[HN Gopher] Kinda a Big Announcement
___________________________________________________________________
Kinda a Big Announcement
Author : nathggns
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-06-02 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.joelonsoftware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.joelonsoftware.com)
| bfrog wrote:
| Is it just me or is the intro relating to COM a bit off the mark?
| thorwasdfasdf wrote:
| not to us old farts, who get a great feeling of nostalgia when
| we read about those win32 APIesque topics.
| drewcoo wrote:
| That's not nostalgia. Look behind you!!!
|
| My primary use of Win32 APIs now is to scare people away from
| making anything that byzantine. If the APIs don't do the
| trick, I start telling back compat stories. [shudder]
| squarefoot wrote:
| Win32? ...Ha! That's modern stuff. My first thought was "who
| the heck would need to maintain .COM DOS executables in
| 2021?":)
| ghshephard wrote:
| The intro is about how some things change slowly. His
| transition paragraph is how things don't seem to get better. He
| then does his real topic launch by then identifying something
| that _did_ change quickly, and _did_ get better.
|
| I've been reading Spolsky essays for 20 years, he really is
| incredibly talented. So much so that even today, you can
| reference some of his early essays on "commoditizing your
| complement" in the tech industry - and there is a better than
| average chance that the person you are speaking to will be
| familiar with Joel's essay on this topic.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It resonated for me because 10 years ago I worked on a COM
| project (browser extension that had to support IE) and the
| total lack of information for that "pre-internet" technology
| meant I had to rely on very hard to find books. There was one
| book in particular that without it, the project would have
| failed. And that's what everything used to be like (well, more
| like before Internet, not necessarily before Stack Overflow).
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Having stopped writing COM components in the early 2000s,
| back then there were very good resources at Microsoft's site
| (MSDN) as well as within the Visual Studio help. It's
| interesting to hear it got worse just ten years later but
| kind of doesn't surprise me that they wouldn't upkeep that
| kind of documentation.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I did a COM project around the same time. It took a little
| bit of searching, but I found an excellent tutorial on a
| random site. Something that could not have existed at
| StackOverflow because it didn't answer a specific question,
| any question it answered would have been downvoted, and it
| would have been difficult to find there.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Is stack overflow even useful anymore? I guess it must be for
| some.
|
| Personally for me it feels like the content is pretty "stale".
| E.g. an answer from 5 years ago that uses a deprecated feature in
| a library that was abandoned 3 years ago etc, a reference to
| something only working in Chrome v12(we are on v90 now IIRC) etc
| etc. It seems like a lot of what I come across on there is just
| so out of date that I personally do not put value on it.
|
| As such I personally avoid it now like I used to avoid experts
| exchange that was the stack-overflow-before-stack-overflow.
|
| I wonder if I am alone...?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Given you mention Chrome, maybe you are a JS dev, and maybe
| things move a bit faster for that language/ecosystem than for
| others (to put it mildly).
| [deleted]
| lliamander wrote:
| Talking with developers who started their career in the early
| 90's, it seems to me the two biggest changes in software
| development over the past 30 years are:
|
| - the rise of easily shared open source libraries and
| applications (supported by infrastructure like CPAN, Maven, and
| Github)
|
| - crowd-sourced documentation (blogs, forums, and Stack Overflow)
|
| It changed not just the way an individual programmer interacts
| with the code, but the way programmers work together.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| What I love about stack overflow is that you don't just get the
| answer to your question (usually) but the top rated answers
| also include the "whys". Meaning you get to expand your
| understanding of the domain in question.
|
| People who write stack overflow answers really are the unsung
| heroes of the open source world.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This highlights something I believe to be a deeper truth
| about programming in general: the whys matter, sometimes more
| than the hows.
|
| So much of programming is patterns that exist for extremely
| arbitrary reasons (note: not _acausal_ reasons, just reasons
| that are unimportant to the immediate problem domain one is
| trying to solve, or perhaps important in a way one doesn 't
| yet know). Knowing those reasons can give you some mental
| hooks to hang the arbitrariness off of.
|
| COM, which Joel mentions anecdotally at the top of the
| article, is a great example of that. I think the biggest
| challenge people have remembering why COM works the way it
| does is it's there to solve a problem that primarily the
| Microsoft software ecosystem had, which didn't show up in
| other software ecosystems as strongly: Microsoft had a vested
| financial interest in enabling developers to create closed-
| source binary blobs that could interact with each other via
| exposed objects.
