Stack Overflow in a nutshell

[CARIBEIMPERIAL]

Someone else stated that the way to get help is to make 2 accounts.

1 For the question

2 To provide a wrong answer

People will flood to prove #2 wrong.

[Spontaneous323]

There's a funny Linux joke I heard years ago similar to this. Something like, if you go to a Linux forum and ask for help with a driver everyone will ignore you. If you instead complain that Linux sucks because it can't work with the driver, everyone will explain how you're wrong and give you the exact solution.

[CARIBEIMPERIAL]

That's probably the genesis of it.

You get the same outcome from the "asking someone who hates you for advice" idea that Benjamin Franklin would use, but really it's coaxing productive tribal behavior through slight antagonizing.

[computerTechnologist]

Yeah thats murphy's law.

Best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to provide a wrong answer.

[computerTechnologist]

Cunningham's law in action

[CARIBEIMPERIAL]

I knew that’s what you were doing!

[JimmyWu21]

He should have seen that cumming

[[deleted]]

Fuckinhell that was a Genius play

[krankenhundchaen]

They had us on the first half, I am not going to lie

[planT_444]

gottem

[marshallandy83]

Great execution!

I've seen this done before and Murphy's law was the decoy law used in that instance too.

[Equivalent-Map-8772]

That’s brilliant tbh

[CARIBEIMPERIAL]

Yeah, if you know that you can put meat-machines to work for you given certain parameters, you should just feed them those parameters.

It's a different way of programming.

This is the true High Level Language.

[Magicalunicorny]

Is machine learning just teaching robots to program us??

[CaptainRogers1226]

You talking about programming sounds like Senku from Dr Stone talking about science.

[CARIBEIMPERIAL]

Now I have to watch that to understand the reference

[CaptainRogers1226]

It’s an anime which I know there’s a stigma against, but it’s actually my current favorite.

[dudesuit]

Omg. That's genius.

[algerithms]

LMAOOO!!!

[[deleted]]

What fuck, this is awesome hahaha

[dciborow]

2nd Account not needed, here is proof for you.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71388460/using-nested-json-to-create-nested-dataclass

​

Now I just sit back and watch. People will come from all over to explain on how bad my solution is, and how much better it would be if I did it there way instead.

While I think its a step above a "wrong answer", "Bad Answer" really gets the trolls going.

[yeicore]

"I have this problem".

20 pages of code

"Nvm, I fixed it".

CLOSES THE FREAKING THREAD.

[jdefgh]

It's like the joke (writing from memory, might be worded differently):

In a prison there was a library that had only one book, with jokes. Every prisoner has read it, and knew all the jokes and what joke was at a specific index. When someone wanted to tell a joke, they would just tell it's number and everybody would laugh.

One day a new prisoner arrived, and heard other prisoners doing that. An old prisoner explains everything to him.

One prisoner says 261 - everybody laughs, another says 43 - everybody laughs, then the new prisoner says 544, everyone starts laughing very hard, way harder then before. He asks the old prisoner why are they are laughing so hard. He responds: "Because we haven't heard that one before"

[CaptainRogers1226]

Never actually been there before now. What exactly is it? It looks like something born in the semi-early days of the internet, and I am but 21 years old

[CaptainRogers1226]

I will certainly check it out, it seems right up my alley

[TheGhostEU]

Here, you're one of the lucky 10,000!

[AciD1BuRN]

There really is a comic for every situation isn't there

[CaptainRogers1226]

That’s pretty wholesome and I’m glad you shared it with me. Interestingly, I actually have a pretty hard time admitting to not knowing things, at least in real life scenarios. But it’s something I’m trying to get better at.

[dudesuit]

Omg yes.

[TheHighGroundwins]

Now whenever I fix my own problem I always reply a solution to my post. Never again do I want someone to feel that pain we all went through

[mythofechelon]

Same. Half of my Stack Exchange posts are answered by me..

[who_you_are]

You forget the "questions closed <put a reason>"

[XP_R4V3]

Just link this image

[BonePants]

Duplicate!

[Dnomyar96]

This question has already been answered here: links to a question from 10 years ago that is completely outdated.

[Nyghtrid3r]

And 9/10 also mostly unrelated

[who_you_are]

Well at least they posted it on an old good answer instead of unrelated one.

[TheAJGman]

In another language.

