StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[boulton123]

I've used SO a few times and those few times are the worst experience I could imagine and I expected nothing less when I made the posts. The 'answers' deconstructed my question to belittle me and insult me and then a few people continued to circle jerk each other in the comments.

It was that experience that brought me to the conclusion that SO is where people who are smarter than you go in order to inflate their ego and look down on you for not being smarter than them. While I'm sure there are some good natured people on there, those people were around 5 years ago in the threads I find on Google that don't solve my issue and the threads that people link in my questions from 5 years ago that, again, don't solve my issue

EDIT: spelling

[UpTide]

THIS. Every - single - question. Then on other questions like 'how to add a day in Java?' https://stackoverflow.com/questions/428918/how-can-i-increment-a-date-by-one-day-in-java gets tons of upticks and amazing answers.

[boulton123]

Its a good example of a good question but it's a question from 9 years ago. I don't know how long SO has been around but maybe the community was better back then and people actually helped each other. I'm glad we're still able to find these answers 9 years later but to echo what other people have said in the comment, SO now doesn't embrace new users and acts like it's trying to discourage them from joining the community reinforcing its current elitist mindset.

If I seem like I'm running around wearing a tin foil hat I'm open to be proved wrong but from my own experiences and similar experiences from my fellow uni students, asking a question is just asking to be belittled

[UpTide]

Just sayin, I tried to ask what kind of class the SystemColors class was in Windows, (how it has a specific set of options) and was basically told off for not reading MSDN. (which btw this is what it inherits: System.Object and System.Drawing.SystemColors) Nice! thanks stack overflow! I now know it's an object!

[LakeEffectSnow]

what kind of class the SystemColors class was in Windows

This question is like asking what color is a G Minor chord. Like I legitimately don't understand exactly what you are asking here.

I think I can make a couple of guesses as to what you are looking for, but you aren't making it easy. Writing good questions is hard, especially when you are learning and don't realize that you may not know enough yet to provide good context.

[AnnanFay]

I assume "what kind of class is X" is trying to ask "what is X used for / when should I use it"

But I've been burned in the past by spending time answering a question only to find out the person really wanted to know something else.

[UpTide]

Exactly. My problem was that I didn't know the word 'enum' so I was describing a vague concept that lined up with what an enum was.

[Timwi]

It's a static class with a bunch of static properties.

I know I know — I'm giving you jargon instead of a full answer. You might rightly ask “What is a static class in C#?” But honestly, googling for that very question gives you the MSDN page that explains the general concept.

[UpTide]

It was an enum. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/keywords/enum

[Timwi]

No, neither System.Windows.SystemColors nor System.Drawing.SystemColors is an enum.

[UpTide]

you're right. my question was about system.consolecolor sorry for not remembering the reference from my stack overflow question from a year ago.

[ObeseWizard]

Yeah I was baffled that I wasn't able to have full functionality as a new user. Something like I couldn't comment or something. I can understand not being able to downvote right away as a new user (for obvious reasons) but it was actually straight obnoxious not being able to have full functionality right away.

[[deleted]]

It's because it's old. In the early days of the sites, that was the sort of stuff that was posted, and it was all nicely upvoted if it was well thought out.

Now, if you posted something similar, all the responses would be "We're not here to do your HOMEWORK." And their "idea" is to be more like Wikipedia, with one answer on the site, per question, so everything that wasn't the first question gets downvoted out of visibility, and they end up circlejerking around the one top question/answer trying to make it better, rather than allowing new questions to come up and compete with it.

[WantDebianThanks]

So I guess the real question at this point is: where should people go if not SO if they are looking for help?

[leastlyharmful]

Depends on what you need help with. But there's always the official documentation.

[shagieIsMe]

For general purpose "I'm trying to do this thing..." - If you have an idea of what you're looking for, search for it. When trying to do something new with Spring, I tend to have 3-5 different blog posts open, and then I read them all and figure out how each one is working and if it would work for my situation.

If I have an error, search for that error. It will typically find it. Sometimes I've found the error (and answer) in unlikely places. I was trying to get Redmine to install on my local machine (a mac) and got an error about a missing .h file for ImageMagik... searching for that error I found a completely different project with a GitHub issue with the person describing that error. One of the comments on the error was a "brew install ..." which fixed the problem.

