Kinda a Big Announcement • Hacker News Board

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#111

Post by eyelidlessness » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

It’s weird he even frames it this way, when the original SO pitch was that it was better than an older, competing website (which they derisively referred to by the disambiguating punctuation in its URL).

On the one hand, there is a slice of history in which SO absolutely deserves this much credit, even if this particular hyperbole is anachronistic. Early on, and for several years, SO did genuinely provide a single place to find relatively high quality/trustworthy answers to a huge range of programming questions.

On the other hand, I think that shark has been jumped for many years since. At least for my usage, I deliberately avoid clicking SO links until I’ve exhausted other promising resources (first party docs, reputable forums and blogs as you’ve mentioned). Because the quality of SO content is generally not just terrible, but because the gamification design they touted as producing quality can’t keep up with volume or time.

Nearly every SO link I’ve clicked in recent months has either been full of garbage answers (with maybe something helpful buried in comments), has an accepted answer years out of date prominently displayed over several more correct answers with no/few upvotes, or tumbleweeds because apparently even moderately difficult questions just aren’t interesting to contributors.

And I’m certainly not retracing my breadcrumbs to try to fix that, which would probably make me feel guilty if I didn’t find the whole enterprise of SO/SE skeezier and skeezier as it grew.

Honestly it’s a shame. I don’t care a bit for their solution, but it was really great to have such a reliable resource when it was one.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#112

Post by eyelidlessness » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 12:51 AM UTC

jamesmontalvo3 wrote: post #66

a1369209993 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you asked about, here is a different solution for your specific scenario". That describes seemingly every Stack Overflow question I've found in the past four years. SO is basically useless for anything advanced enough to need SO.

Perhaps there’s a point at which you become advanced enough to not need SO. I’m certainly not there after a decade of software development. Do I have to dig a bit sometimes and go beyond the first few results on google? Sure. And if that doesn’t work I submit a question. I normally get an answer fairly quickly.

I think the subset of programmers who don’t need something like SO’s value proposition is vanishingly small. Surely there are a few hundred people who have near perfect recall bolstered by perfect reference techniques.

At least speaking for myself, almost two decades in, I didn’t outgrow SO because I don’t need that kind of guidance. I outgrew SO because it doesn’t provide it effectively anymore.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#113

Post by eyelidlessness » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #98

shpx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Chrome, go to chrome://settings/ Search for "search engines" Open "Manage search engines" Under "Other search engines" click on "Add" (on the right) Add this custom search engine: - Search engine: Python docs (first result) - Keyword: p - URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=site:docs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky Install the "Redirect Google Redirects" extension https://chrome.g…

Thank you for your elaborate answer. Now please provide it for Firefox. And Postgresql. And Flask. Now I am using aiohttp here. SQLAlchemy please. Pytest. Sorry, now in the Rust world. Get me some MDN for Javascript. w3.org for CSS3 spec, pleaaaseee! You see where this is going? Python.org was an example to illustrate a point.

If you’re using a Mac, you might want to try Dash[1]. I’m sure similar tools exist on other platforms, but I’m not familiar enough to recommend them.

1: https://kapeli.com/dash

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#114

Post by eyelidlessness » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 12:57 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #103

twic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third hit for me is https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html Maybe Googlebot is reading this thread.

Remember that Google is not showing the results the same way to everyone. Maybe others near me are more likely to click on the SO response so I get that one ranked higher, and less likely to click on the reference documentation, so I get targeted the same way. Maybe if I let Google learn my patterns instead of disabling all the tracking I can, it'd give me better results. FWIW, I get similar results with DDG, but Goo…

I’m still trying to train Google to stop giving me W3Schools results and... I don’t have high hopes.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#115

Post by finder83 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #26

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

I think you might be giving Spolsky a bit too little credit! I remember the days before SO as well, and while you might luck out by finding your answer in some obscure niche blog, there was a relatively high chance that that error message you were staring at wouldn't have an accessible solution online (or at least not one that Google could provide). You could really just get stuck on a problem for a day, or never fin…

I wish I could say my experience matched yours, but SO is an extremely frustrating place for many of my errors and problems. I don't think it made programming worse, it did make it better...but it's far from a panacea, and often a question has answers that are so outdated that the solutions no longer work, the solutions aren't complete or have bugs, or it's close to my error but not the same error, or a different solution. I'd say that's my experience about 1/2 the time I use SO.

I picked up a book last month to learn Clojure...how does SO help to learn a language start to finish? I don't even typically refer to SO for syntax questions, I'm sure it has that information but it doesn't seem like a very convenient place to index it. But maybe that's my subset of languages...

I probably end up on stack overflow a few times a week, and it is helpful...but I'd be fine without it if Google would just return better results.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#116

Post by ravedave5 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #71

Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for some. Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale". E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just so out of date that I personally…

I had to figure out how to do something with videoJS and all I could find were answers for the old version of the lib, there were new answers but they were buried and hard to find.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#117

Post by shpx » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #98

shpx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Chrome, go to chrome://settings/ Search for "search engines" Open "Manage search engines" Under "Other search engines" click on "Add" (on the right) Add this custom search engine: - Search engine: Python docs (first result) - Keyword: p - URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=site:docs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky Install the "Redirect Google Redirects" extension https://chrome.g…

Thank you for your elaborate answer. Now please provide it for Firefox. And Postgresql. And Flask. Now I am using aiohttp here. SQLAlchemy please. Pytest. Sorry, now in the Rust world. Get me some MDN for Javascript. w3.org for CSS3 spec, pleaaaseee! You see where this is going? Python.org was an example to illustrate a point.

I'm not responding to your criticism of Google Search. I'm suggesting to anyone who shares your sentiment something that improved my dev experience.

I also use the uBlacklist extension to hide W3Schools et al. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

I actually make these whenever I get frustrated by Google a few times. I have "m" for MDN... It's not hard you just need to pick a keyword. How to modify the URL in the search string should be pretty obvious. I think you'll find you don't need them for every library. It's mostly general tools with large user bases, like Python, where people are trying to make a living shitting up the search results.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#118

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 3:08 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #30

tdeck wrote: post #13

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf. I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a prob…

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down. As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org docum…

I see docs.python.org as result 9 (of 10) in duckduckgo. And there's a helper box at the top right, with the summary from and link to docs.python.org

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#119

Post by northwest65 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 4:28 AM UTC

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #118

necovek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is exactly not what I am looking for instead of language/library reference documentation as it used to is one the most annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down. As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search engine of choice, and look for python.org docum…

I see docs.python.org as result 9 (of 10) in duckduckgo. And there's a helper box at the top right, with the summary from and link to docs.python.org

7th on DDG for me.

Re: Kinda a Big Announcement

#120

Post by extra88 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #81

arduinomancer wrote: post #53

> some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were in VBScript twenty years ago. I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being repeated in 2021. I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues with this. Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became standard?

To me you proved the point. Centering with Flexbox requires styling the parent and they use two different properties for horizontal and vertical centering. Truly simple to me would not be CSS but rather an attribute on the element. But with CSS, the simplest thing would allow one to just put a style on the element you want to center. The other aspect of this is that there are multiple other ways of doing it.

> Centering with Flexbox requires styling the parent and they use two different properties for horizontal and vertical centering

It does require styling the container, to specify that a new layout system (Flex or Grid) is to be used instead of the default. While it's useful to have separate properties for the two directions, you can also use a single shorthand property to set both at once:

  .container {
    display: flex;
    place-content: center;
  }

Alternately, use only Grid on the parent and place-self on the child.

  .container {
    display: grid;
  }

  .child {
    place-self: center;
  }