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I disagree. As a software person, I'm constantly dismayed by the quality of information in the surface web. Some days it feels like all but the most esoteric se
by cartoonfoxes 9y ago
I disagree. As a software person, I'm constantly dismayed by the quality of information in the surface web. Some days it feels like all but the most esoteric search terms yield so much lowest-common-denominator information useful only to the rank beginner.
As in any branch of science or engineering, learning to work from primary sources is an absolutely core skill. Resources like StackOverflow are a crutch at best, and counter-productive if not outright dangerous at their worst.
At the very least, I always recommend people at least try to correlate the cookbook answers they find against the standard references.
- balabaster 9y agoand half of he time the information you get from StackOverflow (judging by the comments against them) is abstract because it's written by someone who understands what's going on and is being implemented by someone who doesn't. Cut and paste doesn't work when you're trying to take a conceptual piece of code and use it for an actual implementation. You've actually gotta take a minute to understand what it's doing and apply it in real terms.
- nunez 9y agothats why i always go for the second answer, not the first no idea why that works, but it usually does
- mgkimsal 9y agoi agree with your disagreement. I find too often the "it's on SO" responses end up being circular, and people point various descriptions of different problems to the same single answer, which aren't applicable. Just spent way too much time last night dealing with CORS stuff, and kept linking to the same handful of SO threads/answers which were not the problem at all, but at some point in the google/search world, so many things have similar enough keywords that they all congeal together, making it harder to find the 'real' solutions.