The Stack Overflow Age • Hacker News Board

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#131

Post by Noumenon72 » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 3:02 PM UTC

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #62

payne92 wrote: post #19

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more…

[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site: - [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange]( https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ ) I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are bas…

I have never heard of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange, and I've been frustrated for years by how many useful recommendation questions I come across that are closed. They should put a link to Software Recommendations Stack Exchange on questions that are closed for that reason.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#132

Post by Noumenon72 » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 3:04 PM UTC

mkalygin wrote: post #129

payne92 wrote: post #19

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more…

I also noticed that simple questions somehow get higher popularity. If you ask something very specific to your problem, chances are this question won't be answered and also will be downvoted. So people rather answer "how to find an object in JS array" rather than "I have this weird error in X library, how to fix it?". But in my opinion, basic stuff is not what you face with in everyday job. It's all these unexpected…

I have never seen GitHub Issues in a search result. It seems like it is for bug reporting in personal projects. Why would it help with other people's errors?

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#133

Post by payne92 » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #108

payne92 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying about their 'decision' to prohibit 'recommendation' questions, but my point is that it doesn't make any sense. It's a distinction without a difference, as many, many questions on the site are 'recommendations' or 'how do I': https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-lib... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-i... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/100628…

Do you have any examples of such questions asked in the past... let’s say four years? The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them. The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to cu…

Examples of questions about the existence of API and library functionality in the past four years? (with recommendation answers) Sure:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49524937/fast-bipartite-...

... etc ...

I get the idea of avoiding "what's the best programming language?"-type questions, but to the point of my original comment, the application of the policy feels very uneven and therefore "oddly subjective".

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#134

Post by shagie » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 9:49 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #133

shagie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of such questions asked in the past... let’s say four years? The problem with recommendation questions is that they are very time consuming to keep curated and useful. You’ll inevitably have 50 answers of which 20 are duplicates and difficult to delete because of up votes on them. The community moderation for “just close them quickly” is much less than the community moderation necessary to cu…

Examples of questions about the existence of API and library functionality in the past four years? (with recommendation answers) Sure: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46718944/facebook-graph-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7120806/skype-python-api https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34010978/elasticsearch-h... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26305704/python-mixed-in... https://stackoverflow.com/questi…

The application of the policy depends on people with moderation abilities seeing it. The first link for example has only been seen about 50 times a month for the past 5 months.

The Skype question is a bit older Its actually 6 years older and has only been seen on average 100 times a month. The answer is "yes, look at [broken link], and [obsolete python library at source forge]". It needs some curation. Are you up to doing it? The other answer says that the answer was action in 2011... and compares it to using IE5.

The fourth link (python mixed integer linear programming) is interesting in that its three and a half years old, has only one answer and has been updated in the past 5 days. The author of that answer has done almost 20 revisions keeping it up to date since then. This is the work that needs to be done on posts to keep it useful and relevant.

Compare with the second answer to Elasticsearch HTTP API or python API:

> You may also try elasticsearch_dsl it is a high level wraper of elasticsearch.

Thats it. A lot more work is going to need to be done to that post to make it useful. That said, this isn't a "does this exist" question its a "Which technique is better for my occasion? The elasticsearch RESTful API or the python API for elastic search (elasticsearch-py)?"

The Fast bipartite matching actually matches that criteria.

The point I'm trying to make is that it takes a lot of work to keep the good questions of this sort good and useful. Otherwise, they end up like the Skype question and become worse than useless in that they make it harder to find the answer on other sources.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#135

Post by shagie » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #131

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site: - [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange]( https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ ) I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are bas…

I have never heard of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange, and I've been frustrated for years by how many useful recommendation questions I come across that are closed. They should put a link to Software Recommendations Stack Exchange on questions that are closed for that reason.

Software recommendations has a very small community. If even a small fraction of the questions that get closed as recommendation each day re-asked their question there the 9 questions a day they currently get would get lost in noise. Give [this meta post](https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/762) a read.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#136

Post by Noumenon72 » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 12:01 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #135

Noumenon72 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange, and I've been frustrated for years by how many useful recommendation questions I come across that are closed. They should put a link to Software Recommendations Stack Exchange on questions that are closed for that reason.

Software recommendations has a very small community. If even a small fraction of the questions that get closed as recommendation each day re-asked their question there the 9 questions a day they currently get would get lost in noise. Give [this meta post]( https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/a/762 ) a read.

Thank you for showing me where this had been discussed before!

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#137

Post by amai » Tue, Apr 10, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

Stack Overflow (and the Stackexchange network as a whole) is the second most important website on the internet (after Wikipedia). Thank you Joel for this.