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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#461

Post by raverbashing »

Const-me wrote: post #447
raverbashing wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely But even with pristine MSDN documentation and lots of (pre-SO) googling some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced). I think tools also evolved and it's not surprising that "HTML" won, even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes

> some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced). Modern SO doesn’t help with hard problems either, such questions often closed as “too broad”. > even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes C++ is just too low level for GUI. Look at WPF or UWP, both are miles ahead of HTML even with modern webdev stuff like react, but they work fast. I think the main reason why HTML won is Apple,…

> such questions often closed as “too broad”

Oh my questions were very specific usually

(the hardest one I remember was how to put a borderless window inside another window (because it could change) and making it all work. Think some good amount of win32 quirkiness was needed for that to work the way I wanted)

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#462

Post by Chris2048 »

chii wrote: post #347
jasode wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. This is incorrect and a misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the unpaid volunteer answerers who scan the queue of questions to look for interesting things to answer. The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time.[1][2] >Search engines will filter them for us. The vol…

> correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. yep. The answerers are definitly more valuable, because it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place, and there's only the reward of intellectual stimulation for doing so. The questioner are not as valuable, because asking questions is easy. Asking a good question is hard, but the majority of questions aren't h…

> it's hard to actually answer questions in the first place

Only if it's a hard question, and answered correctly.

There is negative value in, say, closing a question as a dupe, that is not a dupe.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#463

Post by tsukurimashou »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

You mean people actually had to think a little when they encountered a problem and had to read the docs, wew hard times

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#464

Post by Const-me »

scardine wrote: post #422
Nition wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love it when you find someone who asked the same question you have, it was locked as a duplicate so no-one could help, and the question it's a "duplicate" of isn't the same.

You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).

I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand.

Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account.

I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote many more messages in chats, edited the question so I’m 100% sure it fits the site.

It got reopened, then closed within days, with the exact same reason “too broad”. https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981

This discouraged me from answering questions on that site. I don’t do web development, I don’t program Java, JS or Python. But the majority of SO community are web developers. The questions I find good and interesting, they find too broad and unclear what’s asked.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#465

Post by Const-me »

raverbashing wrote: post #461
Const-me wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some problems were just very hard (or I was just inexperienced). Modern SO doesn’t help with hard problems either, such questions often closed as “too broad”. > even QT looks like cutting a tree with a kitchen knife sometimes C++ is just too low level for GUI. Look at WPF or UWP, both are miles ahead of HTML even with modern webdev stuff like react, but they work fast. I think the main reason why HTML won is Apple,…

> such questions often closed as “too broad” Oh my questions were very specific usually (the hardest one I remember was how to put a borderless window inside another window (because it could change) and making it all work. Think some good amount of win32 quirkiness was needed for that to work the way I wanted)

It doesn’t matter to the downvoters. Here’s a deleted question closed as “too broad”: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 Copy-pasting below.

What is the best way in C++ to calculate the coordinate of a rectangle (hyper-rectangle) in n-dimension? I have dimensions of the rectangle in a 1d vector like {1d_min , 1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max, ...., nd_min,nd_max}. For example, in 2d the dimensions are {1d_min,1d_max ,2d_min,2d_max}. And the coordinates will be {1d_min,2d_min},{1d_min,2d_max},{1d_max,2d_min},{1d_max,2d_max}. However, I want it for n-dimension.

For people with even minimal background in geometry, it’s obvious the OP wants coordinates of all vertices of an axis aligned hyper-rectangle. A good question in my book, and it has very simple and elegant answer which I wrote there (using bits from an integer vertex index to select min or max coordinates).

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#466

Post by bhandziuk »

another-dave wrote: post #435
jasode wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the problem is just repetitive, boring questions how about the power users just use the API to filter them out? Are you talking about the JSON api? ( https://api.stackexchange.com/docs ) If so, there's no obvious API call where one can put a "not boring" filter as a parameter. Do you have source code examples of what you're suggesting? >The power to ruin someone else's experience is a heavy-handed Right but there…

Create a "beginner" tag and then let people annoyed by beginner questions filter them out. Or allow people to filter out questions from askers with less than N reputation. These solutions probably have their own flaws, but if there was an appetite to be more beginner friendly geberally you could probably road test them a bit more.

Who enforces the beginner tag? Will people be offended by the beginner tag, too? Just seems like it's the same problem but with a different name.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#467

Post by ahaferburg »

1_player wrote: post #98
herodotus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.

It happens, people are a little trigger happy on the Internet, but HN is a forum utopia compared to StackOverflow or Reddit. In my experience, on here people downvote when the answer is either off topic/spam or false with regards to the topic. Sometimes some good comments are greyed out because the profile has been (wrongly) shadowbanned, but the "vouch" feature is great for that. EDIT: is HN so good compared to the…

People in this thread downvoted comments that express unpopular opinions. Even factually wrong posts should not be suppressed but corrected/challenged in a reply. As the rules state, assume good faith.

Downvotes should be reserved for trolls and low effort posts.

I agree that HN is much nicer than SO or Reddit, but that is largely due to the moderators here.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#468

Post by ahaferburg »

mumblemumble wrote: post #40

I think that the fundamental problem with the downvote, pretty much anywhere that has it, is that it's physically structured as being the inverse of an upvote, and then there are some community guidelines saying, "This isn't actually the inverse, it has some additional semantics associated with it." In SO's specific case, the problem it's ostensibly trying to solve is indicating that the question, as asked, needs wor…

Both downvotes and close votes should open a discussion, not be presented as a verdict. It should always be phrased as a question, e. g. "Have you seen this question over there, does the provided answer help you?" And the default assumption should be that no, the other question is significantly different, and the asker has good reason to post another question.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#469

Post by blaser-waffle »

Annatar wrote: post #455
cptaj wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preach, my brother! SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity. I wish every profession out there could have a resource like this. People often share negative experiences asking question in SO but really, I can't fathom how that could happen. Just follow the composition rules, take a few minutes to write and research your question and you will be fine. Don't be so lazy. If you have a question that hasn't alrea…

"SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity." I think it's time to pick up my toys and go home. And never return here.

That's probably for the best

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#470

Post by setr »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #413
wruza wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precio…

But doesn't that just mean the closure of duplicates is irrelevant? You're already getting a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. So the two possibilities are - filter them or go away.

Thats what closing is, isn’t it? One answerer recognizes it as closable, so no future answerer has to deal with it.
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