Comment by pmkary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmkary | Hacker News Reader

People are so mean there. I've seen those who say they love Stack Overflow, but to me, it always feels like I ask a real question that has been haunting me for a long time. At times, I reach the point where I think, "to hell with it," and I ask on SO. For example, I once asked a very specific question about how to manually layout text in GTK, and people responded as if they were noob questions (which honestly they were not). They bully you for not having searched the web, even though you did search and found nothing. This bullying makes you feel dumb, and then most of the time, they just give you a look and walk away without helping you.

For me, it has always been about searching Google. If it led to SO, I would check the solutions, but most of the time, they didn't work. There would always be a blog somewhere with someone nice enough to put in the effort and explain things in detail. Once I got used to this, LLMs emerged, which are so much better. They provide solutions and combinations that make wild things easy, even those without documentation. And they do so instantly and pleasantly. No LLM bullies you for not having searched the web and then walks away. I'm kind of glad that SO is fading; there's a lot of bullying that is running into oblivion.

I wonder how will LLMs give you the answer when the source, SO, is gone?

Once critical mass of programmers relies on LLMs, original code creation and usage will decline, as LLMs will not provide these as suggestions. So entering the “dark ages of programming” will solve for that, as you won’t need to retrain LLMs.

RAG + documentation might help. I wonder if documentation will start to take a more standardized format across projects that's especially easy for LLMs to parse (maybe everything dumped into a single .txt file?). I'm currently learning Polars, and it's frustrating how LLMs keep giving me deprecated code. But if they load the current documentation, they should be able to catch their mistakes.

Why will SO be gone? They are now partners with OpenAI - https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partne...

If nobody is answering new questions, what will the LLM use to learn?

People who crave karma points will continue do so. The game isn't for the faint hearted. SO still has the best gamification model and there isn't any competitor.

Does it, really? I have a few thousand points over there but I just gathered them from my work related issue solving. I never dedicated time just to solve SO questions and I doubt the people who do are plentiful enough to keep the website going. Most answers I see are posted by accounts with less than 10k reputation which really isn't hard to get. I doubt the "grinders" will keep the website alive if everyone else will move to LLMs.

It’s not cool to feed ai and there are no points for doing so. Ai feeder communities will die eventually

Even the best gamification model is not worth very much IMHO.

Theoretically the super intelligent ai will connect your question to the open source repo it read on GitHub. So you will get the answer anyway.

Read the full documentation of the piece u r working on.

If the source was SO, the LLMs would mock you for asking dumb questions and vote to close your question as a duplicate.

Despite all their drawbacks, LLMs don't bully you and I feel comfortable asking them the most idiotic of questions.

Some SO users just run around downvoting everything, and of course the cowards leave no comments.

If you dare bring this up in the SO forum, perhaps suggesting or asking about a way to mitigate this behavior, pedantic douchebags go apoplectic with "Oh THIS again" as if the problem were solved.

People on Stackoverflow give you a look?

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