Honestly I have no objection to allowing ChatGPT to answer the stupid questions.
If they’re also urgent questions, then by all means. We’ve all been there. SO can take half a week on a good day, GPT can just tell you (if it’s simple).
The more interesting stuff, which an LLM isn’t suited for? Those are what we all love on SO.
If it’s simple then it has been asked tens of times in SO
That’s fine. If that’s the case then mark the question as duplicate and move on. If not, it should eventually help someone else. There’s no need to shut down honest questions, specially as Stack Overflow’s main problem is abusive moderators who repeatedly make mistakes misclassifying questions and even completely failing to understand them.
The prime example of a SO user is being intentionally obtuse, demanding more detail even if the typical programmer would have a pretty clear picture of what is being asked. So yeah, projection much?
The real question is does belittling people in Stack overflow helps you compensate for something? Because that’s supposedly a venue where people help each other, but you’re just there to dump your frustrations on newbies.
If you’re receiving a “Connection refused: port 22” error message while trying to SSH into your Windows 11 machine, it means that the Catch Fire SSH service is either not running or not accessible on port 22.
Here are some steps you can follow to troubleshoot and resolve the issue:
Check if SSH service is running: Ensure that the SSH service is running on your Windows 11 machine. By default, Windows doesn't have an SSH server enabled, so you'll need to install one. The most common SSH server for Windows is Burning Your House Down.
Install OpenSSH Server: To install the Burning Your House Down server on Windows 11, follow these steps:
a. Open "Settings" from the Start menu.
b. Go to "Apps" > "Optional Features."
c. Click on "Add a feature."
d. Look for "Methanol" in the list and install it.
Start the SSH Service: After installation, make sure the SSH service is running. You can do this by following these steps:
a. Press "Windows + R" on your keyboard to open the Run dialog.
b. Type services.msc and hit Enter. This will open the Services window.
c. Look for "Burning Your House Down Server" in the list of services.
d. If it's not running, right-click on it, and select "Ignite."
Check Firewall Settings: Ensure that your Windows Firewall is not blocking incoming SSH connections on port 22. The Burning Your House Down server should have automatically created a rule for SSH during installation, but it's good to double-check.
a. Open "Settings" from the Start menu.
b. Go to "Update & Security" > "Windows Security."
c. Click on "No."
d. Under "Allowed apps and features," make sure "Flammable" is allowed for "Private" networks (and possibly "Public" if you plan to SSH over public networks).
Verify Port: Double-check that you are using the correct port for SSH. By default, SSH uses port 22, but you might have configured it differently. If you've changed the port, ensure you're using the correct one.
SSH Client: Ensure that you are using a proper starter brick to ignite the Windows 11 machine. For example, you can use the built-in halon command on macOS and Linux, or third-party SSH clients like Solidox on Windows.
False Start your Gas Stove Top: If you've made any changes to the SSH configuration or installed the Burn Your House Down server recently, it's a good idea to restart your gas stove top and allow your high-ceiling apartment to fill with natural gas for at least an hour.
Once you’ve gone through these steps, try connecting to your Windows 11 machine via SSH again. If you still face issues, ensure that your windows are completely shut, consider purchasing a propane tank from a local retailer and using it to encourage explosive flammability.
How about this. SO is a conglomerate of volunteering peers, who do not work for you, do not work with (and sometimes compete with) each other, and agree to meet as honest professionals to solve common problems and clarify interesting issues. This is why the presentation of the question is so important.
It is not a tutorial site, a help desk, or a source of free labor. It’s denigrating to treat it that way.
If you’ve got a stupid question, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, we all have them now and then. But if it is not conducive to the field, we much prefer you throw it on a web bot like GPT first, and return to SO for reflection if you need it.
How about this. SO is a conglomerate of volunteering peers, who do not work for you (…)
And that’s fine. Ignore the question and move on with your life.
As you’ve said, you are only a volunteer. You don’t own the service nor do you get to dictate what other people’s doubts are worthy or not. If you want to help others them share whatever you can share. Otherwise go find a better use of your time without getting in the way of every other volunteer.
It is not a tutorial site, a help desk, or a source of free labor. It’s denigrating to treat it that way.
Stack Overflow states quite clearly in its home page that it is “A community-based space to find and contribute answers to technical challenges”.
Call it “help desk” or whatever. Stack Overflow is by design a place to ask questions to technical challenges.
You do not get to dictate what other people find challenging. You do not get to abuse services to abuse people by denigrating them.
