Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so yo…
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be poste…
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#942Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing. What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability. Then again, we live in tim…
It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences. I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay.…
My argument is that it stops being a community when it becomes a business.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#943Earlier quoted context omitted.
mm. I did see this when I was figuring it out. The sorting first was the specific thing I wanted to avoid, because it would've been by far the most expensive part of the operation when looking at a million poker hands and trying to target several players for potential collusion.
you're only sorting players within a single hand. so a list of under 10 items? thats trivial
So the goal was to generate signatures for 2, 3 or more players and then be able to reference anything in the history table that had that combination of players without doing a full scan and cross-joining the same table multiple times. Specifically to avoid having ten index columns in the history table for each seat's player. This was also prior to JSON querying in mysql. I needed a way to either bake in the combinations at write time, or to generate a unique id at read time in a way that wouldn't require me to query whether playerIDs were [1201,1803,2903] or [1803,1201,2903] etc. Just a one-shot unique signature for that combination of players that could always evaluate the same regardless of the order. If that makes sense. There were other considerations and this was not exactly how it worked, since only certain players were flagged and I was looking for patterns when those particular players were on the same table. It wasn't like every combination of players had a unique id, just a few combinations where I needed to be able to search over a large space to find when they were in the same room together, but disregarding the order they were listed in.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#944Some 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 The moderation was precisely the reason I stopped using stackoverflow and started looking for answers and asking questions elsewhere. It was nearly impossible to ask anything without someone replying "Why would you even want to do that, do instead!". Or someone claiming it's a duplicate and you should use that ancient answer fro…
I will miss it but you are right about moderation. I don't know what the issue is on some platforms, reddit and SO come to mind. Moderators on many other platforms or forums seem to be alright and keep a clear head, even when they have to deal with a lot of vitriol and they get little thanks for their work.
There are probably negative examples as well but some platforms seem to be especially vulnerable. If I had to run reddit or SO, I would limit moderation to one subreddit/subdomain. No idea if that would help, but the problem isn't exactly invisible.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary representation of the set. Suppose we have 8 players, with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010. 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…
Thanks for the great response. Honestly, TIL that 2^0 = 1. That was a new one for me and I'm not sure I understand it. I failed pre-Calculus, twice.
Visually I think I can understand the bitwise version now, from reading this. But it wouldn't work for 3 integers, would it?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#946Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation.…
Sonnet does it as well, I use it to save credits, I honestly don't see much difference to Opus if you keep your problems/codebase/general context window small enough. In JavaScript land, known for its volatile ecosystem, it often uses constructors that don't exist anymore because of API changes. But a small lookup of the source is usually enough for it to correct the code immediately.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saying it's a tautology because it's just a binary representation of the set. Suppose we have 8 players, with x and y being 2 and 4: set the 2nd and 4th bits (ie 2^2 & 2^4) and you have 00001010. 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…
Thanks for the great response. Honestly, TIL that 2^0 = 1. That was a new one for me and I'm not sure I understand it. I failed pre-Calculus, twice. Visually I think I can understand the bitwise version now, from reading this. But it wouldn't work for 3 integers, would it?
it works for any number of integers. The first proof above (before tl;dr) is showing that every positive integer has a unique representation as a sum of distinct powers of 2, ie binary, and that no two integers have the same representation. You can watch a lecture about the representation of sets in binary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw21xgyN9To (google representing sets with bits for way more like this)
But again it's not useful in practice for very sparse sets: if you have say a million players, with at most 10 at the same poker table, setting 10 bits of a million-bit binary number is super wasteful. Even representing the players as fixed size 20-bit numbers (1 million in binary is 20 bits long), and appending the 10 sorted numbers, means you don't need more than 200 bits to represent this set.
And you can go much smaller if all you want is to label a _bucket_ that includes this particular set; just hash the 10 numbers to get a short id. Then to query faster for a specific combination of players you construct the hash of that group, query to get everything in that bucket (which may include false positives), then filter this much smaller set of answers.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.) This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.
I'm talking here about cases (which is basically all of them) where the first person to ask was simply needlessly specific. Or where the canonical has the list as an incidental detail and the next person insists that the answers won't work because this code has a tuple, you see, and doesn't see the merit in trying them.
If you imagine that the answer should be re-written from scratch to explain that the approach will be the same, you have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the site. Abstraction of contextually unimportant details is supposed to be an essential skill for programmers.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwo…
Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library. Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for. And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the…
Thanks; lots of great information here.
Regarding duplicates and deletion you may be interested in my thoughts: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214/when-is-it-a... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434215/where-do-the... ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421677/closing-a-qu... seem relevant here, browsing through a search of my saved posts.
Having duplicates should make the search better, by pointing people who phrase the same problem in different ways to the same place. But low-quality questions often don't produce something searchable for others, and they cover topics relevant to people who lack search skills.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#950Earlier 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…
This comment and the parent one make me realize that people who answer probably value the exchange between experts more than the answer. Perhaps the antidote involves a drop of the poison. Let an LLM answer first, then let humans collaborate to improve the answer. Bonus: if you can safeguard it, the improved answer can be used to train a proprietary model.
> This comment and the parent one make me realize that people who answer probably value the exchange between experts more than the answer.
I'm more amused that ExpertsExchange.com figured out the core of the issue, 30 years ago, down to their site's name.