HN Explorer

Is Stackoverflow deserted?

7 points by SkyMarshal ↗ HN
I don't use SO very much, but just went on it to post a question about a weird IE css filter:alpha edge case I can't find an answer to on Google.

Most of the front page questions have 0 votes and 0 comments. Is this normal, or just everyone away for the weekend? Should I still bother to post a very niche question?

http://stackoverflow.com/

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uCfrW.png

7 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] thread
robin_reala
The oldest question in your screenshot is 3 minutes old. I think you might be expecting a bit much for them to all have comments and answers!

In my experience, well worded questions do attract answers, even if those answers are a week down the line.

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Jach
I was waiting a bit to make a snarky reply: the first comment on this thread was about 40 minutes after submission, does that mean HN is deserted?

More seriously though, people are sleeping. I don't know what SO's country-usage stats are, but I'd bet most of their active and knowledgeable members are from the States. Also from your screenshot alone you need someone familiar with windows server and C#, php and its relationship to apache and the filesystem, html5 AND its quirks with IE, regex and sed's flavor, more PHP and probably in the context of a framework, Python with templating and google app engine, something to do with HTML tidiness, and mutexes and multithreading in the context of C#. I'm frankly amazed when someone knows about the same thing I'm working on, only a bit better so that they are able to help me within a day of posting. A few times my questions have just been too narrow, and in that case I just shrug as it's usually not a show-stopper question for me.

dangrossman
SO's users aren't sleeping, the questions in the screenshot were less than 3 minutes old and some had multiple answers already. This submission should be flagged, it's not worthy of responses.