7 ms·
Time Spent Waiting for an Answer in StackOverflow (by language)
- dbecker 14y agoOne alternative to leaving out the questions that take a long time is to calculate the average of log(minutes). Harder to interpret, but it accounts for the questions with long delays without letting those questions dominate the calculation.
- subleq 14y agoThis technique is actually equivalent to the geometric mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_mean#Relationship_with_arithmetic_mean_of_logarithms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_mean#Relationship_wit...
- alexchamberlain 14y agoI would have looked at removing the top and bottom 10% and/or fitting a sensible distribution.
- DaNmarner 14y agoNo Python, I'm starting to think OP is a troll.
- guilespi 14y agoYou're absolutely right! these are the python times: * less than 5 hours (easy) => 34 minutes avg * less than 24 hours (medium) => 100 minutes avg
- Jabbles 14y agoWell, the OP has picked a completely arbitrary cutoff time, thus making any numbers obtained virtually meaningless. As suggested elsewhere, use the median and quartile ranges for non-normal distributions. I doubt it's a troll, I'm sure it's well intentioned.
- doesnt_know 14y agoStrange that there is no Python there. [Insert joke about Python being so intuitive and easy to use no one asks questions about it].
- skrebbel 14y agoIt was kind of a relief for me - when frequenting HN, one might get the idea that everybody and their dog uses Python for everything, religiously. It's good that there's people out there who simply accidentally forget that it exists.
- skrebbel 14y agoDear downvoter: What the hell? I can only assume that you clicked that button because I wrote something remotely-not-entirely-worshipful about Python, and in that case, have you really connected your identity so strongly to a single programming language that you feel comments unfriendly towards it should be invisible on a place like HN?
- alexchamberlain 14y agoReally? I thought all of HN used Ruby; I of course use Python, C and C++.
- insin 14y agoIt's the tenth most used tag on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/tags http://stackoverflow.com/tags
- ck2 14y agoCould (My|Postgre)SQL be considered a language too? How about RegEx?
- guilespi 14y agoI've created a query in the data browser, just select the tags you want: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-...
- jpdoctor 14y agoRails?
- guilespi 14y agoJust change the tags in the set: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83626/how-...
- jpdoctor 14y agoHmmm. Seems like I'm an idiot: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83835/how-long-waiting-for-an-answer-by-language http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/83835/how-... There's something I'm missing: Run query doesn't get me the result.
- tomerv 14y agoBy filtering out answers that arrive after more than 5 hours, you're really skewing the data, and in a very arbitrary way. Why not 4 hours, or 6? Note that filtering also caused languages to change relative positions (e.g. PHP climbed from 5th place to 1st).
- guilespi 14y agoIt does, the 'clustering by hand' in categories according to hardness is completely unscientific. I guess if done properly more categories would arise (e.g. bad formed questions) and possibly trends would change. It's fun none the less ;)
- zzleeper 14y agoWell he could always compute the median. Less robust to outliers. 100 questions answered in 1 minute, with one question answered in 1 day will give you an avg of 15 minutes instead of the more representative 1 minute
- ck2 14y agoI think another aspect is SO has the same problem as HN. Same thing posted will get a different response depending on the time of day because of the signal:noise ratio.
- hasenj 14y agoThere was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. I was somewhat active on it and to me it was like an RPG game of trying to get more and more points. It was damn addictive. Then, somehow it got boring and complicated, and I stopped playing. I don't exactly remember what or how that happened, but it was a mixture of new rules and confusing features. I haven't played there for more than 2 years, but I'm still in the top 2%, and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points. StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning. I think a major factor is that simply, all the basic and interesting questions already got asked. New questions these days tend to be very specific and complicated.
- objclxt 14y ago"and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points" Me too: it's the Bank of Stack Overflow. Like you, I was quite active a few years ago, back when iOS development was quite new (that's my speciality). But you're right, many questions now are very specific ("my code crashes at X", etc), which isn't inherently a bad thing but doesn't float my boat.
- a3_nm 14y ago> There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. This is now the case on younger sites of the StackExchange network. For instance, <http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered> http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered> is pretty much always empty.