|
| Though COM is language-agnostic, most examples from textbooks
| of the mid-'90s era reveal the big problem it's solving: C++
| was the hot language at the time, but C++ doesn't standardize
| name-mangling, so two arbitrary binary blobs of C++ code from
| two different compilers weren't guaranteed to be able to use
| the objects in each other's libraries. This isn't a problem
| Apple's software stack saw so often (Apple had fewer
| toolchains, so compiler incompatibility was less frequent a
| problem) and it was rarely a problem in the open-source OS
| ecosystems (if you're passing around source code instead of
| closed-source binary blobs, you don't care about name-
| mangling issues because you're building the source as a lump
| under the watchful eye of one compiler). But in the Windows
| world, with a pile of choices for compiler and a business
| need to support closed-source binary blobs that could expose
| objects, it was hell.
|
| It's helpful in understanding COM to understand _why_
| Microsoft 's ecosystem needed a way for closed-source
| libraries to expose objects in a language-agnostic way.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| What are you looking up that you get "whys"? I consider
| myself lucky if SO returns "here's the name of the library
| function you assumed existed that does what you want."
| master_yoda_1 wrote:
| he sell his soul for only $1.8B
| ilaksh wrote:
| What is that supposed to mean? Seems like a pretty good price
| for a soul.
|
| I would "sell my soul" for a measley $10 million.
| [deleted]
| arduinomancer wrote:
| > some things (like handing a file upload, or centering) that
| were, shockingly, still just as randomly difficult as they were
| in VBScript twenty years ago.
|
| I don't get why the "centering is hard" trope is still being
| repeated in 2021.
|
| I'm a recent new grad front end dev and have never had issues
| with this.
|
| Hasn't it been years at this point since flex-box became
| standard?
| davnicwil wrote:
| You're not wrong, but you may be reading it in the wrong tone.
|
| There is a certain type of joke where the punchline is
| something that was true for so long, it's acceptable to repeat
| it ironically as a sort of inside joke, knowing it is obviously
| not true any more. Best pulled off if you were actually there,
| of course. I think that's what's going on here.
| svachalek wrote:
| Standard? I'd be happy if 10% of my interview candidates could
| do a flex layout.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Google doesn't seem to think it's standard:
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+to+...
|
| Do you accept this as relevant evidence about what is standard?
| (Or would a different search be better?)
| ilaksh wrote:
| To me you proved the point. Centering with Flexbox requires
| styling the parent and they use two different properties for
| horizontal and vertical centering.
|
| Truly simple to me would not be CSS but rather an attribute on
| the element. But with CSS, the simplest thing would allow one
| to just put a style on the element you want to center.
|
| The other aspect of this is that there are multiple other ways
| of doing it.
| tdeck wrote:
| > almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before
| Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and
| the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and
| Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich
| Text Editor Component shelf.
|
| I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving
| himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a
| problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal
| website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum. Remember,
| this was 2008 we're talking about. The UX was undoubtedly less
| consistent, but it's not like we were rushing off to the library
| to look up PHP functions and CSS 3-column layouts.
| quercusa wrote:
| I still miss browsing at Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale and San
| Jose.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Literacy_Bookshops
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow"
|
| Yes. In the early 1990s I relied on Usenet's comp.lang
| hierarchy and the awesome FAQs that accreted there. A thorough
| reading of these could head off a huge number of problems
| before they manifested as bugs. Here are some examples [0, 1]
| to give people the flavour, admittedly from about 10 years
| after I had moved on.
|
| [0] http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C++-faq/part1/ [1]
| http://www.faqs.org/faqs/C++-faq/part5/
| bosswipe wrote:
| I definitely used to buy and read more books back then, and
| documentation in general. Maybe that was a good thing.
| johnfn wrote:
| I feel like this argument is akin to "back before cars, I
| used to walk all the time, and I was in much better shape."
| There's nothing to stop you from going and doing it again!
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Well, yes and no... As an Apple developer, I used to be
| able to rely entirely on Inside Macintosh books because
| Apple's docs were _the best_ in the business, probably the
| best ever. Nowadays, even if I wanted to rely on Apple's
| own documentation, I can't, because the docs are just no
| good any more.
|
| (Their header files are still very informative! But much
| less so in the Swift era, sadly...)
|
| To use your analogy, I'd really like to walk as much as I
| used to, but they ripped up all the walkable districts to
| build highways!
|
| I don't think things are bad across the board, at least.
| For example, you can get a very long way in Javascript
| purely from MDN rather than needing SO.
| SLWW wrote:
| I think that now, more then ever, any programmer that has
| started in the last 6-8 years will have the experience that
| Joel states.
