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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

> Which is never?

In my experience it was "a lot". Because my stack traces were mostly hardware related problems on arm linux in that period.

But I suppose your stack traces were much different and superior and no one can have stack traces that are different from yours. The world is composed of just you and your project.

> Do you often just lie to win arguments?

I do not enjoy being accused of lying by someone stuck in their own bubble.

When you said "Which is never" did you lie consciously or subconsciously btw?

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According to a quick search on google, which is not very useful these days, the maximum query length is 32 words or 2000 characters and change depending on which answer you trust.

Whatever it is specifically, the idea that you could just paste a 600 line stack trace unmodified into google, especially "way before AI" and get pointed to the relevant bit for your exact problem is obviously untrue.

"is" not "was" though.

Pasting stack traces and kernel oopses hasn't worked in quite a while, I think. It's very possible that the maximum query was longer in the past.

2000 characters is also more than a double spaced manuscript page as defined by the book industry (which seems to be about 1500). You can fit the top of a stack trace in there. And if you're dealing with talking to hardware, the top can be enough.

I'm really struggling to see why you might assume that google decreases the maximum query length over time when that's generally the exact opposite of how things develop?

And indeed, in the early days the maximum query length was 10 words. So no, you have never been able to paste an entire stack trace into google and magically get a concise summary.

If you are changing the original claim that you were responding to to "I can do my job without llms if I have google search" Sure of course anyone can. But you can't use that to dismiss that some people find it quite convenient to just dump the entire stack trace into a text chat and have a decent summary of what is important without having to read a single part of it.

> your stack traces were much different and superior and no one can have stack traces that are different from yours

Very few devs bother to post stack traces (or generally any programming question) online. They only do that when they're stuck so badly.

Most people work out their problem then move on. If no one posts about it your search never hits.

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