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Ask HN: When was the last time you visited Stack Overflow?

14 points by TimLeland 1y ago

I recall using Google daily to search for solutions to dev issues using Stack Overflow. I think it's been a year plus since I visited the site. What about you?

tacostakohashi 1y ago
How much of the earth shattering, employee-replacing transformational productivity gains attributed to AI are in fact things that were earlier accomplished with copy&paste from SO? Quite a bit, if this thread is anything to go by...
solardev 1y ago
I actually forgot that site existed until you mentioned it... ChatGPT had 100% replaced it for me. I don't miss SO's terrible moderation at all.
walpurginacht 1y ago
couple of hours ago. I still use it from time to time, after I used ai assistants to help me narrow down what is it that im specifically tryin to solve. Sure claude/deepseek/chatgpt/grok/whatever assistant you use can do that for you, but I enjoy reading the discussion part of stackoverflow when it's not just a bunch of stupid debate of semantics / people being too pissy about their "rules" and whatnot
3vidence 1y ago
I still pretty much use it daily-ish but its more to verify something from Gemini than to find entirely new information.
pavel_lishin 1y ago
About an hour ago.
PaulHoule 1y ago
At least six months ago. I always thought it was crap and that the social mechanisms for sorting good answers to the top "just didn't work". First you have to work your way through the question which is usually poorly posed and rambling and has confusing comments, then the right answer is frequently the #7 or #24 answer, sometimes the accepted answer at the top is wrong and has a long thread of comments begging the original posted to unaccept it. You can't cut and paste Python answers because they are written in Python 2 and say print "something" instead of the Python 3 equivalent print("something") and in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that, as the system prevents the question from being re-asked and getting a better answer. Even worse you're just not allowed to have discussions about many of the most consequential topics for which other people's experience is crucial such as "What framework should I use for X?" But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place. Back when they published a public data dump I thought about making some automated system that cleans it up, deletes all but the best answers, etc. It would be much easier in the age of AI, but that dump is long gone and the world has moved on now that AI can operationalize that kind of knowledge. Had Stack Overflow realized that it sucked 10 years ago it might still be relevant, but the logic of two-sided markets kept it alive long after heat death.
- taylodl 1y ago
  > But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place. Ain't that the truth! That's why I avoid SO if I can - it's like looking for a needle in a shit pile: even if you find what you're looking for you still need to clean up; and if you don't find what you're looking for...
- brudgers 1y ago
  in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that It has been awhile since I used stackoverflow, So I don’t know if it’s still this way but it used to be that anyone could edit almost anything except comments. With some points, you were able to propose edits for review. With more points you could make edits without any review. With enough points you could review edits that people had proposed. And when you didn’t have many points, making edits earned points. And finding things that needed fixing was how I started earning points. Of course, most people don’t care about earning points and there’s nothing wrong with that. And different tags have different cultural norms…I avoided Python for that reason (your broken code Print example is an example of what turned me off of Python culture).
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I am point motivated but I never got motivated enough to play the S.O. game that I would run the gauntlet it took to become a full participant. The folks who ran the Semantic Technology Conferences ran a "Semantic Overflow" instance of the S.O. software and I discovered on that instance I could get a very high score by asking questions, not answering them. I could have outpaced the #1 contributor but I thought he really deserved his spot so I didn't take it but I took the #2 spot because he kept closing my tickets for an open source project he maintained. I did look at that stats and found that nobody had done anything similar on the real S.O. One trouble with all systems of recognition is that a lot of people have pointy qualifications. My opinions on many subjects aren't that good but on some I really am an expert and it's particularly frustrated when you know you really know your shit and you get shouted down.
    - 1y ago
ertok 1y ago
Been almost a year -- the last time I found it useful was trying to work out a capricious error that an API threw that gave virtually no information. Now that I think of it, today I would probably ask an LLM to search the internet for answer if it didn't know and then it would visit stackoverflow on my behalf.
andyjohnson0 1y ago
This morning. Wanted to refresh my memory abiut MultiBinding in WPF. But only because the site was the first hit on Kagi. Haven't interacted with it for quite a while.
JohnFen 1y ago
I honestly don't remember. It's been a long while.
codingclaws 1y ago
10 minutes ago [0]. I needed to git diff two files that weren't in a repo. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-between-two-different-files https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-betwee...
tkiolp4 1y ago
I do visit it from time to time, when chatgpt gets stuck and I lost my patience. It’s either SO or github issues, whatever google throws at me.
khedoros1 1y ago
Yesterday. It still comes up every now and then in my searches. This despite never having been a user there.
austin-cheney 1y ago
Today. I was getting a TLS certificate resolution error making an internal call from a Java application that did not exist outside that application. Stack Overflow had the answer.
markus_zhang 1y ago
It was yesterday when I looked it up for some QEMU problem.
Bender 1y ago
I end up there sometimes due to search engines. What is most embarrasing is when I find my own answer and it was correct.
bencornia 1y ago
Yesterday! For a question about sockets. I have started asking AI to provide sources for its answers so that I can make sure its not hallucinating. A lot of the time it points me to stackoverflow. AI has been incredibly useful but I also firmly believe that other people will always be our best resource.
methusala8 1y ago
More than 2 years ago. LLM's are good at explaining things that I do not understand. And I do not need to vist 10 pages to search for the answer.
brudgers 1y ago
Today to see how many points my profile has. My Q/A participation was 2018. But I am not a programmer, though I can program my way into a paper bag…sometimes.
mkbkn 1y ago
Years ago (15 years ago) I posted a simple question after I failed to find the answer through Google search. Was made fun of, berated, etc. Never opened the website again. F*ck the SOF.
- walpurginacht 1y ago
  They really have the reputation of being way too hostile and gatekeepish, to the point they even made a post about it https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
milanspeaks 1y ago
I have almost stopped using Google Search for my programming queries. Its either ChatGPT (Text and C# related questions), AIStudio (AWS and DevOps), or Claude (UI-UX) that has become default search engines for me.

