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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why.

This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle". And then it was marked as a duplicate and quickly closed.

I never asked a question on Stack Overflow again.

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I've soldiered on through several experiences like that, and sort of assumed it was the usual (being non American, I guess I just assumed it was cultural differences with Americans or my English being annoying). I changed my mind after asking some questions on the math stack exchange, and seeing how answers there were night and day compared to what's usual in stackoverflow. People with phds in areas I couldn't even spell treated me with a level of kindness and patience that I really wasn't expecting... So I guess it isn't just the format of SO.

Stack Overflow is basically under siege 24/7 by every yahoo with a keyboard. The smaller, more specialized stack exchange sites have less nonsense (maybe a 2:1 ratio of bad to good questions compared to Stack Overflow 10:1) to deal with so can afford to be generally friendlier and more helpful. Although sometimes they can be persnickety about what is "on topic" for the given site.

Maybe the site needs rebranding?

It sounds like you don't want it to be "the place where everyone can ask questions" so much as "the place where only good questions get civil responses".

If SO/SE were rebranded to be less inviting it wouldn't be "under siege".

The contributors to the site have been begging for changes like that for more than five years.

The operators of the site refuse because it would limit their advertising reach.

Both sides have become more entrenched over time, and the result is a unhappy disintegrating mess.

Elsewhere on this thread I argue that they are already not a site where everyone can get their questions answered, in practice or by design, and give examples of how the question-asking experience could be improved.

In case you're still curious, I think the reason it isn't included is because auto-increment is a hard problem to do right, ends up being a leaky abstraction for technical reasons, causes bugs, and is philosophically sub-optimal for basically any use case you can dream up. Want to order? Dates are probably always a better thing to order by, or else some natural property of the data like name or title. Want to link two records together? GUIDs are so much better it's not even a contest.

In development, auto-increment appears to be previous field +1. Developers write code expecting that behavior and relying on continuous IDs without gaps. But, well, for example, Oracle doesn't rollback sequence values. They also pull them in blocks (I think blocks of 20?). So sometimes you can end up with numbering like 1,2,3,20,22 if things were weird at just the right time, and you probably never saw it during development or QA unless you happened to know to try to force it.

Then you get things like SQL Server resets auto increment field values on database export/import, so numbering which used to have gaps in the original will have no gaps in the import, causing the numbers to change. (I have no idea why, just seems like a bug/disaster waiting to happen.) Changing some ID fields tends to cause obvious disasters, as you usually have several tables which store a copy of the old auto ID value to join on.

I've seen several production data loss issues as I learned about the joys of this data type and prefer to avoid them as I learned more.

> GUIDs are so much better it's not even a contest

GUIDs require more storage, and are likely (definitely with v4 GUID) to lead to index fragmentation. Postgres requires an extension to do most useful things with GUIDs whereas SERIAL is ready to go. I'm very pro-GUID yet don't universally prefer them in databases.

Thanks! I also realize that if you have distributed database nodes, it's becomes a very hard problem to have a monotonically incrementing id. But still, mysql/mariadb does it, and so does Microsoft SQL Server (via IDENTITY)

MySQL sort of cheats (but it's a good cheat!) by auto_increment_increment/offset which is means as long as you have a fixed amount of nodes , you are good, server #1 uses 1,4,7 etc #2 uses 2,5,8 etc and #3 uses 3,6,9 .. adding a node requires reconfiguring (but not restarting) all nodes.

> I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why

That sort of curiosity makes for a good Ask HN post. Maybe give that a try next time? https://news.ycombinator.com/ask

(For anyone who doesn't know, those are just text posts. It's conventional to put "Ask HN: " at the head of the title if you're asking a question, "Tell HN: " if you're telling rather than asking.)

I see what you're saying and it's hard when something you care about gets changed in a way that doesn't align with your original intentions, but this is something professional Software Developers have to deal with on a daily basis when working on teams, and granted, is a very hard mentality to embrace.

WHY questions are not good use cases for what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. WHY questions to a community that isn't the original developer of a tool have subjective answers and Stack Overflow is trying to be a place of objective problem solving. Possibly your question was better suited for an app like Quora.

There's no excuse to completely change the meaning of a question. Perhaps a comment that "why" questions don't really fit the format of StackOverflow would have been a better choice.

I had a similar experience, I asked a question. It then immediately got moved to a different stack overflow site where it was promptly closed as not relevant. Which is correct, it wasn't relevant to the site it had been moved to, but was relevant to the one I had posted it to.

I still sometimes post questions in the hopes of an answer, but 99% of the time the question is too subtle for the site and I either get no answer, or answers to a question I didn't ask.

Personally, I don't like SO and I'm not convinced we're better off having it around.

My best worst experience was asking how to achieve a particular effect in latex and then having the question locked for not posting a minimal working example of something I didn't know how to do.

One should ask TeX related questions on the TeX SE[0] instead of SO.

[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/

Indeed. That's where I asked.

I find that things at risk of being treated that way are well served by Reddit. If you find the right sub you get treated well as a beginner and get good, timely answers to very obscure questions on subjects you understand. That said, hit the wrong sub and it’s like staring into the abyss.

The entire fact that a moderator can decide what you really wanted to ask even if you are clear that's not the question you want to ask, is, honestly, ridiculous.

Then you haven't seen how many poorly written questions there are. Would you rather have your question outright deleted?

You're implying that there's no middle ground between "moderators unilaterally edit your question, including substantial semantic changes" and "question deletion".

I find that simultaneously troubling and, given my experiences on SE, unsurprising from someone whom I assume is a SE mod. If that's the position that most moderators take, no wonder it's such a caustic place.

Not an SO moderator. I've answered a few questions over the years, and I've browsed the new queue. I suggest you do the same before forming an opinion.

No thanks. The SO community made it very clear they aren't interested in having me be a part of it.

SO says that the question you ask on their site is not yours, so they can do whatever they want with it.

I just stopped asking questions there.

I don't think it's clear from the parent's post that editor was a moderator.

Stack Overflow has the same problem as Wikipedia: they know the only way to scale up a human knowledge repository is by leveraging volunteer effort (the organization itself could never cost-efficiently supply the necessary manpower), but volunteers like this are strongly self-selected to be a bunch of Poindexters who take perverse joy in finding exactly which minor infraction you're guilty of and using it to shut you down. I only contributed to Wikipedia a few times before my edits were reverted under WP:OMGWTFBBQ one too many times and I stopped bothering, and I've never even bothered with SO because I've heard it's much the same.

Actually, the StackOverflow systems encourage that, in a gentle way, by encouraging you to slot questions into concrete categories. If you've accumulated enough cred to have access to those tools, you'll see that they present you with possibly similar questions that you can browse. Volunteers with little time and a lot of items in their queue are probably likely to notice similarities in the questions and just choose the 'identical question' option, and then move on. More detailed feedback on the question itself is hard to give, and for every one that can genuinely be improved by feedback, there's dozens that are unsalvageable, or truly are duplicates.

Did you accidentally post this to the new twitter thread[1] first?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466641

???

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