codinghorror

wow the Google Play fee is only $25 one time ever? That's nuts!

yeah the Java thing stopped me cold. That's bizarre on a Pi.

I deleted my Reddit account long ago. Opinion based downvoting is so toxic on small subreddits, and cannot be disabled in any meaningful way.

Instagram is the future of Facebook. Probably the most important tech acquisition since YouTube.

Did you see this: a random jury of your online peers https://www.minds.com/minds/blog/power-to-the-people-the-min...

I support this kind of stuff in theory but it is incredibly difficult to get to scenarios where this actually happens. You need to be massive scale for it to occur with any regularity.

Ironically Facebook’s original design around “only a list of approved friends see any of your content” may have been more correct in the long term. Randos do not scale, particularly when like Twitter you are not particularly competent at evolving your product.

Ah, the many headed hydra joy of threaded discussions, chop off one head and four more appear!

you and many, many other venture capitalists

if it has Qualcomm inside, the answer is definitely "yes"

It's a problem that is within your power to fix, and in fact within the power of anyone in front of a web browser to fix, because it requires no permissions or even a login. When you see an obsolete answer in need of clarification (such as this only works on versions 1.0 - 5.3, or this functionality was removed in version 2.3), press the edit button and make it so.

if the information in the answer is incorrect as of a certain version of the library / environment, it's perfectly fine for anyone with a web browser to edit that additional information into the post.

There's zero evidence that people stop reading at the first answer. Otherwise no other answers would have any upvotes, and you can see that's not the case.

Editing is not strongly discouraged, and adding a disclaimer is not rare.

Fair. Thanks for that edit.

It is amazing the number of replies in this entire HN thread that have no idea every single question and answer on Stack Overflow is editable, even by an anonymous user. The first item in my list was Stack = wiki for a reason!

Print works fine; try it. Find is indeed contingent on what's loaded on the page, same reason you can't "find in page" when you're viewing paginated page 5 of 20. Not really a valid criticism, unless you're just splitting hairs for fun.

This is covered in the blog post, search for "I didn't do that"

Entirely possible .. but I desperately hope that the /ask page is reworked from the ground up to be a much more engaging sort of dynamic tutorial. Most of the friction from people colliding with the SO system is on that page, and it hasn't materially changed since 2011.

Per the wiki comparison, there's an edit button on every answer and question -- it works even if you're not logged in. Try it!

I'm starting to think that calling the edit button "improve this answer" and "improve this question" was a mistake..

It's not a bad idea, but speculative questions (will anyone really ask this?) lead down the path of the "documentation" effort which was hugely risky and eventually got pulled. https://stackoverflow.com/documentation

> not to read this blog post as a diplomatic pushback to the current efforts of SO leaders to make it more welcoming

Not at all, at least, that is not my intent. I do feel like the key items articulated there (SO as wiki, duplicate danger, competitive system of peer review, for practicing programmers) are not well understood by outsiders and peripheral members of the community, though.

Note that the Stack Overflow tour (which was and is quite good!) that explains what Stack Overflow is was perma-demoted to the footer... well, that used to be true, but actually I just checked now and it's gone altogether? The word "tour" doesn't appear on the SO homepage in incognito mode, at all. You can visit "help" (which is in the footer) and then, and only then, will it appear as a topbar.

https://stackoverflow.com/tour

> They unleash a task force of moderators on them that kick out the low-quality creators

Not following, SO has always had pretty strict rules on quality from 2009 forward. There's no inflection point here.

> How to handle stale information. I still see no solution to this.

Since you're down with "SO as Wikipedia" surely you can find the edit button on every answer and question.. which works even in incognito mode when you are not logged in?

> Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung expecting an answer to their question.

My gut feeling is that this worked better in the past because Stack Overflow was at a smaller scale, and the audience was a bit more insular and willing to read stuff about how the systems work on Stack Overflow (programmers love understanding rule systems; it's literally their job most of the time). Now that SO has achieved permanent world scale, the constant influx of new people who don't take the time to learn the ambient norms before posting, and thus cut themselves on what they perceive to be unnecessary sharp edges, is getting .. large.

Most of this could be solved by a very detailed, educational multi-step /ask page in my opinion.

That's mostly a perk for the question asker. Nobody (that I know of) stops reading at the first answer, because there are usually multiple good ways to solve any problem in programming. And if the accepted answer has a fraction of the upvotes of the answer just under it.. that's another strong signal to "keep scrolling"

> One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse over time, like the uniqueness problem.

It's not discussed because the solution is kinda obvious.. wikis mean editing, right? Even by anonymous users? That's also how it works on Stack Overflow. Edit the answer to make it better, more up to date, or add a disclaimer at the top that it only applies to very specific versions as needed.

Try pressing the "improve this answer" aka edit button and editing it, for starters. Works even for anonymous accounts!

why haven't you, or someone else, edited the answer to indicate this or add a disclaimer?

> However, infinite scrolls cannot keep the state by its design. Users cannot share their current state. Which also means you cannot track users’ actions using analytics tools.

This absolutely isn't true at all; for example in Discourse we update the browser address bar as you scroll to reflect the current post you're viewing.

Per https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13392/SPEC2006-eff_575px.p...

SPECint2006 -- 36.93 --> 44.92 is about 20% better

Speedometer2 -- 90 --> 125 is 38% better

That is nearly 2x what SPECint would predict. (It's also not changes in Mobile Safari / iOS 12 because every device benchmarked was on the same version of iOS 12).

I highly recommend this article in that same vein

http://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditio...

This is when Chrome on Android finally started to turn a corner, they've done a fantastic job. JS perf has increased 50% from 2016 to 2018 in Chrome/Android. Sadly Android is still hamstrung by extremely mediocre Qualcomm SoCs but they've made huge strides on the software side.