27 ms·

Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?

594 points by endofreach 5y ago

Whenever i am trying to google a code issue i have, there is countless low quality sites just showing SO threads with no added value whatsoever. It is so annoying it actually drives me mad. Does anyone know what's up with that? I am really disappointed because the guys creating these sites (i guess for some kind of monetization) must have some relation to coding. But i feel this is an attack against all of us. Every programmer should be grateful for the opportunity to find good quality content quickly. Now my search results are flooded with copy & paste from SO. They are killing that. Am I the only one experiencing this or being that annoyed by it? P.S: I don't name URLs because if you don't know what I am talking about already, you probably don't have that issue.

thesunkid 5y ago
> Every programmer should be grateful for the opportunity to find good quality content quickly Totally. There should be a better way to index SO. you.com seems to try doing it that way. For most code issues, it's easier to navigate and decide what's worth reading from You than from google IMO.
reliable 5y ago
Is it bad that I've actually found my answer on some of these sites haha. But yeah, they're pretty low quality in general.
- didericis 5y ago
  Yes; if the content were original or the different context was increasing discoverability, that’d be ok, but the duplicates of content posted elsewhere almost always just obscures the original, better post with better context and real users to follow up with. I’ve googled things and gotten an answer pop up from one of these types of sites too/not saying its something to beat yourself up about, but if you’re playing devil’s advocate and suggesting there’s discoverability value added outweighing the other value lost, I disagree.
gompertz 5y ago
This is why I often search solutions directly on Stack Overflow, and not via Google. Or I add "site:stackoverlow.com" to my search. Generally SO has all I ever need... I find vendor forums to be a total wasteland for help (ie. Power BI forums) so don't need them as part of Google results.
steve_avery 5y ago
I am with you on this. Lately I have noticed that I've googled for an issue, find a low quality site with relevant results, and later discover that it's just a copy of the GitHub issues page from the original project. Why didn't the GitHub issue link make it to the first page of Google and this crappy knockoff, with no link back to the source material beat it? So frustrating.
brianwawok 5y ago
It’s an easy way to make money. Scrape a popular site like Stack overflow or Wikipedia and add a bunch of advertisements. One of the many ways that scum ruin the web.
- didericis 5y ago
  Wonder if there’s any way to get advertisers to veto scraped content sites. Not really in their incentive to boycott eyeballs, but if advertisers were actively avoiding those sites, it’d dry up the incentive to make them. This could backfire, but fining advertisers that show up on those sites might work. The difficulty would be all the claim verification and process of determining what exactly is a “scraped site”, and backfire scenario could be another hurdle for non established sites/more centralization of content. But if you targeted the advertisers rather than the sites themselves, the advertising networks would be incentivized to do that identification themselves.
  - penteract 5y ago
    Contacting the advertisers to tell them that being shown on those sites makes you want to avoid their products might work, although that would involve not blocking the ads.
slater 5y ago
Spammers. They mirror SO stuff on their own sites and put google ads on them
ruffrey 5y ago
I suspect they were always there, but google and ddg are getting gamed more now. The quality of results has dropped quite a bit in the past 4 or 5 years in this regard.
lloydjones 5y ago
As others have said: SO content is ripped-off (poorly) and mirrored. The page games Google's algorithm and shows up as a 'legit' result. Probably more complex than simple keyword stuffing, which isn't supposed to work these days..
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I don't understand how these sites rank so highly though, they can't get much organic traffic at all. Most people who click on them will bounce immediately.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Generally they show up as one of the few options if you look for very specific subqueries - that is when I tend to find them.
grinchygrinch 5y ago
Same thing with various GitHub issues lookalikes.
legrande 5y ago
Just whitelist Stack Overflow in your head and avoid splogs / spamblogs?
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
People are crawling content that is searched for frequently, then using SEO to rank higher in the results than the original content to make money from the ad revenue. Code and recipes are two examples. I'm also seeing politicians posting Tweets containing a link to their personal website, which has ads.
pupppet 5y ago
Really ticks me off that Google allows itself to be so easily gamed, it's your core business for christ's sake.
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  We have to assume that Google devs see these crappy spammy code websites too on a daily basis, right? What's up with the incredibly strong programmer culture over there, gone already after 20 years? You'd think someone would take these weak search results personally...
  - Hnaomyiph 5y ago
    As someone who knows a handful of devs and hear their near daily grievances of google, it seems like the culture over there has died and it’s just a bog standard Big Corp(tm) now. By how they describe it, a lot of the people, (but not all of course), who deeply care about the ‘craft’ of development have retired or moved onto more interesting roles at newer and more exciting companies and were replaced by people whose main driving force is climbing the corporate ladder at a FAANG. As a result the perf cycles/promotions seem to be heavily based on high impact projects/launches, leaving the “little things” like bad search results or other maintenance work forever on the back burner, because working on those things won’t get you a promotion/more money.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Desktop web search is probably less the core business these days than making search work well on phones/mobile devices with specific applications, such as Maps, etc.
  - jjallen 5y ago
    Why would they do that though? Why would they show you a low quality result if there was a better one available? I have pondered some of these sites as well. I think the answer is that they are actually helpful to some people.
endofreach 5y ago
Well, as i wrote i understand that they try to monetize it. But: why the sudden explosion? I feel there is more of these sites going live regularly. Many times they make up 80% of the first pages on search results, just repeating the SO threads listed before. So it‘s really getting difficult. Something must be done…
- coldpie 5y ago
  Everyone should install an ad blocker so these types of "businesses" become unprofitable. Installing an ad blocker is the ethical choice.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Maybe someone figured out The Google Algorithm (TM/all hail the algorithm...) is allowing source code on dodgy sites, so they've created and marketed to spammers a script/bot to create these kinds of sites (or all the sites just belong to them) to farm that ad money. A bit like how when "hoverboards" got popular, Chinese factories started churning them. And then when fidget spinners happened, same thing: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/how-to-make-millions-of-hoverboards-almost-overnight https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/how-to-...
- lozenge 5y ago
  Maybe these sites share some code? If you've already captured 2% of searches with one site, why not capture 1.5+1.5=3% of searches by running two sites.
vegancap 5y ago
I really hate these. Especially when I'm trying to figure something out and I'm struggling to find answers, I end up haplessly finding the exact same wrong answer on three different sites.
- brootstrap 5y ago
  I've 100% noticed it in the past months. Have a new employee that i'm trying to train up a bit with python and googling has gotten more annoying. fucking codegrepper.com & shit. FUG EM . hilarious when you find the exact same snippet over and over. Even more hilarious those asswipes are probably making $$ (potentially lots) with all the stupid clicks n that.
  - vegancap 5y ago
    Oh god yeah, I wish SO got better at blocking scrapers, I'm pretty sure services like CloudFlare have anti-scraping protection. They need killing off ASAP!
notreallyserio 5y ago
I've found that Bing does a better job at detecting spam like this. Not perfect, just better.
viktorcode 5y ago
The issue is actually pretty old. There was a time when Google introduced blacklisting of search results and revenue of those sites dived. Sadly, later Google rolled back the blacklist.
- matt_heimer 5y ago
  Any idea why they rolled it back?
  - datenarsch 5y ago
    Because Google is not interested in serving the best possible search results but rather in serving those that will make them the most money.
  - russh 5y ago
    It was effective and those affected were able to get the feature axed.
dmortin 5y ago
Search spam sites can be reported to google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/report-spam https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
- beefield 5y ago
  Quoting: "While Google does not use these reports to take direct action against violations" Given e.g. pinterest in the google results, I find it difficult to imagine as sure way to waste your time uselessly than to report SEO spam sites to google. It is obvious they do not care the slightest bit.
hawthornio 5y ago
I’ve had to switch to !py on ddg because the official Python docs never make the first page. It’s really frustrating. :/
MiddleEndian 5y ago
uBlacklist is a great tool to block sites you don't want from showing up on your search results on google (and a couple others including bing and duckduckgo). It supports regular expressions as well, I use /pinterest\..*/ to block all pinterest-related content. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmialoiaghdehhbnbhkkgmjanfhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  If you are using Safari, the DevonAgent app[1] that was linked to in another thread also has a denylist feature [1]:https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonagent
- shever73 5y ago
  That's a great tool, thanks for the recommendation. Pity it doesn't work with Ecosia's image search. I wrote my own extension to remove Pinterest from image results, and I've been thinking of extending it to block Instagram and Facebook too. I hate how these companies point their sewer pipe at search engines, so you get into a walled garden where you have to sign up to see the indexed content.
- jetrink 5y ago
  I wish Google would add that feature natively. Google could even use it to help detect spam sites.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Oh dear God, no. Don't need Google to have even more control. Imagine blocking something and it shows up anyway because Google decided so. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine, just use Gmail on Android. "Spam? That's not spam" - Google. Or just Android with it's fucking "notifications" from all the garbage news sites. Tbf, my fault for using Google apps. Honestly, blocking shit you don't want to see locally is the best solution. Decentralized, under your control, no need to trust BigCorp number 294.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
I use personal blocklist extension. It lets you remove entire sites from your search. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklistnot-by/cbbbhelcpfjhdcncigdlkabmjbgokmpg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist... I've also removed a bunch of trash news sites and wwwSchools, and it's really sanitized my search.
nickthesick 5y ago
Not only SO threads, I particularly hate the ones that mirror GitHub Issues. They don't even link back to the original thread, for Christ's sake!
- yumraj 5y ago
  And as I had mentioned in another thread, DDG so far ignores them, at least in my 1 case, but Google has those GitHub issues mirror sites as the first results. So they are clearly gaming Google SEO.
  - znpy 5y ago
    I'd blame gooogle more than the website, since google search results are generally getting worse and less relevant
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      Totally. This is a exactly what I was thinking about yesterday in the thread where someone was asking if Google results were getting worse. There's no reason the official docs for Python should be lower in the results than a shitty docs clone / spam site when searching for a common package/function in the standard library.
      - kikokikokiko 5y ago
        "There's no reason the official docs for Python should be lower in the results than a shitty docs clone" If Google still used/respected the original page rank algo, the official docs would never be ranked lower than a spammy clone site. I just wish they reverted back to the "power of the crowd" algo, let each node vote with their links and reputation. Nowadays I almost stopped using Google completely. I first noticed it with torrent/streaming censorship ~5 years ago, then the political/ideological censorship started to feel unbearable. I just want my search engine to show me the most relevant results BASED ON THE QUERY I SUBMITTED. No moral judgement crap. My search stack nowadays is a mix o Bing, ddg, Yandex and if everything else failed, Google. It's a sad reality.
mypastself 5y ago
The biggest problem is that they waste your time even when the content is ostensibly helpful, since the search result is usually listed after the Stack Overflow page it crawled from anyway. Each click steals a few seconds of developers’ time, which adds up, given how frequently these types of results pop up on Google search lately. That makes them worse than useless, they actively subtract value.
bschwindHN 5y ago
The answer is, if someone can make money by doing something shitty but not illegal, they will do it. Almost everything on the web is some scheme to put ads in your face so someone can make some money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alx__ 5y ago
  Yeah there's a whole mini scam network that copies programming how-to videos on YouTube and puts new thumbnails on them. So you watch the ad and then get 30 seconds into the video before realizing it's garbage, they've made some a few stupid pennies :(
bigtex 5y ago
If I recall the Stackoverflow dataset is open source or at least made available to download so I assume all these sites just download that information regularly.
ljm 5y ago
My pet peeve is ApiDock, which has managed to SEO itself so high up the rankings when searching for anything connected to Ruby or Rails that it is actually quite difficult to get to the legitimate, official documentation. What's worse is most of the results are outdated so you're looking at web-scraped API docs for Rails 3 or something. Really frustrating.
- pricci 5y ago
  And the site is so slooow for me.
terafo 5y ago
Sites that do auto translate of original SO threads and pretend that it's their original content are the worst. Google sometimes prefers to give me that results instead of the actual SO thread because I'm not in English-speaking country. I have to waste some time to understand that it's just stolen SO thread. And it's not even that useful because some of them AUTO TRANSLATE CODE.
- bserge 5y ago
  Lol. Google's absolute insistence that you must want local language results has been a pain in the ass for years. It's impossible for them to understand. Clearly they have zero people working and living in countries other than their own. /s
- prox 5y ago
  DDG allows you to set your own country or any country easily (without needing an account)
kristaps 5y ago
I wonder if Google as an organization cares enough to start a new spam crusade, but here's what happened the last time: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html?m=1 https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-se...
- diveanon 5y ago
  Based on the current state of GMail I don’t think anyone at Google gives a fuck about spam.
throwaway_dcnt 5y ago
I spoke to a VP at google in 2006 in london and discussed using a combination of curation and entropy to flush out duplicates. He seemed pretty excited by the idea but I don't think anything materialized. Which is another way of saying this is not new - in those days these sites were copying newsgroups too.
michele127 5y ago
I made this chrome extension because of this exact issue. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-noise-filter/niiapginpmjkkkoljaidmpfoebgfibgb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-noise-filte...
diveanon 5y ago
This is more of an issue with google results than the content itself. Google is a shit product and you get shit results when you use it.
- cally 5y ago
  I have many problems with google as a company, but as a product, google search is fantastic. To say it's shit is a huge, huge, huge over-reaction.
hidden-spyder 5y ago
An index of these sites will be helpful to mass blacklist them with the uBlacklist extension. Anyone up for creating one so everyone can contribute to it? The extension allows subscribing to blacklists via links, so a single txt file will be enough.
radiantttt 5y ago
Maybe code snippets are "enriched" in these sites?
- scollet 5y ago
  They are not. All the context and conversations are stripped.
Rastonbury 5y ago
Somewhat tangential but I believe Google Search is going downhill, they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight. Recently, I've had to append wiki/reddit/hn to queries I search for because everything near the top is shallow copied content marketing.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  > they seem to be losing the content junk spam SEO fight Google clearly isn't even trying. So many of these sites are polluting search results for months. It isn't a case of sites that pop up for a few hours until Google notices and blacklists them. Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.
  - MrWiffles 5y ago
    Well I think you already nailed it with “not even trying”. You don’t need to try or optimize when you’re a monopoly. Competition forces that function, but a lack thereof enables mediocrity and complacency.
    - kristiandupont 5y ago
      Oh come on! I am no fan of Google and their privacy policies etc., and I agree that results like the sites mentioned in this thread are annoying but I am not so cocky as to think I have any idea what Google is fighting. There are a lot of very smart people from all over the world putting everything they have into getting to the top of that site. It's not a trivial task for them.
      - kizer 5y ago
        Fair point. But again, that would be less of an issue if there were like 3 or 4 big search engines with different algorithms, all changing and adapting on their own schedules. Would be harder to game the system then.
      - motoxpro 5y ago
dgb23 5y ago
This is an obvious case of SEO spam. But there are tons and tons of other examples worth mentioning. For example many news sites have soft paywalls that can easily be circumvented with a few clicks. The reason they don't have an _actual_ paywall is likely to come up in search results. So essentially they spam search results and obscure the content for technical illiterate users instead of just paying for ads. They want their cake and eat it too. Now this whole dynamic is super weird. We often talk about these issues as if Google was some kind of public service that should make useful and fair search suggestions. Sure they have the incentive to do so, but they have conflicting interests at the same time.
sam0x17 5y ago
It's quite simple. SO has a huge easily indexable database of answers, and SEO scammers can make a quick buck by copying it all and making it seem like they have an answer for unanswered questions. Nothing to see here, blame your search engine.
distortedsignal 5y ago
There was an SO outage this last year, and I only found that out when I tried to go to SO and couldn't get to it. I checked page 2 of Google and found one of the mirrors that you're talking about. I grabbed the content from there and continued with work. I think it's a matter of perspective. If you _know_ that you want a specific site, use google's 'site:' specifier. If you're looking and find something that is from SO, redo the search and get to the SO Q/A. As for me, I'm moderately grateful for the decentralized backups.
- remuskaos 5y ago
  This is a rather contrived argument. In the rare instances that SO was down, I had to make do looking up the original documentation for whatever language I was using. But these scape sites add nothing of value at all, not even as an involuntary backup/archive type, since they are usually laden with ads.