|
| Though for those of us who has been doing this for 15 years,
| that is not the case.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| _I remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and Joel is giving
| himself a bit too much credit here. Before SO, when I googled a
| problem I would often find a solution on a blog, personal
| website, or some community's PHPBB/vBulletin forum._
|
| yep, Stack Overflow eliminated a whole ecosystem of fantastic
| personal blogs. I get a ton of value out of SO, I'm not trying
| to hate on it unthinkingly, but there's tradeoffs in
| everything.
| neogodless wrote:
| The contrast from bookstore to single site Q&A is exaggerated,
| but I was around before Stack Overflow. The problem was not
| just that there wasn't a single (popular, highly active) site,
| and not just that you had to sift through search results. It's
| that if you didn't find your answer, you didn't know for sure
| where to post your problem, and actually expect to get answers.
| You might post it on a personal blog or forum, and then wait _a
| very long time_ to see if a response would appear. Often it
| would not (or it was something you already tried or something
| else that didn 't work), and you'd be on your own, and if other
| people were lucky, you'd document the eventual solution (but
| often, you did not.)
|
| Stack Overflow gave you a central place for you to ask
| questions, and (within a pretty reasonable time frame) start to
| get suggested solutions to try and consider.
| zwieback wrote:
| For me there were three phases:
|
| - pre-web: experts concentrated on Usenet
|
| - early-web: Usenet decline and counter-productive
| decentralization
|
| - SO (and others): recentralization
|
| I think the SO guys just had a good-enough formula at exactly
| the right time and everybody jumped on fast enough
| sorbits wrote:
| _> you didn 't know for sure where to post your problem_
|
| It depends on the topic/domain, but I have fond memories of
| being on various mailing lists, and there was also usenet.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Came to say this - the more niche usenet groups were full
| of helpful people that didn't mind answering questions, and
| discussing fuzzy issues.
|
| I don't think of the developer eras as pre-SO vs post-SO,
| more pre-Google vs post-Google, though SO has definitely
| been a net positive.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Am I the only programmer who finds Stack Overflow to be highly
| overrated? I used it recently for the first time in several
| years as I was learning a new technology, and the most valuable
| answers should have just been in the documentation (or maybe
| they were in the documentation but Stack Overflow covered up
| the results.) But the majority of the time I find the
| documentation just significantly better and give up on SO.
|
| To say nothing about how outdated some of the results are. I
| tried exactly what Joel suggested. I typed "Rich Text Editor"
| and searched stackoverflow.com. All top three results were at
| least a decade old (okay, the youngest was like 9 years 7
| months, but I'm going to round it up). They were closed, jut
| clogging up search results with deprecated answers.
|
| In the time before Stack Overflow, I agree there were many good
| sources online. I also agree that the printed PDFs of sources
| that some people passed off as books were horrible. But I do
| remember a lot of very good books at Barnes and Noble.
| johnfn wrote:
| I think you might be giving Spolsky a bit too _little_ credit!
| I remember the days before SO as well, and while you might luck
| out by finding your answer in some obscure niche blog, there
| was a relatively high chance that that error message you were
| staring at wouldn 't have an accessible solution online (or at
| least not one that Google could provide). You could really just
| get stuck on a problem for a day, or never find the solution at
| all and have to work around it otherwise. SO was really a night
| and day change in how readily accessible it made programming
| information.
|
| And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming
| books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a book
| just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and outs of
| the syntax? I used to do that all the time, and then I
| immediately stopped when SO became popular because I could just
| google for what I wanted and SO would always tell me.
| tdeck wrote:
| > And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming
| books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a
| book just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and
| outs of the syntax?
|
| Perhaps this is an age difference thing? I'm 29 - I learned
| to program between 2003 and 2010 from online resources,
| mostly in the pre-SO era. I learned BASIC, Perl, PHP, and
| Python entirely online. My impulse was always to just Google
| things, although I fully admit finding results was more time
| consuming and frustrating back then. The only language I
| learned from a book was FORTH, and that's mainly because it's
| an older language and Starting Forth is one of the few good
| resources on the language even today.
| necovek wrote:
| How people differ: before SO, I've rarely bought language
| books because most of them had reference pages readily
| available. I've learned and used heavily all of Python, Perl,
| PHP, SQL (with MySQL and Postgresql), a bit of assembly (NASM
| and GNU as), low-level details of C too (from ISO C9x draft),
| JavaScript, HTML and CSS and plain TeX, not to mention
| structures of x86 and VBE programming (I played with writing
| minimal kernels).
|
| This was all before 2001 while I was in high school, with
| books being very hard to get in Serbia, so internet was my go
| to resource.
