Ask HN: When was the last time you visited Stack Overflow?
I recall using Google daily to search for solutions to dev issues using Stack Overflow. I think it's been a year plus since I visited the site. What about you?
I recall using Google daily to search for solutions to dev issues using Stack Overflow. I think it's been a year plus since I visited the site. What about you?
At least six months ago.
I always thought it was crap and that the social mechanisms for sorting good answers to the top "just didn't work". First you have to work your way through the question which is usually poorly posed and rambling and has confusing comments, then the right answer is frequently the #7 or #24 answer, sometimes the accepted answer at the top is wrong and has a long thread of comments begging the original posted to unaccept it. You can't cut and paste Python answers because they are written in Python 2 and say
instead of the Python 3 equivalent and in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that, as the system prevents the question from being re-asked and getting a better answer. Even worse you're just not allowed to have discussions about many of the most consequential topics for which other people's experience is crucial such as "What framework should I use for X?"But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place.
Back when they published a public data dump I thought about making some automated system that cleans it up, deletes all but the best answers, etc. It would be much easier in the age of AI, but that dump is long gone and the world has moved on now that AI can operationalize that kind of knowledge. Had Stack Overflow realized that it sucked 10 years ago it might still be relevant, but the logic of two-sided markets kept it alive long after heat death.
> But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place.
Ain't that the truth! That's why I avoid SO if I can - it's like looking for a needle in a shit pile: even if you find what you're looking for you still need to clean up; and if you don't find what you're looking for...
in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that
It has been awhile since I used stackoverflow, So I don’t know if it’s still this way but it used to be that anyone could edit almost anything except comments.
With some points, you were able to propose edits for review.
With more points you could make edits without any review.
With enough points you could review edits that people had proposed.
And when you didn’t have many points, making edits earned points. And finding things that needed fixing was how I started earning points.
Of course, most people don’t care about earning points and there’s nothing wrong with that. And different tags have different cultural norms…I avoided Python for that reason (your broken code Print example is an example of what turned me off of Python culture).
I am point motivated but I never got motivated enough to play the S.O. game that I would run the gauntlet it took to become a full participant.
The folks who ran the Semantic Technology Conferences ran a "Semantic Overflow" instance of the S.O. software and I discovered on that instance I could get a very high score by asking questions, not answering them. I could have outpaced the #1 contributor but I thought he really deserved his spot so I didn't take it but I took the #2 spot because he kept closing my tickets for an open source project he maintained. I did look at that stats and found that nobody had done anything similar on the real S.O.
One trouble with all systems of recognition is that a lot of people have pointy qualifications. My opinions on many subjects aren't that good but on some I really am an expert and it's particularly frustrated when you know you really know your shit and you get shouted down.
I thought maybe SO points might be a way to land a programming job since I did not know anyone in meat space. It wasn’t. But it was an excuse to write clever answers, get positive feedback, and learn something while helping people. With time my interests moved on and I seem to still pick up a few points a year based on looking at my profile today.
Anyway, stackoverflow was/is a pretty amazing project and I listened to all the original podcast with Spolsky and Atwood while intercity driving. The very original podcast started when development started and was a weekly phone call between them.
Like I said, different tags had different cultures. I spent time in Racket and SML mostly…small ponds for small fish.
I do visit it from time to time, when chatgpt gets stuck and I lost my patience. It’s either SO or github issues, whatever google throws at me.
couple of hours ago. I still use it from time to time, after I used ai assistants to help me narrow down what is it that im specifically tryin to solve. Sure claude/deepseek/chatgpt/grok/whatever assistant you use can do that for you, but I enjoy reading the discussion part of stackoverflow when it's not just a bunch of stupid debate of semantics / people being too pissy about their "rules" and whatnot
Yesterday. It still comes up every now and then in my searches. This despite never having been a user there.
Today. I was getting a TLS certificate resolution error making an internal call from a Java application that did not exist outside that application. Stack Overflow had the answer.
How much of the earth shattering, employee-replacing transformational productivity gains attributed to AI are in fact things that were earlier accomplished with copy&paste from SO?
Quite a bit, if this thread is anything to go by...
This morning. Wanted to refresh my memory abiut MultiBinding in WPF. But only because the site was the first hit on Kagi. Haven't interacted with it for quite a while.
I have almost stopped using Google Search for my programming queries. Its either ChatGPT (Text and C# related questions), AIStudio (AWS and DevOps), or Claude (UI-UX) that has become default search engines for me.
Yesterday! For a question about sockets. I have started asking AI to provide sources for its answers so that I can make sure its not hallucinating. A lot of the time it points me to stackoverflow. AI has been incredibly useful but I also firmly believe that other people will always be our best resource.
I actually forgot that site existed until you mentioned it... ChatGPT had 100% replaced it for me. I don't miss SO's terrible moderation at all.
Been almost a year -- the last time I found it useful was trying to work out a capricious error that an API threw that gave virtually no information. Now that I think of it, today I would probably ask an LLM to search the internet for answer if it didn't know and then it would visit stackoverflow on my behalf.
10 minutes ago [0]. I needed to git diff two files that weren't in a repo.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-betwee...
Today to see how many points my profile has.
My Q/A participation was 2018.
But I am not a programmer, though I can program my way into a paper bag…sometimes.
I end up there sometimes due to search engines. What is most embarrasing is when I find my own answer and it was correct.
It was yesterday when I looked it up for some QEMU problem.
About an hour ago.
Years ago (15 years ago) I posted a simple question after I failed to find the answer through Google search. Was made fun of, berated, etc.
Never opened the website again. F*ck the SOF.
They really have the reputation of being way too hostile and gatekeepish, to the point they even made a post about it
https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
More than 2 years ago. LLM's are good at explaining things that I do not understand. And I do not need to vist 10 pages to search for the answer.
I honestly don't remember. It's been a long while.