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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who complains about stackoverflow should visit their sister site about math:

https://math.stackexchange.com/

Because the difference is night and day. No pedantry (no pedantry on a math site! Impossible!), no assumption that askers are throwing their homework on them. In fact, my experience with mathematicians have had me question whether I choose the right career or if I should have become a mathematician. They all seem damn chill in comparison to most of us developers.

Anyway, the idea behind that site appears to be to help people learn math. Not to build the world's most polished question repository. I very much prefer the former approach.

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I wonder if this has to do with the people who are entering a field. I suspect that people who post on a math forum really want to do math, have an interest in it and don't want to just get a job that pays the bills. In software you have more and more people who got into programming because it's a good job but don't really care for it.

This may diminish the quality of forums because a lot of people just want somebody to solve their problem so they can move on without doing any work. I see that also in a lot of new hires who don't seem to care about actually learning programming but just want to do the bare minimum.

I think there's also a level of cultural gatekeeping in play as well. Programming (and many of its sub-focuses) are considered a fashionable career path, and there are many people who want the reputation that being a programmer/hacker/etc conveys more than they actually want to do the work to learn.

The Security Stack Exchange is full of a similar sort of people. Almost all of the new questions at any given time are either tech support "I think I have a virus!!" or low-effort handholding questions "how do I use kali linux to hack server". I think folks who spend a lot of time on these sorts of websites have adjusted to be more jaded towards questions that look similar. I've learned to ignore it and be thankful that (in general), questions that I ask on stack exchange tend to receive helpful answers.

I think people should think about the saying "if you have nothing good to say, say nothing". Instead of letting people know that they they think they are an idiot, just ignore them and don't post petty comments.

I think the difference is that math is cut and dry.

Stackoverflow has questions about some ridiculous configuration in languages and libraries where the asker couldn't even bother to pinpoint the issue but rather dumped all possible variables into the question.

Seems simple: math doesn't have to deal with that.

Could not agree more!

helping people learn: achievable with very high reward

Creating a catlogue of perfect questions and answers: impossible and of limited resource as every answer only caters for a specific set of back ground knowledge

And what is funny is that with option 1 done right who needs option 2? why scrabble around in the dark when i could be connected with someone who actually wants to help me.

i think that software dev is saturated with people who like to learn lots of things by themselves (excellent work, this is a form of hero), however this is not a good representation of most people. if we want IT to be more inclusive we need systems that can handle people who dont want to read several textbooks before getting some code working.

I find the experience the same. I had to fight and defend my question multiple times and added all sorts of irrelevant details, and in the end, the question was still closed. I eventually found out the answer on my own.

I second the vast community differences across the StackExchange network. I like the mechanics one, the photography one, and the gardening one. They've been super helpful chill folks like you say. I've spent a little bit of time in the Bicycling one, and there may be some snobbery there but that's based on limited experience but the first impressions were a little tainted. The music one was a really warm receiving group.

I think within SO there's sub-communities too just by tech stack. Some of the deep esoteric stuff might attract some snobbery.

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