pawelduda 5y ago
site:stackoverflow.com <query> That's what I do
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Why not just search on stack overflow at that point?
vanusa 5y ago
They get fed into a web crawler and then into a giant hopper whence they become the backbone of that shiny "No Code" technology you've been hearing about.
tsrand0m 5y ago
Scrape-paste is one of the easiest way to make significant money, if it takes off, and that’s why these sites are made. I think, google does well in general with coding or SO questions, but will show you these low quality sites when the questions are new or very specific and difficult to answer. Maybe, time to apply your head more. *been on both sides
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
IMHO the biggest offender: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ They are making me insane with the modal login demand. I wonder if Google has downgraded the authoritative standing of StackOverflow?
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  you can use UBO element zapper, but i recommend staying away from that site except for leetcode type questions. The content quality is mixed at best.
- phgn 5y ago
  Do they not have original content? I'm always frustrated when I click too fast and land on geeksforgeeks.org, because their code examples are so low quality and without explanations. I didn't notice SO being this bad.
- sireat 5y ago
  geeksforgeeks actually has humanly created articles. The quality varies (kind of like W3Schools does). With ublock origin I have not seen any modal logins. For example this article on red black trees: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/red-black-tree-set-1-introduction-2/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/red-black-tree-set-1-introduct... does not seem that horrible with proper references to CLRS and everything OP is talking about ugly looking automated Stack Overflow copies. No idea how those end up so high in rankings.
- 0des 5y ago
  This site has fooled me once or twice. I think there are other domains that point to the same data-set, because that's not the only domain serving up this exact content.
- dmurray 5y ago
  These definitely aren't what the OP are talking about. They focus on original content but the quality is not great. The other sites, every page is a mirror of an SO page, with worse CSS. Maybe you haven't encountered them yet!
- 5y ago
cheriot 5y ago
I wonder if there's a market for a software engineering specific search engine. Skip the shitty content farms, include code from open source projects, and potentially be more smart about finding package uses
shmde 5y ago
Just to chip in with a very minor annoyance, I hate how google puts up w3schools results above MDN for anything related to JS/HTML.
- bbarn 5y ago
  I've seen several developers google "w3schools someDomEvent" because they are conditioned by those search results. Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site?
  - valenaut 5y ago
    It's fine for simple things. I referenced it a lot when I was first learning JS and HTML because it was usually at the top of Google results. I think MDN is strictly better.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    Are you positive the first term wasn't prefixed by a hyphen-minus?
  - vlunkr 5y ago
    IMO it is a legitimately useful site, but strictly for beginners, and probably only for html/css. It teaches you the basics and has the sandbox to test things out. It's fine, just not what you want to see when you're looking for actual documentation.
    - myohmy 5y ago
      I used it to learn CSS way back in the day and it still seems to be a good balance between too little and too much for the beginner, so I still send my newbies there. Not surprised it shows higher than the actual spec. I think the HN community is just getting to the greybeard stage (I'm still cutting out grays), and this is our version of JUST READ THE MAN FILE
  - kilburn 5y ago
    > Has it accidentally become a halfway useful site? It has. It is nowhere near the quality of MDN, but also nowhere nearly as bad as it used to be. W3Schools has less information than MDN. This is bad for the experienced, but a relief for people who are entering the trade. As an example, consider an inexperienced web developer that wants to do something when a button is clicked. They google for it and find these two pages: - https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/event_onclick.asp . Right there in the middle of the page is an example snippet that will get the job done. If I scroll down I see other ways to do it, all of them fully contained (i.e.: I can copy-paste it to some website and they will work). - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/click_event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/cli... . There's a table of things I don't understand (Bubbles? Cancellable?), two lengthy discussions about weird edge cases in some browsers, and (finally!) a single not-so-simple example that is not even enclosed in <script> tags. What website do you think they'll pick?
dlandis 5y ago
FYI, people have been posting about this on stackoverflow meta going back at least 8 years: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/a-site-or-scraper-is-copying-content-from-stack-exchange-what-should-i-do https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/a-site-or-sc...
temp8964 5y ago
The worst of all are those websites that only show the content in search engine. When you click the link to their webpages, you can only see random texts have nothing to do with the search result at all. There must be some really narcissistic programmers behind these.
speby 5y ago
Reminds me a little of an oldie but a goodie: expertsexchange.com
firemelt 5y ago
this shits is just as same as quora and pinterest w3school and apidock
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
It will probably take some time, but sites such as roseindia and expertsexchange also clouded search results in a similar manner. They are now history because Google and others deranked them to the depths of hell.
dvirsky 5y ago
One thing that makes SO an easy target for this is that they let you download all their data and you don't even need to crawl and scrape the content from the website. Just download a dump, put it in an database, slap an HTML template on top of it, splash a few ads, and boom.
mattwad 5y ago
It's for all kinds of sites lately. The uBlacklist extension has solved it for me - one click and you can remove an entire domain from future results.
mkl95 5y ago
I believe Google have hit a sweet spot (for them) where they can keep you browsing a specific topic for a long time while still showing you mildly interesting results. Since the results are consistently on topic, you are shown ads that are interesting to you time and time again, which results in a lot of clicks and a lot of revenue.
- Taylor_ 5y ago
  I really hope that is not true but I guess if you are optimizing for a metric then that could make sense.
ScottWRobinson 5y ago
For years now I've ran a programming site (stackabuse.com) and have closely followed the state of Google SERPs when it comes to programming content. A few thoughts/ramblings: - The search results for programming content has been very volatile the last year or so. Google has released a lot of core algorithm updates in the last year, which has caused a lot of high-quality sites to either lose traffic or stagnate. - These low-quality code snippet sites have always been around, but their traffic has exploded this year after the algorithm changes. Just look at traffic estimates for one of the worst offenders - they get an estimated 18M views each month now, which has grown almost 10x in 12 months. Compare that to SO, which has stayed flat or even dropped in the same time-frame - The new algorithm updates seem to actually hurt a lot of high-quality sites as it seemingly favors code snippets, exact-match phrases, and lots of internal linking. Great sites with well-written long-form content, like RealPython.com, don't get as much attention as they deserve, IMO. We try to publish useful content, but consistently have our traffic slashed by Google's updates, which end up favoring copy-pasted code from SO, GitHub, and even our own articles. - The programming content "industry" is highly fragmented (outside of SO) and difficult to monetize, which is why so many sites are covered in ads. Because of this, it's a land grab for traffic and increasing RPMs with more ads, hence these low-quality snippet sites. Admittedly, we monetize with ads but are actively trying to move away from it with paid content. It's a difficult task as it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything, so the barrier to entry is high unless you monetize with ads. - I'll admit that this is likely a difficult problem because of how programmer's use Google. My guess is that because we often search for obscure errors/problems/code, their algorithm favors exact-match phrases to better find the solution. They might then give higher priority to pages that seem like they're dedicated to whatever you searched for (i.e. the low-quality snippet sites) over a GitHub repo that contains that snippet _and_ a bunch of other unrelated code. Just my two cents. Interested to hear your thoughts :)
- omega3 5y ago
  > The programming content "industry" is highly fragmented (outside of SO) and difficult to monetize I think part of the problem is that the content producers are trying to cater to everyone: google algo (by artifically inflating word count, using specific keywords), beginner programmers, advanced programmers, potentially paid users, ephemeral users that arrive on the site via a referral or via googling. In the end you end up catering to no one. As a side note, RealPython.com is going to go down even more if they're going to keep their "register to view" policy I've started to see recently.
jonas21 5y ago
All user-contributed content on Stack Overflow is under a CC-BY-SA license. So what the sites are doing is allowed under the license, as long as they're providing attribution. Is it annoying? Sure. But neither Stack Overflow nor the authors of the content can do anything about it since they gave away a license to do it. One of the things you have to accept when you release something under an open-source or Creative Commons license is that other people can take it and use it in ways that you don't like.