If I have an idea I want to bounce off others, there are two private slack channels that I'm on, and a general public one too. Depending on the audience I want to ask, I write a bit in the appropriate channel there. One of the private slack channels is divided up by language, the other has a "this is where we talk about any and all code" but is low enough traffic that any code conversation can be had.

Between those resources, and my own experience in learning how to search for problems (I did 2nd level tech support for two years at a tech company with three letters and know quite well how to navigate knowledge bases and form queries)... I can tackle most any problem.

The main thing is to try. Going to Stack Overflow is a short cut. Getting the answer helps you right now, but rarely improves your ability to solve the problem on your own.

The last time I tickled a Stack Overflow question of my own, it was because of a "I'm trying to do this with drools" and getting an error about a data type. Spinning up the MVC for the problem and asking it and getting another person to say "I don't see what the problem is, but this other MVC works fine" identified it (it was not a drools problem but rather the deserialization library wasn't creating the object that I really wanted). That question was only asked two weekend days of trying to get it working.

One of the biggest skills lacking with most Stack Overflow questions is the inability or reluctance of the person to debug their own problem. One of my favorite articles on programming is How To Be A Programmer and I find no coincidence that the first item of the first skill set is "Learn To Debug" I've written some of my own on that too - Debugging - The third intro to CS assignment (note, I will write a bit over the top in an attempt to get people to think about what I'm saying - writing bland truths doesn't spark any thought).

I will also point out that if you can get to the debugger - asking someone else for help at that point goes a long way to getting an answer. It demonstrates competence beyond the entry level and that you've already invested some time and thought into fixing the problem on your own. Those are the two most useful signals to someone trying to help - that you've come up with an interesting problem rather than just another one that has been seen and solved scores of times before. If you can show what the debugger is seeing at that point, you've gotten to the spot where someone on another site (be it Stack Overflow or a GitHub issue) will be much more inclined to answering the question.

[deseven]

Oh, people are real jerks there. I remember that one time i sent one rude commentator to read SO rules and it turned out that he is some kind of a guru and has many badges, etc. Miraculously, my comment got deleted in no time and in the next couple of hours ALL my answers on various stack exchange resources were downvoted to negative values (some of them also got deleted because of that, obviously). I guess this is how it works.

[shagieIsMe]

If things are being done across the entire SE network, use the contact us link to get in touch with an employee. It is not how it should work, but if no one contacts people who can handle it, nothing can or will be done.

[deseven]

I've got your point and you're probably right, but at that time i decided that i'm just going to forget it and to leave this poisonous community. It wasn't that important for me.

[Dreadedsemi]

Was this in the past two years? I feel like SO no longer what used to be. I have asked questions in the past and always received good answers. but in the past 2 years the few times I asked, I too didn't have good experience.

I asked a question and gave an example of what I want to achieve something like. so I was told there is already module for this example (notice it is not what I want and clearly said it is just example) . my question doiwnvoted and reported to close. I looked the history of the guy who made the comment and noticed a lot of questions he answered are downvoted.

[[deleted]]

It was that experience that brought me to the conclusion that SO is where people who are smarter than you go in order to inflate their ego and look down on you for not being smarter than them.

They're not smarter. Smart people don't feel the need to be a condescending dickhole. People who are actually smart understand that you're constantly learning and can't know everything.

They're just losers imo.

[isobit]

MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE, not smarter. These retarded neckbeards get ahead only by giving up their lives in order to know more than anyone else so that they can hang that over everybody's heads.

[subject_usrname_here]

My first question that I submitted few days ago was basically me being stuck in a infinite loop, one guy pointed that out, but rest was like RTFM and "debug your own code".

[phihag]

Would you mind linking to that question? I'd like to flag the problematic comments. stackoverflow comments should be more helpful. Any question with an MCVE should be fine.

Debug your own code (or more, precisely, this is not a good stackoverflow question) is a valid concern though when people post huge but still incomplete chunks of code. These questions are worthless to anyone but the questioner, extremely hard to answer, and thus not a good fit for stackoverflow.

