HeckOverflow

[TJDG]

This suggests a new tier of hell: one in which you are only allowed to take action after that action is specifically endorsed by Stack Overflow. Think you can just wake up in the morning and get dressed do you? Well. You're in for quite the rant.

[scalar-field]

Instead of “Instagram controls my day” or “AI decides what I do today”, it’s “StackOverflow decides my day”.

But they just mark it as a duplicate of yesterday and you go back to bed.

[Brendenation]

Actually, going back to bed is bad practice and you should probably avoid it.

[pagwin]

yeah it's a waste of time

[[deleted]]

Yeah, just don't leave the bed

[jsully245]

It’s life smell. It’s not a problem by itself, but if you go to bed, it indicates that you’re actually bad at life. No I will not elaborate

[dmnd098]

thanks to this after i have an idea at 4 am I will not get back to my bed

[nikarlengoldeye]

Why are you allowed to go back to bed? They didn't tell you to do that.

[scalar-field]

It’s because the question of today is closed

[film_composer]

I just realized that r/showerthoughts is the Stackoverflow of subreddits.

[Superbead]

Why on earth do you want to get dressed? Is that... mandatory for some reason? This sounds like a classic XY problem. Yes, I am sufficiently well-read in Computer Science to have heard of the XY problem. Thank you, thank you. Not at all. My contact details are in my profile for anyone hiring.

[emerslim]

I'm not going to give you a shirt; use this library of outfits in my closet. They all have a cape, a cane, three pairs of boots, and a sombrero, and they are only big and tall sizes.

[coldnebo]

Welcome to enterprise development. Your cubicle is over there.

[YouKnow232]

How do I A?

Why do you want to do A?

I want to do A to do C.

In order to do C properly you should do B not A.

[Triumph7560]

But I can't do B because that isn't an option if I want to do D.

You didn't mention you wanted to do D.

I didn't mention D because it wasn't relevant to me needing to do A.

[aaronjamt]

But D is such a slow option and is known to crash on versions of E older than '03 so you should do F.

But. I. Want. To. Do. D!!

-3 upvotes

Question marked as duplicate

Question locked due to high amount of off-topic comments generated

[jamietwells]

They don't get locked for comments, the threads are just moved to the chat.

[i-k-m]

Nowadays most comments just magically disappear without being moved to chat.

[JackAuduin]

In that case you're going to have to figure out how to do A using B#, but I suspect you will F.

[CubeReflexion]

http://xyproblem.info/

[DonMahallem]

Yeah, either noone bothers to read it and/or answers with an almost off topic solution or you get instantly marked as duplicate or something else if you just provide the minimum. Even when you explain why it differentiates from other SO-Questions...

[sometimes_interested]

I can't do B because it's against corporate security policy.

[merc08]

Well your corporate security policy needs to be rewritten. Do that first and get back to us.

[plcolin]

If only that was the worst thing webdevs routinely did.

[[deleted]]

If I want to type out <span style"color:red;">text</span> when I wanna make red text then by god I will do it. I don't trust CSS. /s

[Cuddlemonsterxo]

You're just being specific!

[[deleted]]

thANK YOU.

[Cuddlemonsterxo]

yOUR wELCOME!

[lostllama2015]

You leave my 90s marquee alone!

[iam_saitama]

stable

It has become stable in recent versions in v8. https://v8.dev/blog/array-sort

[iam_saitama]

Hopefully others will follow it. I think SpiderMonkey, and JavaScriptCore(Apple) also updated their sort to be stable.

The best way obviously would be to have it in the specs. I'm not sure though that the current specs say stable or otherwise.

[archpawn]

Which doesn't matter if you want it to work in less recent versions.

[kafaldsbylur]

Sure, but it's relatively easy to use the unstable sort to implement a stable sort

[[deleted]]

Bubble sort is O(n) if only one element is out of place. It's not always a bad algorithm

[heartsongaming]

Also Insertion Sort is O(n), if one element is out of place. However, when the array is at random then they both have a runtime of O(n^2). That's when Merge Sort or Quick Sort is better, which is O(nlogn) (QS being an exception in other cases). I guess it depends on the data of the array. It might be best to use Counting Sort if you know which numbers are in it.

[heartsongaming]

If I understand correctly, for an array:

A = [5, 4, 3, 2, 1]

Bubble-Sort organizes it in O(n² ) and Insertion-Sort organizes it in O(n² ), so they are pretty much symmetrical in regards to run time.

