Tired of Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#511

Post by mercutio2 » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #441

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I do remember pre-SO times. Companies who developed libraries and frameworks had to do proper technical writing, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to use their technology. Microsoft did amazing job writing their MSDN, but others did well, too. Linux man pages, Java JDK docs, and similar sources contained more than enough information for a motivated reader to start using their tech, get stuff done, and be productive.…

Wow. We had really different pre-SO experiences.

I found MSDN so filled with unexplained parameters and fields, hyper-linked to other unexplained classes, that I gave up and haven’t tried again.

Where did you find the well written documentation?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#512

Post by pushcx » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #431

eitland wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we (and in extreme cases, you) could at least review it and point out if the reasons where nuts (i.e. if an answer has 5 downvotes for wrong then we can factcheck it and point it out) I'm mentioning lobste.rs for the second time in this discussion, but lobste.rs has this and it works kind of well IMO, both to think twice when I downvote and also to try to figure out why someone was downvoted. Then again, lobste.…

The counterargument is that, just as with downvote-reason-giving, downvote-reason-reviewing would be dominated by the same forces as downvoting in the first place. You wouldn't get more signal, just more complexity, plus a lot more work—both because of the reviewing itself, and because of meta-quarrels about reasons and reason-reviews. HN's approach is to stick with something simple, accept that it has downsides as w…

Selfishly, I would appreciate it if HN would adopt downvote reasons because Lobsters has to acculturate people used to how HN does things. Occasionally they're outraged that we do not have downvote-to-disagree when a mod contacts them to ask that they stop picking random reasons to do so. If HN would be so kind as to train several million programmers in the UI and norms I'd appreciate it.

Less tongue-in-cheek, I do think flag/downvote reasons are worth the added complexity for us, but as there's a cultural component to these design issues it's probably a non-starter for HN to adopt. A change in such a fundamental interaction on the site would be an upheaval that's not justified by probability and size of an expected benefit.

+1 on basically your entire message, especially recognizing the limits of mods and size as dominant variable on roughly everything to do with communities. Best of luck.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#513

Post by ioconnor » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 11:27 AM UTC

Quit posting to stackoverflow perhaps a decade ago. Same is true with github. I'll use information from both sources but no way will I ever contribute anything to them.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#514

Post by javaJake » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

From my experience, this behavior is common when volunteers answer questions. Personally, I think this behavior that the author is seeing is because volunteer work is thankless and tiring (even with karma) and when you've seen a hundred questions and answered 20 of them the same way, it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling lazy or angry, and get aggressive either way.

This is the behavior I quickly learned to expect and brace myself against whenever I asked a question on IRC in the 2000's. I'd be mocked, the reasons behind my questions would be probed, and eventually I'd get an answer. I realized that If I asked an extremely specific question and, if someone probed, immediately provided full background, the mocking and probing would end, and I'd either get a shrug, or an answer.

This is not intended to excuse the behavior. I have just stopped being surprised when I see it.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#515

Post by tony2016 » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:28 PM UTC

Stackoverflow is an awesome place to get help for programming questions. Except for the morons who roam in it downvoting all kinds of questions and they never leave a comment to as why they are downvoting. Even when requested to.

Just recently I posted a question in meta for why one of my questions was being downvoted. That question in meta got a flurry of downvotes! Stupid moronic downvoters. It is a hostile place but I will use it as long as I get answers.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#516

Post by MaxBarraclough » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

ahaferburg wrote: post #473

luckylion wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's strange, in all the time I've spent on SO sites, I can remember only one instance where that happened. Maybe it's community related and happens with certain topics more than with others?

Happens a lot in questions related to C. Most answers are followed by a discussion why the code provided in the answer is not portable. Oftentimes answers are more concerned with being technically correct than helpful.

In the particular case of C, it's often important to be pretty precise. If an answer is offering a non-portable solution, or worse still, relying on undefined behaviour, it should get called out. It's not like, say, Java, where you're generally unlikely to get bitten by dark corners of the language.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#517

Post by corobo » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 7:16 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #291

corobo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since someone posted an article on “The XY Problem” nerds on all mediums have been assuming it’s always an XY problem

It might even be the XY problem, but even if it is. Answer their question, and explain why maybe they should be considering something else after you answered the question. At that point, one is being extra helpful by adding context. Which is in stark contrast to 'that is probably the wrong question, and here is why'. Which is hard to distinguish from being willfully obtuse.

After this came up elsewhere here within 5 days of this comment thread I’m giving it the name “The XYZ Problem”

https://cohan.io/the-xyz-problem/