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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#131

Post by TillE »

_ea1k wrote: post #77
SamBorick wrote: post #30

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

It really depends on what you are doing, in my experience. I often ask for code when I know there will be a decent amount of difficult to remember boilerplate. It will do a decent enough job to save some typing and get me a framework to work within. It is pretty good at writing little DTOs based upon a sample JSON too. But harder questions for poorly documented libraries will exhibit a lot of the same challenges as G…

Same experience: if you're trying to do something unusual (an obscure library, or a task that has minimal documentation and few usage examples in the wild), the results are usually bad, and it will very frequently try to call functions which don't exist.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#132

Post by shriek »

anamexis wrote: post #35
shriek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the answers that are technically correct but "weird" In ChatGPT's instance they can be downright wrong and I have to verify if what it's saying is indeed correct on many occasions.

I don't find this to be the case for answers I would otherwise be getting from Stack Overflow. I don't think I've experienced ChatGPT being incorrect about these kinds of straightforward programming questions.

Perhaps you and I have different level of trust for ChatGPT but I have to double verify its responses on topics that are unfamiliar to me still.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#133

Post by mlinhares »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #40

Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before? Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulat…

As a longtime contributor and moderator on SO this is, unfortunately, very true. The community has always been toxic, being a newbie on SO requires a really thick skin or being willing to withstand a lot of abuse to use the site (if you're asking new questions).

The fact that there's very no off topic also makes it nearly impossible to "build" a community out of the site as well, it's all too focused on just questions and answers and I feel no need to go back to talk to anyone because I've never met anyone at SO while I made many longtime friends in other forums.

It also saddens me that SO has killed all these smaller and more or less insular communities, i see very little movement on the old mailing lists and forums that are still up, all questions moved to SO in a way or another (even for non-English speaking communities) so I'm not sure if the site has been positive for the tech community in general.

I had so much coaching and help from people in the local and regional communities I was a part of when I was in college and later starting my career and now there's nothing like it around anymore because SO sucked all the oxygen around them. Not sure where i'd be if I was starting right now.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#134

Post by karaterobot »

sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

Who shows contempt for SO? I don't see much of that, personally. Whenever it goes down, I see a lot of jokes about how nobody can do their job. The linked article agrees with you that it's "one of the greatest compendia of human knowledge ever produced".

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#135

Post by sanderjd »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

I use chatgpt (and copilot) for this same kind of stuff.

I don't at all think it's making me dumber. I'm spending more of my time learning and doing the far more interesting and creative domain-specific parts of my work. That is, it's making me smarter by freeing up time to focus on things that matter a lot more. Just like any other tool I've learned to use to automate away drudgery in the past.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#136

Post by birdstheword5 »

sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in.

I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#137

Post by sanderjd »

layer8 wrote: post #124
laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

The benefit of “sifting through answers” on StackOverflow is that you learn about different perspectives and about possible caveats. You tend to get a more complete picture. At least for me, that makes human-discussed content much more valuable. It’s a bit like reading HN comment threads vs. asking an LLM for its take on a submission.

In theory this is right... But in practice I don't find that SO actually does a particularly good job of this. But nothing really does, unfortunately. When I want this kind of nuance, I end up digging through threads in all kinds of different places (including but not limited to SO) for ages.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#138

Post by sanderjd »

croes wrote: post #81
laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

Wouldn't you normally chose the answer marked as answer marked on Stack Overflow or the one with the most points? ChatGPT doesn't offer that kind of user feedback, so you have no measure if the answer is valid if you don't know the topic well enough

This is something that does concern me for people who are new to software engineering and haven't developed any "taste". But for me, I can sniff out bad or just mediocre answers from the bot and ask it for better ones, or go seek them out elsewhere (like on SO).

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#139

Post by hobs »

One thing that's interesting to me about the consistent complaints about moderators is that SO moderators are elected and only really held accountable by other moderators.

I almost was a moderator for one of the SO sister sites, but I thought it was just too much thankless work, and I can understand why it yields petulant people who would rather see less content that conforms to their expectations than to create and make space for new ways of doing things.

The content itself is an attractant to people like that, once you have an established corpus to corral you perceive ownership and want to "protect" it.

I genuinely don't know if there's any way to fix what I see as inherent problems in online communities, that generate "open source" knowledge at least.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#140

Post by sanderjd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91
Waterluvian wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people (maybe even most people) who write code, programming is just a tool. I know a lot of people who program, and it's the least enjoyable, least interesting part of their job. We need to be mindful, and quite careful, not to adopt an attitude of, "if you don't love it, and it's not your passion, stay out and let the "real programmers" do the work." I absolutely despise painting. But I like doing home reno…

I concede that this is an entirely fair point, and one that I did not consider (mostly because we're on "Hacker News".

Ironically, I think this is more true of "Hacker News" than on other more programming-focused forums. I would describe the ethos here as "innovative problem-solving using computer technology". Whether that involves programming is totally beside the point. It has largely been the case since this site launched that most of the solutions do involve programming, but there's no reason they must. I think lots of non-programmer entrepreneur and product manager types hang out here, because of exactly this.
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