5 ms·

It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as o

It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO. Yeah, as someone who moderates a 200,000 member community, moderation is difficult. They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get. What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise? Or you're using a technology it knows nothing about? Back to IRC channels and reading docs? Where will you copy paste your code from? Cling to it and hope an alternative comes along, all the while shoving more money into closed models?

nprateem 3y ago
Just keep using 2 year old versions of software it knows about.
jalapenos 3y ago
Back to working out the solution yourself?
- lionkor 3y ago
  That's how most of my work and hobby projects go, but I hear there are people copy pasting code and refusing to read documentation. Working it out yourself is always going to be a good way, IMO
  - wink 3y ago
    I think that depends on the problem. My main use of SO is figuring out badly documented DSLs or configurations or magic annotations that have nothing to do with programming per se. I can dig into a language I don't actually know and change a value or fix a trivial bug, as long as it has variables, methods and loops. But I can't guess if @Zorpify is the magic incantation on a method that does something I don't know the name of.
deltree7 3y ago
[dead]
qwertox 3y ago
We could all export our ChatGTP discussions into a local application which uses AI to filter out any PII, reformat and upload coding-related discussions to a SO alternative.
- lionkor 3y ago
  At that point you've just recycled the original training data :/
  - qwertox 3y ago
    Enriched with a guiding discussion in order to archive the goal.
Kiro 3y ago
The stuff Copilot helps me with is not the stuff SO could help me with. Check out 6:05 and 6:25 in this Andreas Kling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8 That's where Copilot shines, not for locating and copypasting answers from Stack Overflow.
- qwertox 3y ago
  Right. But this is about ChatGPT which is getting used more like a replacement for SO due to the lack of integration and the ability to answer questions.
siva7 3y ago
"What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise?" Pay for your tools? This is not exactly a community of low-income people here.
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  With how good local models are getting this might not even be necessary. Code Llama derivatives aren't quite there yet for me but if the $20/month meant much to me they would be.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    I'm not so sure using local models is a cheaper alternative. Computation/electricity is not free and OpenAI is heavily subsidised. It feels like people think local models are free just because they don't need to pay a third party directly. I think the real benefit of local models lies elsewhere.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  A lot of people here have no income and are trying to get into software (or working on their pre-revenue startups). Especially the people who need a better Stack Overflow, are likely not to have huge employee salaries.
- lionkor 3y ago
  Students... :/
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Pay for your tools? This is not exactly a community of low-income people here. The prices of such tools are often oriented towards people who have high-paying job in Silicon Valley. Not everybody who reads or posts on Hacker News belongs to this group. :-(
Eumenes 3y ago
> It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable Discord sucks as a community for open source/software development for more than those reasons. The major one, I find, is the population of gamer/anime users that dominate it - I feel alot of serious developers stick to slack or mailing lists for that reason. Slack's identity is clear - enterprise/business chat and communication. Discord's is a bit more confused and alot of people straight up haven't even heard of it.
jncfhnb 3y ago
> They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get. Yeah see this is the problem. Fuck that man. The vast majority of people who want to ask questions are very new. They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question. They could search for it. SO is full of elitist pricks who are very rude to people who are trying to ask a question and don’t know how and are feeling frustrated. It’s a beginner hostile environment. And that’s not intuitive. Because you DO end up hitting stack overflow for a lot of basic questions from 10 years ago, and that’s nice, but it is bad for people who lack the expertise to navigate that historical index. Discord is not indexed, but it’s largely full of people who are willing to help newbies construct their question and then answer it. It’s night and day a better experience. Same for chat gpt. I have spent a fair amount of time on the unreal engine discord helping what I assume are kids who have never done any programming before realize that their questions make no sense and that they don’t know what a variable is. They are extremely thankful. SO just makes people feel bad for not being experts on the topic for which they are seeking help to learn.
- siva7 3y ago
  This. The more experienced you get the less you are visiting or relying on SO but on other sources. As a junior you usually don't know exactly how to ask or what to ask in order to make progress.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question this is a big one. often you know what you need to do, but knowing what to search is hard.
  - Decabytes 3y ago
    I wonder if a GPT powered SO would be helpful to cut down on newbie questions. I've found a lot of success ingesting an internal FAQ/documentation and wrapping it up in a little chatbot. Then asking the bot questions about it. It works better than control-f or some sort of fuzzy searching, and allows you to ask more general questions but still get specific answers. If the bot doesn't know then you can safely assume the question hasn't been asked, or the question is different enough to warrant asking it on SO
pylua 3y ago
I feel like moderation will be one if the first things automated away.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
That’s probably because SO has been useless for a long time now. They got so uptight about moderating content that they seem to have forgotten their actually user value. Instead of focusing on helping users find more relevant content, they’ve decided they must reduce any possible duplicate or overlapping content. For me, I’ve found most of my issues are complex and nuanced. I want the duplicate content. I want to read 5 posts with slightly different variations of the same issue. They all provide contextual clues and variations that are useful for solving my specific issue. Instead, they all get forced into the same post, resulting in a bunch of absolutely useless junk. Top that with the fact that some information is actually stale, it’s basically impossible to find a solution now. ChatGPT often gives me solutions that are mostly correct. Even when they’re wrong, they often get me close enough that I can read the docs.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  It's a classic perverse incentive. "Moderators" generally only get credit when they "moderate" stuff. If they don't "moderate" a lot, it looks like they're doing nothing.
joe_the_user 3y ago
It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO. I don't think you can say this is a community with opinions. Rather, there are various subgroups of people with strong opinions and certain posts attract one subgroup and certain posts will attract others. You can find a whole lot of people telling you building an app "on top of" an LLM is a dumb plan because they aren't reliable. And you can find a lot of people telling you to delegate all your drudgery to an LLM. That might seem a bit contradictory but it's really slightly different topics pulling in slightly different people. And in the this case, there are lots of people willing to tell you bad things about SO. The story for such bad feelings is that SO was fun to do answers for and now it's really miserable. It may or may not sometimes still be useful in an objective but it's accumulated massive bad feelings. So just about any SO thread attracts the SO-hating subgroup rather than any other subgroup.

