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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions to understand my problem better.

The change with LLM is I can now just ask my hare brained questions first and figure out why it was a stupid question later

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Of course you’re supposed to put in work, that’s how you learn. You have to think through your problem, not just look at the back of the math book to copy the answer.

The problem with Stack Overflow is not that it makes you do the work—that’s a good thing—but that it’s too often too pedantic and too inattentive to the question to realise the asker did put in the work, explained the problem well, and the question is not a duplicate. The reason it became such a curmudgeonly place is precisely due to a constant torrent of people treating it like you described it, not putting in the effort.

Oh, yeah.

SO is infamous for treating question-askers badly.

I have used LLMs for some time, and have no intentions of ever going back to SO. I get tired of being insulted.

> The only stupid question is the one you don't ask.

- A poster on my old art teacher's studio wall.

Wikipedia does the same to those who contribute

StackOverflow intimidated me for reasons you say. What is it with the power trip that some of these forum mods have?

Basic human nature. Many folks that are hard on others, have been the recipient of bullying, themselves. It’s a self-perpetuating thing.

“Breaking the chain” is quite difficult, because it means not behaving in the manner that every cell in your body demands.

SO wasn't even the first site with this phenomenon. IMO SO is way more cordial than some of the forums from the early 00s. And before that, many irc channels were known for being brutal to people coming for help. I was part of the problem there until I realized there was a problem and decided to change my approach, but it took years to unlearn what I had picked up from other channels ops.

I was quite the troll, in the UseNet days.

One of the reasons that I strive to behave, hereabouts, is that I feel the need to atone.

It can be quite difficult to hold my tongue/keyboard, though. I feel as if it’s good exercise.

I can't check, but I don't think I've ever asked questions on StackOverflow, or even Reddit. Maybe I'm lucky, but my searches have always given me enough leads to find my own solutions or where to find them. There's a lot of documentations and tips floating around the internet. And for a lot of technologies, the code is available as well (or a debugger).

I always enjoyed documenting things. So got great delight out of carefully asking the few questions I was really stuck on on stack overflow... and then half the time later coming up with a solution and adding that good answer.

(Mostly this ended up being weird Ubuntu things relating to usecases specific to robots... not normal programming stuff)

Maybe those are two sides of the same coin, question-askers are treated harshly because the priority of the site isn't to help them, the priority is to help the people who are searching up similar questions and browsing the threads. It makes perfect sense from a business perspective, because for every question-asker you'll have many more question-browsers.

I originally learned programming by answering questions on StackOverflow. It was (unsurprisingly) quite brutal, but forced me to dive deep into documentation and try everything out to make sure I understood the behavior.

I can’t speak to whether this is a good approach for anyone else (or even for myself ~15 years later) but it served to ingrain in me the habit of questioning everything and poking at things from multiple angles to make sure I had a good mental model.

All that is to say, there is something to be said for answering “stupid” questions yourself (your own or other people’s).

> ... "it served to ingrain in me the habit of questioning everything and poking at things from multiple angles to make sure I had a good mental model."

Way back in "Ye olden days" (Apple ][ era) my first "computer teacher" was a teacher's assistant who had wrangled me (and a few other students) an hour a day each on the school's mostly otherwise un-used Apple ][e. He plopped us down in front of the thing with a stack of manuals, magazines, and floppy discs and let us have at it. "You wanna learn computer programming? You're gonna have to read..." :)

Pretty much this. Even in topics I'm decently knowledgeable, I feel like the vibe from SO answers will be "just read the spec" or source code; so I usually was able to string other answers together.

With LLMs you can start with first principles, confirm basic knowledge (of course, it hallucinates but I find it's not that hard to verify things most of the time) or just get pointers where to dive deeper.

That's interesting. When SO came out, I was a big contributor, all in on getting the karma points and whatnots. Eventually, I realized I was being bullied by a bunch of Europeans who had never actually worked a real job in their entire lives and were, for lack of a better term, "software enthusiasts." Invariably, I would answer something based on actual experience only to get downvoted because some idiot hobbyist thought it was incorrect. The thing about this biz is that there are things that are blatantly incorrect for sure, but all correctness is some shade of gray, highly dependent on particular situations. People who lack experience have no sense of any of that, though.

A second major issue with SO is that answers decay over time. So a good answer back in 2014 is a junk answer today. Thus, I would get drive by downvotes on years old discussions, which is simply irritating.

So I quit SO and never bothered to answer another single question ever again.

SO has suffered from enshitification, and though I despise that term, it does sort of capture how sites like SO went from excellent resources into cesspools of filth and fools.

That LLMs are trained on that garbage is amusing.

I haven't answered on SO since someone edited my answer to say something I didn't write. It was minor, but I don't like that on principle. It adds huge personal risk to every question I answer.

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