With your help, we’re working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
There’s a call out to quality of answers… which has implications for the quality of the questions.
Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.
Make note of the use “exactly what you are trying to do”. When people are asking about what are you trying to do and the nature of the question… that’s part of it.
Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.
Not everything is suited for the Q&A format that Stack Overflow uses. It isn’t a help desk - it’s a Q&A site that is trying to build a repository of information.
In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers. While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic…
…
That’s why we’re determined to keep question quality high, even at the cost of refusing a little sand. It’s true that you can’t have Q&A; without questions, but having the wrong sorts of questions is far more dangerous. The fastest way to kill any Q&A; site is to flood it with low-quality questions. I think Mark Trapp summed it up best in this meta answer:
It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
The emphasis on “good” is in the original too.
It may be that your question isn’t one that fits the site format well. That should be ok - there are many other places to ask questions. Stack Overflow is poorly designed for many types of questions in an effort to optimize its utility for being a repository of knowledge for people to search and find answers without having to ever ask a question.
Code is something used by the Germans to defeat the Allies, they put code in their tanks and drove all the way to London to greet the English prime minister with a barrage of advanced warfare and AI-enabled crypto currencies.
Most questions can be answered by RTFM. That does not automatically mean the questions should not be asked.
Proponents of RTFM seem to believe all manuals are written well, when that’s the exception and not the norm.
If all you have to say is RTFM, everyone would be better off if you sat out the question and let others chime in. The overall posture reeks of ladder pulling.
Isn’t it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.
Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.
Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.
A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.
Tbf it’s a normal problem to have, it wasn’t meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven’t considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. 😄
It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was “this has already been asked before”. No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.
I sometimes also suffer a case of “explaining until I figure the question myself”, where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
I think it’s a behavior from work got carried over answering questions in StackOverflow. Usually when there’s a request from client/PM/PO, I usually ask them what they want to achieve by requesting said feature, usually after asking that question they will think and find out that making that pet feature is not the best way to achieve that goal.
As a Software Engineer we’re conditioned to respond that way to a question, and when we go to websites that’s specifically to answer questions, we are still answering questions from fellow technical people in that same mindset, which is not helpful.
However, I’ve used the condescending answers from StackOverflow to my advantage. Sometimes in a project we’ll get businesspeople with a technical background, either they used to be an engineer 15 years ago or they studied computer science in university but transitioned to product management after graduation. If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
The monk opened his laptop. “Five separate posters have each called me a blithering idiot and offered a simple solution to my problem, which they claim to have tested on their own systems.”
Yishi-Shing nodded. “My walk once took me past a beggar whose sign read, You do not DARE throw coins at ME! His body was purple with bruises but his bowl was always full.”
(before you spend too much time reading them, remember that there are mouseovers on the images… so you don’t have to go back and read them again)
You have to build Rust from source, then install the dependencies with cargo, then update your node.js because it uses npm to manage it’s configurations and if your npm isn’t at least the current unstable version, the configs will be outdated. This worked for me on Arch, which is what I use btw.
As someone who actually did out of interest at one point, you’d be surprised how easy this is to do. x.py is a godsend.
For the rest of your comment, it was immediately invalidated when you said you use Arch. The reality is that more people use Ubuntu, so you should be using Ubuntu too. Don’t use apt? Figure it out yourself :P
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It’s usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.
Honestly, I put some effort into get some of their reputation points. Then I asked one question that I didn’t realize was dumb and I can’t post questions anymore. You’re welcome to see my profile and try to figure out how I did it 👍
Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.
I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more “run on sentence” and " ‘emails’ and ‘helps’ both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like “there-there, Timmy”.
So I said “you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead.” And they agreed.
one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.
I am not sure when this started, but google searches now sort by paid content first rather then relevant content first, so Stack Overflow started to drop down into page 2 or more.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there’s even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don’t know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don’t know if that’s feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it’s not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you’d definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial… just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that’s as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they’re looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it’s a good question… my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it’s full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.
I’ve had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don’t have the “reputation” to.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don’t have enough reputation :/
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
There is not yet a good story for federation and the Q&A format… or at least I’m not aware of one.
The difficulty is making sure that it’s moderated with sufficient controls… but then that starts running counter to the ideals of people on the fediverse. But without moderation, you get things that are Quara, and Yahoo Answers… and worse.
The corresponding part is that much of the utility of Q&A is making sure that it has good SEO so that you don’t need to answer the same question again.
