Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stackoverflow Outage

stackstatus.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 56 posts

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#41

Post by ecshafer »

nikanj wrote: post #29

The crew that runs SO must be aware of the tone in this thread, right? There always seems to be a strong consensus whenever SO is mentioned on HN, and it’s always very negative. Why don’t they change the moderation rules, if the supposed target audience is constantly frustrated with them?

They should have kicked out every mod years ago.

Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#42

Post by arnaudsm »

Now that SO is almost dead, how will the AI labs train their LLMs on all the programming edge cases it used to document?

Will synthetic data and documentation RAG really be enough? Or will we be stuck at 2022 debugging knowledge forever?

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#43

Post by fooqux »

_mocha wrote: post #36

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

I have a love/hate relationship with the site, and I'm likewise conflicted by its eventual demise.

On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#44

Post by LtWorf »

protocolture wrote: post #14
Etheryte wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? This was always Stackoverflow's bread and butter, and people who only use it as noob search tend to miss that fact. SO can be a tough crowd, yes, but mostly it's people who didn't read the rules before posting who get burnt. That aside,…

>I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? Not Stackoverflow, because all my questions are either ignored or closed, even when extremely detailed and unique.

> even when extremely detailed and unique.

or so you claim.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#45

Post by Waterluvian »

fooqux wrote: post #43
_mocha wrote: post #36

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

I have a love/hate relationship with the site, and I'm likewise conflicted by its eventual demise. On one hand, it's an incredible place full of smart people and has some of the best rabbit holes to fall into. On the other hand, portions of the site (programming among them) has the worst culture imaginable and has likely turned as many people off from learning as it has helped.

Not only does GPT lack the pretty nasty culture of SO, it’s so much faster to work with.

I anticipate SO will go into decline and get worse as a result. I wonder how much GPT will suffer without it as a source.

In a way, they’re kind of a match made in heaven: domain experts who share experience and knowledge not found in the user docs alone, cleaned of the antisocial nastiness usually filtered by tech writers and PR peeps.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#46

Post by BrenBarn »

I find it somewhat sad to see so many people bag on StackOverflow as if it were a total failure. It's true that there were some negatives, but the brusque attitude and rapid question closures were often in response to a genuine flood of junky, repetitive questions. In its time it was unparalleled and even today there's still useful content on there. I also think its rep system is something a lot of sites could learn from in terms of how to gradually increase user privileges.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#47

Post by BrenBarn »

_mocha wrote: post #36

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

I agree it's sad. There were a lot of positive aspects to the SO community.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#48

Post by _ea1k »

sien wrote: post #6

This is an ill formed question. Stackoverflow may be up or down. Please return later when you are able to determine exactly where your problem is and have read all the documentation on Unix, C and the internet.

I thought about making a joke like this, but I was afraid that it'd be closed as a dupe.

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#49

Post by rafark »

Etheryte wrote: post #9
John7878781 wrote: post #3

Stack Overflow is no longer relevant. Today, you can just ask Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT instead, and you don’t have to deal with the usual condescension.

I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? This was always Stackoverflow's bread and butter, and people who only use it as noob search tend to miss that fact. SO can be a tough crowd, yes, but mostly it's people who didn't read the rules before posting who get burnt. That aside,…

> the docs don't cut it

Yet. By the time stackoverlow shuts down, AIs will be powerful enough to take data from docs or just from the source code alone. I mean the new version of opus is pretty good at understanding my front end source code. I think that should be the goal of AIs (that they are so advanced they don’t need to read code examples from a third party website like stackoverflow)

Re: Stackoverflow Outage

#50

Post by protocolture »

LtWorf wrote: post #44
protocolture wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? Not Stackoverflow, because all my questions are either ignored or closed, even when extremely detailed and unique.

> even when extremely detailed and unique. or so you claim.

Well my last attempt turned out to be a vendor issue. It was officially acknowledged by a vendor support rep. It had to do with their unique method of populating a whitelist with DNS entries, and weird response chain to blocks in that state.

I read through the backlog, ensured I had completely exhausted every other avenue (short of 3 more weeks of yelling at one of the involved vendors for information about how they were performing their whitelisting) and had available captures for network and application, full reproducibility steps and details of everything that had been interrogated. I even remember linking similar issues, and explaining how I ruled out their causes.

In fact I am still relatively confident that the way mobile browsers were responding to the bug, probably constitutes a bug in itself but honestly, cant be assed to pursue it.

When enough time has passed I will probably produce a blog about the issue, so it can be digested by the next iteration of the troubleshooting machine. But I really dont feel compelled to provide further data to the stackoverflow community directly considering their complete lack of response. Even closing it as a duplicate of an existing issue would have been helpful, but it wasn't a duplicate so it was just ignored.

Post reply on HN