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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Last year a new Math Stack Exchange user asked What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0? I wrote an answer I thought was pretty good, but the question was downvoted and deleted as “not about mathematics”.

Never change, Stack Exchange.

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Almost every useful answer I've ever found on SE or SO has been marked down with some snarky judgmental horseshit meta-comment. At this point, if I don't see such markdowns, I assume the answer isn't very useful until proven otherwise.

I wonder if this is a repeatable phenomenon wherein a universally-useful resource is more likely to be accessed by a wider gamut of people, thus essentially guaranteeing a judgmental response. That would mean those snarky responses really are a mark of a good and useful question.

After the world solved the scarcity problem with respect to everyone's ability to survive a normal, healthy, dignified lifespan, most of the economy continued to shift towards conspicuous consumption.

If you look honestly at humanity, the motivations of the average person are selfish and unenlightened. An internet mod enjoys authority and an elevated sense of self worth by putting other people down.

There really are some people genuinely enthused by virtues such as intellectual discovery and shared dignity, but they're in short supply and likely to be outnumbered in the population clamoring to become internet mods.

I've had a few posts removed from a SO site after I corrected someone who happened to be a mod there. And the Innocence Project fights to give innocent people their lives back because some prosecutors don't want a scratch on their resume.

I think it would be better if we acknowledged these realities more-often rather than pretending all the evil people in the world died in Nazi Germany, or wherever, and they weren't just normal people.

I think this is also why I always retreat into nerdy or intellectual endeavors. Not because I am particularly intelligent, but because the real world is so ugly.

I agree with everything you said, except that first part about solving the scarcity problem. I'd need you to elaborate there, because it doesn't seem like that's been done in many parts of the world.

Humanity currently possesses the capability to provide everyone their basic human needs (food, safe water, housing, sanitation, essential healthcare) and hunan rights, but not the willingness. People die preventable deaths because they lack access to basic, affordable healthcare while other people are getting plastic surgery. People are homeless all over LA and SF while QE printed trillions for Wall St. Doctors without Borders hospitals are bombed while Wolf Blitzer says ending war there is a "moral issue because it will cost US defense contractors jobs."

Ah, capability to feed, health care, etc., yes. We should be in a post-scarcity civilization with respect to basic needs. I seem to recall reading studies though that showed on a per-dollar basis, it was much better in the long term to boost the local economy rather than just give handouts in the form of food aid etc. However, my thought in response to that has always been that it frames the situation as though there were a choice between the two. My thinking is that if people are living in misery, poverty, disease, and death, why make this a choice? We can do both. It's a multi-decade project, but not intractable. It's also probably hopelessly optimistic, but I'm okay with failures that move the ball forward a bit.

I also think it is true that local economies have been devastated by hand outs. It's a complex issue but it's also not.

There is no real excuse here as far as human cognitive ability goes. The problem is with morality.

I think these examples show that as humanity goes forward I think moral integrity/intelligence/bravery is more important to develop than our purely technological and scientific capabilities.

it's the wiki-syndrome.

Yup, first answer on Stack Overflow sometimes is the most technically correct, often refined to it's smallest elements, but also not nearly as ready to use as the third or fourth.

The third or fourth cover actual use case like solutions, of course that leaves more room to quibble and vote down, but you learn more from it.

It's the difference between answering a trivia question about a car vs actually fixing a car.

There is something inextricably human about this sort of anecdote though, like modern reenactments of the drowning of Hippasus by the Pythagoreans after bringing up irrational numbers.

He showed that the square root of 2 was an irrational.

It's more hostile than Wikipedia to new users. Ask a tough question and there's a decent chance of getting the dreaded 1 downvote and lock.

This hasn't been my experience. I've asked questions that in retrospect were fairly stupid and I've only been treated with respect.

how does one shot web

My experience is more like this:

https://serverfault.com/questions/966765/private-network-dns...

Closed due to "off-topic". With a comment that basically says "I don't like your problem, try to be more normal."

You basically had a problem related to a DNS server, so you thought that Server Fault was the place to ask for help. In reality it's more related to workstations, i.e. try asking on Super User or Unix & Linux Stack Exchange.

I suggest having a look at dnsmasq [1]:

> -S, --local, --server=[/[<domain>]/[domain/]][<ipaddr>[#<port>][@<source-ip>|<interface>[#<port>]]

> Specify IP address of upstream servers directly. Setting this flag does not suppress reading of /etc/resolv.conf, use --no-resolv to do that. If one or more optional domains are given, that server is used only for those domains and they are queried only using the specified server. This is intended for private nameservers: if you have a nameserver on your network which deals with names of the form xxx.internal.thekelleys.org.uk at 192.168.1.1 then giving the flag --server=/internal.thekelleys.org.uk/192.168.1.1 will send all queries for internal machines to that nameserver, everything else will go to the servers in /etc/resolv.conf.

