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

701–710 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#701

Post by cracki »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #2

The decline is not surprising. I am sure AI is replacing Stackoverflow for a lot of people. And my experience with asking questions was pretty bad. I asked a few very specific questions about some deep detail in Windows and every time I got only some smug comments about my stupid question or the question got rejected outright. That while a ton of beginner questions were approved. Definitely not a very inviting club.…

Would you care to link to any of those, even ones that might appear to be deleted?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#702

Post by bazzargh »

noduerme wrote: post #658
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…

That's pretty nice ;) I once wrote this humdinger, that's still on my mostly dead personal website from 2010... one of my proudest bits of code besides my poker hand evaluator ;) The question was, how do you generate a unique number for any two positive integers, where x!=y, such that f(x,y) = f(y,x) but the resulting combined id would not be generated by any other pair of integers. What I came up with was a way to g…

It looks like you have typos? (x^2+y^2)+(sin(atan(x/y))*cos(atan(x/y))) reduces to x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2/y^2 + 1) ) - not the equation given? Tho it's easier to see that this would be symmetrical if you rearrange it to: x^2+y^2+( (xy) / (x^2+y^2) )

Also, if f(x,y) = x^2+y^2+( (x/y) / (x^2+y^2) ) then f(2,1) is 5.2 and f(1,2) is 5.1? - this is how I noticed the mistake. (the other reduction gives the same answer, 5.4, for both, by symmetry, as you suggest)

There's a simpler solution which produces integer ids (though they are large): 2^x & 2^y. Another solution is to multiply the xth and yth primes.

I only looked because I was curious how you proved it unique!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#703

Post by pvtmert »

cracki wrote: post #684
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…

What exactly do you mean by "asymptomatic"? The proper meaning of the word does not fit into what you wrote. "Asymptomatic" means you have a cold but you show none of the symptoms, hence a -symptom-atic, no symptoms.

parent is meaning asymptote as in maths where a line is approaching to a value but never touching it. maybe it was a typo or auto correct...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#704

Post by cracki »

eterm wrote: post #24
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.

It's surely both. Look at the newest questions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest Most questions have negative karma. Even if somehow that is "deserved", that's not a healthy ecosystem. All that is left of SI are clueless questioners and bitter, jaded responders. SO worked when "everyone" was new to it, and they felt energized to ask questions ( even "basic" questions, because they hadn't been asked befo…

It is not "karma". It is not to be taken personally. It represents the objective usefulness of the question, not the personal worth of the person asking it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#705

Post by janaagaard »

SO peaked long, long before LLMs came along. My personal experience is that GitHub issues took over.

You can clearly see the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. That was the final nail in the coffin.

I am still really glad that Stack Overflow saved us from experts-exchange.com - or “the hyphen site” as it is sometimes referred to.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#706

Post by wartywhoa23 »

anonu wrote: post #570

So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.

Yep, exactly. Free data grabbing honeypots like SO won't work anymore.

Please mark all locations on the map where you would hide during the uprise of the machines.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#707

Post by wtetzner »

ambicapter wrote: post #348
stackghost wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.

The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.

Where in the process of "ask question" -> "closed as duplicate" are you interacting with another human?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#708

Post by cracki »

LLMs caused this decline. Stop denying that. You don't have to defend LLMs from any perceived blame. This is not a bad thing.

The steep decline in the early months of 2023 actually started with the release of ChatGPT, which is 2022-11-30, and its gradually widening availability to (and awareness of) the public from that date. The plot clearly shows that cliff.

The gentle decline since 2016 does not invalidate this. Were it not for LLMs, the site's post rate would now probably be at around 5000 posts/day, not 300.

LLMs are to "blame" for eating all the trivial questions that would have gotten some nearly copy-pasted answer by some eager reputation points collector, or closed as a duplicate, which nets nobody any rep.

Stack Overflow is not a site for socializing. Do not mistake it for reddit. The "karma" does not mean "I hate you", it means "you haven't put the absolute minimum conceivable amount of effort into your question". This includes at least googling the question before you ask. If you haven't done that, you can't expect to impose on the free time of others.

SO has a learning curve. The site expects more from you than just to show up and start yapping. That is its nature. It is "different" because it must be. All other places don't have this expectation of quality. That is its value proposition.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#709

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

cracki wrote: post #698
bachmeier wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.

I would ascribe that to these communities evolving differently. There is no reason to assume that the popularity of LaTeX tracks the popularity of programming languages. It's a type setting system. And that doesn't even take into account communities that exist parallel to SO/SE. Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.

> Surely there exist communities today for LaTeX that have been around since before SO began its life.

Yup, TeXhax has been around since 1986 [0], and comp.text.tex has been around since 1983/1990 [1], and both are still somewhat active.

[0]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/texhax

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141lucas-usenet.pdf

Post reply on HN