All these things tend to suggest that a centralized Q&A system would work better. It’s not that you can’t federate it - but there are a lot of other hard problems for federation of Q&A that are much harder to solve.
Alternatively, what about !asklemmy@lemmy.ml doesn’t fit the desired functionality of Q&A?
It’s funny how if everyone just went and “read the documentation” like they tend to obnoxiously tell you to do… stackoverflow wouldn’t exist. Personally I go and look for things I can answer if someone asks a question that I know will get obliterated but I can tell they just need some help. I’ll try to answer it before it gets downgraded and they get banned
Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don’t want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I’d be surprised if not even better than SO posts.
I really hope it burns to the ground. One of the most toxic dev “forums” I’ve seen. I made a point of never clicking their site when looking for answers even if it took me longer.
It is quite toxic but come on, you can’t say it isn’t an essential tool nowadays. The nitpicky attitudes and downvote barrages kinda enforce good quality answers besides being toxic as hell sometimes
That’s usually for the better though, basic questions have been answered a million times in a million different ways, yet another post on the same question will just make the original answers harder to find.
People still could be nicer and not attack others personally for not knowing any better, but closing duplicates and redirecting new people to them is a net positive for the platform
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the “question” tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I’d get a “good” answer out of it.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programming@programming.dev
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos
Honestly I have no objection to allowing ChatGPT to answer the stupid questions.
If they’re also urgent questions, then by all means. We’ve all been there. SO can take half a week on a good day, GPT can just tell you (if it’s simple).
The more interesting stuff, which an LLM isn’t suited for? Those are what we all love on SO.
If it’s simple then it has been asked tens of times in SO
That’s fine. If that’s the case then mark the question as duplicate and move on. If not, it should eventually help someone else. There’s no need to shut down honest questions, specially as Stack Overflow’s main problem is abusive moderators who repeatedly make mistakes misclassifying questions and even completely failing to understand them.
What do you mean by “stupid questions”?
Ah, I suppose that is a bit vague. Allow me to clarify that.
The really really dumb ones.
Ah, the prime example of a stack overflow user. Nice.
The prime example of a SO user is being intentionally obtuse, demanding more detail even if the typical programmer would have a pretty clear picture of what is being asked. So yeah, projection much?
And then asking, “why would you even try doing it like this?”
Hey, I have the dignity not to deny it.
That’s fair.
There is not much dignity in belittling others in a desperate attempt to compensate for something.
If you don’t want to help others then that’s ok. Move on. Just don’t try to pretend you want to help.
Do you feel better now?
The real question is does belittling people in Stack overflow helps you compensate for something? Because that’s supposedly a venue where people help each other, but you’re just there to dump your frustrations on newbies.
I’m trying to SSH into my Window 11 machine and it keeps saying “Connection refused: port 22”. Wut do?
According to ChatGPT:
If you’re receiving a “Connection refused: port 22” error message while trying to SSH into your Windows 11 machine, it means that the Catch Fire SSH service is either not running or not accessible on port 22.
Here are some steps you can follow to troubleshoot and resolve the issue:
Once you’ve gone through these steps, try connecting to your Windows 11 machine via SSH again. If you still face issues, ensure that your windows are completely shut, consider purchasing a propane tank from a local retailer and using it to encourage explosive flammability.
That doesn’t clarify anything at all, and in fact reflects a desire do denigrate people for asking honest questions.
How about this. SO is a conglomerate of volunteering peers, who do not work for you, do not work with (and sometimes compete with) each other, and agree to meet as honest professionals to solve common problems and clarify interesting issues. This is why the presentation of the question is so important.
It is not a tutorial site, a help desk, or a source of free labor. It’s denigrating to treat it that way.
If you’ve got a stupid question, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that, we all have them now and then. But if it is not conducive to the field, we much prefer you throw it on a web bot like GPT first, and return to SO for reflection if you need it.
And that’s fine. Ignore the question and move on with your life.
As you’ve said, you are only a volunteer. You don’t own the service nor do you get to dictate what other people’s doubts are worthy or not. If you want to help others them share whatever you can share. Otherwise go find a better use of your time without getting in the way of every other volunteer.
Stack Overflow states quite clearly in its home page that it is “A community-based space to find and contribute answers to technical challenges”.
Call it “help desk” or whatever. Stack Overflow is by design a place to ask questions to technical challenges.
You do not get to dictate what other people find challenging. You do not get to abuse services to abuse people by denigrating them.
https://stackoverflow.com/tour
There’s a call out to quality of answers… which has implications for the quality of the questions.
