My most downvoted StackOverflow answer | Hacker News Reader

My most downvoted StackOverflow answer

ohadravid.github.io

16 pointstodsacerdoti10 comments

The biggest mistake we (or at least I) repeatedly make on the internet is assuming we are debating with a person in a rational state of mind. Trolling, redirected anger, redirected sorrow, pride, ignorance social experiments, "for the content", LLM powered bots, and some who just want to watch the world burn, there are any number of reasons why folks say what they say and do what they do.

Someday, I hope to remember that before I let yet another comment/post/blog/forum get under my skin.

Most people that have some mental illness but they are not dangerous to themselves or others, are free (depends on the country). For some reason, an ill brain will generate mostly negative thoughts. Something to keep in mind.

You have a much easier time using stack exchange style sites if you try not to take anything personally. Think of it more like editing a wiki (of FAQs) rather than a form of social media.

Similarly, read multiple answers before copy/pasting to make sure you have an understanding of what the solution is.

(1) I'd be angry all the time if I was coding C or C++ or C/C++ or C-- or anything to do with C. It's the programming language that puts the C in Cthulhu. "How do I determine the length of an array in language X?" is one of my benchmarks in programming language question answering and for most languages it has an answer like

   len(a)

   a.size

but the same lack of bounds checking that makes the return after a strcpy Turing complete bites you there.

(2) I'd also be angry all the time if I was looking to StackOverflow for answers because the moderation system being ineffective (for plain ordinary problems, never mind the ontologically challenged problems like this one) is just one of the many quality problems, such as all the Python 2 answers that would be valid Python 3 answers if only

   print x

was rewritten to

   print(x)

With all the excuses from people who think "you shouldn't cut and paste code anyway so it's a good thing that the code doesn't work" and the burden of doing that kind of maintenance work is greatly magnified because SO has at least 10 or bad mediocre answers for each good answer.

(3) A major factor behind "enshittification" is that given the two-sided market reality it is almost impossible to kill or displace a successful site. For instance Twitter lumbers on despite Musk making every effort to kill it short of actually pulling the plug.

author here: but do you find the article helpful in making you less angry?

also:

> I'd be angry all the time if I was coding C or C++ or C/.C++ or C-- or anything to do with C

lol

I am not angry about SO because I don't use it very much so I can't say I am more or less angry. (Particularly now that I have copilot) I never really got into playing the game that it takes to participate in it. (e.g. sometimes I might not know what I'm talking about but sometimes I do and I don't perceive that SO will recognize it when I do)

There was a site that licensed the SO software for a particular topics that I did participate in and I managde to become the #2 user by asking questions, not answering questions. I could have been the #1 user but I thought the #1 user deserved his spot. I knew there had to be some reason why the same strategy didn't work for SO but I never got motivated to find out why.

Personally, I think Stack Overflow's problems are kind of the natural result of the poor documentation and organization of even the most established, broadly used languages and libraries.

It's insane that standard libraries include noob traps with known vulnerabilities, and that are considered bad practice. The first party documentation for a library is typically woefully incomplete at best, and actively misleading at worst, as updates to syntax and parameters don't get added and examples will refuse to compile.

"What does this parameter actually do" is often a question unanswerable by the official documentation.

I can't believe we actually live like this.

In the previous place I worked, if I asked something about a C++ feature, they would point me to cppreference.com. Although it is a good reference work, to me it was always horrible to learn anything new from. First time you use std::optional, have a look at this https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/optional

> Obviously I wasn’t a C or a C++ expert then

Then why did he give an answer? There is nothing wrong with not answering questions you don’t know answers to. If/when I realize I gave the wrong answer I just delete it.

> But I was just starting out, and if someone wrote that my answer was so bad that “there’s little hope to delete-vote it”, I would probably be super sad.

Both people here being childish and immature. The guy doing insulting is also being an a-hole.

I don’t like it when people take stack overflow so personally. It’s just a repository of questions and answers. It’s not your social media profile. Don’t treat up/down votes as like/dislike buttons.

Common people.

Now I’m the one yelling at the clouds. :)

What? How do you compute a compile time constant?

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