14 points by TimLeland 1y ago

I recall using Google daily to search for solutions to dev issues using Stack Overflow. I think it's been a year plus since I visited the site. What about you?

tacostakohashi 1y ago

How much of the earth shattering, employee-replacing transformational productivity gains attributed to AI are in fact things that were earlier accomplished with copy&paste from SO? Quite a bit, if this thread is anything to go by...

solardev 1y ago

I actually forgot that site existed until you mentioned it... ChatGPT had 100% replaced it for me. I don't miss SO's terrible moderation at all.

walpurginacht 1y ago

couple of hours ago. I still use it from time to time, after I used ai assistants to help me narrow down what is it that im specifically tryin to solve. Sure claude/deepseek/chatgpt/grok/whatever assistant you use can do that for you, but I enjoy reading the discussion part of stackoverflow when it's not just a bunch of stupid debate of semantics / people being too pissy about their "rules" and whatnot

3vidence 1y ago

I still pretty much use it daily-ish but its more to verify something from Gemini than to find entirely new information.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

About an hour ago.

PaulHoule 1y ago

At least six months ago. I always thought it was crap and that the social mechanisms for sorting good answers to the top "just didn't work". First you have to work your way through the question which is usually poorly posed and rambling and has confusing comments, then the right answer is frequently the #7 or #24 answer, sometimes the accepted answer at the top is wrong and has a long thread of comments begging the original posted to unaccept it. You can't cut and paste Python answers because they are written in Python 2 and say print "something" instead of the Python 3 equivalent print("something") and in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that, as the system prevents the question from being re-asked and getting a better answer. Even worse you're just not allowed to have discussions about many of the most consequential topics for which other people's experience is crucial such as "What framework should I use for X?" But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place. Back when they published a public data dump I thought about making some automated system that cleans it up, deletes all but the best answers, etc. It would be much easier in the age of AI, but that dump is long gone and the world has moved on now that AI can operationalize that kind of knowledge. Had Stack Overflow realized that it sucked 10 years ago it might still be relevant, but the logic of two-sided markets kept it alive long after heat death.

