answerer is more fragile — he has no commitment to this place.

Of course, to a limit, but “inclusivity” of questioners, at the cost of all else, is a game that has been played before, and has failed many times before (pretty much every online Q&A before SO)

Perhaps SO has gone too far, but its goals seem to me much more reasonable than the commonly suggested alternatives. Beginners have places to go — SO need not be their haven, and need not optimize for them.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#503

Post by kelnos »

shagie wrote: post #313
kelnos wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.

The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums. While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people…

> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format.

The way I look at it is this: if I have a question about something, and do a search, and end up on a SO page, and the contents of that page usefully answer my question, then by definition, the question was fit for the format.

Too often I run into a "locked as off topic" question that fits the above description, and I worry that someday someone is going to go through and delete all the supposedly off-topic questions. Or, just as bad, discourage people from asking questions like that in the future and make the site overall less useful.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#504

Post by kelnos »

protomyth wrote: post #300
kelnos wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.

As mentat pointed out, it shouldn't be locked.

"Shouldn't" is irrelevant; I run into plenty that are, and it's a shame.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#505

Post by blisterpeanuts »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #407
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you could perfectly well find answers in the pre-Internet times; you just had to dig deeper, grub through more books, talk to more colleagues, and experiment more.

Well yeah, but you could also travel from England to Australia in the pre-aeroplane days. Today, you can do it in about 24-36 hours. Back then it took months. Isn't that an improvement?

Ridiculous analogy. It didn't take weeks or months to figure out answers in the 1980s. It just took a little more thinking. I would go so far as to say, programmers were smarter in those days because they had to be.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#507

Post by dang »

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…

It was a flamewar-style comment. Those are not allowed here because of the degrading effect they have on discussion, and we ban accounts that persist in posting them. Edit: it looks like you've done it before as well, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827595 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660007. That's definitely not what we're going for here.

Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them from now on? They explain many things, including what I meant by calling names above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#508

Post by eitland »

shagie wrote: post #500
eitland wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 htt…

I guess part of the problem is Stack Overflow just got too big and now everything gravitates around it.

Maybe it would help if Stack Overflow would explicitely link to alternatives, at leadt when they rejected a question?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#509

Post by rictic »

Rapzid wrote: post #270
kstenerud wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?" This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package." From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want…

My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s

As someone who's spent a lot of time answering questions both on stackoverflow and in similar environments, often you really do need to get more context on what the person is actually trying to do in order to give the best answer.

I try hard to avoid turning it into an interrogation, but answering the question as asked is often either impossible or a disservice to the person asking.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#510

Post by shagie »

eitland wrote: post #508
shagie wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 htt…

I guess part of the problem is Stack Overflow just got too big and now everything gravitates around it. Maybe it would help if Stack Overflow would explicitely link to alternatives, at leadt when they rejected a question?

Consider the impact on HN if every time someone asked an opinion question or recommendation for resources, the people pointed here. Hundreds of posts a day fall into this bucket... would HN be able to moderate it? Would people stop looking there when the top 30 were within the past 30 minutes and all by green names?

I used to be active on another part of the SE network... and we could easily get overwhelmed when people on SO tried to be helpful and point people with questions that weren't quite right for SO in our direction. Without that person being active on our site too, they often failed to realize that it wasn't a good question there either... and we'd have to try to explain that they were misdirected and no, we're not being elitist but the question needs to be closed here too. For a small site, we could easily get half of daily questions being from "helpful" misdirections. ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/ )

I believe that HN really wants people in the ask question who want to be on HN... not just the 'herp derp oh look a textbox' syndrome ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... ). This goes for other online communities too. Trying to be too helpful does all of them a disservice. Consider the advice from ESR in ask questions the smart way: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#forum

> Choose your forum carefully

> cross-post to too many different newsgroups

> Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.

> The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.

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(edit)

To the "It's too big" - yes it is. I believe that that is really at the core of the problem. The avenues where I go for help now tend to be small to the point where on some of them I know every single person by first (real) name.

Having a small enough stream where I can read the entire day's stuff that interests me easily along with being in an environment where the "we are professionals, don't be a jerk" is enough of a moderation pressure that it isn't even an issue.

I believe that a variation on activity pub ( https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ) is the right way to go in the long term, with small sites that moderate and the ability to programmatically screen posts. Not sure how... but something in that nature. And if some other site keeps pushing your site crap, blacklist it and stop accepting it. And to an extent, I'd even be willing to pay for it (for someone else to keep the quality standards that I want).

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