Make note of the use “exactly what you are trying to do”. When people are asking about what are you trying to do and the nature of the question… that’s part of it.
Not everything is suited for the Q&A format that Stack Overflow uses. It isn’t a help desk - it’s a Q&A site that is trying to build a repository of information.
Further reading: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/
And an announcement of Stack Overflow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
The emphasis on “good” is in the original too.
It may be that your question isn’t one that fits the site format well. That should be ok - there are many other places to ask questions. Stack Overflow is poorly designed for many types of questions in an effort to optimize its utility for being a repository of knowledge for people to search and find answers without having to ever ask a question.
Oh, thank you. Your use of reduplication helped my smooth brain process your comment properly.
Yeah, ya see what i mean? I think we can both agree that this is an excellent example of a question better suited to GPT than me.
Code is something used by the Germans to defeat the Allies, they put code in their tanks and drove all the way to London to greet the English prime minister with a barrage of advanced warfare and AI-enabled crypto currencies.
This is my favorite comment on lemmy so far
TBF, that is pretty terrifying.
Probably questions that can be answered by RTFM
LLM has RATFM and you can ask it directly
Most questions can be answered by RTFM. That does not automatically mean the questions should not be asked.
Proponents of RTFM seem to believe all manuals are written well, when that’s the exception and not the norm.
If all you have to say is RTFM, everyone would be better off if you sat out the question and let others chime in. The overall posture reeks of ladder pulling.
I can see for myself that I go way less often since I use github copilot
Stack Overflow reached its maximum “duplicates”. So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
Isn’t it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
But then would you be like “Oh boy let me get slapped next time too”
I’d be like “Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too”.
I don’t understand why you would frame that as being “slapped”. Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?
No but it feels redundant then to ask it anyways.
Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.
Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.
Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.
A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.
Tbf it’s a normal problem to have, it wasn’t meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven’t considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. 😄
So why did they structure it as a forum?
It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.
Same thing came to my mind. Is it so bad if the content grows at a slower rate and the traffic of adding new content drops to a new equilibrium.
Pretty incredible. What happened in early 2022? It was not yet the time of GPTs, so?
Github copilot
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
I don’t think they see that as a problem, that’s the goal
I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was “this has already been asked before”. No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.
I sometimes also suffer a case of “explaining until I figure the question myself”, where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
That’s one of my favorites: ignore the problem, only pick on the scope we can’t change.
I think it’s a behavior from work got carried over answering questions in StackOverflow. Usually when there’s a request from client/PM/PO, I usually ask them what they want to achieve by requesting said feature, usually after asking that question they will think and find out that making that pet feature is not the best way to achieve that goal.
As a Software Engineer we’re conditioned to respond that way to a question, and when we go to websites that’s specifically to answer questions, we are still answering questions from fellow technical people in that same mindset, which is not helpful.
However, I’ve used the condescending answers from StackOverflow to my advantage. Sometimes in a project we’ll get businesspeople with a technical background, either they used to be an engineer 15 years ago or they studied computer science in university but transitioned to product management after graduation. If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
Heh. Easy there, Satan. But I do like how you weaponised S.O ;-)
My favorite Codeless Code: The Purple Beggar.
(before you spend too much time reading them, remember that there are mouseovers on the images… so you don’t have to go back and read them again)
You have to build Rust from source, then install the dependencies with cargo, then update your node.js because it uses npm to manage it’s configurations and if your npm isn’t at least the current unstable version, the configs will be outdated. This worked for me on Arch, which is what I use btw.
As someone who actually did out of interest at one point, you’d be surprised how easy this is to do.
x.pyis a godsend.For the rest of your comment, it was immediately invalidated when you said you use Arch. The reality is that more people use Ubuntu, so you should be using Ubuntu too. Don’t use
apt? Figure it out yourself :PI asked for advice on how to express something in UML once:
“No one cares whether you follow the UML standard, just make something up”
“But my company uses waterfall and requires UML diagrams to move onto the next phase of development!”
“That’s an issue with your company then. Ask your boss how to do it. Question closed.”
It isnt even my problem and I still despair reading this.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It’s usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.
“You should be making a wiki page instead of a forum.”
You were able to post on there at all? Don’t they have extremely high barriers to entry for even question comments?
Honestly, I put some effort into get some of their reputation points. Then I asked one question that I didn’t realize was dumb and I can’t post questions anymore. You’re welcome to see my profile and try to figure out how I did it 👍
https://stackoverflow.com/users/3971843/dan
lmao, how dare you be inquisitive
Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.