nightfeather 5y ago
Surely, even using an extension mainly to hide these stuffs. Not only mirroring SO, also its siblings (like serverfault and askubuntu), and others like GitHub. But the most annoying part is it keeps showing those mirrored and machine translated stuffs that offers little to none benefits to me and I'm already being forced trained enough to identify those at first glance. Those even shows up when I'm already searching in other languages, ahrr. edit: formatting
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I have this problem, and contrary to a lot of people I don't protect a lot of my PI from Google. It used to be Google was good at giving me stuff I wanted in ads, especially in gmail but they don't really anymore. You would think the more they knew about you they would be able to give you better results, so maybe a large scale test should be done - if Google knows your PI do you get better or worse results, or doesn't it matter at all.
dadboddilf2 5y ago
baeldung is the worst offender for java echosystem
- mhzsh 5y ago
  I actually saw a job posting by them on SO awhile back for “part-time article writing”. My guess is if they legitimately hire people to do it, those people just end stealing content to meet their writing demands.
analog31 5y ago
Not related to coding, but I've noticed a lot of "best of" and "top ten" sites that appear to be of the same ilk, possibly automated, that just combine pictures and paragraphs ranging from ad copy to pure drivel. On topics ranging from bicycles to Linux distro's.
lykahb 5y ago
The content farms get ahead of the organic results for many other areas too. Search for the programming questions isn't so bad. At least, the garbage is easy to recognize. Queries about products and services probably have the worst results.
- sgerenser 5y ago
  Yep, just try searching for “Best <consumer product>” nothing but fake review sites stuffed with Amazon affiliate links.
austinhutch 5y ago
Here some of the sites that have gotten traction in my SERPs lately that I can't stand https://pretagteam.com/ https://pretagteam.com/ https://www.codegrepper.com/ https://www.codegrepper.com/ https://issueexplorer.com/ https://issueexplorer.com/ They are all scraping Stack Overflow / Github in some fashion
- endofreach 5y ago
  Pretagteam & codegrepper were actually the sites that made me explode & post this here…
system2 5y ago
Why don't you name the URL? Share so we know to avoid. It is not like we are going to dox the guy or something.
null_object 5y ago
I’ve got into the habit of clicking the 3-dot icon next to the search entry (often number 1 in Googles’s results) and reporting these sites as scrapers, stealing content from SO. Maybe if we all did this, google might eventually take notice?
leifdenby 5y ago
Does anyone know of a good list of these copy sites? I just came across this Firefox extension which makes it possible to filter sites from search results: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/. Would be great with a community blocklist like those for pi.hole
whatsakandr 5y ago
Recently I've found duckduckgo to provide better coding results than Google, which really surprised me. I was only using duckduckgo at home for privacy, and Google at work because "best tool for the job", but I think that might not be the case anymore.
slownews45 5y ago
Google search is going downhill in my experience. My question: What is the alternative?
- randomluck040 5y ago
  I‘m using DDG most of the time but when I have to use Google hoping the results will be better, I try to specify words that need to be in there. However, the more niche your problems are, the less you will find.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    DDG is a gimmick. They claim to be running their own search engine, never checked out for me. More covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4817576 Anyone seeing them crawling your site? Is bing the best alternative? I've seen some pretty compelling evidence DDG copies / uses / has a deal with bing.
    - throwamon 5y ago
      You don't need to search for "compelling evidence", it's not like they're hiding it from you. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
pronik 5y ago
Important tidbit: SO's content is CC-licensed and this is probably completely legal (apart from those who fail to add a link to the original). Not that I don't want those sites to burn in hell, but they are not even in a grey zone legally.
tomaszs 5y ago
It is just Google, with its amazing algorithms that rank established website way higher than a random spam website.
schaum 5y ago
annoyed by that too, weirdly enough they pop up for certain queries and for others they don't. i have also seen that for github issues .. but i switched to https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/ as my main search engine, and i like the results much more than on google - nothing special, but somehow more reliable/predictable. and meanwhile you plant some trees :P
abakker 5y ago
I mean, while we're at it, can we get rid of blogspam? Try googling for instructions for installing cellulose insulation. It takes AGES to find a site that isn't just garbage vague content. It should be possible to detect and demote this stuff. it is so obvious.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I find that for instructions in how to do common mechanical tasks, searching on YouTube is effective. There are lots of carpenters, mechanics, electricians, etc. who want to tell us the best way to do something.
worik 5y ago
I do a lot of this sort of search I have no idea what you are talking about (except for Apple's efforts at astro turfing, but that is not what you mean I think) I use DuckDuckGo, is that why this does not bother me? I have not used Google for search for years.
mccorrinall 5y ago
I hate those websites which just proxy github or npm with a different stylesheet so much.
jppope 5y ago
Just putting this out there... try brave search. The best answers from stackoverflow etc are all snippets and their results are getting better and better every day. I got sick of google after they made the BERT update. Really happy I switched (except for google maps data. google is still winning that game)
ellis0n 5y ago
- 1990 no big data, no data, google indexing a porn and no ads and black hack market, no open source code, no seo articles, no market, bbs only - $ - 2000 censorship, business, big data and ads ads - $$ - 2010 code learning projects, quora, reddit, iphone, spam indexing and seo ads ads ads ads - $$$ - 2020 ai indexing everywhere, no-code indexing and code is a porn of no-code now so ads and ads ads ads seo seo seo - $$$$$$ - 2030 profit $googleplex?
mtoddsmith 5y ago
stackoverflow.com doesn't have google ads. Those copy sites do. What is google's motive to fix that?
sinuhe69 5y ago
I wonder if you are logged in Google and allow search history to be saved? (assuming you talked about Google search). Because I don’t have that kind of problems and I know Google use your search history to improve your personal results.
emodendroket 5y ago
They are doing that because it's technically not violating the license the way they do it.
userbinator 5y ago
At least the SO clones will still probably have content that you can make use of in some way; what's worse is when you search for an error code and you get back tons of pages that don't even have the exact code you searched for, which seems to be increasingly common recently. It also used to be the case that you could dig into the second, third, ... sometimes even 20-30 pages in and hit the jackpot. Now, the results are even less relevant there, you soon get to "the end", and if you change your query slightly and try again a few times to search harder for what you want, you'll get hit with the unsolvable CAPTCHA hellban.
Agentlien 5y ago
Another thing I've noticed recently is that a lot of queries about computer graphics, especially tied to Unity's render pipelines, bring up what look like blog posts full of code snippets but the actual "article" seems nonsensical and impossible to follow. I suspect they are machine translated and they're really annoying. edit: after doing a single Google search for "urp rendercontext" I found this: https://programmerall.com/article/71251053239/ https://programmerall.com/article/71251053239/ Looking at it closely there seems to be some red thread and the images and code snippets do seem to follow a logical progression, but the text itself is a complete mess. I can tell it sometimes references things from the code snippets and hints at things I can see in the image, but it's certainly not informative. Their site description says "Programmer All, we have been working hard to make a technical sharing website that all programmers love." I'm sorry, but I really don't.
rwmj 5y ago
I've noticed that Google Alerts for my open source projects have been useless for years. Full of snippet sites as well as outright scam sites which take code from SO or my blog or just mixed up tech words and repost it. Here's the Google Alert from yesterday (scammy URLs redacted): Guestmount qcow2 - Casino en ligne fiable It uses libguestfs for access to the guest filesystem, and FUSE (the ``filesystem in userspace'') to make it appear as a mountable device. Stdin 1 libguestfs error usr bin supermin exited with error status 1 - Aritco Since libguestfs 1. sudo apt-get install libguestfs-tools mkdir sysroot # Just a test file. Supermin and Docker-Toolbox #14. DIF/DIX increases the ... Edit Qcow2 Image - A-ONE HEALTH BRIDGE The libguestfs is a C library and a collection of tools on this library to create, view, access and modify virtual machine disk images in Linux. img
aryeshalev 5y ago
This reminds me Yahoo! Answers clones 10 years+ ago. To get traffic to website and cheat the search engine they would have index the Yahoo! answers website for specific niche category and create a garbage website with questions and answers not crediting the source and cramp the website with Ads everywhere to earn massive revenue.
ahtaarra 5y ago
Kmnnlm
brainlessdev 5y ago
Plugging my own FF/Chrome browser extension that lets you add domains you want to block and will simply prepend matching text links with an angry emoji and prompt you to confirm whether you want to visit the page or not: https://github.com/fnune/nay https://github.com/fnune/nay
timka 5y ago
This is just Google doesn't need real search anymore. They're now the portal. Market cap is what drives them not some geeks' needs.