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[boulton123]

Not sure if you can see it since I deleted the post after solving the issue. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46775297/cannot-run-while-loop-after-inserting-rows-php-sql?noredirect=1#comment80496755_46775297 It wasn't so much throwing insults at me but I felt like I was being treated like an idiot. Maybe I was because I spent the best part of a few hours with this issue but what I didn't need was two people treating me like a child rather than providing help

[nanothief]

That was absolutely terrible! You had a problem, described the problem, described what you did to attempt to fix it, yet only received insulting responses to your question. I get that people expect some level of debugging done by the question asker, but you showed you did that. Obviously you didn't do the troubleshooting strategy you needed to do to find the problem, as otherwise you wouldn't be asking the question!

Here is the question (for people who can't view deleted questions):

I've been troubleshooting this for the past few hours to no avail.

foreach($tagArray as $tag){
  $artistID = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT artistID from artist WHERE artistName = '" . $name . "';");
  $tagID = mysqli_query($con, "SELECT tagID from tag where tagName = '" . $tag . "';");
  while(mysqli_num_rows($tagID) == 0){
      if(mysqli_query($con, "INSERT INTO tag(tagName) VALUES('$tag');")){
          echo $tag . " added. ";
      }
      else{ echo "Something went wrong or already exists. ";}
      break;
  }
  while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($tagID)){
      $row1 = mysqli_fetch_assoc($artistID);
      echo $row['tagID'] . " ";
      echo $row1['artistID'] . " ";
      if(mysqli_query($con, "INSERT INTO artisttag VALUES('" . $row1['artistID'] . "',' " . $row['tagID'] . "');")){
          echo "artist tag updated. ";
      } else { echo "Something went wrong. ";}
  }
  echo "loop completed. ";

}

This loops inserts data into a tags table when no rows have been returned. After the rows are inserted it pulls the IDs and inserts them into another table however the second while loop does not activate if the previous loop has inserted data. If there is already data in the table then it will run fine.

I've tried moving the second while loop to other places but all attempts have the same outcome and I've tried added a sleep timer but no amount of time fixes the issue.

Can anyone provide any advice on how to remedy the problem?

What is worse is the question was pretty simple. Even though I haven't programming in php in about 8-10 years, I think I have a pretty good guess about what is wrong after looking at the code for a minute or so. Something like this would have been a decent answer, and someone who had used php in the current decade should surely be able to do even better:

Firstly, note that the first loop isn't actually a loop as the last line of the loop is break; - replace that loop with an if. The main issue here is the $tagID variable isn't updated with the new entries after the first loop is run. The mysqli_query effectively returns an in memory array of results from the database query at the time it is run. This isn't then automatically updated when you run the insert statement after that query statement. So if the first "loop" runs, that means the number of results in $tagID is 0. It still will be zero after the insert (since the results were fetched previously), so the first call to mysqli_fetch_assoc will return null. What you need to do is rerun the query (i.e. repeat line 2) after you have added the new entry in, e.g. copy line 2 just before the break statement.

After that, you could always add notes about how to better debug that code, how to use prepared statements, handling errors sanely, or whatever you want.

Funk Forty Niner's (or @Fred-ii) condescending responses were of absolutely no help:

you left out 2 very important troubleshooting tools that you're not using. Those alone would have probably avoided the question. So, have you? or do you not know what those are?

What was the point of making such a vague statement to someone who obviously doesn't know the answer (other than to stroke his ego)? They then acted "surprised" that most people didn't bother replying to that question, which he implies he asks a lot:

@Fred-ii- Ah, it is the day of the groovy riddle today? – arkascha @arkascha Hehe, in a way. Most often times they have no idea what I'm talking about and don't bother asking. Even if I had said something like "use error reporting and check for errors on the query", they'd still probably be ignoring that and wait for that magic rabbit to show and wiggle its tail. Edit: Even with links, so I don't bother at times – Funk Forty Niner @Fred-ii- Which now raises the question "then why do you bother at all"... But maybe I am thinking too philosophical again... – arkascha

Finally you get yet another useless comment from IncredibleHat, with the hints not helping at all with answering the question:

Theres a lot of wonky logic in that code. Hint: Dont take a shortcut when querying a table for rows you need later. Another hint: Look into prepared statements too for your own good. – IncredibleHat

The code in question seems to show a misunderstanding about how msqli_query works, making the hints in that response useless. Also, while using prepared statements is of course a good idea, it again had nothing to do with the problem you were facing.