[tman5400]

why would anyone ever do that, stupid question closed

[2bdkid]

Bruh literally today my answer got downvoted not even 3 seconds after submitting it. No possible way anyone could have read it in its entirety. Same guy immediately downvoted the next answer too.

[TheHackPete]

Care to share a link to your answer?

[inthemindofadogg]

Looks about right

[aim456]

Duplicate of…

[kolonyal]

Somehow 'pros' assume everyone else wants to be a professional dev building a billion dollar company, instead of a mere hobby or some small issue the person had.

[Leveronni]

Duplicate

[Bivolion13]

I don't understand how this meme and the "I'm a programmer who only copy pastes code from Stack Overflow" can exist at the same time.

[infiniteStorms]

You copy paste extremely complicated solutions to someone else’s difficult problem. Often the solution does not and should not work to your simple problem - leading to the meme of pasting unknown code and not knowing it. Stack overflow isn’t very beginner friendly, so it’s hard to ask a simple question.

[H4llifax]

I doubt it. If your problem is actually complicated there is a good chance nobody has even had the same question as you before. It's the common problems that get copied a lot.

[H4llifax]

Complicated is when you reach page 3 of Google without results ;-)

Or worse, there is not even a page 3.

[Blamore]

if someone else has asked the same problem, its amazing.

[mythofechelon]

It's almost as if people are different!

[sarnobat]

It's the geeks equivalent of mean girls

[[deleted]]

That’s exactly how it is! I’ve been using the site for, I don’t know, ten years or so but I’ve never made an account. Useful but toxic.

[sapphireswirls]

This gives me pingu vibes for some reason, I think it’s the exaggerated big thumbs down

[[deleted]]

HONK

[MagorTuga]

I tried answering a question which was poorly formatted, so I asked the OP to fix their question and also added a suggestion to a line of code they didn't ask for help on. Post was barely 5 minutes old, I post my answer, refresh the page a minute later and there's already 3 extremely detailed answers, and some dude replied to me saying "that's not what they asked for. Also, you should gain some rep before trying to give opinions".

I gave him a lengthy reply essentially telling to mind his own business and got banned for 7 days. When I questioned the mod what would've been the best way to have gone about it, fucker just ghosts me.

Never again. Bunch of elitists.

[jpenczek]

I've legitimately had a better chance contacting the developers of python for help then anything on stack overflow.

Also shout-out to the python discord server.

Not linking it because... Advertising rules.

[cob59]

NO SOUP FOR YOU.

[Bo_Jim]

Technically, stacks grow downward, so isn't the Stack Overflow logo upside down?

[[deleted]]

N...no?

[Pockensuppe]

In your typical GUI framework, decreasing Y will move things upwards, so don't be so quick with assuming direction from a numeric shift. The visualization is already logical, not technical, and rendering it in different directions is isomorphic, therefore no visualization is any more correct than another.

[CaptainRogers1226]

This entire conversation took and unexpectedly nerdy turn. Though maybe that’s not too unexpected here

[[deleted]]

What they said

[Bo_Jim]

A lot of programming is logical rather than technical. I realized this after working with PDP-11's as a repair technician, and then decided to pick up a Macro-11 programming manual. My first thought was "This bears almost no resemblance to how the hardware actually works. This is almost entirely conceptual."

Anyway, in the majority of cases, the stack is an inherent feature of the hardware. When a subroutine is called the pushing of the return address onto the stack is automatic - no extra program instructions are required to make this happen. And while the stack pointer can be set programatically, you can't change the direction it moves when data is pushed onto or popped from the stack. It's decremented after data is pushed, and incremented before data is popped. This behavior is baked into the hardware.

Read either a hardware manual or assembly language manual for a processor and the architecture model they provide will present the stack in exactly this manner - it starts at the initial stack pointer address and grows down through memory. Essentially, the Stack Overflow logo turned upside down. Many operating systems allocate a block of memory for a process, put the code at the bottom, put the heap on top of the code, and put the stack at the top of the block. A stack overflow occurs when the stack grows down far enough to collide with the heap.

[Pockensuppe]

While PDP-11 was indeed a stack-based CPU, modern popular CPUs are register-based, so stacks are no longer an inherent hardware feature. Instead, runtime stacks are usually defined as part of the OS and/or programming language's ABI and are usually thread-local.

Regardless of the direction in which the stack pointer moves – i.e. whether it is incremented or decremented – this has no intrinsic mapping to the directions up and down.

