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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#151

Post by mvdtnz »

zahlman wrote: post #110
NBJack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to t…

If the entire internet is telling you you're hostile, aggressive and hard to work with it would pay to stop explaining why you're right and start looking inwards.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#152

Post by 1123581321 »

zahlman wrote: post #113
1123581321 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.

They can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.

Yes, that’s part of it, but it can also correctly reason the language is designed to be hard to understand. If you try this exercise, it’ll list its reasoning for what it thinks each unfamiliar piece of syntax might be, and one of its approaches is to bring in analogues to other languages, including other esoterica attempts. If you give it something more inventive, it’ll reason its way to other academic fields to come up with solutions.

It’s a good check to make sure you haven’t accidentally made something too simple or similar to another language, too; that’ll be spotted immediately.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#153

Post by bfung »

tevon wrote: post #59
bfung wrote: post #10

Where will training data come from for new tech & programming languages if SO dies?

All the same places it comes from for human programmers before a language has many answers on SO. - Documentation - Open source projects using it - Github issues - Source code - Blogs - Youtube videos The list goes on

To add a bit more nuance, SO has a question-answer type format, which leads very well into prompt-rely format to train these chat applications. Most of the other sources do not, except for Github issues maybe. Without this question-answer format, there'll be a need for a bigger data labeling effort to train LLMs on new stuff, no?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#154

Post by amy214 »

mnky9800n wrote: post #89
irrational wrote: post #75

> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site…

Yes I felt the same around then. It seemed like stack overflow was sending the message to not ask questions anymore. It was really weird.

people who own walled gardens often get the idea in their head to prune up the trees a little, make them elegant looking and pretty, that's moderation, deletion, banning,etc. they get a good feeling pruning the tree, making something beautiful, moment of joy, thinking that such a beauticious little garden they've made will make it all the more appealing to visitors and potential garden supporters.

some have a tendency to go overboard with this thinking, only to discover that a heavily pruned tree is now a dead tree, now finding themselves in dead tree garden.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#155

Post by soraminazuki »

datavirtue wrote: post #131
myvoiceismypass wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist

Get a good service. Running it on your old gaming machine?

Maybe at least learn the difference between a web service and a local application before getting carried away by hype.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#156

Post by outcoldman »

It is a bit sad. And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with.

Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class.

I do believe the value of StackOverflow was only about people who were lazy enough to read the documentation of the language/framework they were trying to use. I used to be active on StackOverflow back in the days, but in the last 10 years the only value I saw in it was if I needed to get back to some language to just find an answer on how to write a for loop in that specific language (swift vs go vs ...).

I personally do not believe there is much knowledge base on StackOverflow. In most of my questions to "google" for the last 10 years, very rarely would I be directed to StackOverflow for the right answer.

There are a lot of complicated questions on StackOverflow, but the site was flooded by people asking and answering basic questions about programming. And people who are there just to get some karma.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#157

Post by kamaal »

outcoldman wrote: post #156

It is a bit sad. And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with. Looking at my profile since 14 years ago, the most upvoted answer that I solved was about a basic question of how to specify fields properly when you serialize JSON into a C# class. I do believe the value of Stack…

>>And obviously the reason why it sees such a decline is because AI (ChatGPT and similar) took the job of answering the basic questions about programming that StackOverflow used to help with.

A big reason why AI is replacing these things. A big part is the experience itself. There are quite a few people who have have been repulsed due to the smugness, or other wise having their questions marked duplicate/irrelevant/stupid etc.

AI is also pretty much instant. You can also talk to it like you are talking to a person.

The killer AI feature!---> AI listens, without judging you.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#158

Post by NBJack »

zahlman wrote: post #110
NBJack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to t…

> "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself.

Your response to what was intended as a light-hearted joke tells me how passionate you are about the site. For what it's worth, thanks for all the time you've taken with a genuine interest in helping those in need.

Evaluating how much effort a user has put into their research before a post is really, really tricky, and difficult to quantify. I also know, first hand, the things that seem obvious with the experience I have aren't always the same way others (particularly beginners) see the same problem. For the (few) areas I feel remotely qualified to help in, there are hundreds of others that humble me. Getting a question effectively shut down as a duplicate (with seemingly little recourse) has been both frustrating and disheartening to the point I often just continued my journey elsewhere.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#159

Post by goobie »

zahlman wrote: post #134
palata wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions I see that you just don't hear the complaints. I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions. Because they usually can . There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers. Then when they finally…

Antisocial people flood the site with low quality answers to low quality questions and not indexing everything to the web is just too hard.. Imagine if every town and school was filled with the same pricks? Your kids are stupid and don't understand PhD level research so they should shut up.

It's all very logical for an older time when global communication was the kind of thing you needed to reserve for the top researchers as your total capacity was less than humanity needed. But now you are just repeating the mantras of older generations in an antisocial way.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#160

Post by fernirello »

louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

I've got valuable advice from SO over the years. There's overlap with LLMs, sure, but it's frequent to have questions that have no answers published anywhere on the web; SO brings people who know out of the woodwork, who create an explanation that didn't exist before. A couple days ago, someone in retrocomputing got to bank-switch a 1983 Radio Shack box... that kind of stuff wasn't published anywhere, until a guy who used to write games for that box answered that question on SO.
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