[1]: http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/docs/dnsmasq-man.html

Note that the closing message didn't suggest better places to ask though. And your advice is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Yeah, browsing a few if my own old questions always makes me think, "seriously? Was I that bad at Google-fu?" Though generally it boiled down to having a problem, and not knowing enough to even ask Google the right questions.

I found wikipedia's interface to be pretty unfriendly for me as a new user. Stackoverflow was a lot easier for me to get started with. Maybe that lower barrier to entry leads to more random posts from people that are "low quality?"

Side note: I find a similarity between SO and HN. Both can feel pretty hostile and over-the-top with penalizing you for not saying things "the right way." But as much as it does annoy me sometimes, these are two of the most useful websites for my purposes.

Stack Overflow is worse because the questioners are approaching it in the vulnerable state of "not knowing". This makes the smack-downs worse, because the user already had a problem, and now they have haters as well.

Maybe worse for you. My experience certainly contradicts your claim. And I suspect that your claim is anecdotal as is mine. The difference is I am only speaking about my experience where you are attempting to make a sweeping judgement based on your experience.

Stack Overflow is great for me; I was empathizing with someone in the position of receiving criticism instead of answers.

I just now assume that whenever I post there, the first few comments will be people berating me out for going out of my comfortable zone to ask/answer a question.

For a second there I assumed you were talking about HN.

Eh, as long as you take a bit of care to make the question come across as genuine and not as snark or feigning lack of knowledge to draw out a comment to be hostile to (which people here are often primed to interpret things as), I think you'll generally either get a useful response and upvotes or no response.

Working around other people's hangups is a real pain, but that's basically what a large portion of participating in a pseudo-anonymous internet forum is about, unfortunately.

Yeah, if someone says here, "do you have any examples to share?" then it can be hard to distinguish between an honest request for details vs. a passive aggressive way of saying "I think you're an idiot who can't back up their claims"

I've felt the same way here many times. Although I'm trying to keep it under control now. I understand the mods motivation a little bit better

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/26445/division-by-0

has a long discussion of this problem.

The worst part about it is, all these deleted/locked questions rank really high on google so they pollute the search results.

It's Mathematics Stack Exchange, not Stack Overflow.

Fixed, thanks.

It's pretty much the same across all of the properties, though. I quit using them; they're run poorly and, especially in system administration or programming areas, the quality is uselessly low

Years ago it was the first place I looked - but now, Stack Overflow has a currency problem. Many programming answers are obsolete, the languages or frameworks to which they relate having evolved, and this is reinforced by aggressive moderation policy and toxic attitudes.

Not sure if the curators are unaware or simply don't care as long as they're still getting fresh questions for whatever's shiny and new.

In practice, nonetheless, it is now the last place I look, not the first, and also the last place I contribute. There are plenty of other forums for relevant and current answers, and without dripping poison.

>There are plenty of other forums for relevant and current answers, and without dripping poison.

Would you mind listing a few examples?

They tend to be language or framework specific. e.g. for Ruby/Rails questions I haunt the GoRails slack and a couple of Ruby/Rails specific subreddits.

In quite a few cases the official dev forums for a particular vendor or technology are actually very active, and I think that's because forums just got a lot easier to implement. For example I get a lot back from the Apple Developer forums (not the public discussion community, which is hot garbage) and Vue.js's own forum.

A fair chunk of what I previously used Stack Overflow for (finding code snippets to learn from) has been replaced by the ease of browsing public repositories on Github.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I thought your first sentence was about money; turns out both 'currency' and 'currentness' can refer to 'the state of being current'.

Another issue is moderators close questions as dupes without reading them. I used to hang out in the private slack for the cabal that runs one of the sites; I imagine other stack exchange sites have similar cabals that auto close/auto vote on things

It's the same problem a lot of internet properties that crowd-source data have now, which is that they don't have the concept of time and knowledge degrading over time built into them.

For the first 5 years or so, Stack Overflow was amazing. For newer subjects that haven't changed significantly in a the last couple years, it's probably still amazing, but the shelf life on this is much shorter in general, because new subject generally change quite quick (conversely, when Stack Overflow was first filling up, all the C/C++.Perl/Python/Bash etc stuff were long past their high churn stages).