pixelgeek 5y ago

No it isn't. Ads are their core business. Those crap sites almost all run ads from Google

dgb23 5y ago
That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically.
- _lqaf 5y ago
  Extrapolating from an employee's feelings to the behavior of a huge public company is a terrible way to model reality.
  - spiralx 5y ago
    This whole topic is extrapolating from people's feelings to the behaviour of a huge public company. I've not seen a single piece of actual data anywhere so far.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    That's not what I did. I was implying that those who have a stake in Google's success also have a stake in their search quality.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > That's a shortsighted view because it would imply that the quality of search doesn't have any bearing on their success. I highly doubt any Googler would agree with that. Especially not the ones who have been working on search specifically. Google is the goto search engine today, the competition is virtually non-existant, so they don't have to compete anymore. Hence the quality of their search engine going down hill, conflict of interests and what not. It's not shortsighted, it would take billions to compete with Google search and even Bing isn't even trying anymore. When I look at a Google search page result today I see loads of ads, then their shopping stuff, image search stuff, a list of questions related or not to my search and their answers extracted from third party web pages, then only when I scroll 1 page I see actual search results. Google search wasn't like that 15 years ago. Googlers are working so that Google makes more money, and Google is an ad company first and foremost.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    But that's pretty much how Google pushed out the then popular search engines: with search quality and a minimalist UI. It would be irrational for them to stray away too much from that quality focus.