|
| Now to be honest, even after SO, I only use it as a last
| resort. Somehow only 1/20th of the problems I hit match what
| people seem to hit on SO :/
| dionidium wrote:
| I also remember the "Days Before Stack Overflow" and you're not
| giving Joel (et al) _enough_ credit. It 's not like there
| wasn't _any_ information on the web; it 's just that it wasn't
| anywhere near as organized or as complete as what you can find
| today on SO. And what you _definitely_ couldn 't be sure of is
| that you'd ever get an answer to a _new_ question if you couldn
| 't already find it somewhere else. SO really did change that
| overnight.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Yup. I remember in 2005 I was teaching my fellow students a
| "debugging" course, which was of course not normally part of a
| curriculum. It basically involved "copy / paste your compiler
| error into Google and tada.wav, you'll have mailing lists or
| Usenet or blog posts about your issues".
|
| SO changed some of that landscape, but it was mostly a better
| ExpertsExchange.
| bad_username wrote:
| Right. I taught myself how to make web sites (both front and
| back) in 1999 purely online without much difficulty.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Before SO, when I googled a problem I would often find a
| solution on a blog, personal website, or some community's
| PHPBB/vBulletin forum.
|
| Even more likely, you would get links to Experts Exchange,
| which was ad-riddled with the actual answer behind a paywall.
| I'm glad that SO was able to at least kill that business model.
| Someone should do the same for Pintrest and their dominance of
| Google Images.
| wcarss wrote:
| I remember listening to the podcast where they announced
| Stack Overflow, and cited exactly the problem of walled
| communities like Experts Exchange as who they wanted to drive
| out of business.
|
| Stack Overflow ain't perfect, but it's amazing to see how
| impactful it's been. _Especially_ the unix /superuser stack
| exchange sites for having useful tips that would be a pain to
| find elsewhere.
| mattmanser wrote:
| The actual answer was always at the bottom if you scrolled
| down far enough. Lot of dark patterns on that site.
|
| I personally disagree with tdeck, Joel and Jeff deserve a lot
| of kudos, as an oldie myself SO was an absolute game changer
| for programmers.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think it used to be, but IIRC some time after Stack
| Overflow became popular they started actually gating it.
| Probably because there were people researching questions
| posed on SO and answering them from info on EE.
|
| If so, that was a catch-22 for them. Either leave them
| available and watch the only thing making your site useful
| be rapidly transcribed onto a different and now more
| popular site (whether by people playing into the
| gamification or scraping as used to be the norm doesn't
| make a difference here), or close it off and allow their
| more use hostile experience to force them into irrelevance.
| That's a tough place to be. By the time it became an
| obvious problem SO was probably too far ahead to catch even
| if they pivoted immediately, as I'm not sure anyone ever
| really felt any loyalty to EE with it's poor usability
| bordering on UX hostility.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Yeah, between various forums and blogs and the later-renamed
| expertsexchange you could often find answers. It was SO before
| SO until they started to plaster it with ads.
|
| I've seen plenty of examples on SO where the accepted answers
| are actually wrong. Not wrong as time has moved on, wrong even
| at the time. Early SO is especially guilty of this kind of cult
| of personality that built up around certain people, so whenever
| they answered they would be given the accepted answer, even if
| it was wildly incorrect and/or low effort.
|
| It's an incredibly useful resource but it's not as though if it
| disappeared tomorrow people wouldn't find a way.
| codeulike wrote:
| Spolsky and Atwood had a podcast when they were putting
| Stackoverflow together and they talk at length about what they
| wanted to achieve. Its amazing actually to see they had a very
| precise idea of what they wanted to do and they absolutely hit
| their own objective.
|
| Podcast 1, April 2008
|
| https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W6
|
| _One thing we are noticing is that the book market, the
| programming book market has just completely vanished. It is
| falling apart, catastrophically. The programmers I know don 't
| really learn new technologies from a book any more. What they
| do is they find a tutorial on the web -- maybe -- and they try
| to do something and then they page fault in knowledge.
| Basically, they get stuck on something and they either post to
| a discussion group, or they type their question into Google._
|
| _And those are the two things we want to serve basically is
| the posting to the discussion group and typing things into
| Google. Our longer term goal, if we're successful, is that you
| 're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how
| to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type
| "merge two arrays python" and submit that, and our goal is to
| be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited
| answer to that question that some individual has contributed
| and maybe other individuals have edited._
|
| -----
|
| _So then you go search on the Internet for "Mac remote desktop
| connection beta expired" and you get all kinds of discussions;
| people discussing what to do and how to work around this
| problem, and "how stupid is Microsoft that they can't solve
| this problem." What's interesting is that within five days
| Microsoft had indeed released a new version of it with the
| expiration removed. So, it is still the beta because they're
| still late but it's not actually telling you that it's expired
| anymore.