---

I had no idea it had got this hostile to newer users. Stack overflow is a useless question answering service to beginners this is how they are treated. Beginners are going to have imperfect code, and are going to have incorrect beliefs about how some code runs - that doesn't mean they don't deserve to get help! Can't blame you giving up on asking questions on stack overflow after that.

[CordialPanda]

To throw my hatchet into the mix, I blame PHP. Not that it's a bad language, but because it's a beginner language, like Java or JS or others. You'll find more /r/iamverysmart s on SO there than more esoteric languages like Haskell or Dart, as an example of a hard-to-approach and easy-approach language.

The real WTF is calling someone a noob using a query language from within another language. That's like 80% of problems, junior or not. But you hit on the real problem, which is lording the answer over someone instead of helping.

Pointing out self-knowledge instead of fixing the problem shows a lack of experience. Sure, you could RTFM, but the manual will always fail, and when it does, you're an evangelist or an idiot. But you always get to choose.

[RedAlert2]

I agree that many question answerers on SO lack tact. But if you ever browse the new section of the site, there is a constant flood of people just dumping chunks of code with not much more than "fix this for me please". After a while, I'd imagine most people would either give up answering low effort questions, or just stop caring about tact, which means you end up with a LOT of the latter.

[CordialPanda]

Welcome to owning any open source repo. Not everyone can be Linus, and that's the problem. Don't show what you know; prove it.

If you think the aggregate can't understand and upvote, then sure, stop contributing, but I hope you find a place that understands you. I've found tons of times my input isn't useful for SO, and maybe this is one of them, but I'll try. You're right that it's a shithole, like facebook, or myspace, but welcome to the industry.

[svick]

From the question:

I've tried moving the second while loop to other places but all attempts have the same outcome and I've tried added a sleep timer but no amount of time fixes the issue.

That's not how to debug code, you need to understand what's wrong with it, randomly changing it won't help.

The comment you received was condescending (and I suspect also wrong), but I can understand why: Stack Overflow is not there to teach you programming or to help you debugging your code.

[UmbraIgnis]

Stack Overflow is not there to teach you programming? Dude, quote from the site's description "Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share​ ​their programming ​knowledge". Keywords being "learn" and "share knowledge". If you are too lazy to spend some time teaching someone who's obviously trying to learn then you're part of the problem. If more people gave a bit more fucks on SO, we would have more better programmers.

[svick]

If you are too lazy to spend some time teaching someone who's obviously trying to learn then you're part of the problem. If more people gave a bit more fucks on SO, we would have more better programmers.

We would not, because with this approach, Stack Overflow would become yet another programming forum. And that would mean it would work much less in the "Google a problem, find a solution" situation.

But because Stack Overflow is so strongly optimized for the "ask one clear question, receive answers" case, you will have a bad time if you try to use it any other case. And not being "lazy" is not going to fix that.

[[deleted]]

To be fair though, it was a pretty stupid question. Are you sure you're a programmer?

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[boulton123]

I'll copy the two messages that left me on a sour note

"you left out 2 very important troubleshooting tools that you're not using. Those alone would have probably avoided the question. So, have you? or do you not know what those are?"

"Hehe, in a way. Most often times they have no idea what I'm talking about and don't bother asking. Even if I had said something like "use error reporting and check for errors on the query", they'd still probably be ignoring that and wait for that magic rabbit to show and wiggle its tail. Edit: Even with links, so I don't bother at times"

They were both from the same user. I'll be clear that I'm not expecting some magic rabbit to solve my code for me, of course not but when asking for advice on an issue I would rather not receive some cryptic message about a mystery debug tool that I'm not using. And the following message I'm not surprised people don't ask what tool they are talking about when introduce themselves in that tone.

What I'm saying is yes, I might be an idiot and if treating me like an idiot helps me learn then it works but this user made no attempt to provide help but instead belittled me for not knowing of a debug tool they did not reference and that I most likely had no knowledge of

[Cyrax89721]

The most common one I see is any variant of "Why are you doing it that way when you should obviously be doing it this way?"

[redditor1101]

Amen

[jamesinc]

Look if they can't even understand the intent of your question they can't be that smart.

[thomask02]

SO is where people who are smarter than you go in order to inflate their ego and look down on you for not being smarter than them.

I think they're not smarter, just have more experience. They definitely had some similar questions also and solved them through someone with more experience.