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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.

Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.

Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.

SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has.

Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.

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> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn.

More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work.

DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work.

And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.

I'd even argue that the burden of proof is reversed. There might be billion dollar companies which bring good, but I'll be skeptical of that fact at first.

I would argue that there is plenty of large(above billion dollars) companies that bring net good to world. Manufacturing is good field. Producing things like machinery improves quality of live and productivity.

Not that these often doesn't have negative aspects when they strive for even higher value extraction, looking at something like John Deere. Still it does allow massive efficiency gains in farming.

I wonder if there's a general rule that the larger an organisation the more pronounced the diffusion of responsibility and the higher the likelihood of shady behaviour? It would be interesting to see some studies into this either way.

I would imagine this gets progressively harder the bigger you get.

Thus why one should rather prefer slow growth. Fast growth only means you’ll be more likely to reach the shitty state faster.

But slow growth brings less money to top management, and top management decides if they want to go for slow or fast growth, right?

I think the simplest way to measure that is by asking 'what would we truly lose if this company disappeared tomorrow?'. With one follow-up question of 'how easily could the important bits actually be replaced?'

No; that kind of thought experiment heavily biases in favor of large organizations.

It's much more helpful to ask, "What would we lose if this company were broken up tomorrow into parts no larger than (say) the median company size?"

I think it does the opposite, it makes you think about whether the company is big because of its products/services or other reasons. It's not a yes/no answer, it's a prompt.

> 'what would we truly lose if this company disappeared tomorrow?'

I guess such a big company is here because they managed to create a need. The question may be: "were we really worse off before we had what this company built?".

Example: if GitHub disappears tomorrow, that's likely a pretty big problem. But we were fine before GitHub, we just had different (not worse) workflows. GitHub created a dependency.

I’ll preach it again: people need to learn that satisficing is a good and valuable end-state!

It is a startup wisdom that stagnation (i.e. no growth) means death.

The often stated reason why C-level executives are paid so well is that they have to be able to solve the insanely hard problem of finding new growth opportunities for the company over a long(er) period of time; something few people are capable of.

Well: by this criterion, many CxOs fail to deserve this huge pay (more precisely: they build Potemkin villages to pretend growth where in reality they burn the company's substance).

They should bring me to Startup Bootcamp or whatever it is, so I can preach the satisficing gospel.

"People" understand this just fine the problem is that the economy is structurally geared towards creating unicorn monstrosities that extract value rather than SMEs that create value.

If there were legal and regulatory pressure that crushed and broke down these behemoths (e.g. a FTC and judges that believed that predatory pricing was real and prosecuted accordingly) the VC model would break and this stuff would stop happening.

But the whole "Tech" economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn.

Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people.

IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.

Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up.

Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.

wow that is super interesting (although not very surprising). Do you have any sources for this?

Europe: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expect...

USA: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...

I'm sure there are nuances but according to this particular source European life expectancy went from 75 to 79, US life expectancy went from 78 to 79 with a period of a decline between 2013 and 2018.

What's the biggest impact on life expectancy in the first world that shows up at this level? Healthcare, walking culture, food options, other?

It's probably a very complex thing and both sides of the discussion can pick something to attribute for. For example, you can say that it's because of the opioid crisis in the USA and pretend that it's happening in isolation - just some bad actors doing bad things that don't have anything to do with anything else.

Hong Kong has one of the highest life expectancy of the world and a major contributing factor is high population density. Paramedics are able (and must) arrive within 12 minutes of an emergency call, which is probably the most important time to keep people alive. Doesn't mean Hong Kong is a decent place to live though.

Have you got a source for that?

But your point is valid, life expectancy is not the same as quality of life.

I'd personally rather live five years less and be in great general health than be slogging through pain and medical bingo for my last 10 years.

Sources of high life expectancy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

Source of 12 minute arrival policy of ambulance:

https://www.hkfsd.gov.hk/eng/aboutus/performance.html

Where is the source that says one is caused by the other

My opinion. Basic logical deduction anyway. Are we not allowed to express personal thoughts without quoting someone now?

Young people dying of drug overdose.

Good point, that's contributed 100k deaths per year recently. Also Covid in the same manner for ~ 1 million will skew the average age down.

The decline in US life expectancy is more complex than a general reduction in quality of life, and mostly unrelated to the US financial culture to leads to unicorns. The American ideal of huge companies that must take over the entire market can be traced at least all the way back to the railway robber barons, and has existed even during periods of immense growth in life expectancy.

