821–830 of 1001 posts
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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.
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Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems…
His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall
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The typo is most likely the extra /, in (x/y)/(x^2+y^2) instead of (xy)/(x^2+y^2). `2^x & 2^y ...is the & a bitwise operator...???? That would produce a unique ID? That would be very interesting, is that provable?` Yes, & is bitwise and. It's just treating your players as a bit vector. It's not so much provable as a tautology, it is exactly the property that players x and y are present. It's not _useful_ tho because…
At the time, at least, there was no way to index it for all 8 players involved in a hand. Each action taken would be indexed to the player that took it, and I'd need to sweep up adjacent actions for other players in each hand, but only the players who were consistently in lots of hands with that player . I've heard of bloom filters (now, not in 2012)... makes some sense. But the idea was to find some vector that made…
But to lay it out: every positive integer is a sum of powers of 2. (this is obvious, since every number is a sum of 1s, ie 2^0). But also every number is a sum of _distinct_ powers of 2: if there are 2 identical powers 2^a+2^a in the sum, then they are replaced by 2^(a+1), this happens recursively until there are no more duplicated powers of 2.
It remains to show that each number has a unique binary representation, ie that there are no two numbers x=2^x1+2^x2+... and y=2^y1+2^y2+... that have the same sum, x=y, but from different powers. Suppose we have a smallest such number, and x1 y1 are the largest powers in each set. Then x1 != y1 because then we can subtract it from both numbers and get an _even smaller_ number that has distinct representations, a contradiction. Then either x1 =2^y1>=2^(x1+1)>x, a contradiction.
or, tl;dr just dealing with the case of 2 powers: we want to disprove that there exists a,b,c,d such that
2^a + 2^b = 2^c + 2^d, a>b, c>d, and (a,b) != (c,d).
Suppose a = c, then subtract 2^a from both sides and we have 2^b = 2^d, so b=d, a contradiction.
Suppose a>c; then a >= c+1.
2^c + 2^d so
2^c + 2^d a contradiction.
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> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 ) and w…
You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us". Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually empha…
You misunderstand.
People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.
Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.
> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.
I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.
> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension
I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.
As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?
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> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology. This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times…
Then you're doing it wrong? I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source. Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain wh…
You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it.
They're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them.
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. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have h…
Multiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question that was answering a different question.
Even when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and described how it differs from mine.
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> Moderators used to edit my posts and reword what i wrote, which is unacceptable. My posts were absolutely peaceful and not inflammatory. 99.9% probability the people who made those edits a) were not moderators ; b) were acting completely in accordance with established policy (please read: "Why do clear, accurate, appropriately detailed posts still get edited?" https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ) Why d…
The tone of this answer explains everything why people fled SO as soon as they possibly could.
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> 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.
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It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality. > It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because…
> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise. If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read…
> No, they literally cannot.
You missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate.
So it had answer, just to a different mildly related question.
LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods.
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Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented. One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever…
This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers.
Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.