Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific
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.
A+
43 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] threadI'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.
Its "PerlMonks" for the general programming community.
People do tend to idle on IRC :/ You may need to try a few channels, or wait until someone is awake ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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..!
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).
it's nice if it works though
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?
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.
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.
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.