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

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

data.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#591

Post by [deleted] »

matsemann wrote: post #516
namanyayg wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar beautiful experience where an experienced programmer answered one of my elementary JavaScript typing questions when I was just starting to learn programming. He didn't need to, but he gave the most comprehensive answer possible attacking the question from various angles. He taught me the value of deeply understanding theoretical and historical aspects of computing to understand why some parts of progr…

Had a similar experience. Asked a question about a new language feature in java 8 (parallell streams), and one of the language designers (Goetz) answered my question about the intention of how to use it. An LLM couldn't have done the same. Someone would have to ask the question and someone answer it for indexing by the LLM. If we all just ask questions in closed chats, lots of new questions will go unanswered as thos…

[deleted]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#592

Post by braiamp »

digitalPhonix wrote: post #501
braiamp wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-ssh-c... Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH agent protocol? > Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-site resources

> The community is reviewing whether to reopen this question as of 36 mins ago.

Asking where in the documentation is something is always tricky, specially because it usually means "I didn't read the documentation clearly". Also...

You went and deleted the question immediately after it was closed only to undelete it 2 hours ago (as the moment of writing)[0]. After it was closed, you had an opportunity to edit the question to have it looked at again but choose instead to delete it so that nobody will go hunting for that (once deleted, we presume that it was for a good reason). So, yeah, obviously you will be able to show that as example because you didn't give anyone the opportunity to look at it again.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/79530539/timeline

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#593

Post by eru »

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…

I have a similar story about an interesting little advance in computing that I haven't formally published anywhere, but it's at https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/171695/50292

The question boils down to: can you simulate the bulk outcome of a sequence of priority queue operations (insert and delete-minimum) in linear time, or is O(n log n) necessary. Surprisingly, linear time is possible.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#594

Post by threeducks »

vintagedave wrote: post #4

Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?! I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.

The last data point is from January 2026, which has just begun. If you extrapolate the 321 questions by multiplying by 10 to account for the remaining 90 % of the month, you get to within the same order of magnitude as December 2025 (3862). The small difference is probably due to the turn of the year.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#595

Post by braiamp »

gyomu wrote: post #503
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…

> 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 would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.

Programming is not a static field in the answers side, but it's in the question side. "How to print characters on a terminal with python?" is the same problem today as it was 25 years ago. The answer changed but the problem remained. That's what people saying that programming isn't static is missing: the problem space grows significantly slower than the solution space.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#596

Post by progval »

Nition wrote: post #525
keepamovin wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentr…

I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project. To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's als…

There is https://www.wikifunctions.org/

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#597

Post by braiamp »

throw-12-16 wrote: post #477
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…

Your post formatting is making this very difficult to read

I am aware, I tried to do some kind of bullet point as I've seen other posts, but I don't understand how to "activate it"

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#598

Post by PeterStuer »

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…

SO in 2013 was a different world from the SO of the 2020's. In the latter world your post would have been moderator classified as 'duplicate' of some basic textbook copy/pasted method posted by a karma grinding CS student and closed.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#599

Post by lelanthran »

keepamovin wrote: post #408
erikig wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentr…

> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.

I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.

A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.

Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).

Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.

PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.

(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#600

Post by nomilk »

junto wrote: post #302

I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s. My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly…

Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].

The top voted response points out that SO are [2]:

> destroying a valuable feature for users.

Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220

Post reply on HN