At the same time, a lot of the increase in life expectancy in the EU is due to improvements in medicine that are significantly driven by US-funded research.

Why do you think that actions of these huge institutions are not impactful to the life quality of the Americans?

Also, why do you think that the European live longer thanks to the medicine developed in the USA? Maybe the USA develops medicine thanks to the free and equal opportunity education culture in the Europe? If you look closely to the researchers, you will see that lot's of the people who develop these things have European roots and by roots I don't mean their grandpa was Irish, I mean they were educated in Europe and it just happens that the organisation that develops these drugs is incorporated in the USA.

The tech revolution that changed the world was also developed in Europe, the web was developed by the British in EU institution, Linux was made by a Finnish guy called Linus, Nginx is Russian-made.

Also, we are at a verge of AI revolution and some of the leading researchers are Europe educated people. Just check the bio of the top researchers who were instrumental at Tesla or OpenAI.

Maybe the USA is just the industrial zone of Europe? Maybe the US appears rich and acts poor simply because because the richness comes from the accounting choices? Just kidding of course, the USA is a superpower and is actually rich thanks to many things like its abundant resources and brilliant people but the notion that the Europe is doing better because they just drink smoothies and meditate all day on the American resources and innovation is ridiculous.

I don't think most of what you wrote, almost phrase by phrase. You took an extreme version of what I said and rebutted it. Just because I said that the US had major influence in European medicine and life expectancy, you took it as meaning that Europeans are bad scientists and "just drink smoothies". I think nothing of this sort.

It's very safe to say that US-originated science had a major influence in life expectancy worldwide, including Europe. What's so controversial about it? The increase in life expectancy in Europe, then, was "significantly" influenced by US innovations.

Of course US "originated" science had influence, just like Russia originated one or Korea originated one. Also, Science is not something you dig from the ground to claim it’s origins. Depending on what you want to claim, you can change your definition. You can claim that we are having it so good thanks to the German science from the 1940s. Pick a cut off date and ownership method to suit your argument needs.

I would love for this to be true. Europeans do seem to enjoy a higher quality of life among several axis.

However the US subsidizes European defense (refer to current events) allowing European countries to spend less GDP on their military.

Talent comes to the US from all over the world. That's how it works and has since almost the beginning of the country.

Easier access to capital (and easy bankruptcy, etc), entrepreneurial mindset (less Tall Poppy syndrome), etc etc means business is generally easier in US.

Linus moved to the US. The web was possible bc the internet was funded by the US (arpanet, etc).

Europeans enjoy the Pax Americana without paying tribute to the Amerian empire.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nato-spen...

Maybe the US is spending so much in defence in it's own interests? Maybe that's how US can enforce business benefits like copyrights to the American corporations and business decisions on what other countries can invest into? Maybe that's why US can print USD at will but other countries have to earn it?

But I like the Linus argument, however this complicates things further: Are tech becoming European when the tech CEO's are having a vacation in the French riviera?

The US isn't so much subsidizing defense as it is exporting safety. And it's making bank on it.

And exporting a little teror in the background to make more moeny on their exported safety.

The American military is paid for by debt. The US can only take on this debt because they have the world’s reserve currency. It’s essentially a flat tax on the rest of the world.

Subsidizes????? You mean selling weapons at highly inflated prices benefitting the US economy while eroding Europes industrial base? Not to forget that Europe and Taiwan supplies many of the sub-systems used in US weapons. The Abraham main battle tank gun is German for example.

And by the way Europe has nukes.

> At the same time, a lot of the increase in life expectancy in the EU is due to improvements in medicine that are significantly driven by US-funded research.

Frankly, I don't believe it's true, for two reasons. First, the European Big Pharma is quite strong. It would be more fair - but not precise - to say the rest of the world benefits from the advances made in the West.

As for the second point, it was succinctly put by Dr. Marcia Angell from The New England Journal of Medicine in her famous book. From the blurb: "Drug companies, she shows, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective."

Research mostly done by underpaid researchers from China, India and Europe coming to the US in the hope to get a better life. The whole system is complex.

If the US is funding the research, what is it about the US political system which prevents Americans from enjoying those same gains?

I suggest that perhaps it’s a difference in perspective on rights. In Europe, there is a positive right to healthcare. In the US, there is no such right apart from certain circumstances. We turn our nose up at “handouts”. The US expects the free market to handle it instead, which it has. This has led to large portions of the country with few doctors and even fewer affordable ones.

