Comment by p333347 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by p333347 | Hacker News Reader

There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk.

Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.

Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments.

That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010.

The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.

To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution.

I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

> To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question.

This is what is troublesome. There are far too many questions with many impassioned comments that suggests they were closed and reopened multiple times. It seems the interpretation of rules is done too stringently and arbitrarily for most people's liking.

> I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

I had a nice run there as a participant compared to stack. Even as a lurker, I don't find that many questions meted out the stack treatment.

I agree, I actually really like that there's a high bar for asking. It makes it more likely someone will be able to fully understand and give a good answer. And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it. I'll notice that I've glossed over the details of one part so I'll stop to dig in further and sure enough I had been making a bad assumption and fixing it leads to the answer.

> And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it.

The live search for related Q&As has been particularly useful for me for this. Do I sometimes feel bad I did all that typing first? Sure. But that's vastly outweighed by happiness at getting a solution.

I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. That may be true for adhering to the rules, but it's not enough to get accurate answers.

If you have a problem which is at all subtle or complicated, it's frequently necessary to open by saying "I know about X and Y, that's not what I'm asking!" Otherwise, the fastest guns in the west will see the header, skim a few lines, and answer "Just do X!" Or, of course, mark as trivial because "X" is in the documentation.

I've found a lot of these questions when trying to grapple with broken APIs. Someone will go "I want to do this thing, but the method call to do it is broken in these specific ways", and get answered with "Just use the method call in the API, dummy!" Often, it comes with a downvote and they never get another answer.

You can work around this, I succeeded with "This method call is broken in this way, so how do I work around that?" But it's far from obvious, and it means learning to not just write good questions but preempt systematically bad answers.

> I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers.

I didn't say either of those things, and I don't think either one is true :)

Asking quality questions is a skill, whether that's on SO or elsewhere. I'm just saying it's not rocket science.

Perhaps a better workflow could improve things. Almost like a wizard.

The big problem with programmers.se is that the scope is woefully misunderstood. It started out as that "opinions" site everyone thinks would be such a great idea, and within days it became apparent that the same folks who like discussion questions in theory have their own hangups and prejudices in practice, and the whole thing was turning into a never-ending flame-war.

So by the time it was named "Programmers", the decision was already made to refocus the site on something a bit more useful: a site not about programming but rather dedicated to sharing information relevant to the profession of software development. However, actually communicating that effectively turned out to be a headache and a half.

6 years later, we're looking at just renaming the site again so as to avoid this endlessly painful confusion: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/8204/wha...

> It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010

And that is often a problem, because in 2016 the answer has changed. ;)

Yes, especially web front end development. I still get hits from as far back as 2008. I do do a quick read though because some of the experts are decent enough to point out the changes for the current time, either as an update to the answer or a comment.

I think this is going to be a steadily-growing problem for SO. I already discount old answers of "Not supported, try this framework" because they're often about features which arrived in a later version. Eventually an awful lot of replies are going to be offering deprecated methods or unnecessary workarounds, and I haven't seen a good plan for maintaining quality as that happens.

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