|
| So that's fine, but here's the point: in the mean time, all
| those previous blog articles about this thing being removed are
| still the results you're getting from Google. And so the number
| one result from Google doesn't know about the new thing - the
| fix. In other words, there is something that happens when
| something is broken and then gets fixed. The brokenness gets
| into Google and gets page ranked and that tends to sort of
| dominate the results for a long time because it's got the
| earliest dates on it and a lot of the times you're trying to
| solve something and you find a discussion on the Internet that
| says "the solution to this problem is there is no solution and
| you are borked" and you can't do anything about it. And that's
| wrong, that's no longer correct, you're not looking at the
| correct information anymore.
|
| One of our goals is to have a place where if somebody posts a
| wrong answer or they post an answer that used to be right but
| it becomes wrong that there is a way to remove that and to get
| that out of the site and to get the new right answer at the top
| of the page._
|
| --------------------
|
| Podcast 4, May 2008
|
| https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W781
|
| _So what are we actually going to bring to the table that
| actually makes us better, or at least different, than these
| other programming communities? And I think one of the things we
| have going for us - and it sounds kinda obvious - is when we
| have pretty large audiences that we 're gonna say, "Hey take a
| look at this thing we're doing." Right, so... you know, it's
| kind of like when Nine Inch Nails did digital music
| distribution, and when Radiohead did digital music
| distribution, all the commentators, when they talked about
| that, said, "Yeah, that's no problem, you can do exactly what
| they did if you have a band. Just one: be Radiohead, right,
| two: put digital music online." So, we've built up...
|
| ... Yes, yes, so we're hoping that having large audiences that
| we're involving in this process, through this podcast and
| through the blog and so forth, is one of the reasons that it's
| going to be different..._
|
| ------
|
| _Spolsky: So that was the question, I guess, that everybody
| keeps asking, "why another one, and how are you going to hit
| that so called critical mass?"
|
| Atwood: Right, well, first a bit of terminology. So, it's not
| exactly a forum. I mean, when I thought about this and Joel and
| I were initially talking about this, I framed my mind in a way
| that said, "OK, this is a forum that we're building." But the
| more we looked at it, it's not really a forum. It's more
| focused than that. Cause forums have a problem, and I've
| discussed this on previous podcasts, where you can talk about
| anything, right? And that ends up sort of, you end up chasing
| your tail in some way. When you can discuss anything, you end
| up discussing nothing. So, there's a very laser-tight focus on
| question/answer that I think sets us apart from forums right
| out of the gate. And then also, and I don't think we've
| actually discussed this publicly, but there's going to be a
| Wiki-like aspect to the pages as well. So the questions won't,
| hopefully won't go totally stale over time. Because once you
| get enough trust in the system, you'll actually be able to
| update the questions, point people to different areas as
| questions get old, and so on. So those are my first two
| observations out of the gate. What would you say, Joel?_
|
| ----
|
| See also this "Google Tech Talk" by Joel Spolsky in April 2009
| when he talks in detail about the design decisions they made
| with StackOverflow -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ - again they knew
| exactly what they were trying to do
| necovek wrote:
| To be honest, Google returning SO answers for something that is
| exactly _not_ what I am looking for instead of language
| /library reference documentation as it used to is one the most
| annoying things for me as a developer today. Though I think
| that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them
| down.
|
| As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your search
| engine of choice, and look for python.org documentation: none
| of them show it on the first page for me.
| shpx wrote:
| On Chrome, go to chrome://settings/
|
| Search for "search engines"
|
| Open "Manage search engines"
|
| Under "Other search engines" click on "Add" (on the right)
|
| Add this custom search engine:
|
| - Search engine: Python docs (first result)
|
| - Keyword: p
|
| - URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=sit
| e:docs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
|
| Install the "Redirect Google Redirects" extension
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-google-
| re... (otherwise you'll see a "Redirect Notice" page)
|
| You can also add this search engine:
|
| - Python3 docs
|
| - pp
|
| - {google:baseURL}search?q=site%3Adocs.python.org%2F3%2F+%s
|
| Now, when you need to search for the Python documentation,
| just type "p setattr" and it'll go straight to
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html or you can
| search "pp setattr" and it'll show you the search results,
| filtered only for docs.python.org/3/
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| I just tried this, and the official python language docs came
| in third with SA just after. Now, for sure, it should be
| first, instead of the dumbed down tutorials, but it's
| certainly on the first page.
| twic wrote:
| The third hit for me is
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html
|
| Maybe Googlebot is reading this thread.