dehrmann 5y ago

I used to work for a company that gamed Google like this, but with product search results (that were, themselves, CPC ads). The company got bought for scrap because Google got good at downranking their pages in search results and finally taking shopping seriously. A lot has changed since then, but I doubt that Google has decided these kinds of content farms are suddenly OK. It should also give pause to people asking for "open ranking algorithms." Without some amount of secrecy, content farms will pop up for literally every keyword they can sell ads against, and they'll know how to rank more often rather than just blindly guessing.

WhisperingShiba 5y ago
It does give me pause, but do you really think there is no way to have both open algorithm and good results? What is users assessed sites as they used a search engine, and then this was broadcast back to the engine? I have a feeling there is a way to introduce randomness to this search engine in a way that smooths out the game theoretic arms race of gaming an algorithm. This goes against our natural urge to have a fully deterministic algorithm which always brings the most pertinent sites right at the top. However, because humans are trying to bring order to things for their own benefit, throwing in chaos could prevent people from even trying to game the algorithm
- motoxpro 5y ago
  Markets dont work when everyone knows what I am THINKING. i.e. If I know with 100% certainty you are going to buy something for 1$ I just bid 1.0001. Same with Google search. If I know with 100% certainty that you rank pages in a certain way, I can game them. Markets only work when all data is available but no all opinions. Introducing random elements just makes it worse for everyone.
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    So why was google more effective before? Is this is product of the financial struggle of our society, or do you believe it is an inevitable consequence of a dominant search engine?
    - motoxpro 5y ago
      It is a lot more effective for me. I usually find what I am looking for in the first few results, there are flights, calculators, wiki pages, etc. So I disagree it has gotten worse. The task of search has gotten exponentially harder as well. There are billions more website pages, more spam, more sophisticated attacks, more gaming of the system, etc. They could have gone from a 80% relevant result to a 99% relevant result and you perceive at 10% drop in relevancy. It's a hard problem.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Neural network weighting loops and adversarial inputs say yes, it is impossible.

ziml77 5y ago

My experience has been finding more garbage on DDG, not less. I ended up getting too tired of those results being above the good ones that I switched back to Google.

yumraj 5y ago
Try this, the exact query I was referring to. I leave it to the reader to decide which is better.. The top 2 Google results are scrapped clones (or whatever they should be called) of the 1st result from DDG (Github issues #162 for docker-calibre-web) The closest Google comes in top 4 links is a link to the entire Github issues for docker-calibre-web DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=FakeUserAgentError+calibre-web&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=FakeUserAgentError+calibre-... Google: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=FakeUserAgentError%20calibre%2Dweb https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=FakeUserAgentError%20c... DDG Results: 1) https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues/162 https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues/162 2) https://www.nas-forum.com/forum/topic/67746-tuto-calibre-web-via-docker/page/4/ https://www.nas-forum.com/forum/topic/67746-tuto-calibre-web... 3) https://pypi.org/project/fake-useragent/ https://pypi.org/project/fake-useragent/ 4) https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues/ https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues/ Google Results: 1) https://githubmemory.com/repo/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues/162 https://githubmemory.com/repo/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web... 2) https://issueexplorer.com/issue/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/162 https://issueexplorer.com/issue/linuxserver/docker-calibre-w... 3) https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/issues 4) https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/1527 https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/1527
- nobody9999 5y ago
  Interestingly, as of 02 December 2021 ~0300 US/Eastern, this thread is the third entry in your Google search. It doesn't appear at all on the first page of the DDG results.
  - yumraj 5y ago
    Wow, I checked and that is the funniest thing ever and totally unexpected!! FWIW, I see it as 4th item in Google search results, but that is not important. It's just weird that that will show up at all. Again, I'll say, that's a win for DDG results, at least IMveryHO.
tomtheelder 5y ago
Wow total opposite experience for me. I find Google much better for casual searches, but DDG oceans better for anything technical.

Nextgrid 5y ago

I disagree. Google has absolutely dropped the ball - I'm not saying that it's easy to algorithmically rank good/bad content, but they're not even trying. A stop-gap solution would be to simply penalize anything with ads. Legitimate websites will still have enough "SEO juice" (for the lack of a better term) to offset the penalty, but brand new copycats with otherwise no inbound links to them from other legitimate websites (and no other business model beyond scammy ads) will never be able to rank high, essentially removing the incentive from setting up these sites in the first place. Not to mention, these problems can be identified, prioritized and then tackled manually one-by-one. Stackoverflow copycats can be dealt with by downloading the SO data dump, parsing it and then severely penalizing any website where the bulk of the content matches the dump. Pinterest can be penalized by simply excluding it from image searches until they actually display the searched image without asking for login. So on and so forth. You can't win them all, and you can't train an algorithm to win every time either, but you can manually observe what's happening and deal with the biggest problems. The problem however is that the current status-quo is good for Google. They've got the monopoly on search (every other one is typically even worse when it comes to these issues), and spammy copycat websites happen to have Google ads or analytics so Google actually benefits from them too.

