If you're looking for high quality discussion, SO probably isn't your best bet. Although I have learned a _ton_ about a new topic by doing a search on a topic,

If you're looking for high quality discussion, SO probably isn't your best bet. Although I have learned a _ton_ about a new topic by doing a search on a topic, and then ordering the questions by votes or favorites. For example, this is the most voted question for haskell, which has some decent discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/how-to-learn-haskell http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/how-to-learn-hask... The second most voted question for the 'c' tag has some interesting discussion on compiler optimization and floating point arithmetic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6430448/why-doesnt-gcc-optimize-aaaaaa-to-aaaaaa http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6430448/why-doesnt-gcc-op... Most of the time I use StackOverflow as kind of a warm up to writing my own code. It's a good intermediary step between reading HN and actually getting something done.