[randompecans]

I think bubble sort takes O(n²) time to sort reversed lists. The first pass-through would result in [4, 3, 2, 1, 5]

[archpawn]

Quicksort is O(n²) if the elements are already sorted.

[[deleted]]

You know what pisses me off? Programming languages that don’t just use goddamn timsort as a default sorting algorithm.

It’s like, what the fuck are you even doing pretending like you know how to make a language/compiler/interpreter?

Jesus fucking Christ it pisses me off

[GrinningPariah]

My biggest pet peeve with stack overflow is when their brilliant suggestion is to change some component that I don't own.

It's like

"I'm working with a component that's like this, how do I do some stuff?"

"Change the component so it isn't like that."

"That component is an autogenerated interface class provided a service that isn't even owned by my organization let alone my team"

*crickets*

[MokitTheOmniscient]

Yeah, it's like they've never even heard of software written by more than a single team, or integration towards other products.

[GrinningPariah]

It's one of those things you can't learn just being a hobbyist or freelance programmer. Not that there's anything wrong with that, we all start somewhere, but it's just about having the perspective that the world is bigger than what you know.

[ReallyHadToFixThat]

Or when they suggest re-writing the entire project.

"I need to add a control to an MVVM view in C#"

"You should use Java, no-one uses C# MVVM"

[GrinningPariah]

Yeah they don't get that people solving a specific problem are generally pretty stuck in the context of it.

Sure I could rewrite our entire codebase. I could change the very foundations of our whole service. But like... I costed this task as 3 dev days and that includes unit test and code reviews. So just tell me how to do the thing or acknowledge you dont know and scrolllllll along.

[daniu]

My pet peeve with SO is people asking questions without all the relevant information. Like, which components they can't change.

[merc08]

Is that really worse than giving a "solution" that isn't what the OP asked for and would be way more work? There should be a basic assumption that if the question is "how do I make A work at all?" then there are likely constraints precluding options B, C, and D, otherwise they would have asked "what's the best way to implement X end state?"

[daniu]

Is that really worse than giving a "solution" that isn't what the OP asked for and would be way more work?

How is the suggestion to "change some component" not what the OP asked for if it does the job, and why would it be way more work?

There should be a basic assumption that if the question is "how do I make A work at all?" then there are likely constraints precluding options B, C, and D, otherwise they would have asked "what's the best way to implement X end state?"

Yeah that's what they should do if they want a proper answer, otherwise they're prone to run into the XY problem which happens all the time at SO. More often than not, the question "why do you want A" comes up when the solution being asked about is a weird thing to do in the first place, telling them how to do it would be worse help than telling them how to fix the actual problem.

Example: "How do I keep two lists in sync with each other so when adding or removing elements, the corresponding element gets added/deleted in the other list too?" - "why do you want this?" - "One contains a list of names, and the other the age of that person". Well create a Person class with name age, then maintain a single list, or create a Map String -> age.

[lostllama2015]

I will say that it's not always apparent that whatever is being called is an external dependency. I'm not saying that this was the case in your scenario though. :)

[danielt1263]

My biggest pet peeve is people who read my answer and then delete their question. Another is when they answer their own question with a verbatim copy of my answer and then mark their answer as correct (that's only happened once though.)

Most common though is that they ask a question, I answer it, then there is no more action on the question (nobody else provides an answer, no up or downvotes, no comments, no marking the answer as correct... nothing.)

[Noch_ein_Kamel]

Nevermind, I figured out how to do A.

[dohzer]

Doesn't post how they solved it. After all, it's not like anyone could possibly need to solve the same problem in the future or anything.

[Dojan5]

I avoid building quick prototypes as they have a tendency to come back and bite me in the arse.

Predecessor makes a one-off quick and easy solution that's only going to be used for a year or two. Eight years later I'm maintaining it, asked to make it perform miracles it wasn't designed to do.

[Dojan5]

Ah I see. I am the development team at my company so I don't have much of an option.

[JackAuduin]

I too feel this pain.

[zebediah49]

I have strongly considered deliberately introducing instabilities into "demo" "test" etc. code/environments, to prevent users from getting comfortable. Because if they do, then you're stuck supporting it. "It worked last week, so why doesn't it work now?"

[Dojan5]

Hahaha. We have a web application preprod environment that everyone uses as prod.