Kiro 5y ago
How do you know Google is not already doing all those things? You said it yourself, you can't win them all and we're witnessing the result of that. If Google truly did nothing it would be an unimaginable chaos.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Because I’m not seeing the results. Let’s ignore SO copycats for now because that solution requires at least a slight amount of effort and look at the elephant in the room - Pinterest. Dealing with it is a simple “if image_search and domain == pinterest.com then skip” and they’re not even doing that. They have a site that’s been polluting image search results for years, isn’t even trying to hide (unlike the SO copycats which could technically churn out an infinite amount of domains to work around bans) and they can’t even deal with that.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Well, quite. Why would a company that makes its money selling ads penalise sites that show its ads? And when you get to that state, you've pretty much turned the entire web into content marketing for your ad sales business. So - of course search quality suffers. Search quality is not the point.

rhdunn 5y ago

One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. Related is if you have a lot of content from git repositories that are mirrored from different locations (GitHub, GitLab, etc.), all of which are showing the same content. Or if different sites are hosting versions of public domain texts. You don't want to derank those results, even if they are similar to the "copy a popular site" websites.

lazyeye 5y ago
Google knows instantly how much time you spend on a page and how quickly you return to the search results because it is a useless copy/paste page from SO.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  And probably they track content age too? Since they somehow can lookup by content (they can detect duplicated content), there's probably a date remembered too So they could know if a code snippet was already X years old? And from where, originally. (Unless it got edited a lot but that's not the case here?)
MrWiffles 5y ago
> One of the problems with things like this is how do you know which site has copied from another, especially if you don't want a list of hard-coded exceptions. The core function of that is actually pretty simple: 1. Strip all X/HTML tags 2. Run `diff` Sure, it's not perfect, but an organization that pursues academic quantum computing research can sure as hell afford to run the results of the above against an AI to check for similarities.
- rhdunn 5y ago
  The issue is not figuring out if site X has a copy of a page or text from site Y. The issue is how do you know which site is the source of the information. In other words, the technical bit is easy but determining what to do with that is hard. Especially if you don't want a lot of hard coded exceptions. In the case of things like other sites copying from stack overflow, github, etc. you can figure out which is the source of the information. Lets day you have decided to make github the source of that information, and derank any other sites that also have that information. As a result, you will derank gitlab for having git mirrors of projects, as the source will match that on github. You will also derank sites like lkml as that contains the commit message descriptions, and the patches will partially match content from the kernel source hosted on github. Lets also say you've decided to make wikipedia and other wikimedia sites the source of information. Congratulations, you've now deranked project gutenberg for hosting the same public domain texts as wikimedia, along with other sites like the official sites for authors like Jack London. Plus any blog that includes portions of these to discuss or analyze them. Do you want a blackbox AI making these decisions?
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > he issue is how do you know which site is the source of the information. In other words, the technical bit is easy but determining what to do with that is hard. I interviewed with a 3 or so person company that did just that I think. That was over a decade ago.

testudovictoria 5y ago

> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems. I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results. The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.

stevesimmons 5y ago
If Google actually used its search history, it would see I was a sw eng power user, and return the types of results that users like me want to see. Then again, I have been using Google Maps for 16 years and it still cannot show me distances in km rather than miles. A boolean setting ffs that I've had to manually switch probably a thousand times. If billions of dollars of AI R&D can't even figure that out...
- Kiro 5y ago
  Funny how people complain about Google tracking them and then get angry when they are not being tracked enough.
acdha 5y ago
I'm skeptical that it's all that much better for any group of user. I search for normal things all of the time and it doesn't do a good job at returning relevant results for things like businesses, recent movies / TV shows, etc. and natural language syntax doesn't make the results less bad. What it looks suspiciously like to me is a lack of an effective feedback loop for user frustration — if it takes a number of queries to get correct results or someone doesn't stop using Google search entirely, this would be easy to confuse with improved engagement and I'd especially believe that managers whose job it is to get a number to go up are not in a hurry to question whether that growth is meaningful.

btown 5y ago

There's an interesting dilemma here - if the algorithm were to favor "pages with lots of content alongside the exact-match phrase you're looking for" then it would incentivize content farms that combine lots of StackOverflow answers together. And if you favor the opposite, where there's less content alongside the exact-match phrase, you incentivize content farms that strip away content from StackOverflow before displaying it. Ideally, of course, you'd rely on site-level reputation - is Google just having trouble recognizing that these are using stolen content?

ScottWRobinson 5y ago
> is Google just having trouble recognizing that these are using stolen content? It's very possible. In general Google will penalize you for duplicate content, but that might not apply to code snippets since code is often re-used within projects or between projects. The code snippet sites also typically have 2 or more snippets on the same page. When combined, it might then look unique to Google since their algorithm probably can't understand code as well as it understands natural text. Just a guess
- rodw 5y ago
  Also, while I imagine Google probably has (or at least easily could have) code-specific heuristics at play, it seems like it may be harder to reliably apply duplicate content penalties to source code listings, especially short code snippets. Between the constrained syntax, literal keywords, standard APIs and common coding conventions it seems like even independently-authored source code listings will be superficially similar. Certainly the basic/naive markov-chain-style logic that works really well for detecting even small examples of plagiarism in natural language content isn't going to as effective on `public static void main(String[] args)` or whatever. Obviously there are strategies that could distinguish superficial/boilerplate stuff from truly duplicated code, but between the volume of actual (and often legitimate) duplication on the internet and the (maybe?) low ROI for duplicate content penalties for code relative to other value metrics/signals, maybe this just isn't terribly important as a quality factor?
- 6510 5y ago
  Wikipedia is a good example. Google considers it a high value website (less so than before but still) while it only has a single article about each topic. Other projects have entire websites dedicated to the single topic, products, experts on staff, live support. I presented as an example to some google engineers the wp page on suicide that explains popular ways of doing it vs dedicated prevention projects. Today (for me) it ranks the topic: 1-3) news articles, 4) world health organization statistics, 5) wikipedia, 6) Suicide prevention. ABC news, the NYT, WP and the WHO are considered high profile but the topic is not their area of expertise. Non of them would consider themselves the go-to place for people searching for it.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

I've seen programming newsgroups, those things from the 90's, with what can best be described as MITM attacks having taken place when coders have been looking for solutions to problems and the solutions have not been correct. Most newsgroups were never secure so vulnerable to MITM from day 1 and what is being reported today is just the latest variation in that attack process. I've also seen Bing & Google citing StackOverFlow and the replies in SO awarding or agreeing on a solution comes straight from this "text book" "The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies" https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm Perhaps it would be useful to dig into a posters history on a site and then decide who you trust instead of just trusting a random on the internet? How many people have download code from SO into VS and found it doesnt even do what its purported to do? I've seen plenty of that. Resource Burning the population, in this case programmers, is a perfectly valid technique for a variety of reasons, but the main one being, you are stuck in front of computer and that means you cant get into mischief away from work. Religions have been using that technique for hundreds of years and colloquially its know as "The devil makes work for idle hands to do" or something to that effect. Choose carefully what you want to believe and trust.

webmaven 5y ago
> I've seen programming newsgroups, those things from the 90's, with what can best be described as MITM attacks having taken place when coders have been looking for solutions to problems and the solutions have not been correct. Most newsgroups were never secure so vulnerable to MITM from day 1 and what is being reported today is just the latest variation in that attack process. Well, that's also the side effect of taking Cunningham's Law to heart, which says "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

andai 5y ago

>it's hard to convince programmers to pay for anything Offtopic but I'm curious why this is the case? Is the Free Software movement responsible for this mindset?

