Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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

Shog9 wrote: post #456

Aurornis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in…

Post by mightybyte » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:59 AM UTC

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…

Post by zahlman » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

lurk2 wrote: post #426

josephg wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this: 30…

Post by throw-12-16 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 6:05 AM UTC

braiamp wrote: post #269

Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these: - The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells yo…

Post by 0xfaded » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 6:09 AM UTC

achille wrote: post #467

0xfaded wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/236…