Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time • Hacker News Board

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#461

Post by zahlman » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

erikig wrote: post #262

0xfaded wrote: post #225

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows: With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too.

And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#462

Post by halapro » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #261

palata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.

The dumbest part of SO is how the accepted answer would often be bad, and sometimes someone had posted a better answer after the fact, and if the all-powerful moderators had the power to update it, they sure never did. Likewise, there were often better insights in comments. Apparently if you have the right mod powers, you can just edit an answer (such as the accepted one) to make it correct, but that always struck me…

> took gamification way too far

I disagree, I always thought it SO did a great job with it. The only part I would have done differently would be to cap the earnable points per answer. @rndusr124 shouldn't have moderation powers just because his one and only 2009 answer got 3589 upvotes.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#463

Post by znpy » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

etamponi wrote: post #49

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…

> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.

Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that.

Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic.

Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#464

Post by gfhifd42 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #438

gfhifd42 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Well I've been around here longer than you Prove it. Use your main account, you coward.

I don't have anything to prove to you.

You are the toxicity I'm talking about. You've added zero value to the discussion. I've offered value.

You attack my account age and I've already said why it's not old.

Because idgaf.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#465

Post by JohnBooty » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

mlinhares wrote: post #384

brunoborges wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a produ…

"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".

    world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs

I believe the parent poster was clearly and specifically talking about software documentation that was strong and LLM consumption-friendly, not "everything"

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#466

Post by al_borland » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:51 AM UTC

brunoborges wrote: post #266

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a produ…

If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out.

I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#467

Post by achille » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

0xfaded wrote: post #434

achille wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for sharing that, it was simple, neat, elegant. this sent me down a rabbit hole -- I asked a few models to solve that same problem, then followed up with a request to optimize it so it runs more efficiently. chatgpt & gemini's solutions were buggy, but claude solved it, and actually found a solution that is even more efficient. It only needs to compute sqrt once per iteration. It's more complex however. yours…

Thanks for pushing this, I've never gone beyond "zero" shotting the prompt (is it still called zero shot with search?) As a curiosity, it looks like r and q are only ever used as r/q, and therefore a sqrt could be saved by computing rq = sqrt((rx rx + ry ry) / (qx qx + qy qy)). The if q For the other sqrt, maybe try std::hypot Finally, for your test set, could you had some highly eccentric cases such as a=1 and b=100…

Nice, that worked. It's even faster.

                 yours  yours+opt  claude
  ---------------------------------------
  Time (ns)        40.9      36.4    38.7
  sqrt/iter           3         2       1
  Instructions      207       187     241

Edit: it looks like the claude algorithm fails at high eccentricities. Gave chatgpt pro more context and it worked for 30min and only made marginal improvement on yours, by doing 2 steps then taking a third local step.

https://gist.github.com/achille/23680e9100db87565a8e67038797...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#468

Post by zahlman » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.

Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.)

The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others.

And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.

I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate.

Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#469

Post by csomar » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

culi wrote: post #447

csomar wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.

Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you

I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back later? I didn't.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#470

Post by al_borland » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #376

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones: 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions. 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times than I can count.