| tdubhro1 wrote:
| I've used Google's custom search engine (cse) to help solve
| this, when working on a project, just make a cse with the
| main sources of official docs for the stack you're using;
| instead of getting 20 possibly related questions with half
| solutions that you have to wade through, you get straight to
| the source docs. I guess it works best when those source docs
| are good, eg postgres, but it's certainly been a big win for
| me
| greggyb wrote:
| The sample you gave (and my experience in general) has
| official docs on the first page, but unfortunately below the
| fold. Top answers include various tutorial sites and an SO
| answer.
|
| Ninja edit: my default search engine is DDG.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I also frequently run into the situation where I Google
| something, there is a perfect match on a SO question, but
| then the answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing
| you asked about, here is a different solution for your
| specific scenario". But often that alternative solution is
| not relevant in the general case, and there really are good
| reasons to want to do the thing as originally asked in the
| question.
|
| Basically there are all kinds of situations where the
| specific question/answer format is actually at odds with
| generating good long-term documentation.
|
| But that makes me all the more impressed with the success
| Stack Overflow has had. In my opinion their key insight is
| that it can be good enough. If I had come up with the idea
| for the product I probably would have been discouraged and
| given up way too early based on the fact that it is and will
| always be messy and imperfect.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Ironically the biggest problem I have today is that a lot
| of Q/As on SO are old, so it's hard to know if the answer I
| found is still canonical or if there's a better/different
| way to do the same thing, and I didn't perform the right
| incantations into google to find my answer.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > there is a perfect match on a SO question, but then the
| answer is "Actually, you don't want to do that thing you
| asked about, here is a different solution for your specific
| scenario".
|
| That describes seemingly every Stack Overflow question I've
| found in the past four years. SO is basically useless for
| anything advanced enough to _need_ SO.
| jamesmontalvo3 wrote:
| Perhaps there's a point at which you become advanced
| enough to not need SO. I'm certainly not there after a
| decade of software development. Do I have to dig a bit
| sometimes and go beyond the first few results on google?
| Sure. And if that doesn't work I submit a question. I
| normally get an answer fairly quickly.
| mechEpleb wrote:
| > Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my
| queries by dumbing them down.
|
| I'd say it's become a lot worse than it was just a couple
| years ago when you could massage the queries to get you
| exactly what you want. Now google seems to think it's more
| clever than you and turns every question into an entry level
| one.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| But if you're looking for something as specific as the
| documentation in Python itself for setattr, why wouldn't you
| do
|
| ```
|
| > python
|
| Python 3.7.4 (default, Aug 13 2019, 20:35:49)
|
| [GCC 7.3.0] :: Anaconda, Inc. on linux
|
| Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
| information.
|
| >>> help(setattr)
|
| ```
|
| Or if you want the documentation on specifically Python.org,
| use Google search but type
|
| `setattr site:python.org`
|
| ?
| dpedu wrote:
| I've found DuckDuckGo better for searching for specific terms
| or functions like this. OTOH, google seems better for more
| vague concepts (like "python add attribute").
| noir_lord wrote:
| Zeal (if on Linux) or Dash (if on Mac) are a lifesaver for
| that stuff.
|
| It's ironic that I use Zeal so much but it really does just
| give me the answers quite often with less hassle than
| figuring out the search term to tell the search engine to get
| out the way!.
| OJFord wrote:
| > As an example, try looking for "python setattr" in your
| search engine of choice,
|
| !python setattr
|
| Or am I not allowed to add a character? :)
| smoldesu wrote:
| Most Unix admins will suggest you check the manpages for a
| utility before Googling what you need. The answer is often on
| your system, you just don't know where to find it.
| topsteplocal wrote:
| For me it was usenet and IRC... I still remember discovering
| usenet and the incredible resources on
| comp.lang.c++.moderated... those were the good ol' days where
| reputation was based on people recognizing you and not based on
| some score / number of followers...
| odiroot wrote:
| I think you're onto something. I remember myself, as a young
| developer and a fresh university student mostly reading
| programming forums or browsing newsgroups. Even more so
| official documentation for a programming language or a library.
|
| Only know, having 10+ years of experience behind me, I find
| myself stumbling upon SO because I know exactly _what_ I 'm
| looking for. In other words, my path to finding the answer is
| shorter. So it's just a time saver.
|
| I find issues on Github (for open source software) to be
| frequently of a similar value to me.
| draw_down wrote:
| Always liked Joel as a writer. I do not foresee this being a good
| thing though, except perhaps for owners/shareholders. I'm
| expecting revenue extraction, product stagnation (or worse),
| communities declining. Some of this seems like it has begun
| already, I would say I don't use SO as a resource as often as
| earlier in its lifetime. Seems like these days the answer is as
| likely to come from a GitHub issue.