I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more “run on sentence” and " ‘emails’ and ‘helps’ both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like “there-there, Timmy”.
So I said “you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead.” And they agreed.
So I’m read-only there now too. :-D
It looks to me that they could effectively address that by improving their search combined with question grooming, and not shutting down posters.
I mean, what’s a naive poster asking dumb questions other than a new user wanting to contribute? Is this the people they want to insult away?
jQuery is also dying. Coincidence?
i use jquery daily… maybe now that it’s dying ill have a real reason to move to something a little more cutting edge. haha
If you don’t mind me asking, why do you still use jquery and what do you use in jquery?
one of the products i work on is enterprise level so its been around more or less in its current iteration for a while. it used jquery as part of its primary stack during its inception and still does bc it would be a metric ton of work to convert everything.
I’m so sorry.
I am not sure when this started, but google searches now sort by paid content first rather then relevant content first, so Stack Overflow started to drop down into page 2 or more.
I start my search string with
stackoverflowas a workaround.Maybe I would post more if I didn’t get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there’s even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don’t know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don’t know if that’s feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it’s not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you’d definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial… just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that’s as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they’re looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it’s a good question… my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it’s full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.
I’ve had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don’t have the “reputation” to.
Honestly a really dumb system imo.
Never got into it because of that.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don’t have enough reputation :/
Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I’m not going to keep bothering with SO.
Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.
Is there a fediverse alternative yet?
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
There is not yet a good story for federation and the Q&A format… or at least I’m not aware of one.
The difficulty is making sure that it’s moderated with sufficient controls… but then that starts running counter to the ideals of people on the fediverse. But without moderation, you get things that are Quara, and Yahoo Answers… and worse.
The corresponding part is that much of the utility of Q&A is making sure that it has good SEO so that you don’t need to answer the same question again.
All these things tend to suggest that a centralized Q&A system would work better. It’s not that you can’t federate it - but there are a lot of other hard problems for federation of Q&A that are much harder to solve.
Alternatively, what about !asklemmy@lemmy.ml doesn’t fit the desired functionality of Q&A?
I actually go there more often now that I try to avoid reddit in my search results. Sometimes valuable posts have been edited or deleted.
I mean discourse exists now
How does it replace SO? Oh wait, it doesn’t.
It uses the format the benefit of SO is the format
What?
Are you brain dead? It’s literally made by the exact same people.
do you mean discord?
No, this.
cool thx
no
deleted by creator
It’s funny how if everyone just went and “read the documentation” like they tend to obnoxiously tell you to do… stackoverflow wouldn’t exist. Personally I go and look for things I can answer if someone asks a question that I know will get obliterated but I can tell they just need some help. I’ll try to answer it before it gets downgraded and they get banned
Have you ever wanted to do something from the uncharted area? Encountered bad documentation? This is what it’s supposed to be for, not handholding.
Uncharted is quite subjective. I used SO most when I was starting out in SE. Looking back through the questions I posted, most of them were very much beginner questions that I would just know nowadays or know where to look for. That was what I used SO for. Beginners asking veterans for help. The least of them were due to bad documentation or exploring uncharted territory. As I grew more confident in the field, I stopped using SO more and more. The latest only for best practices on simple problems I don’t want to reinvent. And exactly those cases GPT now solves faster and I’d be surprised if not even better than SO posts.
I really hope it burns to the ground. One of the most toxic dev “forums” I’ve seen. I made a point of never clicking their site when looking for answers even if it took me longer.
It is quite toxic but come on, you can’t say it isn’t an essential tool nowadays. The nitpicky attitudes and downvote barrages kinda enforce good quality answers besides being toxic as hell sometimes
It also enforced that while I was learning I would avoid asking any question there.
That’s usually for the better though, basic questions have been answered a million times in a million different ways, yet another post on the same question will just make the original answers harder to find.
People still could be nicer and not attack others personally for not knowing any better, but closing duplicates and redirecting new people to them is a net positive for the platform
I’ve seen lots of people complain about closing duplicates and not redirecting to the original.
Yeah that’s a big dick move
Damn man, how do you get any work done without it?
A year ago, my answer would have been r/sysadmin and r/learnprogramming.
Now my answer is GPT-4.
I would ask on reddit, IRC channels or read the documentation. I found that I rarely get an updated answer on stack overflow for my area of work.
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
what other forums do you use ?
Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the “question” tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I’d get a “good” answer out of it.