Let me StackOverflow that for you | Hacker News Reader

Let me StackOverflow that for you

letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com

17 pointsaustengary14 comments

Please don't upvote this site. Adding more snark to the world on a nice Friday morning doesn't help anyone.

On the contrary, go visit SO and find a few questions you can help someone with. I'm going to after I get some coffee. Help some others out, just like people have helped us out on so many occasions.

Can't agree more. I can see benefit in asking technical questions (no matter how dumb) because you can educate and communicate one another, not the sort of questions LMGTFY deals with. I wouldn't enjoy working with the person who came up with this site...

Last time I was given a snarky lmgtfy link, the search results didn't actually produce any useful results. I had already tried google-ing the exact words before asking.

I can see that becoming a problem in a couple of years:

Step 1) Go to stackoverflow and search question. Step 2) Answers only point to letmegooglethatforyou. Step 3) Search using letmegooglethatforyou. Step 4) Find only results pointing to letmestackoverflowthatforyou.

As a matter of fact it has already started.

This is why LMGTFY is banned on Stack Overflow. If you see it, please flag it for a moderator to delete.

The links generated don't work. There's the "/" at the end that's screwing things up.

For example, the link generated for "hello world" is:

http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20wo...

Which doesn't work. (don't click on "preview". Copy and paste the link (which is what your "victim" will have to do)).

But "http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello%20wo... will work (will be changed to "http://letmestackoverflowthatforyou.herokuapp.com/hello world")

I don't see how this is better than let me google that for you. Google is a far better search engine for searching on SO ( and you can get non-SO relevant hits), unless you decide to use tags, which letmestackoverflowthatforyou doesn't use.

Neither LMSOTFY or LMGTFY are really truly useful tools, they're good ways to shame people who ask before searching. If I am actually looking for an answer on SO I would probably google. If I wanted to screw with someone, then LMSOTFY might be useful since the main utility isn't the search function.

Stack Overflow's search automatically converts search terms to tags if they happen to be a common enough tag, so that's taken care of when the search is submitted to SO. (Try searching for "Java String" for example.)

The problem I have with this is that the world didn't really need yet another snarky "Let me X that for you" site. This doesn't make the Internet better. LMGTFY links are banned on Stack Overflow because they fail at being either clever or useful. Using Stack Overflow's name and logo for this strikes me as rather dickish.

I've always found it a lot more effective to sit down with someone and find the answer together, no matter how simple the question. If our technique works well, I've found they'll generally try it again the next time they have a question.

Unlike sending this link, figuring out things together doesn't leave teammates avoiding and dreading interactions with each other.

hey everyone -- I'm actually one of the three developers-in-training who wrote this app. We just finished week four of Dev Bootcamp, and this was just a (admittedly stupid) project we invented to practice our abilities in html/css/javascript/sinatra/rspec/heroku. We built it in four hours late on thursday night, basically on a dare.

Also -- we love helping people! sitting down and walking someone through a problem is the best way to help them learn something and to crystalize the concept for yourself. Hell, thats basically the motto of DBC. And of course it's against the ethos of the programming community to belittle others who ask for help, since we're all going to need help at some point.

This site is just meant as a joke. I would hate it if someone actually used this on a curious and well meaning junior developer.

This was yesterday for me. Had a developer come to my desk, asked how to perform an action (set a timeout on a ajax request), I pulled up Stackoverflow and had the answer in about 10 seconds.

So you helped them, and showed them a tool they could use to help themself in the future. That's good!

This tool on the other hand, would help you belittle and alienate them so that they are afraid of asking for help in the future.

I'd like to note that Dash is awesome, and easily searches and displays docs, google, and stackoverflow:

http://kapeli.com/dash

Reply on news.ycombinator.com