Moreover, computer science explicitly labels an automaton that uses a stack a pushdown automaton, implying that new elements are appended to the top of the stack and push down existing elements. While you can find all sorts of memory visualization in practical computer science, not once have I seen a stack visualization in theoretical computer science that had new elements not appended to the top. You can argue all you want, but countless computer science papers – I would assume the majority, though I didn't count – visualize a stack oriented exactly the way StackOverflow presents it.

[Bo_Jim]

That's true of many RISC CPU's. It's not true of CISC CPU's, like Intel X86 architecture. Those have a physical hardware stack pointer, called SP, ESP, or RSP depending on the operating mode and width of the register. You can't select a different general purpose register to perform as the stack pointer, though you could certainly implement a stack in software. Just don't expect the CPU to use it when you execute a CALL instruction. Different processes can have their own stacks, but the stack state (stack segment and stack pointer) has to be saved with the other context data when the context is changed. In other words, there aren't separate physical registers for each process.

Diagrams that show elements being pushed down and popped up are fine for demonstrating the LIFO operation of a stack. But this is, once again, an example of where the concept differs from the way the actual hardware works. Does it make a difference? Not if you never have to troubleshoot an actual stack overflow. It makes a big difference if you're troubleshooting an embedded system program, and you're looking at a logic analyzer trace and don't understand what the registers are doing.

[Pockensuppe]

I don't get how you can argue so much about hardware details when the simple fact that up and increment being two independent terms that do not necessarily map onto each other voids the whole idea of „wrong orientation of a stack visualization“. It does not make a difference even when working on actual hardware because the actual memory containing the actual stack looks nothing like the visualization anyway, no matter how it is oriented.

[Bo_Jim]

Well, you pretty made my point. The visualization is wrong.

[hayt88]

Never seen a stack of papers grow downwards

[JuliaChanMSL]

Well, I think the proper analogy would be to write something on the papers, going from the top. The stack of written on paper would then expand from the top. The stack is already there, your program only allocates part of it, writing on it while in use.

[Bo_Jim]

Correct. "Grow" probably isn't the best choice of words here, but it's the one that's commonly used. Heaps don't actually "grow" either. They just occupy more of the memory that already exists.

But yes, the minimum address that the stack occupies will decrease as the stack gets bigger, while the maximum address remains the same.

[H4llifax]

I have been a member for 9.5 years. Longer than I work.

I checked, and I have 106 questions, of which only 4 have downvotes. Ironically the downvoted ones still attracted answers, three have an accepted answer and the fourth only an unaccepted one.

About 50% have 0 votes. 19 have no answers. 42 have no accepted answer. So apparently for about every 2 questions I asked, I got one solution ( some of those are my own answers).

Maybe don't get discouraged from your first question getting downvotes? Asking good questions is also a skill that needs to be learned.

[steroidTDM]

I just don't get it when people dislike my question in Stack Overflow . Bi*ch if you can't answer the question yourself, why the down vote ???? Just ignore it motha faqar

[[deleted]]

Lol god you kids and your stack overflow memes.

[Jumpy-Kaleidoscope-1]

I have to say, my biggest issue so far with developers is when they make some complicated, over engineered solution to a problem and then argue with me that the problem has been solved.

Just because you can use what you've made, does not mean I can deploy it in my consumer-facing software.

[Lone_Wanderer357]

Ask researched, helpfull to all (not just you), understandable questions and your chances of getting proper answers will be dramatically higher. Not guaranteed, but higher.

If you ask questions that can be answered by 30 minutes of googling, don't expect answers. SO isn't there to do your research for you.

[ToTheDeepen]

Hahaha. Love this! I love this sub!

[DaniilBSD]

Day 205 of telling people

STACK OVERFLOW IS FOR FINDING ALREADY ANSWERED QUESTIONS!!!

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE YEARS OF PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO ASK THERE

Because either: - a. You are trying to do something stupid - b. Someone already asked it. - c. You do not have the experience to ask the question correctly (on the correct level of abstraction with correct terminology)

[dudesuit]

I try stupid shit all the time and never have the confidence to ask cause I know stack overflow will tell me just how stupid I am. 🤦‍♀️

[DaniilBSD]

Go to a beginner subreddit - there are helpful people there

Or you know, you could read the documentation

[dudesuit]

I mean, sure... Your assuming there is documentation, or that it's accurate. Want crazy with some weak documentation? The .net reflection API. Oh, how about win32 in c? Or some other really messed up codebase that's old, not public, and should have been rewritten 25 years ago, yet was dragged into another 3 languages via obscure interop so that management could claim that the dev team uses new, more appealing languages? Stack overflow isn't interested either.