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- nnq 14y agotl;dr ..but ...where is Python?
- chmike 14y agoI guess people use other channels to get help, or not much help is needed, or there are few noobs working with python, ...
- chmike 14y agoThe quality of the service, in the point of view of help to solve a problem we are encountering has significantly dropped. This is partly due to policy and partly due to the much lower quality and pertinence of the answers. Contributors are there to earn points and just try whatever answer comes to their mind even if it's so vague or approximate that it is useless. Just trying, nothing to loose. I guess the experts went away from it because the initial thrill has gone (sign of smartness) and they have better things to do then stare at a browser to catch new questions for no other rewards then getting points. My impression is that stackoverflow was initially in a virtuous circle and now it's in a vicious circle. I now have questions like how EXT4 files with holes impacts performance of an mmap ? Should I force a prior full fill of the file with dd before mmap ? I'll certainly get crap answers and I really don't know where to ask this to get a valuable answer. So I'll end up doing a benchmark, which has probably already been done many time or people knowing how EXT4 works could answer straight out of the book.
- Radim 14y agoThis. Asking a question typically leads to a handful of "shotgunned" answers. Yes, they do come immediately -- but the real story is, they are templated ("I'll fix it later, just lemme be the first to answer"), incomplete, and/or simply wrong. A dozen explanatory comments later, the SO gun slingers finally understand the question and its implications. No, I really was NOT asking that. Neither that. Yes, that condition I mentioned in the question IS important and you cannot ignore it in your answer. You have an error there. That won't work. And once that happens... silence falls.
- billrobertson42 14y agoI'm curious to see an example of one of your questions like this.
- chmike 14y agoHappened to me. And that person responding completely aside of the question voted to get my question closed and erased its answer. I was asking for axisting asynchronous signal slot library to avoid implementing mine. Another guy proposed to use QT and another one to use boost's signal which is not asynchronous. The later guy commented to the QT guy that boost was so much lighter and faster. Boost signal is known to be the less performant, but because its boost it must be the best. This guy also voted to close my question once I said I don't want to depend on boost. The question was finally closed and I implemented my self the signal slot lib with a perfect match to my requirements.
- 10098 14y ago> Hey, Haskell has pretty good answer times, at least considering its 33th position in the TIOBE Index. I need to mention here that the Haskell community on Stack Overflow is AWESOME, they are helpful qualified people giving insightful answers (btw, Don Stewart is an active participant).
- nandemo 14y agoI second this. There are also qualified people asking the questions, which is also a good indicator (e.g. I recently saw questions from Edward Yang and Brent Yorgey).
- crntaylor 14y agoI'll second this. Just browsing the questions in the Haskell tag on SO is a great way to learn the language. There's a really nice mix of practical questions and theoretical, mind-expanding ones there.
- HyprMusic 14y ago"You see there, PHP running at front with 68 minutes average accepted answer time, either it’s too easy or there’re too many of them." It's an average, the size of each data-set shouldn't really affect the results. If there's too many PHP questions then answer times would likely be slower. Seems just like an excuse to dig at PHP.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI think he means that duplicates might be causing a problem? PHP is very approachable, and you probably get a lot of new users asking similar questions, which would be handled quickly. I think this was his motivation in creating the plot of 'hard' questions which took more than a day.
- guilespi 14y agoHi there! I was referring to the PHP programmers "them" :) Pun intended.
- pootch 14y agoActually they should mostly wait. The firehose of SO is largely filled with stupidity, lazyness, and people too lazy to learn or google what they need. SO has become the tit to feed the stupid calf, and the milk has run dry because noone in their right mind should spend any time answering the questions of lazy, good for nothing idiots who think they could program someday, by merely posting every idiotic problem they encounter including syntax errors to SO. If that was SO's mission. Mission accomplished. I and any other person who respects their own time and value will not spend 5 minutes on monkeys typing shakespeare.
- fnl 14y agothis is flawed: the presence of an answer post does not mean that the author actually got an answer...
- mcantor 14y agoThe author filtered on questions with accepted answers only.