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Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

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Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#21

Post by inglor_cz »

CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a pers…

That seems to me like saying that Google Search is insignificant because it only shows content from elsewhere.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#22

Post by dd_roger »

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#24

Post by hprotagonist »

rohan1024 wrote: post #16

I wonder if we could implement a decentralized version of SO. It can be a CLI app since it is used by developers only. The app can keep all question/answers of topic relevant to the developer locally. This will allow developer to find answers offline as well. Since it is only text data it should not take more than a GB.

with a human in the loop, this is IRC.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#25

Post by rovr138 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #21
CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a pers…

That seems to me like saying that Google Search is insignificant because it only shows content from elsewhere.

Google isn’t repeating as us from memory where it could loose information/context, it’s quoting verbatim.

Also, Google can be annoying when it tries to be smart and the item you really need isn’t shown due to past behavior (the bubble it creates)

Maybe that should be shown as prominent/original rank to the query done. But whatever.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#26

Post by tartoran »

CryptoGhost wrote: post #18

None. Most of the content on Stack Overflow is just people repeating what they heard from a more authoritative source looking for some internet points. (and often when it gets repeated it loses accuracy, context, and a real understanding of the issue at hand) There is a small subset of content that is original and not posted elsewhere but its not that common to be worried about. Often quality answers come from a pers…

There are a lot of answers to questions that authoritative sources don’t make the best job of explaining. Also, the more ways of explaining something the better in my opinion. We don’t all think on the same frequency and the more answers the more likely to find one on your own understanding. SO helped me many times when I got stuck on something. When learning something new I wouldn’t go directly there, Id use a tutorial or some authotitative reference

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#28

Post by shripadk »

aayala wrote: post #2

I don’t use stack overflow to much, I usually prefer documentation or blogs

I prefer going straight to Github issues if documentation fails me. But yes, the more familiar I get with the stack, the lesser I have come to rely on Stackoverflow.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#29

Post by EamonnMR »

dd_roger wrote: post #22

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

Stack overflow is very useful if someone already asked your question back when it was still accepting new questions.

Re: Ask HN: What if Stack Overflow suddenly decides to shut down?

#30

Post by langitbiru »

netsharc wrote: post #11
nonameiguess wrote: post #8

The US intelligence community actually keeps a clone of Stack Overflow that is updated every 12 hours and copied to servers on the classified version of the Internet so that people developing classified software can use it without needing to turn around to their unclassified workstations. I'm sure they're not alone in this, so the entirety of the answers there could be restored from mirrors or just used from the mirr…

How do you know that info in the first paragraph? On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way. Although I guess when you work for the spooks, they could figure out how to mask your IP that each query would come from a different IP from the world (basically I'…

> On top of that security, it'd also be interesting to monitor what someone (based on their IP and browser fingerprint) was looking up on SO, you could probably figure out what they were working on that way.

When the security incident happened last year on SO, SO team monitored what information the attacker searched in SO. So I guess some people want some privacy in searching information in SO.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/25/a-deeper-dive-into-our...

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