481–490 of 1001 posts
I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online te…
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The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.
Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"
It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").
I have heard so many times about how people get insulted for asking questions on SO. I have never been shown it actually happening. But I have seen many examples (and been subjected to one or two myself) of crash-outs resulting from learning that the site is, by design, much more like Wikipedia than like Quora.
Quite a large fraction of questions that get closed boil down to "here's my code that doesn't work; what's wrong"? (Another large fraction doesn't even show that much effort.) The one thing that helped a lot with this was the Staging Ground, which provided a place for explicit workshopping of questions and explanation of the site's standards and purpose, without the temptation to answer. But the site staff didn't understand what they had, not at all.
Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge? A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources. However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my pro…
Has AI summarization led to people either getting their answer from a search engine directly, and failing that, just giving up?
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Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"
Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/
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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.
It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.
Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.
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 y…
If they answered correctly, yes.
My point is that providing _actual knowledge_ is by itself so much more valuable compared to _simulated knowledge_, in particular when that simulated knowledge is hyper realistic and wrong.
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The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?
More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level). The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.
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Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
I think PP means it's more in the tone and passive-aggressive behavior ("closed as duplicate") than somebody explicitly articulating that. It's a paradox of poor communication that you cannot prove with certainty that there is an intent behind it. There is always the argument that the receiver should have known better (and bother checking local news at Alpha Centauri).
It is explicitly understood to be doing a favour to the OP: an already-existing answer to a common question is provided instantly.
Cool, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344599 Wonder why my submission wasn't featured and this one went to #1 immediately ... oh wait I actually know :^)!