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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?

#71

Post by mcint »

ruslan wrote: post #37
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.

Whois does seem a little more flexible than dict. Able to delegate and recurse in answering a query. Let's add some flags

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

#72

Post by mraza007 »

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…

Hey when you mentioned US intelligence community do you mean the government agencies such as the army,cia or DoD

I’m just curious to know

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

#73

Post by marcosdumay »

sdevonoes wrote: post #67
marcosdumay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The basic C# libraries are full of undocumented surprising behavior, and surprising behavior that is documented only on thematic docs and not on the function docs. And most of the ecosystem follow the convention.

There are many people that insist the .Net environment is well documented because there is documentation for every single item, but that documentation is far from complete.

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

#75

Post by pan69 »

I remember something Jeff talked about during the original Stack Overflow podcasts, that Google was the main interface for Stack Overflow. As in, your entry into Stack Overflow would for the majority of people be through search. And to speak for myself, this is how I use Stack Overflow 99% of the time.

This makes me wonder. Just having a copy of the SO data without the Google algorithms to bring you to the right question, the experience would probably be different when working of a copy.

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

#78

Post by yagizdegirmenci »

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.

I can't agree this more, once a moderator quoted about this in a moderation room: "I'm starting to become concerned that this room is somehow promoting the idea that all questions need to have an MCVE and/or that debugging questions are the only questions that are on-topic for Stack Overflow. That is not only wrong, it's horribly wrong, dangerously wrong. So I step in and correct this misconception as often as I can."

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

#79

Post by knighthack »

CryptoGhost wrote: post #64
knighthack wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your attitude is that you "can't be bothered" to use a dependency when there is no proper documentation, you probably aren't working on difficult problems, or you're not really doing enough serious programming work where SO becomes the only resource available to solve a hard engineering problem.

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

#80

Post by touisteur »

rovr138 wrote: post #40
touisteur wrote: post #23

Oh we could start fresh with actual up to date answers!

You can add new answers to existing questions if the answer’s changed over time

I know, but most often the answer doesn't rise to the top and you have to look closely at the dates to have some context. Dead links and now-useless answers are my day to day stackoverflow experience.
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