|
| Anyway, congrats to the owners and shareholders I suppose.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed
| off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a
| little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the
| Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun
| policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up
| in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.)
|
| One hopes the new owners will do a better job of managing
| community relations. It will be difficult for them to do worse.
| kbelder wrote:
| This is very true. It sidetracked nearly all the communities
| for a full year, triggered resignations, and caused lawyers to
| get involved.
|
| They've done other things to cause various 'controversies' with
| their base... changing the license answers are under, hiding
| controversial questions, etc... but their amazingly
| unprofessional treatement of Cellio caused more lasting damage
| than any of that.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Monica was just the spark that lit the fire of the community-
| management disaster, but they'd been stockpiling fuel. Even
| the pronoun question itself was only raised as part of a
| somewhat clumsy top-down directive to move away from the
| "ideal questions and answers are universal and impersonal"
| approach that had previously served to render the matter of
| pronouns a non-issue. As things progressed, it soon became
| clear that Stack Overflow's corporate strategy was to try its
| hardest to stick their collective fingers in their ears and
| throw volunteers under the bus.
|
| A thoughtful reader can imagine how pseudonymous moderators
| of the LGBT stack exchanges might be shocked by the company
| itself breaching an expectation of privacy, talking to the
| press using the volunteer's real name, and radically
| misrepresenting her position. What might be next? Might some
| of them be outed? Would a Google search for their name, too,
| reveal only the Stack Overflow controversy?
|
| One open letter reads: "Stack Exchange has rewarded years of
| service by putting one of its volunteers in danger - and
| there's now a very real feeling that we may no longer be safe
| on this platform." https://dearstack.artofcode.co.uk/
|
| A resigning LGBTQ moderator wrote of the broader situation,
| "[Stack Exchange draws] vocal bigots from the woodwork with
| prompts to discussion, and then [vanishes], forcing us to
| decide between tacit approval through silence or defense of
| our own against an unchanging torrent of bigotry."
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334575/dear-
| stack-e...
|
| A _lot_ of volunteers just went straight out the door.
| exhilaration wrote:
| It's interesting, I'm on Hacker News almost every day and
| have benefited enormously from Stack Overflow yet I have no
| idea what you're talking about or who Monica Cellio is. My
| guess is that the vast majority of their users haven't
| either.
|
| I only mention this because seemingly major events in online
| communities don't always have the impact that people involved
| or following closely think they do.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As with Wikipedia, there's a community of volunteers
| curating and moderating SO. Drama in that community doesn't
| necessarily bubble up in obvious ways like the site going
| down, but I'm sure it has an overall effect on content
| moderation and quality over time.
| OJFord wrote:
| The only way I'm aware of it is prominent users/moderators
| having changed their display name to things like '<original
| name> - Reinstate Monica'.
|
| Or maybe I also saw an HN thread about it, but mainly that.
| (I still see them.)
| [deleted]
| kbelder wrote:
| I wouldn't expect you to. HN doesn't report on everything
| happening in every online community.
|
| It was a thing Stack Exchange did to a Stack Exchange
| community moderator, that had a big impact on those
| involved with the Stack Exchange community. I didn't mean
| to imply that the repercussions were felt around the world;
| just that it was a big deal in the group that was
| intimately involved.
|
| There were newspaper articles and half a dozen HN threads
| about it, though.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770
| philovivero wrote:
| Yep. Same. Read HN at least 2-3x/wk and use Stack Overflow
| and a bunch of their related sub-sites about the same
| frequency. No clue who this is or what the event is
| referring to.
|
| (Nor do I want to gain any clue)
| smoldesu wrote:
| Stack Overflow doesn't run on social capital, it runs on
| providing ads to people who need to find answers to their
| incredibly specific problem.
| Graffur wrote:
| Honestly I've used stack overflow since it started and read
| tech news daily. I do not know or care about Monica Cellio or
| internet/twitter drama.
|
| I would bet money that if I asked any of my friends or
| colleagues they wouldn't know either.
| devit wrote:
| The article writer is quite ignorant.
|
| COM is not obsolete at all, it's the main way Windows APIs have
| been and are provided from the release of DirectX until now,
| where it underlies the current WinRT API.
| bitwize wrote:
| Indeed. COM provided and provides integration that Unix nerds
| can only dream of. Windows in the 90s, in general, was
| technology indistinguishable from magic, compared to the state
| of the art from the Unix realm. That's why it would have killed
| Unix entirely but for Linux.
| austincheney wrote:
| > The biggest problem is that developers of programming tools
| love to add things and hate to take things away. So things get
| harder and harder and more and more complex because there are
| more and more ways to do the same thing
|
| Kind of, but not exactly.
