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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?

#31

Post by marcosdumay »

svara wrote: post #15
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 wou…

Yeah, that's the kind of answer that you don't get anymore on SO, mostly because that kind of question isn't allowed anymore.

Nowadays questions must be much more specific, what has the consequence that the answers are much less generally useful.

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

#34

Post by PaulHoule »

svara wrote: post #15
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 wou…

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

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

#35

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.

While SO is geared for developers. If someone takes this on, ideally it would work like StackExchange sites where one can exist for each topic.

- https://math.stackexchange.com/

- https://stats.stackexchange.com/

- https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/

- https://ai.stackexchange.com/

- https://apple.stackexchange.com/

- https://serverfault.com/

- https://superuser.com/

- https://drupal.stackexchange.com

There’s a ton more of these.

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

#37

Post by ruslan »

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.

Preferably a knowlage DB accessable through whois(1) protocol.

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

#38

Post by marcosdumay »

dd_roger wrote: post #22

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

That depends on your environment.

When programming in Haskell or Rust, going into SO is basically a waste of time, and the documentation or some specific search engine (yeah, hoogle) are the place to go.

When programming in C#, SO is basically irreplaceable, the knowledge there is extremely important and you just won't find it anywhere else.

When programming in Python or Javascript, it completely depends on what libraries and frameworks you are using.

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

#39

Post by ArtWomb »

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…

>>> 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 ;)

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