Comment by pheoki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pheoki | Hacker News Reader

Stackoverflow has been a real issue for my team. Too many of my junior developers seem to hold the information as gospel. Something I frequently am forced to reiterate is that just because a dozen idiots up vote an incorrect answer doesn't make it the best or proper way to accomplish something.

The second issue is with understanding. I hold a firm rule, never commit code that you do not fully understand. Because when it breaks, you will have no idea how to fix it. Too often I see developers copy/paste directly, and just change variable names. You aren't writing code, you're playing dev Lego.

My final issue is their draconian insistence on what they consider subjective question locking. When I'm making a technological choice, I'm looking for real world usage, and comparisons between frameworks. These questions can be asked and answered in non-subjective ways; yet even when done so, anything with the word "compare" gets locked. This would be the real value to me, as my research time is very limited, and being able to exclude frameworks and tools based on objective comparisons of feature sets or capabilities and limitations would be highly valuable to me.

To be fair there is (now) a Stack Exchange site specifically for this, though I do understand your frustration.

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

Thanks, I was unaware. Though by the number of submissions, so is everyone else.

The worst part about the locked questions is that they often appear in top spots in Google. So you see the question in the search results, exactly what you've been looking for, but then some bureaucrat has locked it.

It would be more honest if they'd delete locked questions from the site, then they at least wouldn't spam Google result pages ... but the way it's currently implemented is infuriating.

They wouldn't have to delete them, just nofollow or something.

Your third point really hits home for me. The most useful questions & answers I've ever found on S.O. tend to be locked more often than not. And even if they are slightly off topic, they're much more useful and informative to me during my research than the more common type (e.g. http://www.doxdesk.com/img/updates/20091116-so-large.gif). I understand this isn't the point of S.O. but there's really no resource like it for that kind of research.

The image you linked is the very reason I'm wary of consulting SO for javascript answers.

I have found that MDN is a way better resource, including pedagogic examples for most (if not all) concepts without using bloated libraries.

> Too often I see developers copy/paste directly, and just change variable names.

Yeah, I don't think StackOverflow is your problem. I mean, if they're going to blindly paste code, surely doing that from community-curated examples is better than whatever junk they'd find.

This. SO gets a lot of flack for stuff these days, and it falls into two camps - one camp is 'they hate fun', 'they close my questions', where people want to reduce the quality of the content on SO, and one is the 'the content isn't perfect' camp that complains about stuff like this.

It reminds me of the 'wikipedia can be wrong!' crowd - yes, that's inherant to the format. Yes, you are going to need to check things you read there, yes, your 20 page essay about why you are the best person in the world is going to get deleted.

Every time I see a critisism of SO, I tend to see someone who would make the site worse or is misusing the site. Not saying SO is perfect - more can be done to help those people become good contributors or users, but SO is very well designed, and the quality of the content is really very good.

Good point, I concede your objection. I certainly do not concede your conclusion however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com