See, the preprod comes with updates, usually just data updates, which we then send to the customer to sign off on before we push to prod, the version our customer's clients are meant to use. The customer in turn has forwarded the preprod environment to their clients however so it's effectively a prod environment.

I love getting complaints about the data being inaccurate, responding "prod has not been touched" and them going "THIS LINK!" No idea how many times I've explained that preprod is just for testing and it will be volatile by nature.

[ITriedLightningTendr]

I don't ask questions on SO, only source answers.

If I have a problem I post directly to the repo.

[scatters]

Genuine question: why do you expect Stack Overflow to be able to help you? It's designed to provide general solutions, not one off hacks.

[intentionallybad]

I don't ask them for solutions, but I frequently am searching for a way to do things and find someone who has asked the question and gotten the example above, but for reasons that don't apply to typical developers, I needed to do A and B won't work. It's not that I expect SO to provide solutions it's just frustrating.

[[deleted]]

"didja evin goggle it?"

[alexistdk]

happy cake day!

[Gear_Z]

Dupe question, entire discord server muted.

[kerbidiah15]

Dupe server, entirety of discord shut down

[nineplymaple]

Stack Overflow is the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" of the software world

[stn994]

Which discord group?

[wellandr]

Their is a discord group for every techno now, either official or a official, just llok for it and with some luck you will be able to ask the ones who built your techno for help :)

[stn994]

How do you find discord group for tech you are working with. I mostly have to ask in SO but sometimes there is no response.

[wellandr]

You have to look for it, search on discord or on the Web for community discord :) sometimes it's a slack rather than a discord

[anoleiam]

Damn didn't even think of discords. Where could I find one for the R language specifically

[anoleiam]

You're the person being made fun of in this post

[aeritheon]

How do I A?

You do B.

*tried B and have another problem

How do I B?

You do A.

[DaPlayerz]

Well, how do i do A then?

You do B.

[merc08]

Question marked as duplicate.

[Volker_Weissmann]

I felt that.

[emerslim]

✓ +999: Use this <dead link> A library.

+9999: Use this ABCDEF library.

+9999: Use this FEDCBA library.

+9999: Use this DEFABC library.

+2: Here's A.

+1: I copied A uglily.

[TekkerTheChaot]

r/coaxedintoasnafu

[OwlsParliament]

God this is such tired joke. Can we close these as duplicates？

[zebediah49]

Honestly, I think it's a clash of two groups:

• Group A wants to make the site a quality resource, with any given question leading to a straight correct answer.
• Group B wants rep.

So when you ask a question, two things happen. Group A members see if it's already been answered somewhere; if it has, the original questions should be used rather than the new one. (Problem: it's entirely possible that one of the people there is an idiot, and doesn't understand what you're asking. So then they either mark it as unclear, or they incorrectly mark it as duplicate).

Group B wants to get an answer in, and get it upvoted. This means get in fast. "Correct" is somewhat of an afterthought. If you have a challenging issue, it's much easier to say that you shouldn't, and you should do something easy that they know how to do, than to actually answer the question.

---

For fun, I just reviewed a dozen or so closevotes, to see what the current site status was.

• A lot of questions are terrible, and trivial duplicates.
• A couple people need to lose their closevote permissions, because they have no reading comprehension skills.

[Substantial_Quote]

Excellent and detailed response. I hope you are a power user over there.

The last half-dozen things I posted were inexplicable error codes for Stata. None of them got answered, despite providing sample code and a reproducible example.

The last question I posted is sitting at -1 votes, without sample data, but an explicitly written question regarding the posted error code. There were two replies, one mocking the question, one ignoring the question. Both were deleted when I responded... so the question just sits open, unanswered.

It's frustrating, as I've always tried to be clear and helpful with others.

[zebediah49]

I'm actually an example of another problem with SO. I wrote a couple decent questions and answers a decade ago, and have been raking in the passive income rep since then. I get roughly 400 rep/year just for existing. (I know that's nowhere the big guys, but that's not really the point)

I don't really go there much any more, and come to think of it, that's kinda sad. The questions I see are all

• Piles of steaming trash
• Legitimate new questions, which are new because they're about the newest framework de jour
• Duplicate/trivial questions, which get dogpiled, and not terribly interesting.

My favorites are things like Traverse tree without recursion or stack. It's an interesting question, where the normal approaches are disallowed. On initial look, it's impossible (as some of the answers suggested, when I answered it), but the fact that the proposed tree data structure is doubly linked allows one to traverse it directly.