This has come up before (searching for ref) but the basic explanation is GDP when adjusted for PPP in eurozone is more or less same as USA over that period (ie both economies grew at much same rate).

Basically things in America got more expensive (gas, health, education being big contributors). There is lots of wriggle room in the numbers but the vast gulf by nominal GDP is surprising and so unlikely .

Consider a city, paying two gardeners 25k each per year, and an extra 5k for two month. Spending is 55k+oil+chemicals+tool maintenance (that the gardeners usually do). Let's say the annualized cost is 75k. So this service contributions to GDP is 75k.

Now, the city wants to show GDP/capita growth. Simple : let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k. Now the GDP is 95k+ 55k (let's say the gardeners are on the same pay and have the same work). But wait, maintenance can be done by the company Y! Now the GDP is 95k+55k+20k (maintenance fixed cost 10k+worker time 7k+ 3k profit). But wait, now during winter, our gardeners have nothing to do! That eat into our profits!

Now the GDP is 95k + 50k (what is paid to the temp company)+20k+45k, and gardeners are both paid 20k/year gor this job, and can do other stuff during winter (I hear a repair shop need temp workers during inter to fix gardener tools).

The GDP grew from 75k to 160k, a bit more than 100% growth, and we optimized the economy as now gardeners can keep specializing and do gardener stuff during winter instead of learning about motors and mechanics. Great!

Is each transaction added to GDP? In that case it is a really BS number.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14

Where does the extra money come from? Out of thin air?

This is exactly what GDP means... take everything multiply by price and sum.

GDP isn't money. It's production.

There is an assumption behind GDP: people generally pay production for a fair amount of money. The more untrue this assumption is, the less meaningful GDP is.

I’m talking in the example ” let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k.”

Where does that 95k come from?

For this specific example? Just like any company's 95k. They got the initial capital from investors, they sold things to customers, they got loans from a bank, etc.

Or you're asking generally where money comes from? It's a good (and complicated) question. Google monetary and banking. In multiple senses, money DOES come out of thin air.

City budget or loans. Easy enough if your mayor have a friend who want to start a gardening company !

I'm joking: even without corruption, you can find an ideological reason, as a company will surely be more efficient than public servants!

But more likely because of incertitude: what do we do if a gardener resign? Paying an existing company 95k/year instead of spending 75k/year directly isn't a huge expense increase, and if 20k/year is the price for peace of mind (no new equipment to buy, no HR issues...) it can very well be worth it.

I'm not saying this is good or bad by the way, i'm saying this is how GDP work. It's factual. Yes, there is a left-wing slant about how i presented it, but it wasn't heavy, and a liberal could use the same example in the same way and justifying a better distribution of work and concerns (while still finding that GDP is worthless in this case)

This is interesting as an indicator, it's meaningless as a target.

But borrowing that money has implications for the economy and other businesses.

This is the mistake the OP made. You can't "goose" GDP by borrowing because that money has to come from somewhere. And the money used to "goose" GDP is money that doesn't go to other productive uses.

It's not even production because of that assumption. It's "sum of prices paid" basically

It doesn't work like that at all. You add GVA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_value_added) of each entities. Adding more intermediate entities doesn't increase GDP as the GVA of each entities is reduced.

Well… it’s not maximizing the length of life?

I would not cite this as a success story. Europe does not seem to be heading in a good direction imo. The consequences are largely unrealized. Even pretending the war never happened and they continued slurping Russian gas.

Please be informed before commenting. Europe has undergone the hardest and most painful decoupling from Russian gas for quite a while. As of 2022 no gas in Europe is imported from Russia.

Yes, that is my point. That hurts a lot and is enough to derail Europe pretty severely.

But even had that not happened Europe wasn’t trending very well.

It's essentially killed the German economy. It's all by design. The Americans don't want Germany and Russia teaming up to be a Regional Hegemon of Eurasia.

Also now America can supply Germany with Gas.

Is all by design. American Hegemony.

It has not. Germany is in technical recession, but people are not dying in the streets, have jobs, and can take care of their families. In the US the economy is stellar, yet homelessness is peaking, with people unable to afford housing even if they have a job. Stop calling it “the economy” as if it was a direct translation of the reality of a society. It’s not. Signed: a business journalist.

The parent there is spouting utter nonsense.

