Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific

57 pointsbrandnewlow41 comments

I just wanted to sing the praises of StackOverflow.com for a second. I wanted to put together a custom query to display a few key metrics for my social news site. The folks on IRC ignored a polite request and I found a few folks willing to help for $50/hour. Both of these were expected, sensible outcomes.

StackOverflow came through with the answer in about 15 minutes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/696289

The impressive part, to me at least, is that the initial answer posted wasn't yet easy enough for me to follow. I asked a few questions in the comments, more detail was added, I asked a few more questions and came back in a few hours and a copy-and-paste code snippet was waiting for me.

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It's cool, but I couldn't get into it - and I usually get into all of these sorts of sites. Why? People seem to answer questions almost instantaneously and as a new user I can't do anything to flagrantly incorrect answers. As a new user, I am next to powerless on there - at least on HN the only real "power" held back is downvoting. So I'm just a reader of SO and not a contributor - which is a shame really.

That brings up my only real beef with StackOverflow. Since the person who asks the question gets to pick the "correct" answer, you tend to see lots of questions with absolutely terrible advice highlighted in green with a little check mark next to it.

It's easy to see why this happens. After all, the one person in the world least qualified to identify the correct answer to a given question is the one who asked it.

It's easy to see why this happens. After all, the one person in the world least qualified to identify the correct answer to a given question is the one who asked it.

That depends on the context though. If the person is asking a question because something isn't working, and an answer solves the problem, they are then the best person to qualify whether the answer was correct.

Though yes, if you are asking a question from a more academic perspective, then you wouldn't expect the person asking to be the best judge of the right answer.

You'll often see the first answer that comes close being accepted, even though it's fundamentally flawed and doesn't actually work.

Other times, the best answer is something along the lines of "You're approaching the problem wrong.", such as in "I'm storing customer IDs as a comma separated list in a column. How do I join that to the Customer table?"

Too many people will offer up horribly complicated solutions that technically do what the questioner asked, but the real correct answer is "Normalize your schema."

If you asked a mechanic to fix some broken pipe on your car and he used a bit of duct tape to do it.. even if it worked, would you say it was a "good answer"?

I often see the "Accepted" answer with 2 or 3 points, and then a question below that with 10+ points which has more work put into it over a longer time, so the first answer was a quick solution to fix the asker's question, but other users put work into a better answer and the answerer ends up getting points for that as well. This is great because it creates a fast answer (good thing) and a good answer that takes longer. (also good.)

As some of the comments on this thread allude to, it depends on the frame of reference. I'll assume you mean the customer is in a professional garage seeking a permanent fix and has the money to pay for it. In that case is duct tape a"good answer?" I think we both agree its not. But if the person were stuck on the side of a road and a mechanic drove by and that was all he had or if the person had no money to pay for a new hose, well, then duct tape might be a good answer (or the least of evils).

So to point out the obvious with these q/a sites, caveat emptor. One has to look at the context of the site and the question(s) asked to determine what is "right" or "wrong" and what assumptions are made, for right or wrong.

Beggars can't be choosers. Sometimes you have to take what you can get to make the thing work.

One method to fight "the fastest gun" problem, is to cherrypick good questions, and actually write well-written, detailed essays, along with samples. Although more time consuming, these answers usually float to the top in rather short time frames -adding more quality.

I've tried this approach; taking the time to give a detailed answer with reasoning behind my choices and explanations for areas that might be unclear. Two things happen:

1 - The fast, but "good enough" answer wins out for the short term 10+ votes (and "Accepted status), then the question falls into the mire, occasionally floating to the surface via a Google search, where I might get one or two votes.

2 - My answer is accepted, enough that noone else bothers to partake in the question, and it falls off the radar having received maybe 1 or 2 votes.

In terms of getting good answers into the system, I guess things are working as intended. In terms of creating an engaging experience for the questioner and answerer, this seems sub-optimal.

and actually write well-written, detailed essays, along with samples.

Unless the question is on a topic I love, that makes it into work. Is the point of SO to gain points to look clever in front of your peers or to actually help people? I'd rather just write a post blog to send someone to, since it stops other people editing it and I'd get all the credit and the traffic.

Perhaps I'll give it another try - maybe it's settled down a lot since launch when pretty much every question was getting a quick fire answer in minutes.

It is often difficult to find good (easy) questions to answer quickly because they get answered so fast.

One solution is to ask questions - you can get reputation for that as well. Once you have reputation, you can down vote stuff.

Another is to look for difficult questions that haven't been answered. You can even get a badge for answering a question that's been open for more than 60 days (or something along those lines).

I realized I shouldn't complain without giving it another try. So I did. And.. perhaps it's just because I'm primarily a Rubyist and UNIX-dweller (the site seems a lot stronger for those living in the Microsoft world) but there's some rather crufty code in there coming from high karma users. Not only that, but the majority of questions are getting these "quick fix" answers well within an hour of the question going up rather than measured, educational responses that really help.

It's "question & answer" versus "learning." SO is the former. But answers alone do not equate to solid learning. Everyone can read Wikipedia articles on medicine all day, but it can't compete with the wisdom a professor or doctor can give you.

The scoring doesn't help. Usenet was pretty cool in the day because anyone could submit an answer and bad answers would be questioned by people with experience (many forums are still like this, and Hacker News is very much like this despite the points). On Stack Overflow, even if you have enough points to comment, it seems like hardly anyone bothers and there's little "calling out" of sloppy answers.

