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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?

#61

Post by threatofrain »

marcosdumay wrote: post #31
svara wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

StackOverflow once tried to do an interesting community experiment around replicating documentation on everything but it lacked guidance / self-direction and they cancelled it.

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

#62

Post by throwawaybutwhy »

langitbiru wrote: post #59
rovr138 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can use their dataset, https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stackoverflow Source is here, https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

I think what the poster means is more than just unpacking the dataset. So the project should update itself every 12 hours, and has the capability of searching the information (using local database).

> the capability of searching the information

Not something SO is known for. Thus, it would be pure improvement over the status quo.

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

#63

Post by aaron695 »

$1 Billion damage I think is easy.

$10 Billion before it's re-created. Maybe. It'll take years to re-code and re-build the community.

$100 Billion. Doubt it. But not sure.

10 million visits a day, $1 per visit. Are we including all the Stacks? I think Server Fault could be much higher than $1.

https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic

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

#64

Post by CryptoGhost »

knighthack wrote: post #48
CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

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 pers…

Completely disagree, and you're wrong. Depending on the area you're looking into: 1. Many Stack Overflow answers do not exist in documentation at all. 2. Some answers are especially valuable because they touch issues in actual production (which are not foreseeable by documentation). 3. Answers (chronologically given) help ongoing document changes in APIs, which many documentation don't do or make it very difficult to…

I am wrong. For me using a dependency that can't be bothered to create proper documentation or uses SO as customer support is a non-starter.

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

#65

Post by CryptoGhost »

inglor_cz wrote: post #21
CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

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 pers…

That seems to me like saying that Google Search is insignificant because it only shows content from elsewhere.

SO suffers from it's own version of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

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

#66

Post by emayljames »

norswap wrote: post #12
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.

Oh, no; it has always been that way. Either too much information (needle in haystack), or undocumented (think Apple's latest Swift). The best documentation I've seen is the PHP site that not only has all function listed, but gives official examples, with user comments that can be voted on.

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

#67

Post by sdevonoes »

marcosdumay wrote: post #38
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 libr…

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

Not even in the official documentation? Wow.

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

#69

Post by MitPitt »

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 this open-source SO-esque Q&A forum: https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel

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

#70

Post by layer8 »

livre wrote: post #56
layer8 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something like Dash/Kiwix for Windows?

Yes, Kiwix is available for Windows: https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/ There's also Zeal: https://zealdocs.org/ And DevDocs: https://devdocs.io/about

Thanks, somehow I managed to miss that for Kiwix.
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