But I think your analysis is poor. The homeless rate is higher in Germany than the US for example. Germany isn’t on fire, but I think it’s awkward to color it in a way that implies people are doing better there than the US. It will be a painful economic transition.

Then why were successive American President so adamantly opposed to Russia selling gas to Germany? Why would they care?

"JB: Since the Second World War, it has always been U.S. policy to prevent Germany and Russia or the USSR from working more closely together."

JB = Jacques Baud, who worked for NATO.

https://mronline.org/2022/03/31/the-policy-of-the-usa-has-al...

I'm with you in argument. Nonetheless, Europe still imports 9% of its gas from Russia: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/erdgas-versorgung-europas-...

surely there are no confounders here

The digital economy is agricultural revolution 2.0 (probably more like 20.0).

Claim a small corner of (digital) land so you can grow some revenue. Now you can produce content. But now you need to sustain your content production infrastructure for the benefits of revenue. We've now justified our initial claim. Then claim more land, tilling over organic content for an optimized, manufactured experience! Now that you have more land, you can grow more revenue! Now that you have revenue, expand your business! Oops, now your business needs more revenue or else it will starve. Claim more land! Rinse and repeat.

Thanks for saying this. This is absolutely the case. We forget venture capitalism is absolutely first and foremost a framework built on an ideological system. Founders NEED to be convinced they’ll change the world with their juice press or the game won’t work. The growth myth is part of this as well.

“Europe is considered economical failure”

Hahahaha that’s funny. Europe has one of the richest and strongest economies in the world. Thousands of European companies are world leading in high tech areas, exporting high tech to U.S. and other companies around the world.

The worlds most advanced microchips can’t be built without machines made in Europe. European Airbus came from nowhere overtaking Boeing in a short number of years. The European invented ARM is now the leading CPU instruction set used worldwide etc. etc. etc. There are many more examples.

And focusing just on software: C++, C#, Linux etc. were invented by Europeans.

You might as well argue that the US economy is a failure because European and Japanese companies overtook US car manufacturers or that the US is a failure because Americans needs to take illegal drugs to handle the misery of living in the US. All equally silly arguments.

The problem is ambitious management on all levels. When you're running a billion dollar business, you can extract far better compensation (base, bonus, stock options) than if you're running a hundred million dollar business.

The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has exploded while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

> > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn.

> More people needs to understand this.

I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”

Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. We should limit the opportunities people have to choose between "more for me" and "do something useful for society".

One idea here is more progressive taxation.

> We should limit the opportunities people have

Riiight. See you at the voting booth.

Opposite. We should empower people by having a system where you don't become homeless because of random medical expenses.

> Then we should not depend on people making the right choice.

Broadly speaking, any system that depends on an unbroken chain of good people who do the right things out of the goodness of their hearts is bound to fail much sooner rather than later. So I agree.

The system should be designed so that people taking action out of their own interests nevertheless advances society as a whole. As Adam Smith put it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The system that was designed this way is capitalism, warts and all.

> One idea here is more progressive taxation.

I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from your premise. If you want to set up incentive structures such that people chasing their own interests also ends up being useful for society, then you want to make sure that people voluntarily pay money for goods and services that they value. The supplier of that value makes money, the consumer of that value is better off, and society as a whole is enriched as a result.

This also means that the state takes action to break trusts and monopolies, and (more difficultly) guards against regulatory capture, all of which end up making it so that people involuntarily pay for goods and services that they don't necessarily value. Rent-seeking behavior such as this is one of the highest economic ills.

"More progressive taxation" does many things, but it is also exceptionally good at enriching the politically well-connected, often in the form of rent-seeking behavior I described above. Look at world government spending as a fraction of GDP[0] as a good proxy for "more progressive taxation", and tell me between France (58.5%), the US (38.5%) and Singapore (15.4%), which you consider a well-run country where people do more useful things for society.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

I don't think that's true, and I think you're revealing something about yourself vs. the majority of people (besides the fact that most folks, especially in the US, don't have enough money for an extra 0 to mean much). I think of the teachers, social workers, public defenders, volunteers, and civil servants who sacrifice greater earning potential because they believe in what they're doing.

It's like folks who claim people are motivated only by money: no, you're only motivated by money. Most folks see money as a means to an end, namely, a safe, normal life lived with loved ones.

> It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society.

It's fine, but it's no unicorn. And having such a business might be the closest and only chance the people involved have at real wealth and impact - they are 90% there, and only need a little scale, or so they think.

