Stack Overflow is down | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow is down

stackoverflow.com

27 pointsishener32 comments

Million of developers worldwide stopped "writing" code

Interesting question actually - assume I have some code for some specific problem I need to write. Is actually thinking the problem through and writing the code on my own more beneficial, or is it more beneficial to just find code on stackoverflow instead? There are legitimate pros and cons to each way, and I don't know how you tell which is better in some cases.

While writing ConTeXt code (similar to LaTeX), I will reference the StackExchange network:

    % @see http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/128858/2148

Brett Victor asks, "How do you get communication started between uncorrelated sentient beings?" to introduce the concept of automatic service discovery using a common language.[1]

Alan Kay had a similar idea: that objects should refer to other objects not by their memory space inside a single machine but by their URI.[2]

When programmers copy/paste StackOverflow snippets, in a way they are actually closer to realizing Alan Kay's vision of meta-programming than those who subscribe to the "tyranny of a single implementation" -- or "writing" code as some would mock, expressing a narrow view of what they think "programming" a computer must entail.

The StackExchange network provides a feature-rich interface to document source code snippets that perform a specific task. What's missing is a formal, structured description of these snippets and a mechanism to provide semantic interoperability that leads to a universal prototyping language for deep messaging interchange.[3]

How else are we going to go from Minecraft[4] to Holodeck[5]?

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4#t=790

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY#t=2940

[3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY#t=3125

[4]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1h1U5jHh6U

[5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OCKDEdtWys#t=39

I can't believe you said "million", do we really have millions of developers?

There are more than 9 millions of people that write code

Facetious, or an actual figure? If the latter, can you point us to a ref please?

I think that was this talk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ Joel says that according to MS study there are 9mln people that write code. http://careers.stackoverflow.com/uk/products/listings

Stack Overflow gets around 7 million page views per day on the weekend, and around 17 million during the week (https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com?qcLocale=en_US).

Millions seems to be the appropriate order of magnitude here.

I had the opposite reaction actually. You posted that, so I went to find out how many developers there are in the US.

According to wikipedia, there are approximately 457,000 programmers in the US, which seems like a smaller number than I would have guessed. For contrast, there are ~1.2 million attorneys.

on a Sunday?

the weekend is on Friday/Saturday in the Arab world, so yes, lots of people write code on Sundays...

You know, there is Google Cache.

I tend to procrastinate and troll stackoverflow for questions to answer. I'd be more productive, but now I'm trolling Hacker News instead.

https://xkcd.com/1185/

"StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted."

Hm, it is all creative commons licensed, right? Where is the local, daily updated, blazing fast to search offline application? :)

You could go grab the copy we put on internet archive a few weeks ago.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

Pretty sure we'll have this worked out with our provider before you can finish downloading though.

Try http://data.stackexchange.com/ ;)

...so you can get a taste how it felt writing code in 2000

Time to dust of my old c++ reference book :)

There's plenty of other sources to get code snippets and solutions, besides SO.

This isn't really that debilitating of an issue, although I guess copy-and-paste code monkeys will find it highly inconvenient.

I personally find SO to be really great compensation for given technology vendor's crappy documentation.

Seems to be their network provider: https://mobile.twitter.com/StackStatus/status/43513035754625...

Just search on google, click on the arrow next to link and next Cached. Voilá

blazing fast it isn't.

too bad they can't start a thread asking for tips to bring it back online

Interestingly, I am able to connect to SO when I VPN into the Southwest, but not from the Northeast. Availability zone-specific downtime?

New DNS records propagating.

...and i've just collect my first +15 this week. Great. :)

Doesnt work in Europe either.

I realized this when using howdoi:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/howdoi

That was fast; seems to be back up now

BACK UP!!!

i was hoping this would be most trending here and here we are !

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