TheDudeMan 5y ago
It's hard to convince anyone to pay for anything.
john-tells-all 5y ago
I train programmers, and strongly recommend they buy books or do other types of money/time investment to make themselves better (and more highly-paid programmers). They won't do it. I've had multiple programmers literally shocked and avoid my outstretched book. Once I got a question, said "I just read the answer to this in this book right here"... and the programmer refused to read the book to answer his question. I don't get it. This, coupled with companies lack of investment in their expensive engineers, is mystifying. None of the above has anything to do with the FSF.
- tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  Maybe books are too low density. Like the “quantity of information” per amount of words is lower than a blog post for example. I dunno, I’m not really a reading type but I do own programming-related books. It’s the only type of book I own. I learned a lot from books like The Clean Coder, The Pragmatic Programmer and some 90’s book about Design Patterns with c++ examples and I don’t even write c++
  - Retric 5y ago
    Good programming books are some of the highest information density of any writing you can find. College professors tend to prefer the lower density versions which might be biasing people.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Is that true? Or even your actual experience? The recommendations I got from lecturers at university were thick academic textbooks. The 'good programming books' popular on HN etc. - without taking anything away from them - tend to be more waffley blog-turned-book type things. Aside from classics from the former category that are also popular in the latter. Sipser, the dragon book, Spivak, etc.
      - Retric 5y ago
        This comes to personal preferences, I generally prefer reference books vs educational books. Find a good fit between what you’re working on and what the book is trying to do and they can be extremely helpful Best example that comes to mind is the first edition of SQl in a nutshell. It was thin reference that covered SQL and the major differences between different SQL databases that I picked up back in 2002 ish. Quite useful if your working with several at the same time, but not something to teach you SQL. I haven’t looked at a recent edition because I am not in that situation any more, but I presume it’s still useful for that purpose. Granted most books are significantly more verbose, but the physical limitations of books can promote extremely precise writing with minimal extraneous information.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        It's my experience that this is often the case. I don't like high-theory books, so that means that things like the dragon book aren't likely to be in my sample.
    - intrasight 5y ago
      Some of the highest, but nothing like quantum mechanics, where my head explodes at page 2.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    If anything, a good book (or video course) will be a high-density, concentrated pill of everything you need to know about the subject to know what everything is and how it interacts. By comparison, reading blog posts and random YouTube videos is more akin to "grazing" - sure you can learn, but not as fast and you'll be missing context until the lightbulb goes off.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Do you have some book recommendations for web development?
ahepp 5y ago
The content I want already exists. It’s provided for no charge on stackoverflow, reddit, Wikipedia, cppreference, and a handful of other high quality sources. All of which do not charge users a fee, most of which obtain the content from users in the first place. So as far as I see it, the problem is not that the content is uneconomical to produce. The problem is that searching doesn’t discover the content I want. It brings up geeksforgeeks or worse.
- bob332 5y ago
  Wikipedia is trash
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Precisely. For me, the value in paying for a course or a book is not that they produce this knowledge, but that they collate it, filter through subject matter experience they already have to remove misleading additions, and add in any missing parts that may take a long time to grasp without a "Eureka!"-inducing explanation.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The service worth paying for is turning the collection of facts into usable information.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Exactly. Filtering information from misinformation is also a good selling point.
mdasen 5y ago
It's been a hard habit for me to break, but when you know that you could do something and theoretically do it better, it can bias you against paying for something. None of that is meant to sound arrogant - every company could do a better job given more time and resources, just as I could. But my time isn't infinite and I've found that paying for solutions in my life is a good thing. Sure, I could run my own email, but I'll just pay for it. Sure, I could create an app that does exactly what I want, but this one is close enough and it's $10. With knowledge, the problem can be worse. You can't even evaluate if it's any good until it's been given to you. At that point, you don't need to pay for it because you have it. The number of paid knowledge things that I see that don't really have good information and avoid all the real problems that they promised they were going to solve for you can be high. I think sites can build trust with users, but it can mean creating a lot of free content in the hopes of converting some people to paid users. Of course, if that model is too successful, then there will be an army of people dumping free content hoping to do the same, but then your paid content is competing with the free content available from many trying to do the same business model. If Bob creates a business doing this, do Pam, Sam, Bill, James, and Jess try to do that a few months later which then means that the amount of free content is now 5x what it was and there's no need to pay for it because it'll be a freebie on one of those sites?
tobyhinloopen 5y ago
Most developers will rather spent 2 days to build something than pay $60 for something better.
- lazysheepherd 5y ago
  I suspect the reason is the fact that not all developers live in the bay area, and $60 is a good money for them, and could worth more than 2 days. Also if you code for fun anyways, you might as well build what you need, and get chance to use that shiny new technology while you do it. You save money, have fun, improve your resume, share projects with your friends and communities for kudos, all at the same time.
- boomlinde 5y ago
  If I can do it in a way that's better suited to my use case, learn something from it and/or entertain myself, that may not be as bad a tradeoff as it may otherwise seem. Reinventing wheels out of plain curiosity has exposed me to a variety of problems and their solutions, and I believe it exercises my general problem solving skills.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  They're not wrong. When I build something, it's mine and I control it. I get to learn about all sorts of interesting stuff, making me a better programmer in the process. If I publish it on GitHub, it becomes résumé material, helps other people and might even start a community if enough people start contributing. I get to contribute to the state of the art in free computing, advancing it not just for myself but also for everyone else. If I pay for something else, I don't get source code, I get borderline malware that spies on me constantly, I'm subjected to idiotic non-negotiable terms and conditions and I'm at the mercy of some gigantic corporation that can kill the product at any time. We don't pay for "something better" because it's not actually better at all. We're not laymen, we actually understand the fact it's a shitty deal. We're not some mindless consumer companies can just dump these products on. We have the power to create. The more we use this power, the better off we are.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Teenagers are likely to do just that. Their money is expensive, while their time is cheap. If they get to learn in the meantime, even better.
kevstev 5y ago
I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer friction of paying. In a corporate context it's going to be a days long battle, at best to get a new piece of software approved- just from an expense pov- we aren't even talking the IT and infosec teams. If it's technical content on a website, sure maybe I can pay out of pocket, but it's actually a lot less friction to just move onto the next site than to open up my wallet, get charged and maybe get what I am looking for that justifies the price.
krmboya 5y ago
The Free Software Movement is for free as in free speech and not free as in free beer. It's about freedom to access, modify and distribute the source code.