When all these sites were new and shiny and still filling in the gaps, this wasn't a problem. Now that we've gotten a decade or more of some of them, they have the problem of being filled with information that was highly relevant at one point, but as it's lost relevancy over time is still treated as relevant.

As the timeline of major changes to these crowd-sourced repositories of knowledge goes, I think the next major advance will be a good algorithm to degrade relevancy (points?) over time with the ability for people to "vouch" for data as still accurate, or to "refine" data to limit the scope it applies to when the subject has expanded and it no longer is as accurate as it was because of that.

E.g. an answer for a Python which works only for Python 2.X but at the time applied generally because Python 3 had not been released. After Python 3 comes out, that answer either needs to be less relevant because it's only sometimes correct, or refined to note where it does and does not apply, in which case it retains its relevancy and should hopefully not crowd out data for the portions of the subject it does not apply to (Python 3 in this case).

I'm convinced this, or something like it, is the next big thing for crowd sourced data, as it becomes more and more important as our collective online data ages.

Edit: It's worth noting Google has likely already solved this, at least for their problem space. Then again, the way Google could be considered to be a repository of crowd sourced data is slightly different than most sites. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to hear they have a solution, either in place or planned, for how to deal with this affecting the knowledge graph.

That's why there are tags like:

- [python-2.x] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-2.x

- [python-2.6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-2.6

- [python-2.7] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-2.7

- [python-3.x] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-3.x

- [python-3.6] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-3.6

- [python-3.7] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-3.7

- [python-3.8] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python-3.8

and so on.

Are you implying if I go look at any python question from 8+ years ago it will be correctly tagged as not just python but also the correct python subversion?

Part of the problem is that at the time of the question the tags might be entirely sufficient but become less so as the the subject changes over time and new tags are available.

If you think that a new version of Python is that different, just ask a new question with the corresponding tag. To avoid its closing you might want to specify that it's not a duplicate of previous question because their answers are for an older version of Python.

Also you could try retag a question with the appropriate version tag, e.g. [python-2.x] or [python-3.5], so other people will know that when using a newer version of Python there might be other (better) answers.

> If you think that a new version of Python is that different, just ask a new question with the corresponding tag.

I use python versions to illustrate the point. That doesn't.meannit encapsulates all the nuances. For example, take a question that asks about the best way to handle HTTP client needs in Python that doesn't include an answer suggesting the requests module[1] because it predates it? Its not strictly tied to a python version, but it does.auffwr for being older, and adding a new, better answer years later may take years more to be ranked high in the answers (if ever). Can.that problem. Be solved with tags? Maybe. Can it. Be solved well by fairly free-form community decided tags? I doubt it.

> Also you could try retag a question with the appropriate version tag, e.g. [python-2.x] or [python-3.5], so other people will know that when using a newer version of Python there might be other (better) answers.

Yes, and people could instead just volunteer their time to accurately rate every question and answer on some absolute scale, say 1 to 1000. Unfortunately systems like that don't scale because it requires too much effort from the individual, and people tire of it.

What sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit spearheaded was to instead give users many tiny, easy, and individually insignificant decisions which when taken in aggregate allowed for the emergent behavior to show its value.

I suspect we'll see a similar solution (at least in part) to this, where some small behavior is incentivized to not just generate and rate the data, but curate it over time. Tagging may be part of that solution, but I think it's fairly inadequate in its current incarnation.

1: I'm assuming requests is still popular. I'm not really a python programmer, but it's more common than my preferred languages so I figured it would convey the point easier.

My guess is, if you opened a Python question, it would be closed as a dupe right away

Stack Exchange has quickly turned into a garbage dump of obsolete answers. They have no means of clearing out answers that are totally out of date, which can lead to needless frustration when people need help with a framework or language.

For instance, Ember.js is still seeing lots of development and has changed drastically in some ways, but every time I've searched SO it almost always brings up questions from ~2013. I'm convinced that a lot of the so-called "learning curve" would go away if Stack Overflow was wiped out of existence, which is a weird thing to say having once been a big fan of Stack Exchange.

A better way to find solutions is to just join Slack/Discord/IRC servers for different software communities and ask questions there.

Don't even get me started on the toxic attitudes on SE.

One department is probably arguing that this increases overall traffic to SO.

One thing related: I do find I frequently need to check the date of a answer to find out whether it's out of date. Then, ......, I can't find where the year is. Their date format is so bizarre .......

There are essentially no CMake answers that are valid for creating idiomatic, modern CMake. I know how to correct the answers but can't unless I jump through the hoops. So I don't.

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