It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO. Yeah, as someone who moderates a 200,000 member community, moderation is difficult. They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get. What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise? Or you're using a technology it knows nothing about? Back to IRC channels and reading docs? Where will you copy paste your code from? Cling to it and hope an alternative comes along, all the while shoving more money into closed models?

nprateem 3y ago

Just keep using 2 year old versions of software it knows about.

jalapenos 3y ago

Back to working out the solution yourself?

lionkor 3y ago
That's how most of my work and hobby projects go, but I hear there are people copy pasting code and refusing to read documentation. Working it out yourself is always going to be a good way, IMO
- wink 3y ago
  I think that depends on the problem. My main use of SO is figuring out badly documented DSLs or configurations or magic annotations that have nothing to do with programming per se. I can dig into a language I don't actually know and change a value or fix a trivial bug, as long as it has variables, methods and loops. But I can't guess if @Zorpify is the magic incantation on a method that does something I don't know the name of.

deltree7 3y ago

[dead]

qwertox 3y ago

We could all export our ChatGTP discussions into a local application which uses AI to filter out any PII, reformat and upload coding-related discussions to a SO alternative.

lionkor 3y ago
At that point you've just recycled the original training data :/
- qwertox 3y ago
  Enriched with a guiding discussion in order to archive the goal.

Kiro 3y ago

The stuff Copilot helps me with is not the stuff SO could help me with. Check out 6:05 and 6:25 in this Andreas Kling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8 That's where Copilot shines, not for locating and copypasting answers from Stack Overflow.

qwertox 3y ago
Right. But this is about ChatGPT which is getting used more like a replacement for SO due to the lack of integration and the ability to answer questions.

siva7 3y ago

"What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise?" Pay for your tools? This is not exactly a community of low-income people here.