|
| As a given software platform evolves rarely do the defining
| foundations significantly change. This means there becomes many
| ways to solve a problem down the line, but the original few
| solutions typically still work and apply just the same as they
| did in the early days.
|
| _I cannot emphasize enough just how important that is._
|
| The implications of grasping this allow a developer to solve
| almost any problem like magic. The mythical 10x developer
| sprinkling their pixie dust like dropping blow at a night club.
| That is because the developer knows the durable solutions to most
| problems already and optionally may consider newer approaches
| when beneficial. They know what works and have the freedom to
| deviate at their convenience.
|
| The implications of missing this produces infantile developers
| dependent upon the flavor of the moment. The developer reliant
| upon a late stage convention or supplemental tool has less
| flexibility than the developer more experienced with the
| foundational concepts of the given platform. This is vaguely
| related to the Law of Leaky Abstractions[1], but that law just
| describes reactive scenarios.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...
| mikewarot wrote:
| The days before Stack Overflow were far better. A search used to
| return a blog post in which a person described a bug, how they
| got there, and the resolution.
|
| The net effect of stack overflow was to spam the search engines
| with non-answers like "you asked in the wrong forum", "you didn't
| ask nicely", etc.
|
| Long ago I learned to route around it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Really?? I remember frequently running into a site that was
| strangely named ExpertSexchange and having to fight through ads
| to get information.
| bitwize wrote:
| It was supposed to be Experts Exchange and... yeah, bad
| choice of domain name, especially since "sex change" is an
| outdated term now considered a slur, on par with "Eskimo".
| phorkyas82 wrote:
| Still love that guy and his writing.
|
| Went with my current company mostly because they dropped his name
| in the job description.
|
| (Also: Went so heavily into table tennis that it always seems to
| me he's holding that table tennis racket a bit awkwardly or like
| a hobby player in that picture. But great hobby.)
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Where are the flying cars?
|
| Understanding why we don't have flying cars will tell you how the
| entire world works. It turns out that "progress" has nothing to
| do with "want", and more to do with need, availability, and
| timing.
|
| > They lack the structure to make the data they contain readily
| accessed programatically, so step one is miserable screen
| scraping and data cleanup. That's where a lot of people give up.
|
| > We think we have an interesting way to fix this.
|
| RDF? OWL? SKOS?
| bena wrote:
| All of those address the issue from the other side.
|
| If I'm aware of the Semantic Web, agree with their conclusions,
| and wish to do so, I can make my site Semantic. That's true.
| And if I wanted to publish data and make sure others could
| access it, I would.
|
| It's not required however. And if I want to make my data only
| accessible through my portal, I have a vested interest in
| making my site as anti-Semantic as possible. Like I don't think
| Multiple Listing Service (MLS) companies would ever make their
| sites Semantic. Nor would any company that consumes their data
| (like Zillow or Realtor). It's the data itself that has value,
| so they want to put hoops in front of it.
|
| But it's technically publically available data that they're
| publishing for free. Technically, if you acquire the facts
| themselves, it doesn't matter how, they can't do anything to
| you if you redistribute that data. The only thing they can do
| is make their site as difficult as possible to scrape.
|
| Then there are the sites that don't care either way and making
| their site Semantic is only additional work. For example:
| Lego's storefront. All of that information is from their
| databases. They already have the information and don't care
| whether or not someone else has access to it. The information
| provides little to no value. So they have no incentive to
| invest resources in making that data more easily available to
| others.
|
| So to get the information from these sites, you have to scrape.
| It's unfortunate, it's miserable, but those are the facts.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Yeah, what is this all about SO changing things overnight.
| Exaggering by far. It took years and years before SO became a
| more useful resource and for a long time (maybe even still I'd
| argue) was a joke that it was a haven for lame Q's and dangerous
| A's.
|
| Everyone was referencing blogs and google groups (usenet before)
| and searches.. hitting sites like ExpertsExchange etc. What code
| languages/scenes were active around then too -- Ruby/Rails stuff
| = blogs/groups. PHP? = forums, even the comment sections of the
| PHP docs.
|
| Alot of what changed gradually around then was the rise in better
| documentation out there. So much better/more emphasis on writing
| proper docs etc
| asadlionpk wrote:
| > (Bill Gates, 1990: "How many f*cking programmers in this
| company are working on rich text editors?!"
|
| Where is this quote from? I haven't read this one before.
| garettmd wrote:
| Does it seem like "GRAND" in that last paragraph was a hint at
| what they're building for the data issues he mentioned in the
| second to last paragraph?
| Etheryte wrote:
| Also discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370026
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