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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#751

Post by CuriouslyC »

noduerme wrote: post #728
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…

>>what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the resp…

Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#752

Post by HappyPanacea »

0xfaded wrote: post #479
achille wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Haha nice, hanging in there by a thread

Do you think you can extend it to distance from a point to an ellipsoid?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#753

Post by RobinL »

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 (…

I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull the spark repo into the working area and consult the source code/cross reference against what you're trying to do.

Once technique I've used successfully is to do this 'manually' to ensure codex/Claude code can grep around the libraries I'm using

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#754

Post by noduerme »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #751
noduerme wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the resp…

Labs are spending billions on data set curation and RL from human experts to fill in the areas where they're currently weak. It's higher quality data than SO, the only issue is that it's not public.

Can you explain what you're saying in greater depth?

Are you saying that the reason there is no human expertise on the internet anymore is that everyone with knowledge is now under contract to train AIs?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#756

Post by sebastiennight »

djfergus wrote: post #235
specproc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…

> I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing list? Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate? And if they don’t have the experience that is just a question of tokens?

> Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate?

I think the name "Mixture of Experts" might be one of the most misleading labels in our industry. No, that is not at all what MoE models do.

Think of it rather like, instead of having one giant black box, we now have multiple smaller opaque boxes of various colors, and somehow (we don't really know how) we're able to tell if your question is "yellow" or "purple" and send that to the purple opaque box to get an answer.

The result is that we're able to use less resources to solve any given question (by activating smaller boxes instead of the original huge one). The problem is we don't know in advance which questions are of which color: it's not like one "expert" knows CSS and the other knows car engines.

It's just more floating point black magic, so "How do I center a div" and "what's the difference between a V6 and V12" are both "yellow" questions sent to the same box/expert, while "How do I vertically center a div" is a red question, and "what's the most powerful between a V6 and V12" is a green question which activates a completely different set of weights.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#757

Post by shagie »

computersuck wrote: post #673
computersuck wrote: post #667

Someone needs to archive the entirety of StackOverflow and make it available over torrent so that it can be preserved when the site shuts down. Urgently.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange Found it

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange_20250930

> As of (and including) the 2025-06-30 data dump, Stack Exchange has started including watermarking/data poisoning in the data. At the time of writing, this does not appear to apply to the 2025-09-30 data dump. The format(s), the dates for affected data dumps, and by extension how the garbage data can be filtered out, are described in this community-compiled list: https://github.com/LunarWatcher/se-data-dump-transformer/blo.... If the 2025-09-30 data dump turns out to be poisoned as well, that's where an update will be added. For obvious reasons, the torrent cannot be updated once created.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#758

Post by ItsMonkk »

josephg wrote: post #305
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…

> 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…

The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution.

If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#759

Post by jappgar »

nospice wrote: post #35
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by…

It's funny that people blame the site for this.

That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#760

Post by sotix »

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.

By the time my generation was ready to start using SO, the gatekeeping was so severe that we never began asking questions. Look at the graph. The number of questions was in decline before 2020. It was already doomed because it lost the plot and killed any valuable culture. LLMs were a welcome replacement for something that was not fun to use. LLMs are an unwelcome replacement for many other things that are a joy to engage with.

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