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

The Fall of Stack Overflow

observablehq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 808 posts

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#201

Post by msla »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

That can be infuriating.

Want to host videos on a laptop (which has a big SSD) and stream them to a Pi (which is attached to a big screen) over a LAN? Hey, here's a post about how to host videos on a Pi and stream them to a laptop! Upvote and share! My point is, you don't even have to be trying to do something all that strange for people to apply the XY Problem logic and refuse to help you.

(Solution: NFS mount and a patient understanding that the Pi cannot play certain kinds of video, so you'll need to transcode some of them first. See? Nothing bizarre, but surprisingly outside-the-box given what I could find online at the time.)

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#202

Post by jb1991 »

sedatk wrote: post #198
wodenokoto wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No other platform, not even post-Elon Twitter or Facebook does this. Doesn't hacker news also do this?

It doesn’t. You just have to send an email.

The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#204

Post by casey2 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #168
JohnMakin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here’s a classic SO thread: OP: “how can I accomplish X doing Y?” top voted response: “I wouldnt do X by Y. Instead, I’d consider Z. It’ll do everything X by Y would do, plus these other things.” buried sub comment to top voted response: “that’s not what he asked, to do X by Y (exact solution provided)” then 10 comments blasting the guy who actually answered the question for not doing it the way the top voted answer…

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

Everybody is aware and have read esr etc. The point is that people who are asking X by Y want to learn Y, with accomplishing X as a side goal at best. It's funny that you call wanting to learn Y a waste of time. Is it because you believe Z is a superior way of doing X? Why do you believe that? Experience, science or mathematical proof?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#205

Post by dleeftink »

fhoffa wrote: post #105
minimaxir wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Overflow used to release their data archives quarterly on BigQuery. Looking at the BQ datasets, they were last updated Nov 2022, which doesn't have the latest 2023 info in the submission.

FWIW, I now analyze the Stack Overflow dumps on Snowflake https://medium.com/snowflake/how-to-load-the-stack-overflow-...

Thanks for sharing, good to see alternative options popping up. My wish is that the Stack Exchange dataset could one day be provided as a streaming parquet or arrow table, as underfunded grads and post-grads could then more easily/selectively sample the datasets (similar to how Huggingface provides some of its datasets)[1][2].

The Hugginface repo unfortunately prefilters some of the tables/rows according to some criteria, making it less usable for general analytical queries that the BQ or SEDE datasets enable. If anyone knows of an 'XML-streaming' solution that directly samples from the Internet Archive's data dumps, I am all ears.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets-server/rows

[2]: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceGECLM/StackExchan...

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#206

Post by alex_lav »

ezconnect wrote: post #135
svachalek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 110% replaced it with ChatGPT. Perhaps SO would still have a chance back in its glory days but there's no comparison to having a direct, specific, instant answer vs having to fight against SEO or moderators for hours.

I always read here ChatGPT is amazing. Can you give a link on how to use it? Every time I tried to google it returns lots of different results and when I tried it it:s not even usable for basic things I want. Is the ChatGPT you:re talking about on their website? Do I have to pay for it?

You're mostly right in your experience. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to get ChatGPT to be a worthwhile piece of my workflow, and I guess sometimes it is, but most of the time the basic code or config or content I try to generate, it gets very fundamental things incorrect. It feels like it's mostly just hype these days.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#207

Post by [deleted] »

casey2 wrote: post #204
Eisenstein wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

Everybody is aware and have read esr etc. The point is that people who are asking X by Y want to learn Y, with accomplishing X as a side goal at best. It's funny that you call wanting to learn Y a waste of time. Is it because you believe Z is a superior way of doing X? Why do you believe that? Experience, science or mathematical proof?

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#208

Post by _3u10 »

zulban wrote: post #191
Eisenstein wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that oftentimes people who want to do 'X by Y' are actually asking how to accomplish Q. They think 'X by Y' is the solution and get hit by a roadblock, not knowing that it will not help them and they are wasting time. This is called the XY problem and is extremely common on tech related forums and mailing lists. * https://xyproblem.info/

Alternatively, people might have to use X and Y to accomplish Q because of their organization or team. If it's technically doable, there should be a solution and explanation for that X and Y problem somewhere.

Like how to use a database as a queue, which generally works much better than any queuing system I’ve ever used, except ones that use redis as the database engine for the queue.

I’m sure if you’re twitter Kafka is actually a better solution, for everyone else, it isn’t.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#209

Post by sedatk »

jb1991 wrote: post #202
sedatk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t. You just have to send an email.

The question was about whether hacker news allows you to remove your content? It does not. You can send an email just to have your content anonymized, but it will remain forever.

That’s appalling. I thought they honored deletion requests. Terrible look on HNs side too.

Edit: It seems like there’s a wiggle room, but still terrible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293237

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#210

Post by orangussyy »

monkin wrote: post #166

I think Discord has had a huge impact on Stack Overflow as there are many communities created for specific technologies, languages, frameworks, or topics, where most users can get answers from direct contributors or people who have the best industry knowledge on the topic in question. Not to mention how beneficial it is for brands and products to create such closely-knit communities for their users. There's no need t…

Yeah except Discord is toxic as fuck and should be banished...
Post reply on HN