Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoodenvranx | Hacker News Reader

This highlights a problem I see with stackoverflow (and also google in general) more and more often:

In the beginning of stackoverflow all of its content was up-to-date but now that it is running for a few years a lot of stuff is out of date.

If you google for "c++ pointer 0 or NULL" you get this page from 2008 as the top result: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/176989/do-you-use-null-or...

With C++11/17 these answers are now out of date but this pagr will continue to be at the top of google for the forseeable future.

And exactly the same happens for all other technical stuff as well... I learn Javascript at the moment and at least 50% of all solutions I find on stackoverflow and other pages are heavily out of date.

And this problem will get worse in the next 10 years. Perhaps it is time to go back to curated link directories?

(I hope it is clear what I want to say, I am on mobile and busy with other stuff)

View on HN

I think the initial idea was that if somebody later came along and found some stale information, they could go in and fix it, the same way you do with Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this vision of the site is at odds with the way Stack Overflow actually works, where each question has multiple answers that are upvoted, and one gets an "Accepted" checkmark from the asker.

The solution that feels right is adding a new answer rather than stomping on somebody else's, but it seems unlikely that the new answer will get a lot of upvotes and even less likely that the asker will come back and reassign the checkmark. So a lot of more current answers are probably abandoned before they're even posted, and those that are posted end up buried (like the correct answer to that question, which is posted there but is currently languishing at 4 upvotes).

Personally, I say that if you feel like an answer is outdated, you should either comment with a polite correction if you'd like the author to fix it or just edit in the updated information yourself. (This nets less karma than answering new questions, but I can say from personal experience that 150k karma and a dollar will buy you a pack of gum.)

There was a bitcoin faucet that gave out 0.2 btc for stack overflow rep over a threshold. I've got a lot of gum now!

While I agree, a trick I've found out is using the advanced search feature in Google. I ask it to limit the results to within the last year. This has reduced the noise when searching for JPA questions.

This is really a flaw in Google, not stackoverflow (maybe at SO too, depending on how their search is ranked).

The relevance of a page at StackOverflow is less relevant if it is 5years old than if it is 1 year old, even if the page rank based on links is higher. I'm not sure if/how Google implements this, but a good heuristic would be to classify content as modern tech and have a page rank decay based on age.

For an even more advanced implementation, very "new topics" should decay even faster. Articles about Windows 10 or the Rust programming language should have a half life of 6 months now, while older topics can have longer tails.

This would require a decay factor based on content. I think that a programming related information's relevance decays faster than something about elementary physics. I'm not saying this is impossible though.

I think of this as a SO feature where out of date questions would point forward to the newest related question. This could easily be a moderated feature. One would think this preserves the evolution of the language is some sense. It is incentive also for people to capture such knowledge :)

Yes, although that only works within SO.

When I google for a rust term now, I'd rather hit a 6 month old blogpost than a 2 year old SO question, ranks being equal. With C# it's the other way around. The only difference between the two is that the search trend history shows that we are on year 15 of C# searches so the difference is small compared to the age of the technology.

With C++11/17 these answers are now out of date

I had the impression that more often than not such questions also contain a recently added or edited answer, upvoted and all, pointing to the C++11 of C++14 answer. Also note that the accepted&highest vote and second highest vote answer to the question in your link both mention C++11 nullptr.

Please consider chipping in at StackExchange to help find out an answer to this. There have been a number of discussions on about how to handle obsolete answers without a clear winning idea or feature - it's a difficult topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com