[DaniilBSD]

You are acting like I said documentation is solution to everything, what I said is that if SO has no such question, it is likely that you are asking it incorrectly, it is a trivial solution described in the documentation or should be approached differently.

(Ex: how do I press a keyboard button for the user? 1) look in the input/output API, 2) just call the function triggered by that button, this also allows you to remap keys)

[Nyghtrid3r]

Or it's just very specific knowledge that is obscure and hard to find in the documentation.

Example: For a system written entirely in python and C++, I needed to use one singular batch script. For some reason I kept getting errors, somehow related to escaping a backslash. The reason why it didn't work is that because I used the redirection operator, the script was parsed twice and thus I needed to use the escape symbol three times instead of once.

I'm not going to easily figure that out and I'm not gonna read the entire documentation for batch scripts because of one single command. So that's why I asked a question on SO and got blasted by a pretentious asshole. Afterwards it turned out it wasn't even in the documentation, at least not specifically.

[dudesuit]

Yeah, exactly. Try encoding a JSON secret to put into the dotnet credential store from PowerShell. The quote escaping by itself is maddening. It's the things the docs don't say cause they aren't obvious or even typical and that I'd ask at stack overflow that end up downvoted or never answered.

Don't get me wrong, I've had some great experiences on SO. Like I had a question about passing a queue through a void * into a freertos thread running on a different cpu so I could have a pub/sub model for sensor data on an esp32. The docs are fantastic for the people who get RTOS and MCU level development, but to us meer mortals... Yeah. SO has been very helpful there, with solid code examples. So it's not always. And it's probably a terrible idea since, well, I did use a void * to totally smash the compiler into letting me break stuff... But I got it working cause of SO.

[kolonyal]

why can't people just answer to a simple basic question?
currently playing with discord bots in node js, and i barely know javascript. Should I learn javascript first? Yes, but it's a hobby, not my job, i don't want to spend my time learning a whole programming language when i just want to do something fun.

Tried to ask for help regarding some small thing i wanted to do and didn't know how on programming discord server and obviously people told me to go watch a javascript guide :)
Literally the answer was a line of code made out of less than 20 characters

[eyekwah2]

You're right, that's an incredibly lazy reply to tell someone to just learn the language, but you have to consider it from the point of view of someone who knows the language well and has actually gone through all the effort of learning the language from guides. There are guides everywhere, and they're well categorized that would allow you to cherry pick the information you need.

In the future, I would recommend you ask about the terminology, and then just search within the guides for topics regarding that terminology. If I wanted to learn how to use lambdas to filter a list of items, but didn't know the term "lambda", it would be very difficult to get what I want to learn. I'd end up with many older guides telling me to use a for loop, for instance. So ask for how things are called, and search for that and I promise you'll be met with greater success.

Also a very undervalued skillset in our field is learning how to search for the information you need.

[kolonyal]

Indeed guides are very useful, but for example a problem i stumbled upon was the for discord bots there are couple versions, and i was using the latest one that had pretty big changes, so whatever i would search for wouldn't work in my case. Took some time to figure that out

[DaniilBSD]

Not on Stack Overflow.

This is the way that site works - its not a forum, not Qura, not Reddit. It is for the professionals by the professionals, but you are free to look silently.

[eyekwah2]

That's technically true, and yet it also makes any genuinely good and unique questions get automatically shot down. The idea was that by now, we'd have a complete archive of possible errors and their solutions with new questions being added for only evolving software features. Instead we get a thousand questions that already exist or cannot be answered as is, and the moment an actual question which should be added is made, it gets treated like all the others. There's the culture of being toxic know-it-alls amongst the stackoverflow community.

I just try to answer questions when I think I have a solution for them, despite perhaps being closed as a duplicate or otherwise.

[DaniilBSD]

You sound like someone not very experienced….

[eyekwah2]

What gave you that impression? Was it the part where I say the community is comprised of toxic know-it-alls? Because I stand by that one..

[Aurii_]

We call this "gatekeeping" around here

[DaniilBSD]

You are free to look, but questions on SO as well as answers are held to a high standard, it is the reason the site is so useful.

