Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#1

Post by brandnewlow » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 5:38 AM UTC

I just wanted to sing the praises of StackOverflow.com for a second. I wanted to put together a custom query to display a few key metrics for my social news site. The folks on IRC ignored a polite request and I found a few folks willing to help for $50/hour. Both of these were expected, sensible outcomes.

StackOverflow came through with the answer in about 15 minutes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/696289

The impressive part, to me at least, is that the initial answer posted wasn't yet easy enough for me to follow. I asked a few questions in the comments, more detail was added, I asked a few more questions and came back in a few hours and a copy-and-paste code snippet was waiting for me.

A+

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#2

Post by nopassrecover » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 7:03 AM UTC

Raises the interesting points of a) when will regular coders start outsourcing their jobs on SO and b) when will the large community of "offshore" coders currently doing this sort of patch work swarm SO. Having said that, I have noticed that people are more likely to help helpful people so unless those people add value to the system first it is unlikely they'll get extreme amounts of help.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#3

Post by adrianwaj » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 7:22 AM UTC

People on Stack Overflow are generally very charitable. Thanks S.O. people.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#4

Post by richardw » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 7:51 AM UTC

It's starting to come up a lot in Google searches, which is better than paid-for sites, say. Make an effort to read through all answers and up-rate those that are lower down but you think are better. Sometimes they're newer and better but people ignore them and just consider the top one.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#5

Post by draegtun » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 8:12 AM UTC

Stackoverflow is informational, educational & addictive!

Its "PerlMonks" for the general programming community.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#6

Post by axod » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 8:25 AM UTC

>> "The folks on IRC ignored a polite request"

People do tend to idle on IRC :/ You may need to try a few channels, or wait until someone is awake ;)

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#7

Post by lbolognini » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 8:25 AM UTC

Stack Overflow is ace!

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#8

Post by Herring » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 8:27 AM UTC

nopassrecover wrote: post #2

Raises the interesting points of a) when will regular coders start outsourcing their jobs on SO and b) when will the large community of "offshore" coders currently doing this sort of patch work swarm SO. Having said that, I have noticed that people are more likely to help helpful people so unless those people add value to the system first it is unlikely they'll get extreme amounts of help.

I don't know how SO implemented their solution, but it's a solved problem, see bittorrent.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#9

Post by Herring » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 8:30 AM UTC

I've tried to get something like this for the math/physics communities, but they're lagging behind a few decades. That code release by cnprog was painful to watch.

Re: Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

#10

Post by jmatt » Tue, Mar 31, 2009, 9:08 AM UTC

Ok I can't be the only one that doesn't find answers at SO.

The question that brandnewlow submitted was relatively simple and thus you found a quick answer. Try asking a challenging question and you are just as likely to find an old blog post with an answer as a StackOverflow answer. Now, I think SO has it's place. For instance when you are picking up a new language that is used in the industry. But I've rarely found answers there recently (C#, VB.NET or Lisp...).

I agree that they are improving and that some of the these rare challenging questions are beginning to be answered (Woot no complaints). And that when they are answered the answers are usually correct. But it's far from terrific.