If you were in their shoes, you would do the same.

You can't talk people into not being greedy. Definietely not while living in an economic system that is built on it.

God, I wish more companies realized this. Doing one thing, and doing it well, is admirable.

But how can I build a company to send rich people to space for dick measuring contests with only $1m a year in salary?!

But each CEO of those businesses would like to be the next billionaire. Furthermore if the business doesn't turn out to be as good as they hope they can leave and try to get lucky at another company. They care about the company only up to a (small?) point.

More people do understand this, but aren't in a situation to follow it.

Many tech companies are only plausible with VC funding. In order to get VC funding, you generally have to have a path towards being a unicorn.

You shouldn’t take VC money if you’re not going to try and be a unicorn.

VC’s aren’t interested in your “smallish business that turns a profit” and neither are the LPs that invest in the fund.

Once you take VC money, you don’t really have a choice but to grow large. That’s their entire business model.

I can’t find it now. But Spolsky himself wrote about how Fogs Creek Software could be what we now call a “lifestyle company” that could grow slowly. But he felt he needed outside investment so Stack Exchange could grow fast since it was only useful if it had network effects.

On the contrary, it's difficult to sustain the lifestyle of a unicorn founder unless you have a unicorn valuation. In less sarcastic terms, the ecosystem (VCs, founders etc) often is drawn to or selected for those who whish to get rich and get out.

A hundred and fifty years ago people risked incredible suffering in order to strike gold. All when slow and steady profit could be made by owning a farm.

> Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023

Its not possible to run a business that loses $84 million. You will run out of money.

While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site).

I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question", but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.

Wikipedia is not particularly well run. Just look at their infrastructure expenses. On the other hand, they bring in tons of money from companies and user donations.

Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?

You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself?

Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.

Wikimedia is swimming in money. Give to the Internet Archive instead. They really need it.

Your post just got me to finally donate to internet archive!

> If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.

If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing.

Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.

Even knowing those issues and hating it, after all the news last year I'm starting to appreciate the fact that Wikimedia at least still isn't changing its core function at all. Any new things they try is independent to Wikipedia and funding for Wikipedia itself still isn't cannibalized ao far for those other projects.

I can't say the same for other enshittified companies.

> their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.

(Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and also for turning undocumented and badly documented examples of JSON into a collection of (swift) `Codable` structs.

> one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow

I'm pretty sure it's the main usage of almost all the programmers who use ChatGPT.

That and translating short messages into neurotypical-appropriate management-impressing emails, lol. Example, the message "tl;dr":

Dear [Recipient's Name],

I trust this email finds you well. I am writing to express my appreciation for the time and effort you invested in composing the recent email you sent my way. Your commitment to clear communication is commendable, and I value the insights you often bring to our exchanges.

However, I must admit that due to the current demands on my schedule, I have not had the opportunity to read through the entire content of your email in its entirety. Recognizing the importance of your message, I feel it necessary to be transparent about my current time constraints and commitments.

With a view to ensuring that I can fully grasp the essential points you wish to convey, I would be grateful if you could kindly provide a condensed version or a summary of the key takeaways from your original message. Rest assured that your efforts in doing so will be highly appreciated and will enable me to offer the attention and consideration your thoughts deserve.

Please understand that my intention is not to diminish the significance of your communication but rather to ensure that I can respond meaningfully and efficiently to your input. I truly value our professional collaboration and the valuable contributions you consistently make to our discussions.

Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to receiving your condensed version of the email at your earliest convenience. Should you have any questions or require further clarification on this matter, please do not hesitate to reach out.

With warm regards,

[Your Name] [Your Title/Position] [Company Name] [Contact Information]

I would be extremely confused if I received this email.

First, the request is bizarre. “I don’t have time to read the email you sent me, so rewrite it and resend it” is an extremely strange thing.

Second, this email has about 10x the words it actually needs. This isn’t being polite.

It's humour, run with it :)

You didn't even read this garbage did you

I don't think you read the first line of that comment where there's a "lol". It's just a bit of fun.

Ok, that's hilarious :) so many words that say absolutely nothing.

Yeah for me ChatGPT is my go-to for "I know what I want to do but I don't know the exact syntax, get me an answer quickly without having to wade through endless SEO spam sites and SO questions without an answer" kind of situations.

Honestly LLM generated and moderator edited/vetted answers would make SO vastly more useful

Looks like the CEO agrees with you, which is a nice thing to be able to say given all the cynicism everyone seems to have of late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892057

Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features.