taylodl 1y ago
> But if you need 10 wrong answers for "How to center a <div>?" it's your place. Ain't that the truth! That's why I avoid SO if I can - it's like looking for a needle in a shit pile: even if you find what you're looking for you still need to clean up; and if you don't find what you're looking for...
brudgers 1y ago
in general the mechanisms of the site don't allow for correcting things like that It has been awhile since I used stackoverflow, So I don’t know if it’s still this way but it used to be that anyone could edit almost anything except comments. With some points, you were able to propose edits for review. With more points you could make edits without any review. With enough points you could review edits that people had proposed. And when you didn’t have many points, making edits earned points. And finding things that needed fixing was how I started earning points. Of course, most people don’t care about earning points and there’s nothing wrong with that. And different tags have different cultural norms…I avoided Python for that reason (your broken code Print example is an example of what turned me off of Python culture).
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I am point motivated but I never got motivated enough to play the S.O. game that I would run the gauntlet it took to become a full participant. The folks who ran the Semantic Technology Conferences ran a "Semantic Overflow" instance of the S.O. software and I discovered on that instance I could get a very high score by asking questions, not answering them. I could have outpaced the #1 contributor but I thought he really deserved his spot so I didn't take it but I took the #2 spot because he kept closing my tickets for an open source project he maintained. I did look at that stats and found that nobody had done anything similar on the real S.O. One trouble with all systems of recognition is that a lot of people have pointy qualifications. My opinions on many subjects aren't that good but on some I really am an expert and it's particularly frustrated when you know you really know your shit and you get shouted down.
  - 1y ago

ertok 1y ago

Been almost a year -- the last time I found it useful was trying to work out a capricious error that an API threw that gave virtually no information. Now that I think of it, today I would probably ask an LLM to search the internet for answer if it didn't know and then it would visit stackoverflow on my behalf.

andyjohnson0 1y ago

This morning. Wanted to refresh my memory abiut MultiBinding in WPF. But only because the site was the first hit on Kagi. Haven't interacted with it for quite a while.

JohnFen 1y ago

I honestly don't remember. It's been a long while.

codingclaws 1y ago

10 minutes ago [0]. I needed to git diff two files that weren't in a repo. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-between-two-different-files https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683121/git-diff-betwee...

tkiolp4 1y ago

I do visit it from time to time, when chatgpt gets stuck and I lost my patience. It’s either SO or github issues, whatever google throws at me.

khedoros1 1y ago

Yesterday. It still comes up every now and then in my searches. This despite never having been a user there.

austin-cheney 1y ago

Today. I was getting a TLS certificate resolution error making an internal call from a Java application that did not exist outside that application. Stack Overflow had the answer.

markus_zhang 1y ago

It was yesterday when I looked it up for some QEMU problem.

Bender 1y ago

I end up there sometimes due to search engines. What is most embarrasing is when I find my own answer and it was correct.

bencornia 1y ago

Yesterday! For a question about sockets. I have started asking AI to provide sources for its answers so that I can make sure its not hallucinating. A lot of the time it points me to stackoverflow. AI has been incredibly useful but I also firmly believe that other people will always be our best resource.

methusala8 1y ago

More than 2 years ago. LLM's are good at explaining things that I do not understand. And I do not need to vist 10 pages to search for the answer.

brudgers 1y ago

Today to see how many points my profile has. My Q/A participation was 2018. But I am not a programmer, though I can program my way into a paper bag…sometimes.

mkbkn 1y ago

Years ago (15 years ago) I posted a simple question after I failed to find the answer through Google search. Was made fun of, berated, etc. Never opened the website again. F*ck the SOF.

walpurginacht 1y ago
They really have the reputation of being way too hostile and gatekeepish, to the point they even made a post about it https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

milanspeaks 1y ago

I have almost stopped using Google Search for my programming queries. Its either ChatGPT (Text and C# related questions), AIStudio (AWS and DevOps), or Claude (UI-UX) that has become default search engines for me.