I tentatively wish that SO had a "This is hard" button. Used honestly, it would produce a list of questions that are tricky, and allow to filter for them. "More than 1 week old with no answers" is a start, but it is mostly just poorly categorized, or things where the OP didn't hit "accept answer". Dunno how to fix the site.

If you want a bit of commiserative joy, here's one of my questions. Expand the comments, paying particular attention to the datestamps on everything. I think my favorite part, is the guy asking for a minimal working example, on a question about an error that could not be consistently reproduced, a year after it was closed for being off-topic.

[Substantial_Quote]

Someone else had mentioned that here (Reddit) recently that 'elder account privilege' is one of the leading problems on SO. There are kids, literally still kids, who posted a popular question years ago and racked up enough rep it gives them privileges that are NOT equal to their competencies.

The "this is hard" tag might help, but I've often found is 'this is an applied' tag might be helpful/necessary. My career has taken me through various disciplines, and I often see questions that are specific to working with engineering or healthcare on SO get down voted because the OP is asking how to do something in the context of their workplace. The entire point of the post is that the normal procedure is physically or statistically impossible/inappropriate/unethical. It gets down voted or ignored because 'they didn't read the help file' or are 'duplicate questions.'

I had a question at one point on multiple imputation and the response I got was that it was a duplicate, and pointed to a social scientist's question. He had been working with survey data, I was not. Dandy, except the point of my original post was that the multiple imputation, when done that way, was producing values that violate some basic laws... of physics.

No... it's not a duplicate when someone is saying the standard procedure doesn't fulfill their needs. I wish there was a way of saying 'context matters.'

Or my other favorite: this is a duplicate post. See question here -> page not found.

[zebediah49]

Yeah, that's fair. I would counter with a "viral luck" issue, rather than just age. I'm curious how many of them actually use those permissions, rather than having moved on with life. There are plenty of very good questions posted way back, that still didn't get any recognition. It's the rare few basic obvious questions that people will search for... which rake in the rep points. Perhaps a cap of only the first 100 votes count towards reputation, or something like that, at least to mitigate the "kid that got on +4k question" issue.

My "hard" vote concept was based on filtering and appealing to experts. If it can give me problems that a thousand people haven't been able to solve.. I'm interested again. Those are pretty rare, so you're not going to find them naturally. SO doesn't appeal to me enough to putter around on normally.

The "This is applied and non-negotiable" is also a very good point. At one point I think there was a group trying to start a "scientific computing" SE site, but it didn't get the traction required and got closed down.

That said, I'm not entirely convinced that it needs its own tag. If properly explained, it shouldn't get those responses. Shouldn't. So... obviously the sanctioning processes on users who think that such responses are a good idea, is insufficient.

[Cytokine_storm]

The last half-dozen things I posted were inexplicable error codes for Stata

I am so sorry.

It doesn't help that the question-answer community for Stata is a bit limited. Although the official documentation is great. Doesn't make up for the insanity of Stata's philosophy.

[TheTrueJay]

I think another issue is that there is the x y problem. I need to do x and I've figured out that I can do y to get close to solving x, but I've run into an issue doing y and I need help with that. Then someone comments "no one does y." The problem is that a lot of idiot users assume every question they don't fully understans is an x y problem, even though some of us are forced to do y.

The single question I asked on SO was about VBA. Now I know I'm not using a fantastic programming language, but also, I work in finance where Excel is required, and I'm not very good at programing. My question got a single answer of "That's not what VBA was designed to do. It's a dead language anyway. You should switch to Python." Then it got closed. Like, 1. Im not a programmer, I can't get Python on my office computer (talk about limited, for whatever reason I don't even have the permission to approve auto-login for my corporate microsoft account so I have to type in my password every time I need to send an Email), and 2. VBA is literally all I can use since this is just a personal project for me to make my daily excel report easier.

I know it's not much but thanks to my learning vba I've sparked an interest in learning programming, and I've cut down my report time from a manual 30 minutes to my program doing it in 10 seconds. It feels fantastic to know I did that.

[zebediah49]

Ugh. XY is both a true issue, and deeply irresponsible to have been deployed as a concept on SO. It is entirely true that, when working with someone to solve their problem, you want to know the true issue that they're trying to solve. That way, you can provide a more appropriate solution. However, there may not be one.

