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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?

#11

Post by netsharc »

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'm describing Tor, I wonder if they have their own Tor network).

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

#12

Post by norswap »

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…

> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway.

In the absolute that may be true, but even if a low percentage of those are not available elsewhere, they are absolutely crucial. At least, they have been crucial to me.

I'm too young to know if it's a recent development, but documentation this day ain't worth much.

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

#13

Post by kevsim »

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!

Dash on macOS also lets you download StackOverflow for offline use. It was my goto for working on airplanes, way back when traveling on airplanes was a thing.

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

#14

Post by herodoturtle »

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 sites like stackoverflow.

But I still think it's one of the best places to seek assistance - plus, helping out programmers on IRC in real time is a good way to stay sharp and on top of the continuously evolving software landscape.

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

#15

Post by svara »

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…

> Nearly all of the information there is also available in the public documentation of whatever the question asker is asking about anyway.

That's really not true in any meaningful way. Maybe the information is somewhere, but some Stackoverflow answers are so good that they are the best resource on a specific narrow topic that you will find online.

See for example something like [0]. That's the type of answer you would get from a good book or teacher, good luck finding something comparable in the often terse official python docs.

Sure, there are a lot of lazy SO Q/As that sound like someone wasn't doing their homework, but that's far from the only type of content there.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100003/what-are-metaclas...

(Edit: another great example is basically anything that concerns advanced usage of matplotlib. That library is so weird and the docs so terrible that working off of SO examples really is the most efficient way to use it.)

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

#16

Post by rohan1024 »

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.

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

#17

Post by swalsh »

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.

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

#18

Post by CryptoGhost »

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a person who has already published work somewhere else (eg. white paper, book, blog, documentation, etc).

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

#20

Post by qntmfred »

dataflow wrote: post #10
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…

> Forcing developers to use real documentation instead of Stack Overflow would not likely hurt everyday work. For beginner-level stuff maybe, but there's so much on StackOverflow about bugs, pitfalls, caveats, breaking changes, rationales, use cases, background, etc. that you can't find easily (if at all) in software documentation, if the documentation even pops up in your searches.

> there's so much on StackOverflow about bugs, pitfalls, caveats, breaking changes, rationales, use cases, background, etc

this question is closed as off-topic.

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