But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics.

If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO.

But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.

I just hope they understand the core value proposition of SO is that answers come from people. That is their product.

If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with.

I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.

It's doubtful that ChatGPT would be able to answer so many tech questions, if it wasn't for the existence of SO.

I don't remember which podcast was it coming from, several years ago there was motion to shut down the US National Weather Service, or is it the NOAA I don't remember, because AccuWeather is all people need. No one seems to question where AccuWeather get the meteorological data. It is from the government service

Found it. Turns out it is an audio book by Michael Lewis, The Coming Storm https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43...

I use a search engine called phind. For simple problems, usually I just have to pass in a short description of what I am doing and the error message, and it would find the relevant SO posts and summarize several potential solutions. Half the time one of the solution would work and I dont even have to open the SO posts.

Try phind.com, it's pretty much what you described. It's an AI search engine for programmers which is able to annotate its results with SO links for every paragraph it generates in case you don't trust the generated text.

Done and bookmarked. I forget how cool these things are. Now I just want it read to me in Trump’s voice with a very indignant tone and some cuss words mixed in like the presidents discuss anime videos.

Thanks, I'm currently trying to guide two students through the hell of setting up ML on CUDA without doing everything from scratch and they use chatGPT a lot.

This will probably come in handy for all the weird cryptic errors that they get along the way.

Yeah, I'm surprised that a company whose core product could be run by three people for less than a million USD per year with room to spare for lavish company cars, somehow manages to lose $84 million USD.

This is a “Dropbox is just a pretty rsync”-level comment

Plenty of sites of similar scale were run on less or are to this day. SO also is technologically as basic as it gets. They don't even serve big files.

Some can't stand the fact that they have a perfect product.

I think OP may be referencing SO has multiple products outside the core QA site that may be more headcount-intensive or at least have more costs outside a few .NET servers and a well tuned database.

Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.

Atwood and Spolsky themselves boasted repeatedly that SO, for a long time, was just a Windows server and a SQL Server with some C#.

The key element in the success of SO was not technical: it was Spolsky and Atwood leveraging already-established (Microsoft) audiences they had, to create a virtuous circle of sharing that snowballed for years.

Musk can buy it and run it like that. Maybe drop the O and make it SX?

> Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.

Please god no. Why this tendency to grow something you like until it includes everything?

There are other places to discuss including the actual Reddit. SO is about question-answers, that's why it got popular. You try to turn it into Reddit, you will add Reddit-scale moderation overhead across 100000 simultaneously running threads to already existing moderation overhead for actual answers. If you didn't notice Reddit can't even manage their own overhead so they freeze discussions after a while.

This is the opposite of what SO should do, which is focus on discovering and improving existing information instead of adding more and more ways to contribute low-effort junk

Anyone can edit any answer (unless it is specifically locked which is uncommon)

For new users the edit does have to get approved by 3 other users to give some check on vandalisim.

Thus answers are wikis.

> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion.

This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

Chat is instant. Blink and you will miss it. It isn't suited at all for thread discussion where they might be months between additional answers and comments.

Or move it to zulip or zulip like so it's at least threaded in a way that works over months. But as is it's just two different purpose tool and cramming one's use case in the other just doesn't fit.

But SO is not meant for discussions.

It is to provide answers (preferably one) to a question.

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?

I mean, if you can copy/paste my answer here into your codebase, I would be very surprised.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...

I'm surprised you didn't get a mod complaining there's nothing to copy/paste in there :)

Stated a little more politely, that was its original purpose, yes.

Those are really the only questions which need SO though. If it would be clear how to ask or answer the person wouldn't need SO.

This exact type of discussion comes up on GitHub issues, and quite often some combination of replies hides a true solution.

I'm always surprised Discourse was never integrated into SO.

Their "migrated to chat" feels alot like "wished away to the cornfield".

For one, it's almost never a chat. You go there, and the other person who might be talking last posted 12 hours ago. That's not an immediate conversation. These are still "comments". It's a clumsy interface. Then, despite no longer having to be a "comment on a question" like in the main interface, it's still this crappy pseudo-IRC that doesn't give you full markdown to work with.

> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO

Such they claim.

20K+ karma in SO. I have never used SO chat. I don't come to SO to socialize. To me chat means socializing.

I'm in a similar point... though tbh, most of my points are just entropy from being fairly active early on. I don't use SO chat either... if I want/need something closer to chat, I'm more inclined to join various dev channels in IRC/Libra.

> Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow.

Wikipedia isn't run like a business, but relies on charity. Wikipedia doesn't have to be profitable to exist so of course it isn't run like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is backed by a foundation that gets plenty of donations. Maybe SO should adopt that model, but that's an entire different question.

If Wikipedia had to be profitable it would be a very different platform.

Both are crowdsourced (so are reddit, facebook and youtube), and the similarities stop there.

> needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.

I use GPT to implement classes with many interfaces. Even though I often have to make corrections, it's still way faster than looking up the documentation for each of these interfaces. Saves a lot of time in these cases, all the more so I don't have to ponder on which interface in the class hierarchy tree I need to implement.

> SO doesn’t need large language models.

It could use it to improve its search. However, it should be trained on SO, because the language is quite specialized.

> meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management

A bimbo is a woman who makes up for a lack of intelligence or competence by having sex appeal.

Don't take my word for it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo

Did you mean to use a different word?

It's 2023! There's no reason we can't assume gender-neutrality of previously-gendered terms. Maybe the parent commenter finds Prashanth Chandrasekar absolutely smoking hot (despite his seeming incompetence).

If you assume gender neutrality, you're still left with the near-explicit implication that management at Stack Overflow is chosen for their sexuality. It's not at all rare to accuse management (wherever) of being chosen for something other than competence, but usually you'd be saying they are where they are for political reasons, not because they slept with someone.

This claim is unusual enough that I wanted to know if it's what my parent commenter meant.

They probably could use the LLM to do a lot of things:

Imagine sanity checking old answers for new versions of language or Library. Adding probabilistic merit to new user answers. Asking the question asker to review machine generated answers in troubleshooting questions with little traction.

Obviously, enshittiffication is at work in how these social0-esque sites try to use tech.

> Thank god Wikimedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow.

I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.

There's a lot of nuance to how SO and other sites they run work. Turning programmer focused FAQs into a collaborative site was the route it kind of had to take.

Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.

Yet, now that stackoverflow is becoming increasingly hostile to their contributors, I think it would be a good moment to the Wikimedia folks to venture in this area.

I take it you haven't had to deal with many mods on Wikipedia.

Depends on who's fiefdom you encroach upon (and language version). I think SO "culture" is more equalized, even among multiple tags.

> I didn't know he was one of its creators

This comment just made me feel old :-)

In a rosy red version of stack overflow yes, in reality it is a place for javascript developers to copy paste answers from. There core value proposition is being destroyed by GPT generating more contextualized copy paste snippets for them.

The ChatGPT answer for "how do I serialize a Java object" is spot on, better than the one I found on SO in a comparable amount of time. I encourage you to try it.

Really hope SO internalizes these suggestions

> SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.

Mods are the worst. Community moderators are ruining SO faster than the CEO.

Yeah, the CEO nailed the problem 5 years ago and tried to fix it. The community was having absolutely none of it - meta overflow more or less had a collective “are we so wrong? no, it’s the questionmakers who are wrong…” and then went right back to it.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.

I guess all the people downvoting are moderators on SO who are upset they killed a community.

Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all.

I did use GPT4 for a lot of the minor things that i am too lazy to remember and would have „relearned“ on SO every time… maybe others have a similar experience and management just sees visits dropping? Maybe they just focus on developing a target audience for a tailored product.

> Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all.

Google algorithm changes have absolutely curbstomped SO visibility, probably due to third-party sites mirroring their content and making it appear to be a linkfarm to google.

It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone. Even just pushing a site down a ways in results will massively reduce the amount of traffic, even for us technical users.

There have been a lot of "monkeypatches" from users working around it, like adding "reddit" or site:reddit.com or other hints, but fundamentally google result quality has been significantly declining for 10+ years now and it's getting to the point where it no longer surfaces desirable content anymore.

> It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone

Good point!

Your response just made me remember why Copilot & later ChatGPT came in so handy. It was a weirdly perfect timing . It was after i have been so annoyed with all these trashy low quality code snippet sites just copying SO content appearing multiple times on the first page for almost any code related query. After months I even made a Ask HN because i wondered, if only I was so incredibly annoyed by these sites popping up.

I just stopped googling for much programming related questions because of this.

OT: A silly thought crossing my mind: I never really understood the value of these sites. In hindsight now, does it seem plausible that microsoft or openAI were behind these or had something to do with these sites?

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