cmcaleer 3y ago
With how good local models are getting this might not even be necessary. Code Llama derivatives aren't quite there yet for me but if the $20/month meant much to me they would be.
- Kiro 3y ago
  I'm not so sure using local models is a cheaper alternative. Computation/electricity is not free and OpenAI is heavily subsidised. It feels like people think local models are free just because they don't need to pay a third party directly. I think the real benefit of local models lies elsewhere.
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
A lot of people here have no income and are trying to get into software (or working on their pre-revenue startups). Especially the people who need a better Stack Overflow, are likely not to have huge employee salaries.
lionkor 3y ago
Students... :/
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Pay for your tools? This is not exactly a community of low-income people here. The prices of such tools are often oriented towards people who have high-paying job in Silicon Valley. Not everybody who reads or posts on Hacker News belongs to this group. :-(

Eumenes 3y ago

> It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable Discord sucks as a community for open source/software development for more than those reasons. The major one, I find, is the population of gamer/anime users that dominate it - I feel alot of serious developers stick to slack or mailing lists for that reason. Slack's identity is clear - enterprise/business chat and communication. Discord's is a bit more confused and alot of people straight up haven't even heard of it.

jncfhnb 3y ago

> They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get. Yeah see this is the problem. Fuck that man. The vast majority of people who want to ask questions are very new. They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question. They could search for it. SO is full of elitist pricks who are very rude to people who are trying to ask a question and don’t know how and are feeling frustrated. It’s a beginner hostile environment. And that’s not intuitive. Because you DO end up hitting stack overflow for a lot of basic questions from 10 years ago, and that’s nice, but it is bad for people who lack the expertise to navigate that historical index. Discord is not indexed, but it’s largely full of people who are willing to help newbies construct their question and then answer it. It’s night and day a better experience. Same for chat gpt. I have spent a fair amount of time on the unreal engine discord helping what I assume are kids who have never done any programming before realize that their questions make no sense and that they don’t know what a variable is. They are extremely thankful. SO just makes people feel bad for not being experts on the topic for which they are seeking help to learn.

siva7 3y ago
This. The more experienced you get the less you are visiting or relying on SO but on other sources. As a junior you usually don't know exactly how to ask or what to ask in order to make progress.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
> They barely know how to phrase the question they’re trying to ask. If they knew how to ask it, they probably wouldn’t need to post a question this is a big one. often you know what you need to do, but knowing what to search is hard.
- Decabytes 3y ago
  I wonder if a GPT powered SO would be helpful to cut down on newbie questions. I've found a lot of success ingesting an internal FAQ/documentation and wrapping it up in a little chatbot. Then asking the bot questions about it. It works better than control-f or some sort of fuzzy searching, and allows you to ask more general questions but still get specific answers. If the bot doesn't know then you can safely assume the question hasn't been asked, or the question is different enough to warrant asking it on SO

pylua 3y ago

I feel like moderation will be one if the first things automated away.

SkyPuncher 3y ago

That’s probably because SO has been useless for a long time now. They got so uptight about moderating content that they seem to have forgotten their actually user value. Instead of focusing on helping users find more relevant content, they’ve decided they must reduce any possible duplicate or overlapping content. For me, I’ve found most of my issues are complex and nuanced. I want the duplicate content. I want to read 5 posts with slightly different variations of the same issue. They all provide contextual clues and variations that are useful for solving my specific issue. Instead, they all get forced into the same post, resulting in a bunch of absolutely useless junk. Top that with the fact that some information is actually stale, it’s basically impossible to find a solution now. ChatGPT often gives me solutions that are mostly correct. Even when they’re wrong, they often get me close enough that I can read the docs.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
It's a classic perverse incentive. "Moderators" generally only get credit when they "moderate" stuff. If they don't "moderate" a lot, it looks like they're doing nothing.

joe_the_user 3y ago

It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO. I don't think you can say this is a community with opinions. Rather, there are various subgroups of people with strong opinions and certain posts attract one subgroup and certain posts will attract others. You can find a whole lot of people telling you building an app "on top of" an LLM is a dumb plan because they aren't reliable. And you can find a lot of people telling you to delegate all your drudgery to an LLM. That might seem a bit contradictory but it's really slightly different topics pulling in slightly different people. And in the this case, there are lots of people willing to tell you bad things about SO. The story for such bad feelings is that SO was fun to do answers for and now it's really miserable. It may or may not sometimes still be useful in an objective but it's accumulated massive bad feelings. So just about any SO thread attracts the SO-hating subgroup rather than any other subgroup.