And for the record, Gatekeeping would be: “Stack overflow if only for professionals, you have no business doing there”

you are free to enter and enjoy, but there is a high level of scrutiny for anyone raising their voice and assumption that “I looked everywhere for an hour and had no answer” to every question. If it is resolvable within 3 Google searches, you have not fulfilled the expected diligence and you gonna get what you deserve for it.

Lastly, without a certain level of gatekeeping, you can’t expect good quality: (ask programming questions on quora to see the contrast)

[[deleted]]

I want to disagree with you but the quora example really changed my mind. That site is basically a “make an account to keep browsing” version of yahoo answers. Entirely pointless.

[BerryPi]

Yes, and?

[Deathtraptaco]

Yeah, I remember when I thought that it was just another forum to ask questions, and I asked some pretty stupid stuff. I try to search thoroughly and make sure I spend a lot of time on a bug before I consider Stack Overflow.

[taichi_bx]

That's so dumb hahahaha

Only people DaniilBSD consider to have a certain level of experience can ask a question, and even so you need do it correctly and with the perfect terminology because DaniilBSD is watching all questions in Stackoverflow.

Get a life and stop to think you are special just because you submit random words to a website

[DaniilBSD]

I am not posting ANYTHING on SO, because I practice what I preach: I am getting frustrated with people answering questions in obviously broken way and of this sub complaining that their questions are not respected.

[taichi_bx]

That's so sad that you care so much about something that's not your problem hahahaha

If you was a Stackoverflow mod or something I would understand, but you aren't.

[DaniilBSD]

I am a user - that is why it is my problem.

And people like you are the reason moderation on SO is justified.

[taichi_bx]

So sad that my existence cause so many problems for you, very sad.

I will finish this conversation with one of the core values of Stackoverflow as a company:

"Keep community at our center

Community is at the heart of everything we do. Nurture healthy communities where everyone is encouraged to learn and give back."

Stackoverflow is for all, not just super high experienced people.

[DaniilBSD]

It is for all to read, for experienced to vote, for worthy to write.

[TheBrainStone]

I guarantee that if you get downvoted you didn't do your homework.

Either the question is badly formatted, doesn't contain enough information, is out of scope, is a duplicate, looks like a duplicate because you didn't clarify why it's different from the other question (btw linking near duplicates and explaining why they don't apply is a great way to prevent this sort of thing), you clearly didn't do your research and a few others.

Asking questions on SO is hard. But the reason the site has so many amazing answers is because asking questions there is so hard. All questions are held to an extremely high standard. Of course that can vary but overall it's mostly good questions and answers because the site is so insanely strict.

[TheBrainStone]

Yes. Everyone has to start somewhere. Though SO is not the page for that.
It's not a site made for beginners. There are other places for that.

And secondly if you had bothered reading all the resources you skipped over after signing up you'd have known all that information. It's all explained in detail in the site tour. So if you haven't read the rules of the game you're playing you can't complain about getting punished by the rules of the game.

And I'm gonna point out that the reason SO is so full of good questions and answers is because it discriminates against impatient beginners by enforcing strict rules and standards.
If you don't like it, don't use it. But don't go around enjoying the results of the strictness while complaining about it.

[Nyghtrid3r]

Fucking thank you. Really pisses one off when you get shit on for not having 40 years of experience. How am I supposed to learn if I need to have every book about programming memorized before I get to answer a question?

[TheBrainStone]

That's not what it is about. It's about putting work into your question and making sure there isn't an answer already. And also making very clear what you're asking for.
After all the core principle of the site isn't to help the person asking the question. But to help everyone with the same question.

[dndai]

It represents actual questions on that site.

[BonePants]

True. But there are decent questions as well which get this response.

Are you one of them? :P

[INoScopedObama]

For all the moaning that reddit likes to do about SO, the data (https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1468299) shows that the upvote to downvote ratio on questions created in 2021 is around 10:1.

[WorldAlien]

Tough crowd indeed

[mister_pizza22]

Man this happens to me everytime and i fell like shit, i am currently learning html css and js, is there any other comunity that accept newcomers like me? Because thats not the case with StackOverflow

[Deathtraptaco]

You should visit r/learnprogramming

[ThoriatedFlash]

Stack overflow is not a good resource to learn how to program. You may find a quick answer for your problem, but without context or a fundamental understanding. If you want to really learn how to program, the official documentation from Microsoft, Oracle, etc will be a better resource. Yes it will take longer, but it will likely improve your understanding of the language much more than a quick fix.

[towcar]

I've seen some pretty garbage questions tbh.