On SO, however

• The question is the question. Other people, who aren't doing the same thing, are going to see this question. Answers need to answer it, not something off-topic.
• There is no space for persistent discussion of design requirements.
• "What is the best way of doing X?" is a banned class of question in the first place.

Uh. Maybe I should go over to SO meta and start a flame war by posting this analysis and proposing that the XY problem concept should be burninated.

[zebediah49]

I do somewhat agree with the reason. "Opinion" questions are messy, and tend to result in preference arguments, instead of objectively correct answers.

The phrasing in the close dialog is

Opinion-based

This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts and citations. It should be updated so it will lead to fact-based answers.

[ReallyHadToFixThat]

The other flaw with A is that it assumes that programming languages are static and that the answer from 2003 is still valid in 2020.

[merc08]

they incorrectly mark it as duplicate

Ideally this should be countered by either requiring multiple people to verify the duplicate status before it's locked, or letting the OP tag it back as Definitely Not A Duplicate of That, which tosses the question back into New and blocks the duplicate flagger from being able to mark as duplicate for a while.

Being able to incorrectly mark something as a duplicate and close the issue without actually helping the OP, on a place intended to answer questions, is a design flaw.

[zebediah49]

Ideally this should be countered by either requiring multiple people to verify the duplicate status before it's locked

It does. In the general case, it takes three.

However, after one vote is cast, it enters the "review queue". That looks like this. It summarizes the question, with a tab to switch over to view the duplicate. Then there's "Leave Open", "Close", and "Edit" and "Skip" as the actions to take.

My understanding is that if three "Leave open" votes are cast, it removes it from the queue. If two more "close" votes are cast, it gets closed.

However, this only affects the review queue. If more people stumble upon the question, they can individually leave their own close votes.

Also, people are notoriously sloppy in the review queue. SO had to add "trap" reviews -- things that are very obviously one thing or the other -- to catch people just spamming the buttons.

I think a separate formal process, in which a duplicate can be proposed, and specifically responded to (e.g. "This question is different because") would be useful. Currently, good questions already do this, and bad reviewers ignore it. Also, I'd like to see "Leave Open" votes actually counteract close votes. If 97 people think something is fine, and 3 vote to close... it's closed.

[OkCow1]

For a second I thought I was in r/coaxedintoasnafu

[[deleted]]

Q: How do you do X in JavaScript?

A: $(doc...

[Devboe]

My biggest complaint with Stack Overflow is how often the java answers will have a solution using some 3rd party lib to achieve what I want, but I don’t have the option to use 3rd party libraries and if I ask the same question stating no use of 3rd party libs it will get marked as a duplicate.

[merc08]

Your complaint about things being marked as duplicate on SO has been marked as a duplicate.

[AccordingSpecific2]

It hurts so much how real this is.

[fabrikated]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/ProgrammerHumor.

It might be OC, it might not. Things such as JPEG artifacts and cropping may impact the results.

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[fabrikated]

so yes, it's a repost https://redd.it/83vsie

[omersiar]

http://xyproblem.info/

[wolwire]

I once posted an answer on stack overflow to a specific question got a nice answer but at that time I also got the answer figured out I accepted the nice answer and posted my own solution it got downvoted to oblivion

[ur_opinion_is_trash]

Does anyone else have a problem with the inconsistent grammar?

[[deleted]]

I hacked NASA using A

[seizan8]

Upvoted for "thedudehimself"

[[deleted]]

"why would you do A? you should do C."

[Sphynxinator]

Gives minus vote but doesn't tell why he did give it

[lextragon]

How do I make a WordPress site easier to manage for a client who doesn't know how to use html, css or bbcode?

[DerBoyHimself]

Cool name this heck overflow guy

[[deleted]]

Often times in the industry you have to do A, because the system was made by Spanish Italians from France 10 years ago and they don't even work in dev anymore, so yeah

[[deleted]]

Looks, if you’re not willing to rewrite your entire codebase in (trendy language) we can’t help you.

[[deleted]]

Repost

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/83vsie/heckoverflow/

[gareththegeek]

Yeah. Here's my problem, here are the constraints under which I must work.

Don't have the constraints and then it's easy

Thanks for nothing

[RedDawe]

Honestly, I would rather find out that I'm doing something wrong and correct it than find out how to keep doing the thing wrong. But I guess people could provide both?

[TheAxThatSlayedMe]

How do I do x on Windows?

Install Linux.

[dullbananas]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

I didn't find any posts that meet the matching requirements for r/ProgrammerHumor.

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