I haven't regretted trying it though. It's a well designed site and there are some great Q&As. I suspect in certain disciplines it's very useful. But, for me, I've realized working on my books and other documentation will be time better spent than having to play a game for points answering questions against the clock on a social network when I'd rather just help and teach folks instead. So, I tried..!

Ok I can't be the only one that doesn't find answers at SO.

The question that brandnewlow submitted was relatively simple and thus you found a quick answer. Try asking a challenging question and you are just as likely to find an old blog post with an answer as a StackOverflow answer. Now, I think SO has it's place. For instance when you are picking up a new language that is used in the industry. But I've rarely found answers there recently (C#, VB.NET or Lisp...).

I agree that they are improving and that some of the these rare challenging questions are beginning to be answered (Woot no complaints). And that when they are answered the answers are usually correct. But it's far from terrific.

Manage your expectations :)

There are questions that are challenging by nature (objectively hard problems) and those that are challenging to me, mostly because of my lack of experience in a particular domain, but are no-brainers for an expert (or even someone who spent an hour RTFM-ing). For the latter ones, SO works like magic.

I think that StackOverflow works best for beginners and Junior developers. Simple questions like the one here get answered quickly.

The people answering questions are mostly beginners themselves, with a bunch of semi-experienced folks who want to show off their knowledge, and a few genuinely smart people thrown in for good measure.

But you're right, you still won't be able to find help with anything genuinely tough there. The kind of people who could answer your question tend to also be the types who recognize the value of their time.

People on Stack Overflow are generally very charitable. Thanks S.O. people.

>> "The folks on IRC ignored a polite request"

People do tend to idle on IRC :/ You may need to try a few channels, or wait until someone is awake ;)

It's starting to come up a lot in Google searches, which is better than paid-for sites, say. Make an effort to read through all answers and up-rate those that are lower down but you think are better. Sometimes they're newer and better but people ignore them and just consider the top one.

Like everyone else said, SO is great for answering questions like yours. But if you have a more complicated question around code style or something more subjective it doesn't work as well.

It really helps to update a question to clarify if answers seem inadequate. Because of the volume of answers, there's a tendency to post the shortest quickest answer. Otherwise you end up on the third page, unread and forgotten.

Since it's not really a discussion forum, you have to learn to work with the question-answer format to be able to hash answers out and get real insight out of them.

SO still feels a little off for me, partly because it's large and impersonal. The answers don't speak to each other (for good reason) so the whole thread feels disconnected, and doesn't seem to move forward too much.

Raises the interesting points of a) when will regular coders start outsourcing their jobs on SO and b) when will the large community of "offshore" coders currently doing this sort of patch work swarm SO. Having said that, I have noticed that people are more likely to help helpful people so unless those people add value to the system first it is unlikely they'll get extreme amounts of help.

What do you mean by "start outsourcing their jobs on SO"?

I've had situations where instead of spending another day struggling with an issue on my own, I post a problem description on SO before leaving work, and have a good idea or two waiting for me when I get back in the morning. Sometimes it was there already when I did a late night check. SO makes me more productive. My boss does not exactly object to that.

I guess I'm thinking of freelance sites etc. reselling SO solutions.

I don't know how SO implemented their solution, but it's a solved problem, see bittorrent.

Stackoverflow is informational, educational & addictive!

Its "PerlMonks" for the general programming community.

If you're in one of the big languages on SO (C#, SQL, Python, Ruby), it's terrific.

If you're trying to get help with some other language, I've found it to be far worse than mailing lists, IRC, or even USENET. In less-popular languages, the only questions are of the form "How/Should I learn $(lang)?". There's no Jon Skeet of Haskell there.

I've tried to get something like this for the math/physics communities, but they're lagging behind a few decades. That code release by cnprog was painful to watch.

I just typed in a really long question on StackOverflow and pressed 'post', site is down and now I lost my question :(

it's nice if it works though

It has saved my butt on a few occasions already.. all within a couple hours. For 'non expert' programmers the answers always have actual code and not just high level explanations that take hours to figure out.

I too can't say enough about it. Perhaps it's most appealing to people with lower level questions (like mine) that can be answered in 2 paragraphs?

SO is just amazing, pretty much useful in every aspect of programming and software development.

A StackOverflow for the business of software would be a big success.

I'd be hesitant to provide business advice unless I were a lawyer or accountant and those guys aren't doing it for free. There's not enough questions either and you really don't want someone else telling you how to run your business. Find a trusted advisor and good reference material and figure it out. The scope is not nearly as big as programming questions.

The place I work at built a small business resource and discussion site for a client with some similarities to SO and it's not doing so hot.

Since SO is "Currently offline for maintenance", here is the question from Google cache: http://tinyurl.com/csjjxg

If you got the answer you needed you should really mark it as the accepted answer.

Don't forget to mark a response as the "Accepted Answer", it'll give the poster some additional rep

I did forget. But I just went back and did it. Thanks!

yes, it is powered by joel, you really can't expect more.

it's not really powered by joel. his technical contribution is roughly 1%. that's what it seems like from SO podcasts.

SO is the HN for programmer discussion ++1

Stack Overflow is ace!

My question was answered within 5minutes. It's sick!

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