Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 352 posts

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#131

Post by labrador »

stuff4ben wrote: post #125
labrador wrote: post #81

I recently silently rage quit a subreddit because it got a new moderator who is not very bright and deletes my posts as being off topic when I'm clearly on topic to anyone with a greater than room temperature IQ. I quit after several months of getting my posts deleted. I remind myself they do it for free, which was why I was silent in my quitting. The article isn't about AI writing code instead of using SO, but a fol…

That's gotta be frustrating. I'm sure you tried reaching out to other moderators. It's almost like Reddit needs a mod committee for mods so that users can petition their cases.

I think the problem is there is a lot of turnover. I appreciate the work of most moderators to keep the quality up, but like open source, the work-for-free model comes with it's problems

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#132

Post by mdaniel »

melling wrote: post #117
fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

Nope, if that was the case, people wouldn’t go around closing questions because you didn’t “try hard enough before asking” I used to ask “interesting” questions to build that quality knowledge base, usually in less popular topics. At one point I had almost half the Emacs Lisp questions. I eventually ran into this problem where I explained that I tried nothing before asking. I briefly debated with the admins, then sai…

> by “Pair Programming” with an “AI” assistant

I would actually love this to be a thing, since if potential posters would read the Minimum Complete Verifiable Example page^1 it would cut down on so much of the "I am already frustrated and then my 'why no work' question was closed" drama

I wouldn't even need advanced AI to get it done, as the existing Eliza's "why do you think that is?" model^2 would be pretty close

1: https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA#/media/File:ELIZA_conver...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#134

Post by thedonkeycometh »

_fat_santa wrote: post #92
fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

> The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And whil…

[dead]

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#135

Post by marcus_holmes »

chrisan wrote: post #124
marcus_holmes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct). But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is tha…

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. You are 100% correct. SO clearly has an issue as this comes up time and time again. I wonder if a ChatGPT like front for it would serve everyone better?

Yeah, probably. Even doing the modding in real time would help, I think:

"Your question appears similar to these other questions, do they answer your question?"

"Your question appears to be a rant, and doesn't actually ask a question. Is this true?"

"Your question is easily solved: you have mis-spelled this configuration setting. Would you still like to post it?"

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#136

Post by playingalong »

nmilo wrote: post #88

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…

Me neither. But I think to ask a good question (on SO or to a more senior colleague at work) is a skill itself. Most people don't have it. Even most developers don't have it, which is somewhat surprising.

Also this skill is not taught actively, or at least not widely.

So people end up asking these poorly worded or poorly aimed questions. And they receive hardly any help to get it right. Neither before (in their education), nor during/after (when using SO).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#137

Post by ryathal »

bena wrote: post #93
fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

But the other part of that was that it would be constantly up to date. They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct . But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different. But you can't "re-ask…

This is something I hope actually gets added, more formal potentially deprecated flags that can be added to questions. Given the attitudes of meta when I actually cared, I doubt it ever will happen.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#138

Post by dang »

andrewfromx wrote: post #38
benjamoon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a GPT summary?

I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary? I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!

Please don't. HN is a place for humans to write and converse with each other. Bots have never been allowed here and we've banned accounts for posting like this since long before GPT. (I don't want to ban you, obviously)

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#139

Post by stuff4ben »

BeetleB wrote: post #130
stuff4ben wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you lose the ability to participate in the community because of your "reputation".

From https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation : > Reputation is entirely optional > The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all! Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get the…

That's basically what I'm saying. Lack of reputation inhibits your ability to participate in the site (beyond asking, answering, and editing questions).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#140

Post by aaron695 »

andrewfromx wrote: post #38
benjamoon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a GPT summary?

I can't lie, yes. BUT I used to write the same type summaries with my human brain all the time here too. Is it wrong to get all these points from an AI summary? I guess you could argue HN might as well just auto summarize every article now!

[dead]
Post reply on HN